RemixOS for PC released | Hacker News Reader

RemixOS for PC released

jide.com

214 pointsSujan134 comments

Just booted it. The EULA is frightening to say the least.

1. "You agree that you irrevocably waive any and all ownership, legal and moral rights to your user content."

2. You're also not allowed to oppose "the basic principles determined in the Constitution of the People's Republic of China", harm it's "national honor and interests", or undermine it's "national religious policy, promoting cults and superstitions".

3. Also, you're not allowed to spread rumor, disturb social order, or undermine social stability.

There's other strange rules of conduct that just turned me off from the entire project. Besides, it doesn't see either of my wireless adapters and the desktop blanked out when it attempted to adjust my screen resolution:)

I'm still interested in getting completely off Windows 10, so I'll stick with Linux for now.

Fuck China.

-- posted from my RemixOS desktop

What an amazing thing to put in a EULA. Are they somehow sponsored by China?

Jide appears to be a Chinese company founded by former Google employees:

http://www.jide.com/about

> 北京技德科技有限公司

If the stuff above is in their EULA, it's probably Chinese legal boilerplate. More heavy handed than the boilerplate we're used to, perhaps.

If this is really true [1] and not an exaggeration, there is no way on Earth I will touch this or let anyone I care about touch it with a 100-foot pole.

Closed source? Waive legal rights? to my own content? Not criticize China?

Not in 100 million years. Glad I switched to 100% Ubuntu. Donated and anticipating 16.04 LTS in April.

It's one thing to get pressured into a gray area w/r/t freedoms in exchange for some perceived benefit, but to explicitly waive them and endanger myself to a foreign power? Who knows what China would do? No way.

How do these people even make a EULA with a straight face and expect people to drink it up? Even though Windows and OSX are closed-source, at least hackers have a grasp on what it's doing and you're not instantly giving up rights and ownership when you turn it on.

This crosses my line in the sand.

[1] I've been trying to find the EULA online somewhere, but can't so far. Any leads? I'm afraid to install this and look at the EULA.

>Glad I switched to 100% Ubuntu. Donated and anticipating 16.04 LTS in April.

Try Trisquel if your hardware supports it.

Thank you for donating.

Check my sibling post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10891284

I would recommend trying the parent project then, which is Open Source under APL 2.0 - http://www.android-x86.org/

This should be considered malware for the first point.

The others are impossible for China to enforce outside of China but if your content somehow got to them via this OS, they can legally sell your content to anyone. It'd be your responsibility to challenge that in various courts. It's just not worth it.

If this is really true, wtf. I wonder why we see RemixOS for the third time on HN frontpage within days.

On the other side Win10 eula is almost as bad. The difference is they really enforce their things and even backported some to Win7/8 disguised as security updates. Why do they get away with this? Why do we occasionally see "positiv comments" about it on HN.

Take it from the positive side - looks like there will be finally a year of Linux desktop (even if because of being pushed out of other operating systems due to their draconian terms of use)! ;-)

> On the other side Win10 eula is almost as bad.

This must reach some sort of high point for satirically awful comments here. Really? Can you point to the bit of the Win 10 EULA that allows Microsoft to claim anything you create with it as theirs?

Nearly all of that is the same as Xiaomi's EULA: http://www.mi.com/my/about/agreement/

Perhaps it is legal boilerplate for People's Republic of China companies.

Consider that an American EULA might require a "worldwide, sublicenseable, irrevocable [...]" user content license, and forbid activites illegal in the USA.

the weird thing is that I don't see those terms in any other searchable, English language EULA.

Did you look only at EULAs for downloadable software, or more broadly? How about the ones below?

http://www.canon.com.cn/corp/csr/delightedimage/education/en...

https://www.adxmi.com/terms

"Perhaps it is legal boilerplate for People's Republic of China companies."

It seems like that text is from this government web site: http://www.cac.gov.cn/2015-02/04/c_1114246561.htm

e.g. "宣扬邪教和封建迷信的" is roughly the same as the "promoting cults and superstitions" found in the EULA.

I just booted this up in a virtual machine and I managed to copy the EULA to the clipboard:

http://pastebin.com/t9E3SUQP

I'm posting this from within RemixOS, so I can't say any bad things about China right now :)

Thanks for the heads up, no way I'm touching this.

From the EULA, point 1 applies to anything you upload to their site or to "Jide services". Jide services require registration and are necessary to some functionality within the OS. This could be a horrible interpretation of giving up certain rights to content you share on a social network or site.

It's awful, yes, but it may not apply to everything you do within ReactOS. The other 2 points do apply to everything you do in ReactOS, so you're supposed to censor yourself based on Chinese government censorship policies whenever you use it.

Interested in getting off Win 10 because of the legal issues or because you don't like the UX?

I love most of the interface. There's still a few bugs that haven't been addressed, but it's 95% solidly done.

The telemetry capture is a huge issue for me and also no longer releasing the contents of updates. I've done what I can to limit or minimize how much information is collected, but I shouldn't have to do that.

When Microsoft released their metrics on Windows 10 usage (for example, how many times their Photos app had been used), people should've been absolutely livid. Who knows what else is captured besides the process list?

It's way too black box for me.

Thanks for pointing this out. I've written about this in Xataka (http://www.xataka.com/servicios/remix-os-promete-pero-su-lic...), where I work as editor, and after getting in contact with Jide's team they've let us known that these terms apply only to China and that they will update the EULA:

"Thank you for bringing this to our attention. In full disclosure, we utilized the language (relevant to China and China only) and copied it over to the EULA for our international ROM. Our legal team has now reviewed this and has removed all language pertaining to legal and moral rights of the data as well as anything that mentions the Chinese government as this is not relevant to non-Chinese users. This is a very serious matter and will be corrected in all future releases of the EULA."

I would not be surprised if RemixOS had a spyware/keylogger/backdoor installed. Do not trust it unless they open source the whole OS.

I have a little box for my TV running Android. The issue with all the apps is that 90% (looking mostly at games, I guess) of them more or less expect gestural input, and are either really difficult to play or just not fun with a mouse.

I doubt that particular issue is as bad in productivity apps etc., but there's a lot more to running a mobile app on a big screen than just resizing a window. Does this have some magic to solve that in a general way?

It's really up to app developers to make sure their apps work ok (provide fallbacks if gesture heavy) for mouse.

I think we are in a period where Android is just starting to get used with mouse so I'd expect it to take a bit of time for things get in shape for mouse users.

Some apps work better than others

Understood who should really address the problem, but if RemixOS doesn't have an interim solution we might see the same catch-22 here as we often do. App developers will care about these things when it matters commercially, and consumers will care about them when the apps work.

It'll be a thing soon (1-3 years from now) once Google integrates Android with ChromeOS.

Personally I find a lot of Android apps already very usable with mouse, YMMV

Mouse support in the OS has been there a while, a friend had one of the early Asus Transformers some 4 years ago with a trackpad.

I can use the mouse on my android box ... the issue is that the things you have to click don't make sense with a mouse. E.g., there'll be two buttons, one on each side of the screen. Easy to hit with two thumbs, impossible to hit with a mouse.

Would a trackpad that does the touch/gesture input not address and resolve all these set-top-box style arrangements?

Lots of android games play well with a bluetooth or USB controller instead of a mouse. You can easily hook an XBox or PS4 controller to a PC.

Yep! I've got an NVidia Shield TV running Android TV and I'm pretty happy with it. Great hardware (super fast mobile GPU) and the software isn't bad either. The included gamepad works great, additionally I bought a Logitech K400 wireless keyboard/trackpad to use some apps which aren't great on the gamepad (Chrome etc)

Android TV (like on my NVIDIA Shield box) is far better than any stock android. The apps are designed to be used with a controller or remote. And they work well.

It is now my primary media device. The games aren't PS4 quality, but they run in 4K and everything is smooth. We use it for everything, and it's _mostly_ a good experience.

> The games aren't PS4 quality, but they run in 4K and everything is smooth.

Could you elaborate? Interested in 4K gaming without the expense of a rig. If the graphics are better, what's worse?

Well, they're Android games. Mostly cheaper games ported from mobile devices. And the CPU/GPU in the machine isn't as hefty as what's in consoles; framerates and pixel quality is good but shading, etc. not.

And the big publishers aren't making big games for it. There's nothing like a Skyrim or whatever for it. There's no DVD/BD disc reader in it, so everything has to be download only, so there'd be problems distributing games of that size anyways.

The best games to show off 4K are vector games like Geometry Wars, etc. They look great and are snappy and fun.

It's also pretty good for emulators, once you get all your ROMs on and get the controller mapped correctly. I've even got Dolphin running a few Gamecube games at mostly acceptable quality, tho not consistently.

Ah I see. Have you used 'GeForce Now'? It's actual PC games like Witcher III from beefy GPUs in the cloud: https://shield.nvidia.co.uk/games/geforce-now

My Internet connection is a bandwidth capped 2.5Mbps 3g connection, as I live rural with no high speed terrestrial connection. So no, I haven't used it. I can barely do Netflix.

Makes sense - thank you for replying!

I use it, been playing the Lego Harry Potter's with my son.

Works very well, I forget I'm streaming the game. I've got 160mbps internet but it should work with 10mbps+. No noticeable latency for this type of games, might be a different story for multiplayer FPS where every ms counts.

Only complaint is the selection of games is quite low right now, I'm guessing Nvidia has a lot of work ahead of them to convince games publishers that this is the future

I used to use Android on an old netbook --- a Toshiba AC100, ARM-based with 512MB of RAM. The netbook originally shipped with Gingerbread and was practically unusable, but after I upgraded it to Honeycomb it was a really rather comfortable thing to use.

I had Debian running in a chroot on it, so I got a combination of the Android UI with a proper Linux environment underneath it. This meant that stuff like wifi and quick wakeup and sleep all worked fine, together with Android's lightweight web browser etc. But if I wanted it, apt and all the build tools were available.

Unfortunately, since Honeycomb, each successive Android release has been steadily worse to use with a touch pad --- the Honeycomb status bar was great, the ICS action bar isn't. These days I use a Chromebook.

Seems that Android may be heading back towards Honeycomb, given that the 6.0.1 release put the buttons in the screen corners (back and home bottom left, switcher bottom right).

Never mind that 5.0 or something put in a notification shade that was more useful on larger screens.

The biggest problem with Android right now is perhaps the release cadence, and that Google sticks to it even if it means shipping half baked functionality.

For my purposes, the current biggest problem with Android is that it's diverging more and more from desktop Linux; the security model is now sufficiently different that a Debian userland basically won't run. (selinux errors when doing anything with apt.)

I used pchroot for a while, which was magical --- it fakes a superuser chroot in a normal user account --- but there's something about recent Androids it doesn't like and it's stopped working for me.

The switch to a Chromebook was partly because of this. Crouton seems at least semi-blessed, although recent Chromebooks with Freon no longer support running X in a new VT. (You instead pass through X to a Chrome tab.)

Theodore Ts'o praised GNURoot the other day.

https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/chfKCGTSz3m

GNURoot is based on pchroot. I spent some time trying to make it work.

I was also chrooting Debian on top of Android for some time.

I really like Linux, but desktop GUI software has become quite stagnant due to excessive framework fragmentation.

I have long thought that Android converging back with regular Linux is a very real possibility. It might be the case that we end up having Android as a standard desktop instead of Gnome or KDE.

I'd rather have the latter, as I don't think Android will easily get rid of Google stuff like GCM, but some competition will be good.

I've used Linux for a very long time. "Excessive framework fragmentation" hardly describes the current GTK & Qt/KDE almost-monoculture. In fact, I can't remember the last time when Linux (or any Unix derivative) was so quiet in this regard.

Desktop Linux was anything but stagnant ten years ago, when there were at least three frameworks in current use (Gnome & co., KDE & co., wxWindows -- although that's not a full application framework) plus a lot of other UI frameworks that still weren't dead (Motif, Jesus Christ...) or we had not yet given up on (GNUStep, which is an entire application framework). And there were the people writing GTK software not intended to necessarily run under Gnome (which is being increasingly discouraged by the Gnome team now), as well as people writing Qt software without KDE's framework. Ooh, and Tcl/Tk wasn't dead and buried yet.

If anything, GUI software on Linux appears stagnant because we're in one of those CADT rewriting phases that jwz was writing about twelve years ago ( https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html ). There hasn't been much improvement in the last three years, indeed; that's largely because Gnome 3 is struggling to come on-par with Gnome 2 in terms of features and flexibility, and as KDE finally emerged from 4.x's perpetual beta, it got into 5.x's. And, between KDE's increasing lack of relevance after everyone ran away from early 4.x releases, and Gnome's agenda for world domination, there's hardly any room left for developers who have neither a passion for architectural astronautics, nor a taste for political partisanship, so very little desktop software gets written outside these two.

They should have stopped with Gnome 2 and KDE 3. All these rewrites to make it look more like OSX or whatever... no words.

KDE2/3 with Win95 style themes was pretty good back then. Gnome2 was ok too. Nowadays Ubuntu is ok too.

Archived version of the jwz.org post, since Jamie started blocking Hacker News referrers:

https://archive.is/wuAfV

Hopefully they'll find a way to make something like RemixOS Android TV compatible - apps made for that respond to remote controllers rather than touch inputs.

I have a little box running Windows under my TV, and RemixOS looks very interesting as a simpler OS I could use that will still have things like Netflix streaming etc. The only downside is that I need some background services (for DVR, etc) - I'm not clear on how Linux-y RemixOS is that this would or would not be possible.

I keep wishing somebody would make an airmouse with buttons configured to simulate common touch-gestures - like put a d-pad on it for swipe up/down/left/right, and a scrollwheel simulating pinch zooms.

Google keeps trying to get vendors to support their half-forgotten TV oses GoogleTV/AndroidTV, but it seems like it would be simpler to just make a peripheral that emulates the common touch actions and use let Android be Android, even if it's on a TV.

Or, you know, Apple's desktop trackpad which lets you do all these gestures.

Yes, but for a remote for a TV device you want something one-handed and hand-held, which creates an inherent problem with the pinch action. Trackpads are a desktop/laptop experience.

Once you're using a trackpad, you may as well go with the Chromecast approach of using a full phone-like device. Sad that Android is so bloated, otherwise I'd think a small 3.5" barebones full Android device would be good as a bundled "remote".

Have you seen the new Apple TV Remote? I haven't done a lot with it, but it's got a touch pad on it for gestures. Maybe these remote / trackpad devices would do the trick.

Intel's Realsense perhaps?

You have a mobile phone, I assume? With a touchscreen? Which does multi-touch? And the thing sports a bluetooth adapter?

In that case all you need is a program running on that phone, emulating you 'airmouse'. No need for more hardware, just use what you have. The same works for a 'normal' PC, btw. I know there are several apps for Android which can provide this service, I guess the same is true for the other contenders in this area.

Mostly thinking about my kids on that one, as they don't own phones.

Is there really a chart comparing performance on an i7 to a bunch of smartphones? I'm having a really hard time seeing the point of that comparison. Why not benchmark against other PC operating systems, like say Chrome OS?

Notice the units too.

I see what you did there.

The i7 does 214218 CPUs...duh.

RemixOS uses GPLv2 code (Linux, etc) and other open source licenses. They might got away with proprietary devices, their official response on their old (closed) forum was telling. But now they will have to provide it.

The idea of adding a several improvements to Android for desktop usage (improved right mouse click) is good, but why not keep it open source? Also I don't see a real business model, as Google is already working to merge Android and ChromeOS "somehow" (as indicated by news lately) and both ChromiumOS and Android are open source.

Because they want to profit from it. BTW - the kernel layer is GPL-ed and is already available in source form with the Ansroid x86 project.

The Android layer is Apache licensed and they are't required to open source it, or using your own misleading verbiage, they can "get away with it".

How will they profit from giving away their OS for free? Maybe by gathering their users' data, given their EULA?

I don't know what their exact business plan is. Just like Twitter STILL doesn't have a real business plan.

Hmm, it requires legacy boot. I wonder why it doesn't support UEFI? Makes it hard for me to test this on the devices I would want to use it with.

EDIT: More research. Results:

There is an EFI system on this image, but it has a corrupted GPT. I fixed it with gdisk and I ran into some issues trying to boot it via EFI shell on one of my netbooks. My libreboot laptop was able to boot it but it gets stuck during bootup. Does not show up as an option for booting on my macbook. Going to try booting it via EFI shell on my desktop and report back.

Alright, got it to POST on my desktop, but it hangs during boot. On my libreboot laptop, it boots all the way to desktop if I do it in _guest_ mode. Pretty underwhelming once I got there, though.

Someone got it to work on /r/remixos using efi files from chromeos

My laptop that had BIOS only got to the bootloader and crashed soon after doing the disk write test. My NUC is set to UEFI but only successfully ran by manually selecting it in legacy, as you say.

so this would be the first closed linux distro in history. An ironic milestone for the open source community. or have I missed something?

Well, depends on what you consider a Linux distro, there are many Android ROMs that are closed in a similar way, including those from phone manufacturers, where kernel sources are released but nothing else, there definitely existed before Remix OS.

Does Android really qualify as a Linux distro? Does a Linux distro need a GNU system behind it? Because that's missing here, no glibc, no coreutils, etc. This is why some people have been insisting on calling it GNU/Linux all along, it can create ambiguity in situations like this. Linux is after all, just a kernel.

Since there are various systems which use the Linux kernel without the GNU userland, it can make GNU/Linux more important as a term, in contrast to Android and others.

Although I have wondered if OS like Maemo, which use Busybox instead of GNU, should be considered Busybox/Linux. :)

It's definitely still a Linux distro. It's just not a GNU/Linux distribution, but Bionic/Linux.

It's more like a closed Android ROM/distro, which isn't that uncommon.

CyanogenOS isn't open source either.

"First" is a difficult claim to sustain. But Tivo is a better candidate for the most notable early one, as it was a major motivator for GPL v3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization

"or have I missed something?"

You've missed nearly every Android OEM build. The AOSP being open for Nexusis the exception, not the norm.

Even with a Nexus there's a reasonable difference between AOSP and the Factory Image - I don't think you'll get HDR or panorama photography on AOSP (without flashing a GApps bundle)

I recall, perhaps mistakenly, that there use to be a big buzz in the 90's about having Java as a desktop OS.

Anybody got this to work on VirtualBox? It's not moving past the bootloader screen for me, no matter what VM configuration I select.

No, same issue here with VMWare player.

It detected it as FreeBSD for me. It never really booted in VMWare player.

Nope. I also tried it on a ESXi 5.5 . The only small notification i see is that it cannot determine the USB writing speed and then it reboots again. So perhaps because it doesn't have write access.

It works fine for me, be sure to choose guest mode though.

Virtualbox on a W10 host.

edit: screenshot http://i.imgur.com/Ev7Kvil.png

Strangely, it didn't work at all on VirtualBox on Ubuntu, but worked on a Windows 7 host.

Thanks for the hint!

If you've got the OSE (free) version of VirtualBox on Ubuntu, it might be missing chipset support.

Configured as Other Linux 64bit w/12gb of disk and 2gb of memory it booted for me in VirtualBox

Thanks! Worked for me on Win7 host, but not on Ubuntu host. Must be a Virtualbox bug.

Are you running the same architecture? assuming Remix is a 32 bit download.

e.g. I have previously had problems with virtualbox and a 32 bit guest on a 64 bit host (old cpu/chipset combo)

I made that mistake initially, and then saw the "_64" in ISO filename. But still couldn't make it work on an Ubuntu host, only on a Win7 host. I suspect it was a Virtualbox bug.

Probably not the virtualization but rather the hardware support of the OS.

I tried booting it on 2 physical machines - It runs on my NUC but crashed on my laptop.

Seems to be working - boots up to language selection (which I believe is a "normal" app), but won't let me choose any - mouse clicks register for language selection, but not for the "next" button, keyboard: nada :( Cursor only updates on LMB held down (with mouse integration and without). I think there's more work to come back to desktop-ish user expectations.

W7, x64, VBox 5.0.2, Windows guest w/ 1 GB RAM

Works fine on Virtualbox using 'Linux' as Guest. The mouse DOES work, it just doesn't show the cursor, if you click and drag, it will show like a "finger cursor" on screen.

To navigate the menus, you can use tab, as usual. (in the case of the "next" button.

I have it working on a Linux host as a Linux 64 bit guest with 2 GB ram. You have to change the input device from USB tablet to PS/2 mouse in the VM settings.

However, it's very slow and the taskbar is green most of the time. also, there's a test (block) cursor blinking in the middle of the screen.

Managed to get it too boot on my Acer laptop. Not impressed with it honestly. Mouse isn't really useable and the only thing that make it "desktop like" is the task bar at the bottom. The music application still opens full-screen with no close button or any window chrome at all. Sure the site says it has Google Play Store but there is no sign of it here.

Awesome. It's much easier to make Android (with it's massive app ecosystem) a desktop OS than it is than to build an app ecosystem for traditional Linux desktops.

Interestingly enough it doesn't look like there's an installer - they want you to run it from USB for now.

Except that massive app ecosystem is designed for small screen phones and single window design.

It also hasn't helped Windows Mobile at all with it's "massive" desktop ecosystem.

Small-screen phones and medium-screen tablets. And some netbooks. Pretty much the same as the set of devices Windows 8's Metro UI was designed for.

Look what Windows 10 did with Metro apps: it took those "single-window designs" and just... stuck them in regular windows. And that works pretty well, it turns out.

So...we went from windowed apps to fullscreen apps and thence to windowed apps. Yaaaaay, fabulous progress! ;)

From mainframes to Personal computers to Citrix. Progress too ;)

Imo if you can run existing Android apps in resizable windows it would be a huge win. There are many well made Android apps that would work just fine as their own windowed applications

some would definitely work pretty well.

Several streaming services have native apps on both mobile & desktop. I think that their mobile apps could run pretty well on desktop.

For many complex apps though (like anything dealing with text edition), the lack of hover & right clics handling would be a pain. Android supports 'hover' events (and since API 1 IIRC) but nobody implements them in custom widgets.

Android supports mouse input but even as an android engineer I have no idea what the right click does in that situation.

I know this is a cop-out, but wouldn't Google Docs work just fine in the browser here. I mean I haven't done any work on Google Docs, but I did use it all the way through uni.

Or maybe we should just force everyone on Vim and world would be more glorious and productive place.... right?

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/MotionEv...

BUTTON_SECONDARY is reported in the getButtonState() of the MotionEvent, but I'm not sure most apps ever check that. I would guess in a lot of cases, if there is only checking on pointer down and up, it will act like the left mouse button.

Not sure Windows is similar: Windows Phone has very few apps, Windows 8 desktop has very few 'modern' apps which can handle being distributed through an app store. Neither can leverage the other because there's nothing to leverage.

There is also project "shashlik" by the KDE folks which, if it works as advertised at some point, should make it possible to run Android apps natively in Linux.

https://github.com/shashlik/shashlik

How well does that work?

Neat. I've been using ARC with chrome for a couple of apps that i grabbed from my phone with adb. This looks like it'll eventually be pretty nice to avoid having to open chrome for them.

Another option would be to be able to run Android apps on traditional Linux desktops. I hope that will be possible in the future, right now there isn't anything that achieves that seamlessly.

Except that the android apps almost all suck. I'd far rather have the Debian repository on my phone than Google play on my laptop.

Anyone want a review?

Bad problems booting certain machines data partition creation very slow no Google Play

Good eventually boots! wifi and bluetooth work can configure layout for external keyboard f-droid works firefox has reasonable keyboard shortcuts

Ugly multi-monitor support - screen mirroring only no multiple screens and rotation support apps not designed for mouse input - right/middle click or drag and drop app install of apks a little flakey inbuilt browser very basic graphics rendering slower than X11

Would be cool if they'd release this for ARM too. The Pi, Cubietruck and all the other dev boards would run this nicely.

From what I remember, there are ports to RaspPi but a major issue is getting graphic acceleration working. Not sure what the current state of it is.

There definitely are Android ports for RaspPi and other ARM boards, but I don't think there are RemixOS ports for these, which I would like.

I would love to add my comments as a tester, but I can't get the PC version to boot successfully after Linux and Windows install attempts. I thought the USB 3 interface specification was only desirable, but it seems it's a requirement.

I have ordered some USB 3 memory devices, I'll post again if I see a successful boot.

How is this different from android-x86?

It appears to BE android-x86. I'm pretty sure all they have done is created a custom shell/launcher.

I have a spare AIO touch-screen PC which I'm hoping to revive. This could be perfect.

Anyone know how they are building a desktop experience on Android?

Have they just layered a userspace on top of traditional Linux.. Or did they actually work with binder /init - > kdbus/systemd

Does it run easily on a Raspberry Pi 2?

It's probably mentioned somewhere else, but I suspect a lot of people here will want to know the answer.

No - because this build is targeted at the x86 architecture

Android needs graphic acceleration which doesn't work on the pi. So it might run but very slowly.

Do someone understand their business model? What are they planning to sell?

I guess their Ultratablet and Mini, running Remix OS with multitasking support.

It's pretty cool to see work being done to get Android working better in a desktop environment. I applaud the progress. But I don't really have a need for this. I love my Chromebook and ChromeOS too much and it feels like they fill similar niches.

anyone managed to boot this off USB stick on macbook pro?

Trying to right now, there's 0 instructions provided for OSX booting other than to hold 'Option' for the boot loader which is pretty useless.

Hoping I can just dd it to my SD card and have it boot.

Edit: doesn't seem to want to boot from my SD card or recognize it as bootable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10886820

HTH.

I just booted in a rMBP 15 2014. It worked well but withou Play store nor Google Chrome, nothing fancy.

can't you install Google Play Services apk from apk mirror or similar?

I tried but didn't work :/

f-droid.org works, if you restrict yourself to free software...

Google should buy this now before Microsoft applies its EEE strategy on it or tries to fill it up with Cortana and stuff.

They would be wasting their money it's terrible.

https://dn-cdn-shop-jide-com.qbox.me/jide_upload/S1451544263...

That's it! I am buying that jeans.

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