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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

> combining the best of GNU/Linux and Fuchsia OS

Why does a new open source OS project have to always shoehorn the entire GNU/Linux ecosystem with X11/Wayland, GTK, DBus and GNOME onto a totally different system?

The only positive takeaway from this is perhaps the learning experience in OS development. Other than that is there a point to this?

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For the same reason UNIX actually won against much better OSes, copy paste of freely available source code, C is the JavaScript/PHP of systems programming languages and there were much better and secure platforms out there, including Multics.

However the power of free beer....

That, and the other OSes (Multics, VMS, VM/CMS) were considered competitive advantages and not really available for hacking on under the hood or porting to new architectures.

Unix only "won" in the sense that it's used. It doesn't mean that the situation has improved since the 80s... Y'all can stop boasting about a completely mediocre operating system with zero innovations for the last 30 years that functions about as well as what it was copying from the 80s. Y'all even failed to implement plan9's bind despite being an obvious improvement from what we have today. We're stuck with crappy, but stable, software that keeps you employed out of pure shittiness. Congratulations on sinking to the level of private enterprise.

Not sure exactly what it has to do with gnome or dbus, the desktop is backed by X11 (Migration to Wayland is underway but it's a pain to work with), the Flutter embedder itself renders with GTK. The project was started as a Fuchsia fork, and we intend to continue working hard on getting that ready, but sadly a lack of access to compatible modern hardware forced our hand to temporarily switch over to Linux as the development platform, so our layers of project would not stagnate while we wait for more polishing on Google's end.

For one thing, Fuchsia itself has had support built in for running Linux as a guest OS since roughly two years ago. [0]

For Dahlia specifically, it looks to ship a Linux kernel out of the box to extend its hardware compatibility. Relevant section below:

> Our dual kernel approach allows users with new(er) hardware to take advantage of the Zircon Kernel, while maintaining support for older devices using the Linux Kernel.

[0] https://9to5google.com/2018/06/15/fuchsia-friday-machina-bri...

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