The great thing about Fuchsia is it's like a Google version of Plan 9.
The bad thing about Fuchsia is it's like a Google version of Plan 9.
The bad thing about Fuchsia is it's like a Google version of Plan 9.
<ramble> To me the major overlap between them is their designs are clearly informed by the contemporaneous shape of network architectures. Fuchsia is a take on what an OS design would be as a set of named microservices that can be routed. Plan 9 noticed network topologies of compute labs and clusters weren't too different, and both graphs could be represented in filesystems. The major visible difference to me is that the visibility of routing is much more apparent in Plan 9 than it is in Fuchsia. It's still a little difficult to understand how and where capabilities propagate through the system.
Implementation-wise, FIDL is a much different take than 9P2K. Though much simpler, 9P2K forces every API to exist via a filesystem interface (many of the higher level protocols also involve quite a lot of string passing) and struggles with throughput of streaming operations. Individual FIDL APIs might have similar problems, but the message encoding itself is relatively more efficient. </ramble>
They may decide to kill it next week and switch to XNU or symbian or templeos and no one would be surprised.
But those write-ups were years ago and there hasn't been new reviews with much UI focus since then.
There is now a UI experience available as part of Fuchsia in the workstation product, but I wouldn't overly index on it as it's just one take on what you could use Fuchsia to build.