Ubuntu/Unity (and Gnome shell) are doing all the wrong things and this shows it.
Ubuntu especially are now focusing on blingy desktops that somehow require really new cards and hardware only, and yet are also trying to throw away the traditional desktop to cram themselves onto a phone. And yet with high end requirements they are now not the desktop OS of the light weight / poor hardware people, they are for the high end only paradoxically.
Android is coming the other way: a good core set of features now slowly building out into a potential desktop replacement. Because the desktop is still important, especially for anyone looking to do any productivity work.
And after watching a fast demo on the site, I see another thing Android is doing right. Somehow even though it's incredibly low resource it has animated desktops. I was first exposed to the idea in the mid 2000s with a video demoing Enlightenment 17 showing animated desktops. I even made a bug with Gnome asking for the feature. No dice. Even with all their modern "bling" and high and hardware requirements, they can't do live wallpapers/desktops. So with a lame static desktop, try running them on this hardware? EXPLDOE. Won't work.
Meanwhile light little android also has this cute feature.
And this really just underscores to me that in all ways Ubuntu/Unity/Gnome shell are just going in all the wrong directions while Android seems to be increasingly going in many of the right ones.
Ubuntu especially are now focusing on blingy desktops that somehow require really new cards and hardware only, and yet are also trying to throw away the traditional desktop to cram themselves onto a phone.
Bling is so much less work than games that even a low-end GPU can drive Unity's bling. The only problem is when you have no working 3D driver at all.
Phones actually have better 3D drivers than desktop PCs, because Linux is the dominant kernel for phones. Every phone SoC has working GLES 2.0 Linux drivers. (The drivers are proprietary but that doesn't bother Ubuntu.)
My main laptop is a Thinkpad from 2006 and it has no problems running Gnome shell. You can also find plenty of videos online where people show off unity running on Nexus 7. It's a combination of the requirements being quite low and the hardware in question actually being quite powerful.
If you can't find support for animated desktops in Unity, then it's probably because none of the people who actually write the code thought it was a valuable addition.
While Android is light (it ought to be, its a Mobile OS). It is NOT a desktop replacement. Google themselves promote ChromeOS over Android.
Retro-fitting Android onto desktop devices isn't the solution, there are many lightweight linux distributions if you want an actual desktop OS.
Animated desktops atleast to me are a gimmick, and the reason other linux distros haven't been able to optimize their graphics is because of the desktop parts and unreliable drivers (Nvidia & AMD), now most of these micro-PCs use mobile parts (ARM Cortex processors, PowerVR graphics cores.) which have readily available open-source drivers or OS-optimized proprietary blobs.
Obviously a desktop linux ("lightweight" or otherwise) makes more sense on a desktop than a retrofitted android, since android will always be, first and foremost, a mobile OS.
That said, android's app stores have produced, in a fairly short timespan, an entire ecosystem of polished, useful apps that users love. Without android, many of these applications wouldn't exist at all.
As a developer, a regular old linux distribution on my desktop makes more sense[1]. As a normal everyday user who just wants the additional amenities offered by a big monitor and a real keyboard, "android on the desktop" makes more sense.
It boils down to whether or not internet apps will completely replace desktop apps. Since the majority of higher-ups at Google stem from the internet era, they're in position to heavily push Chrome OS as internet-as-desktop and undermine Android's potential.
I don't think there are that many "lighter-weight" Linux distros than Android. I mean Android flies on a Nexus 7, but even Lubuntu (with LXDE) struggles a bit on it. Sure there might be those "run it in RAM distros" or whatever, but I don't think those are too relevant for consumers. Keep in mind that mobile apps are on average about an order of magnitude "leaner" than the average Linux (or Windows/Mac OS) x86 program. So I don't think the "light-weight" argument is that good here.
Also, while ChromeOS may make sense for schools and businesses that have adopted the cloud fully, I'm not sure ChromeOS is that good of a option for regular consumers, other than having a more optimized interface for the desktop (a lot more than even Windows 8).
But for a consumer, does ChromeOS offer that much more than Chrome for Android?
Honestly, I think the only thing keeping me from using Android as more of a desktop replacement is the lack of solid local compilers. That, and a handful of more specialized desktop applications like MatLab (which run just as well on my lab computers- I probably don't need to carry them around), are the only reasons I can't just make the jump.
Though to some extent possibly putting a debian chroot onto an SD card might almost be enough. There are a few different attempts to start putting dev environments onto android (and then there's also the ipad as a devtool "buy a linode and ssh to it" method...)
but yeah, sadly even on some devices that means cracking/rooting them just to be able to properly chroot, but with that you'd at least have all the compilers you want and vim and/or emacs :P
Then we could start looking at bootstrapping more tools I suppose
Seems to me that a bigger problem, at least for ARM SoCs, is that the SoC vendors are only developing binary drivers for Android's kernel+framebuffer. X11 and Android have a rather different model for GPU drivers, and you can't just port a binary driver from one to the other.
I understand why many people would never think of Android as a true desktop OS right now, but I think it's going to be inevitable, as long as 3rd party developers make more powerful apps for it, to take advantage of the more powerful hardware that's coming, and as long as Google optimizes it a little more to be more suited as a desktop OS, while not compromising on the touch interface.
I mean even Microsoft is pushing for full-blown touch interface on the desktop. Android right now is certainly not worse from an interface point of view. If anything it might be more familiar to Windows users because of its more desktop-like UI and icons, than Windows 8's Metro interface is.
For many billions of people Android is going to be their first OS, an OS that is open source, and comes in very affordable devices. Give it 3-5 years and I think it's going to become a real competitor not just in the "mobile OS" space, but in the whole OS space.
> as long as Google optimizes it a little more to be more suited as a desktop OS
I think it's a bigger jump than just a little optimization. Consider:
* no proper windowing
* no OS support for copy and paste of anything except plain text - you can't
even copy some bold text from one part of an email to another
part of the same email!
* the mouse support is really mouse-simulating-a-finger, with all its clumsiness
(for example, you have to "long click" to get functions you'd normally "right
click" for on a desktop), there's no "mouseover"
* apps are killed randomly in the background and often don't restore their state
upon returning eg: switch from your word processor to your browser and back
again and there's a *chance* your word processor got killed. Depending on the
quality of the code, it'll start up blank, perhaps with the same document, but
almost never in exactly the state you left it.
I would love for Google to address these things but they haven't shown any sign of it. The fact that they went out of their way to kill multi-windowing in CyanogenMod is interesting ... and the fact that the CM team complied without a whimper suggests that something may happen on that front, but I might be hoping more than really optimistic.
I'm only semi serious, but only supporting plaintext copy and paste is more of a feature than a limitation for me. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has kept notepad open to copy into to remove formatting. Not so much an issue anymore with "paste and match style" available.
Hackborn starts with a stick ("I suspect we are going to need to start doing things to prevent you from impacting our app ecosystem") and then shows just a tiny glimmer of carrot ("Doing this correctly, without impacting our app developers... I also think it is something that needs to be done at the mainline platform level...")
So who knows what to make of that. My main reason for hope is that it's just so unusual for Google to speak out that way. All kinds of bizarre things get added to ROMs and they just ignore it. Then this comes and the Google engineers go bananas. It has to mean (or at least, I think it has to mean) that they have some plans around it, and they really don't want something incompatible coming out and becoming a defacto API ahead of that.
One PCs you have right click and double click, which are both replaced with long click. Using PC design interfaces on mobile will usually work (2 becomes 1). But the reverse fails because 1 cannot become 2.
Ubuntu especially are now focusing on blingy desktops that somehow require really new cards and hardware only, and yet are also trying to throw away the traditional desktop to cram themselves onto a phone. And yet with high end requirements they are now not the desktop OS of the light weight / poor hardware people, they are for the high end only paradoxically.
Android is coming the other way: a good core set of features now slowly building out into a potential desktop replacement. Because the desktop is still important, especially for anyone looking to do any productivity work.
And after watching a fast demo on the site, I see another thing Android is doing right. Somehow even though it's incredibly low resource it has animated desktops. I was first exposed to the idea in the mid 2000s with a video demoing Enlightenment 17 showing animated desktops. I even made a bug with Gnome asking for the feature. No dice. Even with all their modern "bling" and high and hardware requirements, they can't do live wallpapers/desktops. So with a lame static desktop, try running them on this hardware? EXPLDOE. Won't work.
Meanwhile light little android also has this cute feature.
And this really just underscores to me that in all ways Ubuntu/Unity/Gnome shell are just going in all the wrong directions while Android seems to be increasingly going in many of the right ones.