At what point is it just Android with a different launcher/desktop?
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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I think that's actually the goal. If they can get a single core OS working on all their devices, that cuts down a lot on the difficulty of things like application development and security patches.
Why not use Android in the first place then? I mean, it works fine on pretty much any device.
That's... basically what they're doing. "ChromeOS" is basically just going to be a desktop-friendly UI on Android.
They are doing this in order to enable Chrome OS UI/UX on Android's incoming desktop mode when video out is enabled.
Aww, it was kinda good while it lasted.
I guess someone could cross-compile a bunch of desktop Linux apps like Gimp or Krita and publish them to Play Store to run on Chromebooks. There was some work on porting Wayland to Android, there's also X server on Android although it's unmaintained, and all other libraries like QT and GTK can be cross-compiled with some effort on top of Bionic.
I think that ship has sailed; I can't see this being a priority for Google and supporting this seems like a massive undertaking.
It was so simple for Google to add desktop mode to Android during Android 5 times. And they even had Android TV as a mouse-oriented hardware. And they could populate Play Store with quality opensource Linux desktop apps, by just organizing the work, there's currently no technical reason why Krita or Gimp couldn't be built for Android natively, it's just that no one cares to do it after Google ignored Android desktop mode for ten years.
At least it might bring desktop chromium to android.