Ironically, general purpose computing. Like servers, smartphones, etc. The premise of Fuchsia, as a prominent example, is to build an OS that operates more like a sandboxed/capabilities-based microservices platform, with structured IPC across processes. All major platforms both cloud and clients (even browsers) have gone to great lengths to deliver precisely that on top of existing OSs, with many expensive layers and hacks. It would be a lot nicer to have it built into the OS.
Dumb, probably overly broad Q: I'm looking to build a hardware project off a flutter app. Linux on Raspberry Pi is the straightforward option. But I want an excuse to build on Fuchsia.
Let's pretend Fuchsia is just as easy to deploy on (I'm 99% sure it won't be).
Does Fuchsia buy me any cool stuff long-term that isn't possible on Linux?
Like, what's my excuse for going with Fuchsia other than "(handwaves) it'll be more secure"? (to be clear, im teasing myself and my understanding of Fuchsia, not your explanation)
> Let's pretend Fuchsia is just as easy to deploy on (I'm 99% sure it won't be).
To stress this beyond a doubt: don’t do this unless you’re willing to become an early-masochistic-martyr adopter. My knowledge is outdated by years though. I don’t know how far you’d get today.
> Does Fuchsia buy me any cool stuff long-term that isn't possible on Linux?
I don’t think so. Fuchsia shines with capability-based multitenancy, and basically anywhere you would have different processes from different vendors communicating together (like a mobile OS with multiple partially trusted apps that may need to talk to one another). If you own/audit all code on your device, especially in a single app, you don’t gain anything from that.
Some auxiliary stuff like content addressable file system and OTA deployments may be attractive, but I have no idea if those things are actually supported or even around these days.
Oh, one thing that may be worth tracking in your domain is how fuchsia is progressing in terms of power management. If you’re on arm and battery power, and they prioritize it, it may beat Linux & android in terms of low power devices. But that’s pure speculation.
Unikernels. Throw away the OS completely, and just run the server application on the hardware/hypervisor. That would be my answer for servers. You kinda don't need an OS for them.
Does that mean it’s truly ripe? I don’t know.