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.
I have found the earlier model, the MK802/MK803 to be unreliable. I've gone through two of them already and have opted not to buy a third. The first one quit working, the second one the wifi quit working and other strangeness.
If you're going to drop ~$250 it might make more sense to just buy the Samsung ARM Chromebook or the Nexus 10 and slap your own Linux or Android build on it, unless you really need the easy JTAG connection or something.
There's supposed to be a cheaper ($135) option in the form of the 'ARMBrix Zero', but it is currently only up for preorder:
Thank you for the information. I was looking for something around $50-$60, but I guess the A15 is that much better that it warrants the increased price?
I recently purchased an APC 8750, and I found that it is very good quality hardware. It worked out of the box, and the community forum answered most of my questions. Overall, the web browsing performance and UI has too many problems to be usable as a PC. I bought it to explore using Android as a platform for IOT and other such projects and unfortunately, it fell down here as well because it has no GPIO interface to drive other hardware including LEDs, LCD displays, sensors, IR devices, motors, etc. Further, Google did a great job of addressing this requirement with Android by releasing the ADK of 2011 which provides built in integration with Arduino via a USB ADB interface, but the ADK requires Android 3.1 or higher.
Looking at the Paper's new faster performance, the addition of GPIOs, and Android 4.0, and an optional case, it is clear that VIA has been listening to user feedback. They certainly delivered on my wishlist. In the end the 8750 was a $65 lesson on how far Android has come in such a short period of time.
Android applications are excellent, so while I see plenty of complaints about what it doesn't have, it is certainly getting the developer attention necessary for applications that can / will replace productivity applications on Windows machines. For the 80%, the desktop is nearly dead.
Further, Android is a great platform for embedded applications, and it looks like APC has delivered an inexpensive platform for the maker / hacker community.
Though a direct comparison to RPi is unfair, an APC comes with a power supply and 4GB of flash, so I consider a Raspberry Pi to actually cost $75:
$45 (Actual street price of a Pi)
$15 Memory Card
$15 for a decent USB power supply (a low quality PS causes many of the RPi stability and Ext4 corruption issues I have seen on forums).
(Also, Android is preloaded, so it is a much lower effort to get running.)
And the comment about fire made me laugh. The CPU of the 8750 might have reached 40 degrees under very heavy load and the power supply is external, so cardboard certainly won't be an issue. I thought it was funny because I actually use the cardboard box the 8750 comes in because it is virtually impossible to find a Neo-ITX case for the board.
Hope that provides some insight. I am glad to see VIA remains committed to this project.
I find it odd that there are so many desktop-ish things based on Android instead of Ubuntu. One would get a lot more software and a much more familiar experience with Ubuntu.
> I find it odd that there are so many desktop-ish things based on Android instead of Ubuntu.
That may be a reasonable thing to ponder until you try to run Ubuntu on a device which formerly ran Android. I thought the same as you and installed Ubuntu on my Asus Transformer TF101.
While the original Transformer sports reasonably dated specifications, it's provides a very neat, fast and responsive Android-experience.
I expected Ubuntu to offer the same, but with a wider-selection of (non touch-optimized) software. I was thoroughly disappointed. Just opening the Terminal Emulator took 5-10 seconds. Trying to open Firefox or any web-browser was a joke.
What most people fails to realize (I guess because Android has adopted the Java-is-slow-meme, either it wants to or not) is that Android is heavily optimized because it has to be responsive on ultra-light hardware. Given its feature-set, it's a very fast OS compared to most other out there.
Ubuntu on the other hand, is heavy enough to sometimes make my Core i7 wish it had more CPU-cycles. Putting Ubuntu on underpowered machines is something I wouldn't recommend to anyone.
As a contrast, i'm running ubuntu 12.04 with unity on an old atom netbook, and it runs perfectly fine. It does need about a gig of ram to run comfortably with a few apps open, so i suspect people having a bad experience are running into issues with the amount of ram in their system.
Android obviously handles low memory situations better. Ubuntu can't match its ability to free up the ram used by inactive apps.
Was this using Unity? I found Unity unusably slow on my old netbook — 5 seconds to open Terminal wasn't too far off the mark. But Xfce was so snappy it made that thing useful again.
I'm not disagreeing with your general point, but I wonder if a lighter DE would make a big difference. (Unless you were already using Xfce, and got the results you describe... that would be bad news.)
Allow me to disagree. While I myself use Ubuntu as my main desktop PC, I can totally see how Android makes more sense for a lot of customers.
Don't forget who this is aimed for. Alas, Ubuntu is still mostly for folks above some level of computer proficiency. Android, on the other hand, is probably one of the most "familiar" experiences for people using smartphones, and the (huge) amount of applications is easily accessible through the Play store with lots of reviews and hence high quality. You just don't get that for Ubuntu.
I assumed it was mostly due to using components like GPUs that have binary blobs for Android but nothing for standard linux kernels. This was the main reason given for why Firefox OS and Ubuntu Phone would (optionally) run on top of an Android kernel.
I'm going to disagree. LXDE, as used by Peppermint OS (an Ubuntu derivative), is as simple and complete a user experience as I've found — surprisingly modern, as well. I never expected LXDE to get this good, frankly.
Nice! Just want to point out, this seems to be referring to the original APC, which is now called APC 8750, not the Paper. (They mention getting a case for it, while the Paper is new and comes in a case.)
Given the frequency with which Ubuntu pushes updates (every couple of days it seems) and that handling these updates requires an administrative password, I can see sound user experience concerns which Android would better address.
Most likely not unless the user compiles it (or finds it on somewhere like xda-developers from someone else who compiled) and flashes it. The problem with that though is if Android updates break compatibility with any of the proprietary drivers it may come with in the future. The device could also be made by one of those shady OEMs that don't comply with releasing the kernel source under GPL. Either one of those things happening just made compiling the latest version of Android much much harder as well as certain components not working or having full functionality.
Even with that though, the kernel not getting updates and continued patches makes it harder to keep things built for an end user, but I'm not sure if that is so much of an issue past the Linux 2.x to 3.0 jump with Android devices.
Updates for anything Android outside of Nexus devices that Google maintains are generally far from automatic or dependable.
I hope that this is the restart of the under $200 PC era. I also hope that young boys and girls are provided real tools to program these things out of the box. Thinking about it, a new version of BASIC might not be such a bad thing, but that might just be nostalgia for my Atari 400 8-bit BASIC cartridge.
I was actually pretty disappointed with the "beginner" workflow for the Raspberry Pi, which is essentially "run this linux distribution, which has some educational applications pre-installed once you fire up X". Not to knock linux, but based on the stated mission of the RPi, I would have thought something more similar to the traditional 80's experience of "boot & start programming" would have been the out-of-the-box default.
I've actually been mulling over starting a project like this for machines like the RPi and APC -- an OS where you basically boot into something like a REPL, and start coding away.
You could just remove X/desktop from any Linux distro and be right where you want to be-a shell which can all command line programs and you can program it via one liners or scripts.
Couldn't you have it boot into something like Squeak running on the framebuffer? http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3484 discusses this for the x86, but with no Raspberry Pi in my possession (I haven't been able to order one yet - busy with other projects).
Well, that was supposed to be the banner that RaspberryPi was flying. Except everyone seems to be busy building XBMC and MAME boxes out of it, and not much visible work on how to make it friendly as a beginner's programming tool.
I'm nostalgic for the old 8-bit BASIC too, but primarily because you could switch the thing on and the interpreter was in ROM and ready to go a few seconds after powering on.
> The Colour Maximite is a small and versatile single chip computer running a full featured BASIC interpreter with 128K of working memory and eight colours on a VGA monitor.
> It will work with a standard PC keyboard and because the Maximite has its own built in SD memory card and BASIC language you need nothing more to start writing and running BASIC programs.
> The Colour Maximite also has 40 input/output lines including an Arduino compatible connector. These I/Os can be independently configured as analog inputs, digital inputs or digital outputs. You can measure voltage, frequencies, detect switch closure, etc and respond by turning on lights, closing relays, etc - all under control of your BASIC program.
"I'm nostalgic for the old 8-bit BASIC too, but primarily because you could switch the thing on and the interpreter was in ROM and ready to go a few seconds after powering on."
The immediacy is something lacking in current IDEs and ease of start. Turn on, type, and something happens.
I'm still hopeful I'll see an under $200 programmable computing device sold somewhere. Perhaps if OLPC is actually serious about selling at Walmart[1], it will happen.
I dunno if there's a need for basic when there is so much easy functionality other places. When I started in the 80s, it was on my Commadore 64 and interesting to use, and a lot more straightforward than pascal or c when I was 10.
But there are a lot of good tools without creating anything new. IMO, the real places for improvement are learning methods.
My own idea has been to get my boy to start learning javascript via codecademy. We're seeing how that goes.
He's 11 and more interested in minecraft (which, IMO, has a similar set of activities such as wikis and researching via message boards as my own day-to-day why-doesn't-this-work programming issues), but we'll see how this goes.
The other thing that I did was to put together a desktop from parts with him over the holidays, which was a bit more fun than our usual yearly giant lego build, and I hope will give him an idea that these machines aren't magic-- they are put together, even if I don't have the skills to convey that at the circuit level.
"The other thing that I did was to put together a desktop from parts with him over the holidays, which was a bit more fun than our usual yearly giant lego build, and I hope will give him an idea that these machines aren't magic-- they are put together, even if I don't have the skills to convey that at the circuit level."
How much did it cost to build? I would wager it was more than $200. To put together a PC is beyond a lot of parents skill.
I bet you could boot one into an Apple II or C64 emulator fairly quickly. My little one actually finds some of the older games, like "The Pond" and "The Factory" more engaging than the much more polished modern educational stuff. Now I just need to find a 9" monitor with HDMI input.
Sure. Rightly so. The Samsung Chromebox uses an OS designed for it. I'm just remarking that people seem to be interested in making, buying and selling cheap, small android "PCs" (and media boxes & such).
It worth remarking on specifically because it is not where Android was designed to go and it fits rather awkwardly.
Imagine you sell taco kits. Then you discover some people are buying your taco kits, throwing away the shells, downloading instructions from the internet and using the other ingredients in different proportions to make bean soup. You also sell canned soup and it also sells decently. You might decide to bring out a bean soup range based on the taco kit. Maybe they think it tastes better then your intentional bean soup. Maybe they like making it themselves. Either way, it's worth noticing.
The only conclusion I can draw from the Chrome OS experiment is that consumers and developers aren't at all interested in it. It's yet another incarnation of the limited thin-client concept which has proven to be a failure time and time again.
They'll likely merge at some point. Chrome now runs on Android and desktop Chrome already has packaged apps that are native-like.
There's still a huge business market for browser apps such as Docs and it would take a while before there are equivalent Android apps for desktop form factor.
Hey netcan - I wanted to shoot you an email, but it's not in your HN profile. It's completely irrelevant to this topic (email is for jewelry dropshipping), but I think this is the only way to message you.
Another fail from VIA after their earlier Android PC, which was derided on their forums for being too slow. There are tons of mini pcs now available with double the specs of the VIA pc and up to 2x lower price. Some even have 2GB RAM and can run Ubuntu with hardware acceleration.
Cardboard's ignition point is above 400C. Computer components don't do well running above 80C. Something would have to go horribly wrong for a computer to ignite cardboard. Cardboard just seems easy to ignite because it's commonly burned with a butane lighter that burns at over 400C as well.
I've got an i.MX6Q bare board running next to me. It's beefier than this book PC (quad A9s instead of one). It has no heatsink and gets only slightly warm to the touch after running it hard for a while.
If any excess heat is generated by this thing, that aluminum backplate can probably sink it.
As for UL certification, this thing is low-voltage DC only. The power brick should be certified but that's probably all that's needed. And FCC class-B like usual.
It's a modest step up from the imx5, and OMG MORE COREZ. We're looking at it more for a cost-reduction move from the imx53 than a performance gain.
Freescale got the hint and put a lot of the voltage regulation on-board so there's no need for the external PMIC anymore. That was always the dirty little secret of these SoC chips, you needed the companion chip to make it complete...
Yeah, the thing that would prevent me from buying that "book" is the limited RAM. It is easy to expand storage, but only having .5GB on-board RAM is not ideal, especially for something that is going to be a desktop replacement.
There are quite a lot of Android based desktop computers available, some with better specs and cheaper than the VIA offering.
Just google for "Android USB Mini PC".
Seems a little short-sighted to only feature 2 USB ports. If you have one of these set up with a keyboard and mouse and you wish to use a flash or external drive, you'll have to temporarily sacrifice an input device or use a hub. Surely they could have squeezed in one or two more without too much of a cost increase.
Interesting aesthetic, but there's no way it won't look out of place with all the wires sticking out of it. And I think I'd want something more durable than cardboard for the case.
Pretty much every Android device I have encountered phone or tablet wise could at least chroot and allow the user to partition off and install some other version of Linux along side Android. So, though it comes with Android, you could probably get Debian, Fedora or whatever running on there as well.
If I read "PC" here, I'd expect something other than "phone" and "tablet" mode, i.e. a proper multi-tasking desktop view. But AFAIK that's not available, although there have been hints about something like that in 5.0.
Most Android builds comes touch-optimized and configured out of the box to cater to touch-users. It might be a build which has more defaults tuned towards non-touch input like keyboard and mice.
I know if you tried to run Android on Netbooks using the 2.x codebase (which was possible) you'd have a horrible user-experience due to the platform's limited support for non-touch input-devices.
With Android 4.x the support for these has been improved to the point where you can call the thing a "PC" and almost use it as such.
power consumption is what got me into this kind of thing. I donot expect a good browsing experience nor gaming on this kind of stuff. please quit ranting about the spec.
Can we stop calling something a PC until it comes with a proper input and output device? Let's just call it a CPU, if that is a more accurate term here.
Also wondering if we connect a screen, a USB keyboard and power supply, will it still "blend into the office environment"?
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.