Amazon Building its Own Linux-Based OS to Replace Android

Nice! And they will probably differentiate from the competition by allowing GPL applications and sideloading, and having a total control for your privacy and no tracking, right?

Right?

Cool. Another OS to avoid.

They want to harvest the data, without Google's control, and give none to Google.

Hahahaha cool, Linux with ads and tracking and all the spyware you could ever want.

I wonder if it's going to be as terrible as their Fire OS.

The author is exited but I'm not. I am not a big fan of corporations taking the free work of FOSS developers and turning it into a proprietary dystopia.

A third competitor for Android and iOS would be amazing. But not if it's Amazon..

Windows Phone: Electric Boogaloo

TL;DR Amazon is building a Linux distro that starts a chromium to run react native apps. Apparently, you need hundreds of people for that.

Oh so I won’t be able to sideload streaming APKs onto any new Amazon devices? Guess you can fucking keep your shit hardware then

oh great, yet another platform that will use free software to restrict what people can do with their computing devices 🤮

how is this supposed to be a good thing? 🙄

Apps are going to be written in React Native

So despite the desire for one, Vega won’t be an Android-killer, won’t bring an influx of big name apps to benefit regular Linux distros, nor see Amazon do something crazy cool like create its own Linux tablet UI.

This is not what I meant when I said we need more Mobile OS competition...

Amazon out here thinking “could you imagine how much cheap garbage we could try to sell people if we can harvest literally all of the data directly?”

Amazon can't make TVs or ereades without filling them to the brim with ads and spyware like the greedy shits they are, I dont want to think about how screwed up their OS would be. As much as I sneer at Microsoft and windows BS as a snobby Linux user I get the impression amazon would be way worse and make Ol Gatey boy say 'have a little class, would you?'

LMFAO, can't wait to see Adbuntu.

These tentacular megacorporations are a problem. Amazon is OK as a merchant, MS as an OS developer, Google as a search engine... If they do vertical integration the market is corrupted.

Lmao, they can have fun with that. I can't imagine it being anything decent. A mobile phone equivalent of a DVD Player OS lol

Good luck getting all the developers to rewrite their apps. The only reason you had any apps was because it was based on Android so it was little to no effort to port. Going plain ol' embedded Linux is basically the death knell of your developer story. Source: been there, had no third party apps, switched to Android

I already tried an Amazon Fire tablet, Amazon. No thanks. I returned it. I don't need a locked-down console that spies on me. Windows is well on its way to becoming that already.

Surely this other monopoly will save us

Absolutely hell no.

The only thing I care about in this is if they will contribute anything back to the open source ecosystem, be it code or anything else.

Probably because it is stupid simple to escape their ecosystem just by sideloading apps. They want to lock you down with their own OS.

Nice try Amazon. I'm not falling for it.

if it's anything like amazon linux on ec2 i'll pass

I know it won't happen, but it'd be nice if Linux switched to GPLv3. That would at least help somewhat here

The mixed blessing of GPLv2

So they want more control over what people are able to install

What are the chances this will not produce wrong doing?

All I'm hearing is that we might be able to hack these devices and put full Linux on them.

hopefully they'll design some package manager incompatible with android at the most basic level - and then double down when it's proven to be a huge mistake. a good tick upwards for dev jobs, but the time for actual competition was over 10 years ago. this will fail miserably.

Most TV operating systems are already non-android linux based. They mostly just run webapps.

Another not-Linux Linux based operating system. Can't wait to argue same as with Android and ChromeOS that this is not like "real" desktop Linux looks.

We really should stick to calling it GNU or something.

So basically

"Windows for freeloaders: "You are the product(tm)" edition."

Curious if it'll be opensource and mobile linux distro. If Amazon gets into the mobile linux game, the mobile phone market might change radically.

I'm confused, why not just continue with AOSP?

It already has most of the Google stuff stripped out and any remaining parts will be easy to replace in comparison to rebuilding and maintaining a much larger software stack while also simultaneously retaining compatibility with all the android apps already on their app store.

All I have to ask is why though? They already have access to skinned aosp and from there can(and do)quite a bit of tweaking on their own. Fireos has been a worse version of android for some time now and Im unsure what the benefit of making their own in house OS would be.

If it's a true GNU/Linux OS with compatibility with linux programs, then that would be kind of neat, and if it's open enough to let advanced users install flatpaks(I suspect it's going to be immutable so at least flatpaks would be nice) then that could be neat. Currently it's very easy to sideload on fireos devices and even install the play store in full so it's possible the end product could be more like the steamdeckOS which is very much a user friendly store front end with a power user true linux experience underneath.

That said, for some reason I suspect that they will be locking things down even more and its going to be one of those many user facing linux devices that's technically linux but very limited. Like a smart fridge interface or something. If this is the case then dropping android support would be a bad move. You lose easy/lazy portability to your store from developers who already have a product to sell and you lose many apps that already exist, and for power users you lose access to the many apps that can easily be side loaded like tachiyomi(though I imagine amazon would rather you buy from them than buy their subsidized $80 tablets to read pirated manga/comics and library books on libby)

But who knows if they actually do an OK job this could lead to a new wave of GNU compatible touch forward apps for the rest of us. Linux has gotten a lot better at touch forward design over the last 4 or 5 years on its own, but its still fairly rough.

I'm devastated they didn't choose to pick up webOS for this.

Ugh I don't know which is worse. Next timeline, portal gun.

lets hope the devices can be rooted and we can have phosh or ubuntumobile or sth. like that flashed

If all the apps are in React Native I feel like they are gonna have a bad time. If you're not careful React Native apps have bad performance, and Fire TVs don't have a lot of performance to spare.

As. Someone who is incredibly poor and use my current fire stick as a way to help me because of accessibility for my disabilities. Does anybody know if there's a alternative to Chromecast, fire stick or Roku that doesn't involve another computer (which I could get a raspberry pi or another computer dedicated to media, but government doesn't believe in giving disabled people enough for those things)

Save us phosh, or something similar..

Well i think it will help us to access more apps

For some reason I thought they had already made a nix OS