Google's mysterious Fuchsia operating system gets a wild UI

Shawn Knight

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Google has for some time now been working on a new operating system. Tentatively known as Fuchsia, the search giant's third operating system (alongside Android and Chrome OS) is an open-source project that's slowly but surely coming together.

As we reported last August, Fuchsia isn't based on Linux but rather, a new Google-developed kernel referred to as Magenta. The OS was limited to just a command line last summer but now as Ars Technica highlights, a new UI has emerged that's worth taking a look at.

The Fuchsia System UI, dubbed Armadillo, in its current state features a pretty radical card-based reimagining of the home screen alongside a keyboard, home button and a window manager. As Ars notes, nothing really "works" at this point - it's all just placeholders - but it's interesting nevertheless.

For what it's worth, Google describes Magenta as a product that targets modern phones and personal computers packing fast processors and copious amounts of RAM with "arbitrary peripherals doing open-ended computation." Given that description, it's easy to see how some believe Fuchsia could be Android's eventual replacement.

Ars points to a post on the public Fuchsia IRC channel from developer Travis Geiselbrecht who says it "isn't a toy thing, it's not a 20 percent project, it's not a dumping ground of a dead thing that we don't care about anymore."

More details could emerge at Google's annual I/O conference later this week although given the current status of the project, I wouldn't count on it.

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Let's hope they choose a better path than Microsoft did, 'cos for now it looks similar...

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I'm just hoping they develop it to be "fully self-standing" and not dependent upon the internet to function. This would give it a leg up, especially if they choose NOT to tie it directly to google, but allowed the end user to determine how much, if any dependency exists between it and the programs it runs. The good news for end users could be a strong competitor to Microsoft, forcing them to once again let the end users make their own decisions.
 
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