Google has released its brand new OS, to the public, Fuchsia. Whilst consumers have been using devices powered by Google’s two current operating systems Chrome OS and Android, Google has been hard at work for the last few years on its next operating system and now it is here, but What is Google Fuchsia? Is it a new Android?
Google has been pretty quiet about the project and it initially leaked in 2016, after code was shared on GitHub before Google issued a guide to run the OS on one of his Pixel Books in 2018, and launched its official website in 2019. The new OS is designed to work universally across devices, so think of it running on everything from phones to laptops to car dashboards and be honest to smart objects like traffic lights.
What is Google Fuchsia? Is it a new Android?
Google Fuchsia looks like a new Android, and we think that it is the main purpose. Unlike Chrome OS and Android, Google Fuchsia is not built on the Linux Kernel, instead, using a completely different Kernel called Zircon which was originally conceived for low energy consumption on embedded devices. If you do not want to try Google Fuchsia, and want to install Chrome OS on your PC, you can read our Chrome OS guide before continuing.
The OS launched not with fanfare or celebration as you might expect but with a quiet update of a relatively low-key product if you own a first-generation Nest Hub from 2018, then you are in luck as this is the first device to get the new OS. It is delivered by an over-the-air update first to users in the preview program, then to all devices over the next few months, you likely had not noticed the change.
However, as the hub world looks and works the same as always has just the engineering under the hood will have changed. This is possible due to the device’s software having been written in a flutter the fewer developers build applications that work across multiple platforms including iOS, Android, and most importantly future beyond, this software can run Android apps natively, and it looks like a lot of work has been done to make the OS change as seamless as possible.
Google has acknowledged the software rollout is happening but they do not seem to want to make a big deal of it at their major developer’s conference. It is not clear what the next step for the OS will be could it appear on the other smart home devices other made by Google products possibly even a phone or a pixel book.
How Good is Google Fuchsia OS?
With the combination of Google’s release and some fantastic work by the developers of dahlia OS and with the help of an emulator, we tried Google Fuchsia in its early stages to try it for ourselves. Previously efforts to use Google Fuchsia have not exactly been a user-friendly task.
The portable Google Fuchsia emulator has helped us spend some hands-on time with an open-source portion of Google Fuchsia without having to spend hours downloading and building which is a great bonus but there are still some prerequisites here that, we would wager some of it out there.
You will not see any graphical interface or something because again they do not want that, and they are working internally on that. Some huge progress and exciting news are we saw the next certification running Google Fuchsia 1.2 and a few years back they added support for Snapdragon CPU, so they are definitely working hard on that and of course, they may launch a smartphone device with Google Fuchsia in the future.
It is also important to note there is some minimum to get the Google Fuchsia emulator up and running on your machine. You will need at least an Intel CPU made after 2010, if you have a dedicated graphics card or a fourth-generation Intel CPU with integrated graphics, if not 8GB of RAM is of course the baseline, while you will need to be running Ubuntu 20.04+, otherwise, you might not even be able to launch this pre-packed emulator provided you follow the instructional steps.
Should you try Google Fuchsia?
It is honestly hard to suggest that you jump through the numerous hoops, it requires an active Linux build to actually run and even then unless you are inquisitive it is probably not worth that effort required for the average tech fan.
We also encountered plenty of issues attempting to use a virtual machine running on Windows when trying to get this working making the entry-level a little bit more difficult than it’s probably worth. This is still the publicly available open-source code of Google Fuchsia though. If you want to download visit these pages: Portable Fuchsia and Fuchsia.
