Just booted it. The EULA is frightening to say the least.
1. "You agree that you irrevocably waive any and all ownership, legal and moral rights to your user content."
2. You're also not allowed to oppose "the basic principles determined in the Constitution of the People's Republic of China", harm it's "national honor and interests", or undermine it's "national religious policy, promoting cults and superstitions".
3. Also, you're not allowed to spread rumor, disturb social order, or undermine social stability.
There's other strange rules of conduct that just turned me off from the entire project. Besides, it doesn't see either of my wireless adapters and the desktop blanked out when it attempted to adjust my screen resolution:)
I'm still interested in getting completely off Windows 10, so I'll stick with Linux for now.
If this is really true [1] and not an exaggeration, there is no way on Earth I will touch this or let anyone I care about touch it with a 100-foot pole.
Closed source? Waive legal rights? to my own content? Not criticize China?
Not in 100 million years. Glad I switched to 100% Ubuntu. Donated and anticipating 16.04 LTS in April.
It's one thing to get pressured into a gray area w/r/t freedoms in exchange for some perceived benefit, but to explicitly waive them and endanger myself to a foreign power? Who knows what China would do? No way.
How do these people even make a EULA with a straight face and expect people to drink it up? Even though Windows and OSX are closed-source, at least hackers have a grasp on what it's doing and you're not instantly giving up rights and ownership when you turn it on.
This crosses my line in the sand.
[1] I've been trying to find the EULA online somewhere, but can't so far. Any leads? I'm afraid to install this and look at the EULA.
This should be considered malware for the first point.
The others are impossible for China to enforce outside of China but if your content somehow got to them via this OS, they can legally sell your content to anyone. It'd be your responsibility to challenge that in various courts. It's just not worth it.
If this is really true, wtf. I wonder why we see RemixOS for the third time on HN frontpage within days.
On the other side Win10 eula is almost as bad. The difference is they really enforce their things and even backported some to Win7/8 disguised as security updates. Why do they get away with this? Why do we occasionally see "positiv comments" about it on HN.
This must reach some sort of high point for satirically awful comments here. Really? Can you point to the bit of the Win 10 EULA that allows Microsoft to claim anything you create with it as theirs?
Take it from the positive side - looks like there will be finally a year of Linux desktop (even if because of being pushed out of other operating systems due to their draconian terms of use)! ;-)
Perhaps it is legal boilerplate for People's Republic of China companies.
Consider that an American EULA might require a "worldwide, sublicenseable, irrevocable [...]" user content license, and forbid activites illegal in the USA.
Thanks for pointing this out. I've written about this in Xataka (http://www.xataka.com/servicios/remix-os-promete-pero-su-lic...), where I work as editor, and after getting in contact with Jide's team they've let us known that these terms apply only to China and that they will update the EULA:
"Thank you for bringing this to our attention. In full disclosure, we utilized the language (relevant to China and China only) and copied it over to the EULA for our international ROM. Our legal team has now reviewed this and has removed all language pertaining to legal and moral rights of the data as well as anything that mentions the Chinese government as this is not relevant to non-Chinese users. This is a very serious matter and will be corrected in all future releases of the EULA."
From the EULA, point 1 applies to anything you upload to their site or to "Jide services". Jide services require registration and are necessary to some functionality within the OS. This could be a horrible interpretation of giving up certain rights to content you share on a social network or site.
It's awful, yes, but it may not apply to everything you do within ReactOS. The other 2 points do apply to everything you do in ReactOS, so you're supposed to censor yourself based on Chinese government censorship policies whenever you use it.
I love most of the interface. There's still a few bugs that haven't been addressed, but it's 95% solidly done.
The telemetry capture is a huge issue for me and also no longer releasing the contents of updates. I've done what I can to limit or minimize how much information is collected, but I shouldn't have to do that.
When Microsoft released their metrics on Windows 10 usage (for example, how many times their Photos app had been used), people should've been absolutely livid. Who knows what else is captured besides the process list?
I have a little box for my TV running Android. The issue with all the apps is that 90% (looking mostly at games, I guess) of them more or less expect gestural input, and are either really difficult to play or just not fun with a mouse.
I doubt that particular issue is as bad in productivity apps etc., but there's a lot more to running a mobile app on a big screen than just resizing a window. Does this have some magic to solve that in a general way?
I used to use Android on an old netbook --- a Toshiba AC100, ARM-based with 512MB of RAM. The netbook originally shipped with Gingerbread and was practically unusable, but after I upgraded it to Honeycomb it was a really rather comfortable thing to use.
I had Debian running in a chroot on it, so I got a combination of the Android UI with a proper Linux environment underneath it. This meant that stuff like wifi and quick wakeup and sleep all worked fine, together with Android's lightweight web browser etc. But if I wanted it, apt and all the build tools were available.
Unfortunately, since Honeycomb, each successive Android release has been steadily worse to use with a touch pad --- the Honeycomb status bar was great, the ICS action bar isn't. These days I use a Chromebook.
I was also chrooting Debian on top of Android for some time.
I really like Linux, but desktop GUI software has become quite stagnant due to excessive framework fragmentation.
I have long thought that Android converging back with regular Linux is a very real possibility. It might be the case that we end up having Android as a standard desktop instead of Gnome or KDE.
I'd rather have the latter, as I don't think Android will easily get rid of Google stuff like GCM, but some competition will be good.
I've used Linux for a very long time. "Excessive framework fragmentation" hardly describes the current GTK & Qt/KDE almost-monoculture. In fact, I can't remember the last time when Linux (or any Unix derivative) was so quiet in this regard.
Desktop Linux was anything but stagnant ten years ago, when there were at least three frameworks in current use (Gnome & co., KDE & co., wxWindows -- although that's not a full application framework) plus a lot of other UI frameworks that still weren't dead (Motif, Jesus Christ...) or we had not yet given up on (GNUStep, which is an entire application framework). And there were the people writing GTK software not intended to necessarily run under Gnome (which is being increasingly discouraged by the Gnome team now), as well as people writing Qt software without KDE's framework. Ooh, and Tcl/Tk wasn't dead and buried yet.
If anything, GUI software on Linux appears stagnant because we're in one of those CADT rewriting phases that jwz was writing about twelve years ago ( https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html ). There hasn't been much improvement in the last three years, indeed; that's largely because Gnome 3 is struggling to come on-par with Gnome 2 in terms of features and flexibility, and as KDE finally emerged from 4.x's perpetual beta, it got into 5.x's. And, between KDE's increasing lack of relevance after everyone ran away from early 4.x releases, and Gnome's agenda for world domination, there's hardly any room left for developers who have neither a passion for architectural astronautics, nor a taste for political partisanship, so very little desktop software gets written outside these two.
Seems that Android may be heading back towards Honeycomb, given that the 6.0.1 release put the buttons in the screen corners (back and home bottom left, switcher bottom right).
Never mind that 5.0 or something put in a notification shade that was more useful on larger screens.
The biggest problem with Android right now is perhaps the release cadence, and that Google sticks to it even if it means shipping half baked functionality.
For my purposes, the current biggest problem with Android is that it's diverging more and more from desktop Linux; the security model is now sufficiently different that a Debian userland basically won't run. (selinux errors when doing anything with apt.)
I used pchroot for a while, which was magical --- it fakes a superuser chroot in a normal user account --- but there's something about recent Androids it doesn't like and it's stopped working for me.
The switch to a Chromebook was partly because of this. Crouton seems at least semi-blessed, although recent Chromebooks with Freon no longer support running X in a new VT. (You instead pass through X to a Chrome tab.)
Android TV (like on my NVIDIA Shield box) is far better than any stock android. The apps are designed to be used with a controller or remote. And they work well.
It is now my primary media device. The games aren't PS4 quality, but they run in 4K and everything is smooth. We use it for everything, and it's _mostly_ a good experience.
Well, they're Android games. Mostly cheaper games ported from mobile devices. And the CPU/GPU in the machine isn't as hefty as what's in consoles; framerates and pixel quality is good but shading, etc. not.
And the big publishers aren't making big games for it. There's nothing like a Skyrim or whatever for it. There's no DVD/BD disc reader in it, so everything has to be download only, so there'd be problems distributing games of that size anyways.
The best games to show off 4K are vector games like Geometry Wars, etc. They look great and are snappy and fun.
It's also pretty good for emulators, once you get all your ROMs on and get the controller mapped correctly. I've even got Dolphin running a few Gamecube games at mostly acceptable quality, tho not consistently.
My Internet connection is a bandwidth capped 2.5Mbps 3g connection, as I live rural with no high speed terrestrial connection. So no, I haven't used it. I can barely do Netflix.
I use it, been playing the Lego Harry Potter's with my son.
Works very well, I forget I'm streaming the game. I've got 160mbps internet but it should work with 10mbps+. No noticeable latency for this type of games, might be a different story for multiplayer FPS where every ms counts.
Only complaint is the selection of games is quite low right now, I'm guessing Nvidia has a lot of work ahead of them to convince games publishers that this is the future
I keep wishing somebody would make an airmouse with buttons configured to simulate common touch-gestures - like put a d-pad on it for swipe up/down/left/right, and a scrollwheel simulating pinch zooms.
Google keeps trying to get vendors to support their half-forgotten TV oses GoogleTV/AndroidTV, but it seems like it would be simpler to just make a peripheral that emulates the common touch actions and use let Android be Android, even if it's on a TV.
You have a mobile phone, I assume? With a touchscreen? Which does multi-touch? And the thing sports a bluetooth adapter?
In that case all you need is a program running on that phone, emulating you 'airmouse'. No need for more hardware, just use what you have. The same works for a 'normal' PC, btw. I know there are several apps for Android which can provide this service, I guess the same is true for the other contenders in this area.
Yes, but for a remote for a TV device you want something one-handed and hand-held, which creates an inherent problem with the pinch action. Trackpads are a desktop/laptop experience.
Once you're using a trackpad, you may as well go with the Chromecast approach of using a full phone-like device. Sad that Android is so bloated, otherwise I'd think a small 3.5" barebones full Android device would be good as a bundled "remote".
Have you seen the new Apple TV Remote? I haven't done a lot with it, but it's got a touch pad on it for gestures. Maybe these remote / trackpad devices would do the trick.
It's really up to app developers to make sure their apps work ok (provide fallbacks if gesture heavy) for mouse.
I think we are in a period where Android is just starting to get used with mouse so I'd expect it to take a bit of time for things get in shape for mouse users.
Understood who should really address the problem, but if RemixOS doesn't have an interim solution we might see the same catch-22 here as we often do. App developers will care about these things when it matters commercially, and consumers will care about them when the apps work.
I can use the mouse on my android box ... the issue is that the things you have to click don't make sense with a mouse. E.g., there'll be two buttons, one on each side of the screen. Easy to hit with two thumbs, impossible to hit with a mouse.
Hopefully they'll find a way to make something like RemixOS Android TV compatible - apps made for that respond to remote controllers rather than touch inputs.
I have a little box running Windows under my TV, and RemixOS looks very interesting as a simpler OS I could use that will still have things like Netflix streaming etc. The only downside is that I need some background services (for DVR, etc) - I'm not clear on how Linux-y RemixOS is that this would or would not be possible.
Yep! I've got an NVidia Shield TV running Android TV and I'm pretty happy with it. Great hardware (super fast mobile GPU) and the software isn't bad either. The included gamepad works great, additionally I bought a Logitech K400 wireless keyboard/trackpad to use some apps which aren't great on the gamepad (Chrome etc)
Is there really a chart comparing performance on an i7 to a bunch of smartphones? I'm having a really hard time seeing the point of that comparison. Why not benchmark against other PC operating systems, like say Chrome OS?
RemixOS uses GPLv2 code (Linux, etc) and other open source licenses. They might got away with proprietary devices, their official response on their old (closed) forum was telling. But now they will have to provide it.
The idea of adding a several improvements to Android for desktop usage (improved right mouse click) is good, but why not keep it open source? Also I don't see a real business model, as Google is already working to merge Android and ChromeOS "somehow" (as indicated by news lately) and both ChromiumOS and Android are open source.
Hmm, it requires legacy boot. I wonder why it doesn't support UEFI? Makes it hard for me to test this on the devices I would want to use it with.
EDIT: More research. Results:
There is an EFI system on this image, but it has a corrupted GPT. I fixed it with gdisk and I ran into some issues trying to boot it via EFI shell on one of my netbooks. My libreboot laptop was able to boot it but it gets stuck during bootup. Does not show up as an option for booting on my macbook. Going to try booting it via EFI shell on my desktop and report back.
Alright, got it to POST on my desktop, but it hangs during boot. On my libreboot laptop, it boots all the way to desktop if I do it in _guest_ mode. Pretty underwhelming once I got there, though.
My laptop that had BIOS only got to the bootloader and crashed soon after doing the disk write test. My NUC is set to UEFI but only successfully ran by manually selecting it in legacy, as you say.
Well, depends on what you consider a Linux distro, there are many Android ROMs that are closed in a similar way, including those from phone manufacturers, where kernel sources are released but nothing else, there definitely existed before Remix OS.
Does Android really qualify as a Linux distro? Does a Linux distro need a GNU system behind it? Because that's missing here, no glibc, no coreutils, etc. This is why some people have been insisting on calling it GNU/Linux all along, it can create ambiguity in situations like this. Linux is after all, just a kernel.
Since there are various systems which use the Linux kernel without the GNU userland, it can make GNU/Linux more important as a term, in contrast to Android and others.
Although I have wondered if OS like Maemo, which use Busybox instead of GNU, should be considered Busybox/Linux. :)
"First" is a difficult claim to sustain. But Tivo is a better candidate for the most notable early one, as it was a major motivator for GPL v3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
Even with a Nexus there's a reasonable difference between AOSP and the Factory Image - I don't think you'll get HDR or panorama photography on AOSP (without flashing a GApps bundle)
Works fine on Virtualbox using 'Linux' as Guest. The mouse DOES work, it just doesn't show the cursor, if you click and drag, it will show like a "finger cursor" on screen.
To navigate the menus, you can use tab, as usual. (in the case of the "next" button.
Seems to be working - boots up to language selection (which I believe is a "normal" app), but won't let me choose any - mouse clicks register for language selection, but not for the "next" button, keyboard: nada :( Cursor only updates on LMB held down (with mouse integration and without). I think there's more work to come back to desktop-ish user expectations.
I have it working on a Linux host as a Linux 64 bit guest with 2 GB ram. You have to change the input device from USB tablet to PS/2 mouse in the VM settings.
However, it's very slow and the taskbar is green most of the time. also, there's a test (block) cursor blinking in the middle of the screen.
Nope. I also tried it on a ESXi 5.5 . The only small notification i see is that it cannot determine the USB writing speed and then it reboots again.
So perhaps because it doesn't have write access.
I made that mistake initially, and then saw the "_64" in ISO filename. But still couldn't make it work on an Ubuntu host, only on a Win7 host. I suspect it was a Virtualbox bug.
Managed to get it too boot on my Acer laptop. Not impressed with it honestly. Mouse isn't really useable and the only thing that make it "desktop like" is the task bar at the bottom. The music application still opens full-screen with no close button or any window chrome at all. Sure the site says it has Google Play Store but there is no sign of it here.
Awesome. It's much easier to make Android (with it's massive app ecosystem) a desktop OS than it is than to build an app ecosystem for traditional Linux desktops.
Interestingly enough it doesn't look like there's an installer - they want you to run it from USB for now.
There is also project "shashlik" by the KDE folks which, if it works as advertised at some point, should make it possible to run Android apps natively in Linux.
Neat. I've been using ARC with chrome for a couple of apps that i grabbed from my phone with adb. This looks like it'll eventually be pretty nice to avoid having to open chrome for them.
Imo if you can run existing Android apps in resizable windows it would be a huge win. There are many well made Android apps that would work just fine as their own windowed applications
Several streaming services have native apps on both mobile & desktop. I think that their mobile apps could run pretty well on desktop.
For many complex apps though (like anything dealing with text edition), the lack of hover & right clics handling would be a pain.
Android supports 'hover' events (and since API 1 IIRC) but nobody implements them in custom widgets.
Android supports mouse input but even as an android engineer I have no idea what the right click does in that situation.
BUTTON_SECONDARY is reported in the getButtonState() of the MotionEvent, but I'm not sure most apps ever check that. I would guess in a lot of cases, if there is only checking on pointer down and up, it will act like the left mouse button.
I know this is a cop-out, but wouldn't Google Docs work just fine in the browser here. I mean I haven't done any work on Google Docs, but I did use it all the way through uni.
Or maybe we should just force everyone on Vim and world would be more glorious and productive place.... right?
Not sure Windows is similar: Windows Phone has very few apps, Windows 8 desktop has very few 'modern' apps which can handle being distributed through an app store. Neither can leverage the other because there's nothing to leverage.
Small-screen phones and medium-screen tablets. And some netbooks. Pretty much the same as the set of devices Windows 8's Metro UI was designed for.
Look what Windows 10 did with Metro apps: it took those "single-window designs" and just... stuck them in regular windows. And that works pretty well, it turns out.
Another option would be to be able to run Android apps on traditional Linux desktops. I hope that will be possible in the future, right now there isn't anything that achieves that seamlessly.
Bad
problems booting certain machines
data partition creation very slow
no Google Play
Good
eventually boots!
wifi and bluetooth work
can configure layout for external keyboard
f-droid works
firefox has reasonable keyboard shortcuts
Ugly
multi-monitor support - screen mirroring only no multiple screens and rotation support
apps not designed for mouse input - right/middle click or drag and drop
app install of apks a little flakey
inbuilt browser very basic
graphics rendering slower than X11
I would love to add my comments as a tester, but I can't get the PC version to boot successfully after Linux and Windows install attempts. I thought the USB 3 interface specification was only desirable, but it seems it's a requirement.
I have ordered some USB 3 memory devices, I'll post again if I see a successful boot.
It's pretty cool to see work being done to get Android working better in a desktop environment. I applaud the progress. But I don't really have a need for this. I love my Chromebook and ChromeOS too much and it feels like they fill similar niches.
1. "You agree that you irrevocably waive any and all ownership, legal and moral rights to your user content."
2. You're also not allowed to oppose "the basic principles determined in the Constitution of the People's Republic of China", harm it's "national honor and interests", or undermine it's "national religious policy, promoting cults and superstitions".
3. Also, you're not allowed to spread rumor, disturb social order, or undermine social stability.
There's other strange rules of conduct that just turned me off from the entire project. Besides, it doesn't see either of my wireless adapters and the desktop blanked out when it attempted to adjust my screen resolution:)
I'm still interested in getting completely off Windows 10, so I'll stick with Linux for now.