Needless to say, while the old proverbial "elephant in the room" (in the form of absolutely needing Microsoft Office on your Linux machine, or another Windows-only program) has been defeated[1], the new elephant in the room seems to be the necessity to be able to create native iOS apps on your machine, which is only practically possible on a true Mac system. I wonder if this is something that we tackle along the way as well.
[1]It is not entirely clear to me whether the Microsoft Office "tax" went away more because of the advent of Google Docs, or because people started to migrate their tasks to specialized web apps.
As a Linux fan I prefer they stick to ChromeOS. It's just a custom Gentoo. Many of their devices support Coreboot, which makes them excellent machines to run my favorite Linux distro.
[1] http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/smartphones/smartphon...
[2] http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/tablets/shop-tablets....
They used to have an FAQ which acknowledged the unofficial Android-x86 project: https://web.archive.org/web/20140331192152/https://01.org/an...
[1]: http://consoleos.com [2]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mmv/console-os-dual-boo...
But, I think both ConsoleOS and Remix have their place (if at all this space picks up). One is trying to leverage the desktop hardware to run more powerful Android apps and the other is interested in using cheap and affordable hardware (lower end arm chips) to give an experience / solution as close to a desktop as possible
It's way faster than any ARM flagship tablet of the day though, except for HD video. I don't think it's brings enough on the table when compared to a `real' desktop OS such as Windows or Debian because it's not designed for keyboard at all.
"ASUS Eee PCs/Laptops"
This reminded me that I have a 5 year old Eee laptop that I haven't used in years and throwing Android on there could be a fun weekend-afternoon project.
http://www.jide.com/en/remixos
But as long as Google and now Sundar Pichai consider ChromeOS to be the one and only Google desktop OS ever, unfortunately that won't happen. Of course such a desktop OS would also have to be more like Android Wear than "AOSP" - as in only Google would ever control the interface and only Google would be in charge of updates.
I suspect Google actually wants Android to be more like Chrome OS. But they know Android's too important and popular to risk by outright replacing it with Chrome OS. That's why they are slowing mixing them together.
Chrome on Android is now integrated in the taskbar while they are pushing things like Web Manifests, Web Workers and Web Push Notifications. On the other hand it is now possible to run Android apps on Chrome OS via App Runtime for Chrome (ARC).
Of course, I meant from visual and usability stand point. The ARM equivalent on Windows will be Continuum when it launches.
Comparison can be found here: https://www.genymotion.com/#!/store
I do not say that dismissively. It is mind-blowing to me that they can port this to x86 (whether or not the toolchain supports it at this stage) and iron everything out with every major and minor release.
I see no mention of Lollipop or Marshmallow, but I am really curious.
http://www.android-x86.org/releases/releasenote-4-4-r3
> The 4.4-r3 release is based on the Android 4.4.4_r2.0.1 (KTU84Q) release.
Their "What is new?" section on the front page says development on the Lollipop branch had started by 2014-11-06 (just two days after Google released the source) and that lollipop-x86 was updated to 5.1 on 2015-03-18.
I'm guessing part of the reason there isn't a stable Lollipop build yet is the switch from Dalvik to ART.
By the way, x86 VMs for development have been there for many years. It runs way better than their ARM counter-parts of course.
Considering the sad state of software available for Linux I wouldn't mind seeing a fully backed Google effort. And with multi-window support coming it could turn out to be a very good desktop OS.
Apps. Netflix, Amazon Instant Video (which to be fair is fucking awful on Android), iPlayer, Chromecast stuff, Instagram, online banking apps etc.