this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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AWS turns Amazon's Fire TV Cube into a thin client (www.theregister.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/technology
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[–] kescusay 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Android is Linux. Also, they already have an android distro that is fine-tuned for the hardware, so why not reuse it?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Android is Linux-based but it has a modified kernel. It might be subtle but the entire design philosophy of Android is mobile first, which is very different of Ubuntu or Arch.

But there the similarities end. AWS created custom firmware and ripped out anything remotely related to running a consumer device, replacing it with software designed solely to create a secure connection between the device and desktops running in the Amazonian cloud.

If they are going to rewrite the firmware, remove most of the features, why even bother with an OS designed for touch screens and partially written in Java? Can't they fork one of the 22 ARM Linux distributions?

[–] kescusay 3 points 1 year ago

Again, it's probably down to the hardware. They already had firmware that fully supported it, and they knew what they wanted to add and remove as far as features for this other use-case. It probably would have been more work to grab an off-the-shelf Linux distro and tune it to the same specifications.