Technology

59713 readers

5802 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

AWS turns Amazon's Fire TV Cube into a thin client (www.theregister.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/technology

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [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.