Astian OS, Alternative to B2G OS

[alfonsob...@gmail.com]

Astian OS is an operating system based on Firefox OS but unlike B2G, we want to continue with the original idea to continue with the maintenance of Gecko and where we avoid replacing it with Android.

One of our major goals is to bring Astian OS to more powerful devices, to implement new technologies such as WebGL and others to consolidate a competitive operating system, which is not only low-end but also high-end devices and desktop devices with web technology .

We also believe in the convergence between devices. Astian OS is developed by the Astian Foundation, a non-profit organization that develops free software and technologies.

Astian OS is our main project and in which we are investing all our time and energies.

this is our group on Telegram https://t.me/AstianOS.

Thanks

[Prateek Jadhwani]

I love the idea of Asitan OS. Has this been built on any devices yet?

Or is there any documentation link for installation on devices?

Thanks

Prateek Jadhwani
https://prateekjadhwani.github.io 

Github Profile : https://github.com/prateekjadhwani

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[Fabrice Desré]

Hi Alfonso!

On 03/28/2017 09:55 AM, alfonsob...@gmail.com wrote:
> Astian OS is an operating system based on Firefox OS but unlike B2G, we want to continue with the original idea to continue with the maintenance of Gecko and where we avoid replacing it with Android.

There is some misunderstanding here. The idea with B2GOS is not to
replace gecko by Android - it's too use the android widget layer of
gecko since gonk is not supported anymore. Yes, that means that overall
we would rely on a fatter stack.

> One of our major goals is to bring Astian OS to more powerful devices, to implement new technologies such as WebGL and others to consolidate a competitive operating system, which is not only low-end but also high-end devices and desktop devices with web technology .

WebGL has been supported on b2g since day 1. Actually one of the first
homescreens was written in WebGL by cjones. Git archeologists can likely
find it in a repo somewhere!

> We also believe in the convergence between devices. Astian OS is developed by the Astian Foundation, a non-profit organization that develops free software and technologies.
>
> Astian OS is our main project and in which we are investing all our time and energies.

I'm worried that you are wasting your time and energy on a project based
on flawed assumptions. I already talked to you and others in the Astian
telegram channel about that, but let me explain once again:
A lot of b2g specific code is being removed from Gecko (see
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1306391). This means that
you have the following choices:
- Stay on an old gecko. I think that version 48 is the latest one with
full b2g support. This exposes your users to potential security issues
and that's quite irresponsible to base a new project on this version.
There is no ESR version with security backports that you can rely on
since the current ESR is based on gecko 52.
- Move to gecko trunk, and backport the apis you still want to use.
Given that you seem to plan keeping support for mozApps, this
practically means forking gecko, and that practically impossible given
the kind of changes involved. That is well understood and agreed on by
people familiar with the codebase.

Unless you explain *how* you will solve these issues, it's hard to take
Astian seriously.

We learned enough working on b2g to know how to design a better OS -
getting stuck with the initial ideas as if they were some kind of sacred
mantra is not the way to make progress.

We know that not all the choices we made in b2g were right. Some things
didn't work (eg. the new app model didn't get traction), some were not
the best technical choice (eg. telephony api exposed as DOM apis).
That's why we spent some time last year to modernize and simplify the
b2g codebase in order to limit the b2g-specific bits. We wanted to have
as little coupling between the web runtime (gecko) and the UI layer, so
we came up with this solution:
- The "system" UI (current Gaia) will run as currently, using chrome://
urls.
- Hardware related APIs that are not web standards will be exposed by
external daemons. Only the system UI will be able to talk to these
daemons, likely through a secured websocket connection.
- We can't rely on Gonk being available, so we will start by relying on
the Android widget and media support, but running a single app. Nothing
is being drawn from usual Android.

So far progress has been very slow on b2gOS (thanks to vmx who is doing
great work on the daemon side!) but fragmenting the community of people
that still care about building a web tech based OS will not help either.

I think there is a need to take a cold, hard look at what would such a
project look like and what it would be based on. Which rendering engine?
which base layer? What runs as chrome vs. content? Which hardware support?

If Astian wants to contribute to a better computing platform for the
people, by all means let's start by discussing how to best reach that
goal. Your current track is a dead end I fear.

--
Fabrice Desré
Emerging Technologies
Mozilla Corporation

[Benjamin Francis]

On 30 March 2017 at 19:06, Fabrice Desré <fab...@mozilla.com> wrote:

Your current track is a dead end I fear.

As much as I would like to see you succeed, I'm afraid I agree with Fabrice. The previous technical direction we were taking is a dead end, as I've explained in this blog post.

FWIW I've also been experimenting with the approach Fabrice describes, with Webian. I'm trying out qbrt as a desktop runtime and GeckoView for touch devices, with the intention of running the system UI as a single Android app on top of Android Things and system services running on NodeJS. This is the direction I would recommend anyone still working on B2G OS to take.

(BTW Webian Shell is mostly a personal experiment by me to play with my own browser OS front end, not an intention to fragment B2G OS).

Ben

[Faheem Ahmad]

please people add android apk support otherwise u would end up like before and please also launch i astian launcher for android phones

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Faheem Ahmad about.me/faheem-ahmad

[asti...@gmail.com]

Our website as a foundation is astian.org, Thanks for your comments, we are currently migrating the information and documentation of the Firefox OS project because we know that at any time can be eliminated.

[Chris Mills]

> On 30 Mar 2017, at 15:11, asti...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> El jueves, 30 de marzo de 2017, 8:26:38 (UTC-5), Prateek Jadhwani escribió:

> Our website as a foundation is astian.org, Thanks for your comments, we are currently migrating the information and documentation of the Firefox OS project because we know that at any time can be eliminated.

FYI, the B2G OS docs are all archived here:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/B2G_OS

A lot of work went into this documentation, and we wouldn’t just delete it ;-)

Good luck with Astian - ping me if you have any questions about the documentation.

Chris

[Benjamin Francis]

On 4 April 2017 at 08:49, Chris Mills <cmi...@mozilla.com> wrote:

FYI, the B2G OS docs are all archived here:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/B2G_OS

A lot of work went into this documentation, and we wouldn’t just delete it ;-)

MDN maybe, but http://mozilla.com/firefoxos has already been taken down, including the list of Firefox OS products and their specifications. It now redirects to support.mozilla.org.

Not sure why this was removed whereas older sites like Mozilla Labs and Identity are still archived.

[Chris Mills]

Hrm, that’s a bit sad.

[alfonsob...@gmail.com]

> Faheem Ahmad
> about.me/faheem-ahmad

We are working based on Gecko 48 so we can provide future support for android applications.

[Fabrice Desré]

On 04/05/2017 10:05 AM, alfonsob...@gmail.com wrote:

>
> We are working based on Gecko 48 so we can provide future support for android applications.

How so? did you change your plans about using gonk?

[alfonsob...@gmail.com]

At no time have I expressed that we will not use gonk, You are very worried Fabrice, I invite you to collaborate more;)

[Fabrice Desré]

On 04/05/2017 01:19 PM, alfonsob...@gmail.com wrote:

>
> At no time have I expressed that we will not use gonk, You are very worried Fabrice, I invite you to collaborate more;)

That's what I said: you want to keep using gonk. How do you also plan to
run Android apps? It would be much easier if you used an aosp base and
the Android widget port of Gecko for that. (And no, I will not pursue a
gonk+gecko project, for the many reasons we already talked about).