• Poutinetown
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    7 months ago

    I’m curious why it runs android instead of Linux.

    • kescusay@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      7 months ago

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

      • Poutinetown
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        7 months ago

        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@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          7 months 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.