Mr Light_fixture writes back in...

Hello,

My initial response to Flutter as a whole had been, "Oh great, another one of *these*." But as time goes on, I continue to warm up the idea of a ubiquitous, cross-platform toolkit for designing apps that isn't dependent on the browser. Because yeah, definitely better than Electron and that whole mess.

My first time hearing about Fuchsia, I was so skeptical. It was around the discourse at the time about these things "replacing" Linux as a developer darling, and so the way I went on to think about Zircon in particular was stacking it up against Linux. For a long time I thought of it like, how could Zircon possibly catch up with the software integrations and hardware compatibility in Linux enough to supplant it? However, it's like you said in the episode - they don't have the same goals at all.

Linux kinda tries to be everything for everyone. Zircon was never meant to be a drop-in replacement since it has no intention of supporting everything Linux supports. This new platform diverting developer time dedicated from large companies away from Linux is still a shame of course, but I can't see a future where Linux will ever be neglected.

Instead, if things continue like this, Linux's quality of trying to be everything for everyone is almost guaranteed to have developers far in the future keep it alive because it's the only thing that supports all the esoteric stuff that isn't profitable for the other platforms to maintain. In the past, many technologies have died because they lost or maybe never had a common thread from which to maintain compatibility with that came after, but today we're assured in a way that we'll still be able to support many things as long as we maintain Linux.