
RemixOS for PC released - Sujan
http://www.jide.com/en/remixos-for-pc#downloadNow
======
dizzyviolet
Just booted it. The EULA is frightening to say the least.

1\. "You agree that you irrevocably waive any and all ownership, legal and
moral rights to your user content."

2\. You're also not allowed to oppose "the basic principles determined in the
Constitution of the People's Republic of China", harm it's "national honor and
interests", or undermine it's "national religious policy, promoting cults and
superstitions".

3\. Also, you're not allowed to spread rumor, disturb social order, or
undermine social stability.

There's other strange rules of conduct that just turned me off from the entire
project. Besides, it doesn't see either of my wireless adapters and the
desktop blanked out when it attempted to adjust my screen resolution:)

I'm still interested in getting completely off Windows 10, so I'll stick with
Linux for now.

~~~
chillingeffect
If this is really true [1] and not an exaggeration, there is no way on Earth I
will touch this or let anyone I care about touch it with a 100-foot pole.

Closed source? Waive legal rights? to my own content? Not criticize China?

Not in 100 million years. Glad I switched to 100% Ubuntu. Donated and
anticipating 16.04 LTS in April.

It's one thing to get pressured into a gray area w/r/t freedoms in exchange
for some perceived benefit, but to explicitly waive them and endanger myself
to a foreign power? Who knows what China would do? No way.

How do these people even make a EULA with a straight face and expect people to
drink it up? Even though Windows and OSX are closed-source, at least hackers
have a grasp on what it's doing and you're not instantly giving up rights and
ownership when you turn it on.

This crosses my line in the sand.

[1] I've been trying to find the EULA online somewhere, but can't so far. Any
leads? I'm afraid to install this and look at the EULA.

~~~
anthk
>Glad I switched to 100% Ubuntu. Donated and anticipating 16.04 LTS in April.

Try Trisquel if your hardware supports it.

------
matt_morgan
I have a little box for my TV running Android. The issue with all the apps is
that 90% (looking mostly at games, I guess) of them more or less expect
gestural input, and are either really difficult to play or just not fun with a
mouse.

I doubt that particular issue is as bad in productivity apps etc., but there's
a lot more to running a mobile app on a big screen than just resizing a
window. Does this have some magic to solve that in a general way?

~~~
Pxtl
I keep wishing somebody would make an airmouse with buttons configured to
simulate common touch-gestures - like put a d-pad on it for swipe
up/down/left/right, and a scrollwheel simulating pinch zooms.

Google keeps trying to get vendors to support their half-forgotten TV oses
GoogleTV/AndroidTV, but it seems like it would be simpler to just make a
peripheral that emulates the common touch actions and use let Android be
Android, even if it's on a TV.

~~~
Yetanfou
You have a mobile phone, I assume? With a touchscreen? Which does multi-touch?
And the thing sports a bluetooth adapter?

In that case all you need is a program running on that phone, emulating you
'airmouse'. No need for more hardware, just use what you have. The same works
for a 'normal' PC, btw. I know there are several apps for Android which can
provide this service, I guess the same is true for the other contenders in
this area.

~~~
Pxtl
Mostly thinking about my kids on that one, as they don't own phones.

------
ivl
Is there really a chart comparing performance on an i7 to a bunch of
smartphones? I'm having a really hard time seeing the point of that
comparison. Why not benchmark against other PC operating systems, like say
Chrome OS?

~~~
rplnt
Notice the units too.

~~~
mbesto
The i7 does 214218 CPUs...duh.

------
castell
RemixOS uses GPLv2 code (Linux, etc) and other open source licenses. They
might got away with proprietary devices, their official response on their old
(closed) forum was telling. But now they will have to provide it.

The idea of adding a several improvements to Android for desktop usage
(improved right mouse click) is good, but why not keep it open source? Also I
don't see a real business model, as Google is already working to merge Android
and ChromeOS "somehow" (as indicated by news lately) and both ChromiumOS and
Android are open source.

~~~
mankash666
Because they want to profit from it. BTW - the kernel layer is GPL-ed and is
already available in source form with the Ansroid x86 project.

The Android layer is Apache licensed and they are't required to open source
it, or using your own misleading verbiage, they can "get away with it".

~~~
niutech
How will they profit from giving away their OS for free? Maybe by gathering
their users' data, given their EULA?

~~~
mankash666
I don't know what their exact business plan is. Just like Twitter STILL
doesn't have a real business plan.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
Hmm, it requires legacy boot. I wonder why it doesn't support UEFI? Makes it
hard for me to test this on the devices I would want to use it with.

EDIT: More research. Results:

There is an EFI system on this image, but it has a corrupted GPT. I fixed it
with gdisk and I ran into some issues trying to boot it via EFI shell on one
of my netbooks. My libreboot laptop was able to boot it but it gets stuck
during bootup. Does not show up as an option for booting on my macbook. Going
to try booting it via EFI shell on my desktop and report back.

Alright, got it to POST on my desktop, but it hangs during boot. On my
libreboot laptop, it boots all the way to desktop if I do it in _guest_ mode.
Pretty underwhelming once I got there, though.

~~~
petecox
My laptop that had BIOS only got to the bootloader and crashed soon after
doing the disk write test. My NUC is set to UEFI but only successfully ran by
manually selecting it in legacy, as you say.

------
timwaagh
so this would be the first closed linux distro in history. An ironic milestone
for the open source community. or have I missed something?

~~~
ultramancool
Well, depends on what you consider a Linux distro, there are many Android ROMs
that are closed in a similar way, including those from phone manufacturers,
where kernel sources are released but nothing else, there definitely existed
before Remix OS.

Does Android really qualify as a Linux distro? Does a Linux distro need a GNU
system behind it? Because that's missing here, no glibc, no coreutils, etc.
This is why some people have been insisting on calling it GNU/Linux all along,
it can create ambiguity in situations like this. Linux is after all, just a
kernel.

~~~
gtk40
Since there are various systems which use the Linux kernel without the GNU
userland, it can make GNU/Linux more important as a term, in contrast to
Android and others.

Although I have wondered if OS like Maemo, which use Busybox instead of GNU,
should be considered Busybox/Linux. :)

------
hitekker
I recall, perhaps mistakenly, that there use to be a big buzz in the 90's
about having Java as a desktop OS.

------
lovelearning
Anybody got this to work on VirtualBox? It's not moving past the bootloader
screen for me, no matter what VM configuration I select.

~~~
michielr
It works fine for me, be sure to choose guest mode though.

Virtualbox on a W10 host.

edit: screenshot
[http://i.imgur.com/Ev7Kvil.png](http://i.imgur.com/Ev7Kvil.png)

~~~
lovelearning
Strangely, it didn't work at all on VirtualBox on Ubuntu, but worked on a
Windows 7 host.

Thanks for the hint!

~~~
voltagex_
If you've got the OSE (free) version of VirtualBox on Ubuntu, it might be
missing chipset support.

------
pmx
Managed to get it too boot on my Acer laptop. Not impressed with it honestly.
Mouse isn't really useable and the only thing that make it "desktop like" is
the task bar at the bottom. The music application still opens full-screen with
no close button or any window chrome at all. Sure the site says it has Google
Play Store but there is no sign of it here.

------
nailer
Awesome. It's much easier to make Android (with it's massive app ecosystem) a
desktop OS than it is than to build an app ecosystem for traditional Linux
desktops.

Interestingly enough it doesn't look like there's an installer - they want you
to run it from USB for now.

~~~
SG-
Except that massive app ecosystem is designed for small screen phones and
single window design.

It also hasn't helped Windows Mobile at all with it's "massive" desktop
ecosystem.

~~~
746F7475
Imo if you can run existing Android apps in resizable windows it would be a
huge win. There are many well made Android apps that would work just fine as
their own windowed applications

~~~
on_and_off
some would definitely work pretty well.

Several streaming services have native apps on both mobile & desktop. I think
that their mobile apps could run pretty well on desktop.

For many complex apps though (like anything dealing with text edition), the
lack of hover & right clics handling would be a pain. Android supports 'hover'
events (and since API 1 IIRC) but nobody implements them in custom widgets.

Android supports mouse input but even as an android engineer I have no idea
what the right click does in that situation.

~~~
yincrash
[http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/MotionEv...](http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/MotionEvent.html#BUTTON_SECONDARY)

BUTTON_SECONDARY is reported in the getButtonState() of the MotionEvent, but
I'm not sure most apps ever check that. I would guess in a lot of cases, if
there is only checking on pointer down and up, it will act like the left mouse
button.

------
petecox
Anyone want a review?

Bad problems booting certain machines data partition creation _very_ slow no
Google Play

Good eventually boots! wifi and bluetooth work can configure layout for
external keyboard f-droid works firefox has reasonable keyboard shortcuts

Ugly multi-monitor support - screen mirroring only no multiple screens and
rotation support apps not designed for mouse input - right/middle click or
drag and drop app install of apks a little flakey inbuilt browser very basic
graphics rendering slower than X11

------
isbn
Would be cool if they'd release this for ARM too. The Pi, Cubietruck and all
the other dev boards would run this nicely.

~~~
soylentcola
From what I remember, there are ports to RaspPi but a major issue is getting
graphic acceleration working. Not sure what the current state of it is.

~~~
isbn
There definitely are Android ports for RaspPi and other ARM boards, but I
don't think there are RemixOS ports for these, which I would like.

------
lutusp
I would love to add my comments as a tester, but I can't get the PC version to
boot successfully after Linux and Windows install attempts. I thought the USB
3 interface specification was only desirable, but it seems it's a requirement.

I have ordered some USB 3 memory devices, I'll post again if I see a
successful boot.

------
Nursie
How is this different from android-x86?

~~~
pmx
It appears to BE android-x86. I'm pretty sure all they have done is created a
custom shell/launcher.

------
kitd
I have a spare AIO touch-screen PC which I'm hoping to revive. This could be
perfect.

------
sandGorgon
Anyone know how they are building a desktop experience on Android?

Have they just layered a userspace on top of traditional Linux.. Or did they
actually work with binder /init - > kdbus/systemd

------
igitur
Does it run easily on a Raspberry Pi 2?

It's probably mentioned somewhere else, but I suspect a lot of people here
will want to know the answer.

~~~
mankash666
No - because this build is targeted at the x86 architecture

------
mirap
Do someone understand their business model? What are they planning to sell?

~~~
lovelearning
I guess their Ultratablet and Mini, running Remix OS with multitasking
support.

------
Bossman
It's pretty cool to see work being done to get Android working better in a
desktop environment. I applaud the progress. But I don't really have a need
for this. I love my Chromebook and ChromeOS too much and it feels like they
fill similar niches.

------
dharma1
anyone managed to boot this off USB stick on macbook pro?

~~~
SG-
Trying to right now, there's 0 instructions provided for OSX booting other
than to hold 'Option' for the boot loader which is pretty useless.

Hoping I can just dd it to my SD card and have it boot.

Edit: doesn't seem to want to boot from my SD card or recognize it as
bootable.

~~~
sandGorgon
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10886820](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10886820)

HTH.

------
mtgx
Google should buy this now before Microsoft applies its EEE strategy on it or
tries to fill it up with Cortana and stuff.

~~~
pmx
They would be wasting their money it's terrible.

------
leishulang
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