We’re all familiar with Android and Chrome OS, but Google has been working on another operating system for the past five years, Fuchsia, and now it’s ready for primetime and rolling out to your Nest Hub..
The rollout of Fuchsia, which has graduated to a 1.0 release for the launch, will start by pushing out to the Google Nest Hub, ‘over the coming months’ according to 9to5Google, replacing the Chromecast based ‘Cast OS’ that the Nest hub launched with.
The operating system, called Fuchsia, was first found back in 2016 when the repository was discovered on GitHub. At its core, Fuchsia is a microkernel based OS which has little overheads and so is designed to run on anything from basic embedded systems right up to fully fledged PCs.
So, what is a Kernel? Well, it’s the layer that sits between the computer OS and the hardware.
Google has used Linux for the basis of both Chrome OS and Android, and hence the Linux Kernel. As such they’re beholden to the Linux foundation for updates to the kernel. With Fuchsia, Google is free to forge ahead unencumbered.
Excactly what we’ll see for Fuchsia as it progresses past the 1.0 stage isn’t clear but the scope of Fuchsia is pretty large, so we’ll have to wait and see.
