Interesting device new on the market runs Window 1o on Intel Atom chip:
Device is smartphone size....
I want my Gnome shell ...etc....on it.
I'm working with Android for a while, and it is pretty good. It's very easy to create useful applications in it, once you learn the ropes.
Currently Android is not a desktop OS for one simple reason: its window manager (WM) is a single-window, always-fullscreen one, despite existence of some animated overlays. This prevents use of Android on a generic PC, because on a PC you want overlapped windows under control of a more complex WM.
This is, basically, all that Google needs to change. Maybe a few drivers need to be added for a few common Ethernet chipsets; that is not a big deal, and all of these are already present in Linux (which runs Android as a GUI and a VM.)
The combined version of Android will be very well received. Android already has quite a few useful applications, and more are added every day because software development for Android is free and requires nothing but a PC. If Android can be deployed on a common PC, this will further dilute the market of Windows 10 - as Win10 is a terrible overkill for the vast majority of systems. About 100% of home systems will be much happier on Android. When was the last time you needed to fix registry on Android, or recover from BSOD? Even Dalvik, which is not even the latest VM, is amazingly fast; but Android 5 uses ART, which is even faster:
Unlike Dalvik, ART introduces the use of ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation by compiling entire applications into native machine code upon their installation. By eliminating Dalvik's interpretation and trace-based JIT compilation, ART improves the overall execution efficiency and reduces power consumption, which results in improved battery autonomy on mobile devices. At the same time, ART brings faster execution of applications, improved memory allocation and garbage collection (GC) mechanisms, new applications debugging features, and more accurate high-level profiling of applications.[1][4][5]
This further marginalizes native code (C/C++ etc,) improves portability, and fully enables the long-sought idea of "write once, run anywhere." That idea is already mostly alive within the Android's environment. If it spreads to PCs, there will be very little reason to code for anything else, unless you are doing very specialized work.
What Greysard said.
“improved battery autonomy”
Please explain.
Thanks. I have a few Android devices. All but one are now years old and slow and fussy, but can do some amazing things using one app at a time.
Interesting device new on the market runs Window 1o on Intel Atom chip:
Device is smartphone size....
I want my Gnome shell ...etc....on it.