Is Huawei planning to ship Linux on its upcoming MateBook laptops instead of HarmonyOS NEXT? A fresh leak out of China this week suggests so. Huawei is no
Their laptops were running Windows / Linux, and this article is saying that while they initially planned to shift to HarmonyOS Next, they are now likely to stay with Linux.
Also, while HarmonyOS Next is proprietary, the kernel (Hongmeng, a microkernel optimised for arm64 and with a Linux compatibility layer) and large parts of the underlying code (OpenHarmony) are open-source. Sort of like Android and AOSP. The ‘optimised for arm64’ thing might be why they are sticking with Linux - the laptops mostly use Intel x86 chips.
A Huawei version of Android.
Important clarification: it’s much more than this. HarmonyOS is not any more a skin or a version of Android. It’s its own OS.
HarmonyOS is IMO going to do to Android what BYD has done to Tesla and VW. This is another chapter in China declaring independence from the West.
So their laptops were running Android?
Reading the article it was a closed source OS, with their own closed-source Linux-based kernel.
Their laptops were running Windows / Linux, and this article is saying that while they initially planned to shift to HarmonyOS Next, they are now likely to stay with Linux.
Also, while HarmonyOS Next is proprietary, the kernel (Hongmeng, a microkernel optimised for arm64 and with a Linux compatibility layer) and large parts of the underlying code (OpenHarmony) are open-source. Sort of like Android and AOSP. The ‘optimised for arm64’ thing might be why they are sticking with Linux - the laptops mostly use Intel x86 chips.