It will be very interesting to watch how Fuchsia evolves over the next couple of years. Especially what Google has planned for it.
It might be a small moonshot experiment to see if they can come with a sensible, modern OS.
It might also be the designated successor for Android/Chrome OS, and the future of the Google ecosystem.
Conceptually, Fuchsia is interesting. It's built on a microkernel (Zirkon) and a capabilities based system. Drivers are isolated elf binaries with a stable ABI, other normally privileged things like file systems are also isolated services.
On one hand, I find it promising as a application platform, both for mobile devices and desktops: while Linux sandboxing capabilities are evolving (cgroups , namespaces, ...) , very little of the ecosystem is built around isolation as a primary concept, leading to all kinds of half-baked sandboxing and permission solutions: chroot, Flatpack, firejail, SELinux, (Docker, mentioned hesitantly since it's mainly for server environments)... All of which are somewhat tacked on an hard to use properly.
So a clean sheet design might be the best viable (practical) path.
On the other hand:
* this throws away decades of work on Linux
* many drivers will be closed source; open drivers are a major achievement of Linux
* Linux is a very collaborative effort with many stakeholders, while Google is known for keeping a very firm grip on their projects
Curios to hear other thoughts on this.
One other con for ya:
* Google is very likely to kill privacy enabling features
Yeah as a dev I am not touching this with a 5 foot pole. Google open source is not open source. It's a nasty tactic of pretending to be open source while not actually being open source as the speed of development is so fast that it's impossible to fork anything and then its laden with proprietary blobs where you have to "trust" Google which basically means tolerate them doing nefarious shit.
I do not understand what this means, the code is open isn't it?[0]
This sounds very over exaggerated and alarmist, just like Android and for example Chromium people have forked it and removed all the Google proprietary stuff from it[1], I am sure you and other privacy conscious developers in the future will do the same for Fuchsia.