Having an opinion on why its unnecessary does not equal being unappreciative when it happens.
Having an opinion on why its unnecessary does not equal being unappreciative when it happens.
I know you are joking, but the most realistic way I can see iOS applications running on the Switch (in the future) is by using darling on Linux, but darling doesn't support GUI applications currently and someone needs to create the iOS libraries for it.
To add on to what you said, it is unlikely we would ever see syncing software like syncthing running in the background on the Switch's OS. However, Android OS would easily allow this to run in the background. This would make it convenient for me to sync my save and roms between the Switch and PC.
Funny how people get excited when they see an NES emulator on Switch, but when it comes to Android it's "bleh, what do you have a smartphone for?"
People are whining that there's no web browser, but again, when someone mentions Android there's the "you have a smartphone". With that logic, we don't need a Switch browser at all.
It's not like Android already has a crapton of great emulators from NES to PSX to GameCube. Also, not everyone has a phablet/tablet for videos.
People are whining that there's no web browser, but again, when someone mentions Android there's the "you have a smartphone". With that logic, we don't need a Switch browser at all.
It's not like Android already has a crapton of great emulators from NES to PSX to GameCube. Also, not everyone has a phablet/tablet for videos.
Last edited by nmkd,
In any case what would be interesting is to be able to run the switch OS in other Tegra X1 devices
Not that it's ever gonna happen
That would be very interesting. Also, while I'm thinking about it. I hope someone makes a keyboard app for Android modeled after the Switch's keyboard.
I get the feeling people feel that hackers/homebrew devs are somehow "wasting their time" and misplacing their energy towards making something they don't care about when they feel it could be put towards, say, piracy or custom firmware for the normal OS.
Obviously, this is completely untrue, and totally fucking asinine at best.
On another note, the potential of turning a Switch into a dual-booting NVidia Shield is a damned hot prospect. All the more reason to do it in my book.
Obviously, this is completely untrue, and totally fucking asinine at best.
On another note, the potential of turning a Switch into a dual-booting NVidia Shield is a damned hot prospect. All the more reason to do it in my book.
If someone were to theoretically spend a bunch of time porting an operating system to the Switch, It would be much better if it was GNU/Linux instead of Android. Sure, the operating systems are quite different, but the key difference is there are (literally) no tablets that run GNU/Linux, and tons that run Android. If you're gonna go through the effort you might as well port something that provides new benefit instead of something mostly redundant.
Also once you have the kernel/bootstrap/drivers ported, porting all the userland stuff will be a cakewalk. If someone is smart enough to port everything else you won't really need to depend on a package manager.
The only downside is that you won't be able to run Android apps and closed source stuff but who cares about that
Last edited by cheesylard,
People tend to port operating systems to things for fun, some of the desire is less now we all have raspberry pis and whatnot but it is not really the sort of thing you have to offer bounties for and work really hard to make happen. "theoretically" in this case is more like an inevitability.
I am not worried about it being a dead end or hamstringing other development. As you mention if the effort is put in to figuring out the hardware then everything else is mostly going through the motions.
People make the redundancy argument a lot but it never even occurs to me.
Spending all the effort and porting say ubuntu to it, OK.
Spending all the effort again and porting Linux Mint. Not so useful and an example of redundancy.
Android represents such a different beast that it does not compare.
"I have other devices". And? Said other devices surely play games too. Why do you have a switch?
On tablets. Are there really no distros that figure it out for a given tablet like we used to see for various laptop models?
"you won't be able to run Android apps and closed source stuff but who cares about that "
I would argue anybody that wants a useful computing device.
In the end I still find this hostility towards the notion of porting android to be utterly perplexing. Easily written off with "if you don't like it, not sure why that might be but hypotheticals here, then don't play it". I tried to figure out where it might be coming from and came up short too
Was it some kind of "android is teh filthy casuals, don't want it here" type thing? Surprisingly not. I had seen it several times on the forums in years past but it seems the march of acceptance carried on (I always like the evolution of web browsing -- started out "only in an emergency", moved to "OK I can see it being useful on some sites", then "yeah I do most of my internet on it" and today is "what kind of stupid site owner does not have a fully optimised mobile browsing experience". Games are about 2 years behind in that pattern) and now people see potential in it. There might be a bit of latent "blah, android" but not enough to account for what I was seeing.
Was it some kind of "if we do android we will never get retroarch" type thing? If it was I don't see it. Could see it happening after the general boring homebrew scene that was the 3ds compared to the GBA, PSP and DS.
Was it "android is fairly slow performing Java and that will hurt battery life, maybe if we try for native from the start"? I wish it was that nuanced.
I haven't seen anyone actually hostile here. Having an opinion that differs from yours does not make it hostile. The "you have other devices that play games so why own a switch" argument isn't very valid. Most decent Android devices can all play the same games, but most of the games on switch are not on android, and other consoles those games are on are usually not portable. So owning a switch is not redundant, but having yet another android device when most people already own one or multiple devices with Android does make it redundant. Most people however do not own a Linux tablet, which would make that less redundant.
I don't think anyone is upset about Linux being ported over. Rather we just have the opinion that with so many other devices already having it with most people owning one of those devices, it would be much cooler to see something like a full Linux distro ported over instead. Having that opinion is not being hostile.
I don't know quite where you got disagreement with my opinion = hostile thing from me from there but OK. Thinking more hostile might have been the wrong word, I won't retract it for now though, but the objections seemed rather strong, far stronger than I would have expected (on top of being frankly quite bizarre to me) and with the occasional bit of condescension and incoherence that accompanies the typical flame. I was also talking about the stuff on the matter in the TX chip thread. Some were about non issues but of those that remained I was still puzzled.
If you have your own android from the ground up you have root and with that you have most things that matter. You can run services, have a full network stack to play with and speak to wherever you like in the filesystem. So you don't as easily get to futz with whatever aspect of the kernel you read about in some tech rag but the stuff people mainly care about (chaining an encoder, file system viewer, network file server and scraper and then using my switch as a home media server sort of thing) still goes off just fine.
Moreover people talk about wanting all sorts of cool things for their switches. While we are not quite in the world of the GBA, PSP and DS any more* it is still a desire I can get behind. From where I sit the minute an android port rocks up you have it all. The worst that would happen is the controls might not be optimised for it, in which case I imagine most of the android emu devs would have it there in fairly short order or there would be an abstraction/emulation layer made a la joy2key on PCs.
Conventional linux port rocks up and that is less likely, a conventional homebrew scene with loads of separate standalone applications happens and where the first "wow it actually compiled" ports happen fairly early on they lack all the polish other things will have and if the 3ds, and death of the DS homebrew scene, was anything to go by probably always will. I don't even feel the need to humour the notion of there being highly optimised emulators made from the ground on up for it.
*people seem to forget that at the time they genuinely were best in class devices. Europe had a few sort of programmable phones but the agreements the manufacturers made you sign were outrageous. Today as many insist on mentioning the switch is another sort of interesting device among many.
If you have your own android from the ground up you have root and with that you have most things that matter. You can run services, have a full network stack to play with and speak to wherever you like in the filesystem. So you don't as easily get to futz with whatever aspect of the kernel you read about in some tech rag but the stuff people mainly care about (chaining an encoder, file system viewer, network file server and scraper and then using my switch as a home media server sort of thing) still goes off just fine.
Moreover people talk about wanting all sorts of cool things for their switches. While we are not quite in the world of the GBA, PSP and DS any more* it is still a desire I can get behind. From where I sit the minute an android port rocks up you have it all. The worst that would happen is the controls might not be optimised for it, in which case I imagine most of the android emu devs would have it there in fairly short order or there would be an abstraction/emulation layer made a la joy2key on PCs.
Conventional linux port rocks up and that is less likely, a conventional homebrew scene with loads of separate standalone applications happens and where the first "wow it actually compiled" ports happen fairly early on they lack all the polish other things will have and if the 3ds, and death of the DS homebrew scene, was anything to go by probably always will. I don't even feel the need to humour the notion of there being highly optimised emulators made from the ground on up for it.
*people seem to forget that at the time they genuinely were best in class devices. Europe had a few sort of programmable phones but the agreements the manufacturers made you sign were outrageous. Today as many insist on mentioning the switch is another sort of interesting device among many.
The way I see it.
Originally the only big screens people had were TVs. They only took RF and composite/scart in.
Minicomputers had long since died and trying to get your PC (which could do all this cool stuff) into one of those was hard.
Up rocks the likes of the xbox*, which was pretty cheap for what it was, and gets hacked and being essentially a PC gets all sorts of cool things made for it. Emulators, video watching (ever tried to use one of those MPEG4 DVD players?) and cool stuff people made just because and would never be viable for homebrew all happened. Some people seem to be in a hurry to forget the last thing ever happened and think homebrew = emulators, no doubt it was popular but I feel genuinely sorry for those people.
Around the same time handhelds also represented a really nice way to have a portable programmable screen** with some inputs and computing power. http://reinerziegler.de/GBA/gba.htm#great GBA hardware for some of the things. The DS and PSP also offering a full network stack and some reasonable power. A few people had tried to make phones of some power and programmability before the iphone came along but it was not going to happen (far too restricted, or possibly far too Japan centric) and j2me stuff was definitely a product of its time.
*there was some homebrew on older things (it tending to be called PD/public domain back then), however it was the GBA and xbox that really kicked it off.
Android and IOS then changed everything, not all for the better (I still resent not having root by default), but it changed the game entirely, as readily available money is wont to do and it is not going anywhere. PC demands also stagnated (a core2 machine could well be over a decade old and still represent a viable machine for everyday use) and prices dropped, not to mention screens gained HDMI and VGA to match PCs. Plug computers also got usefully powerful and then stuff like raspberry pis happened.
**I recall about 13 years ago being in a computing room in the electrical engineering department of a university. On the wall were all these posters saying look at this company called ARM and all the things they power you did not know about. Today having some drooler in the phone shop actually know the difference between two different ARM chips of the same line is then staggering to me when I think back.
In some ways I reckon many got stuck in the previous era and think it can happen again. The pitful showing on the 3ds saying how laughable I think that notion is. If not that then they are about the devices, I hold however that devices are a means to an end and not the end goal and I am still very much about having cool things nobody in either sales, marketing or legal could see being released.
At the same time people quite like if not a dedicated device then one they can set to a task and not really be down a device, maybe one day we will have universal computing (have you ever been on your PC and picked up your phone to do something? You have then suffered a failure of computing user interfaces) but given we can't even sort instant/text messaging out I am not expecting much any time soon. Or if you prefer then remove my PC from me and I am troubled, take one of my raspberry pis and twist it to do what you want before having it back a few hours later and it is all good. Being able to rock up at your friends, drop the switch in a device, play some games and then watch a film you downloaded (you know Nintendo is never going to provide a nice MKV demuxer that you can swap subs, languages and more about on) is cool.
That alone is also but one part of why I find the "but I already have a phone" argument so weak. Equally were I a funnier man we would cue up some imagine and I would find the "android is a bad plan" set talking in the switch potential threads.
I don't know that we will be seeing people buying Switches to turn into media boxes like we saw with the original xbox (or PS2 and PS3 for DVD and blu players respectively, and possibly an xbone for some of the streaming stuff), and I don't know that we will be having people buy one like they might have got a DS to SSH into machines (it happened). We might however see some kids picking one up as their private computing device (it is just games after all) as PCs have long been locked down and plenty of parents are wise to phones and tablets.
For another thing out there to consider. While the likes of the GBA, DS and PSP were nice they were more just acceptable power than comfortably powered. To make the most of them you did need fairly good coding skills, and there were serious benefits to having outright great ones (all those lovingly hand crafted emulators, with all the nice features, something the 3ds did not have really). Android then allows someone that can fumble their way through eclipse to generate something cool, especially if they can take some nice web api and write a wrapper for it.
So yeah the Switch is in a tenuous position in homebrew terms. Android is instant library, lower barrier to entry, gives the big boy devs a chance to earn some money which retains/attracts them and helps with the "disposable" device thing. I then struggle to see downsides.
I dunno, that extra layer would really probably slow things down a lot. I suppose it'd be nice to get steam running, even if it's just mobile steam games. I'd just rather think the exciting stuff will happen using the switch OS, as it's optimized, rather than a slower OS.
If done correctly, switch homebrew emulators would run better than generic android emulators because they can be optimized for that specific hardware. We are already running emulators, just need the final touches for proper SD access instead of network storage for roms and saves (though going through network is a good way to keep games and saves synced across devices)
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I'm interested in having homebrew/emulation and a backup loader. Zero interest in Android on Switch, so hopefully there isn't too much time/effort put into that.
"If done correctly, switch homebrew emulators would run better than generic android emulators" if done correctly, for how long? i hope they dont abandon it when new console came. my experience on android emulator is perfect in every way much faster than pc emulator. esp. this emulator DRASTIC 60fps. save state smooth. so many features.
android is open source so they have more control on what they want to do.
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as i remember on PSP scene(or any other console that have emulator having same fate) after they create a emulator 2 years later they abandon it , why because money, or mostly they have new project on another console. on android as long as it making money on playstore , they will continue it to the perfect state of emulator.
For retro emulation once you get it working well there isn't a need to continue development. The game list is finite. Once they all work properly at full speed there isn't much more to really optimize and continue development. Android emulators need updates to support more devices properly (they don't immediately support all devices) and to support newer Android revisions. If they don't keep them updated they will stop working eventually. Unlike console homebrew where once its done there isn't a whole lot more that has to be done. It will pretty much just keep working on the device.
Yes, that is correct. Like I said, there are literally no tablets that run GNU/Linux. It's a huge issue! And it's a driver issue, not a "distro" issue, device manufacturers (i.e. basically just Qualcomm, since they essentially have a monopoly) want to keep their platforms closed for as long as they possibly can. They only provide closed-source Android drivers, no Linux ones.
The only thing that comes close to something that runs GNU/Linux is the Nokia N900. Current efforts are the Neo900 and the Librem 5, but who knows if they will ever see the light of day.
Like, if someone manages to successfully port GNU/Linux to the Nintendo Switch it could change everything. It would send ripples through the entire software and hardware industry. Since in this theoretical scenario we've already done the Herculean task of reverse engineering drivers and bootloaders and whatnot, GNU/Linux is just so, so, so much better of a target.
Like, the difference is "dual boot the switch OS with Android" vs "dual boot the switch OS with another OS that has never been on a tablet before". GNU/Linux is really an entirely different beast from Android; if we could get it on the Switch in a significant way, there's no telling what would happen. The homeberw scene would likely go supernova.
--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------
Correction: nobody owns a Linux tablet, because none exist.
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