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Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop
Adobe has announced
that it will no longer be producing versions of Adobe AIR - or security
updates - for desktop Linux; instead, they see Android as the future. Some
more information can be found in this
blog entry: "So, with Desktop Linux, we see a basically flat
growth curve hovering around 1%. And since the release of AIR, we've seen
only a 0.5% download share for desktop Linux. For Android and IOS we see
substantial growth in share, and see predictions that indicate that in the
Mobile OS market, the Android share could be 46%, with iOS at 16% (IDC
March 2011)."
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Android on the desktop Posted Jun 15, 2011 17:34 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
Do any Linux distributions ship with support for running Android applications?
Android on the desktop Posted Jun 17, 2011 23:35 UTC (Fri) by skierpage (guest, #70911) [Link]
I doubt any distribution supports Android, there's no clean approach and a host of limitations.
* You can run the Android emulator from the Android SDK. "The Android emulator is a QEMU-based application that provides a virtual ARM mobile device on which you can run your Android applications" - http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/devices/emu...
* You can boot the Android-x86 project in a virtual machine, from a live CD, or installed to your hard drive - http://www.android-x86.org/
* You can wait for one of the projects that aims to support Android as just another runtime to come to fruition. Canonical explored such a project two years, this Ars Technica article discusses the issues such as Android's Binder kernel driver for IPC - http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/05/canonical... . BlueStacks is a startup hoping to do the same for Windows operating systems; Myriad makes an "Alien Dahlvik" portable version of the Android runtime and demonstrated it on a Maemo device; some wild-eyed Linux developers promised a rebuilt Android stack several months ago but I can't remember their project names.
I think all of these won't have access to the main Android Market and won't have some of Google's apps. The 2nd and 3rd approach will have problems with any ARM code built with Android's Native Development Kit
(Disclaimer: I've tried none of these.)
I think extending the phone onto the desktop as the Motorola Atrix does, or sharing your computer's screen and hardware with the phone, are going to be more appealing. You've already got the apps on your phone, so make it work well when you're sitting at a computer.
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 15, 2011 17:40 UTC (Wed) by sud0er (guest, #71979) [Link]
All the more reason not to install AIR on my phone. Gotta love a cross-platform runtime that doesn't run on my primary platform.
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jul 5, 2011 21:25 UTC (Tue) by XERC (guest, #14626) [Link]
Love or hate whatever, but there is one fundamental mistake that is done all over and all the time in social sciences and, apparently, also in business.
The mistake is that if one studies correlations let's say, between parameters A and B, then the fact that they are correlated does not say anything about whether A causes B or B causes A or C causes both A and B.
There also is a multiplier that the correlation has to be multiplied with. For example, just a few tiny crystals of a poison can cause the death of a human or other huge mammal. At the same time that mammal might have been eating some nonpoisonous chemical, for example water, in quantities that far exceed the poison. Now, which is more correlated with the death of the mammal, water or the poison?
In terms of market share, if one cuts the support for developers that produce majority of the enduser software while being a minority amongst developers that use, download, the technology, then does it really make sense to assess the effect of Linux/Windows/Mac support by the number of downloads?
Of cource, one can forgive the businesspeople their stupidity, because all of us born to this world as white sheets and none of us can learn everything. For instance, most software developers (as individuals) are truly bad at selling their products.
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 15, 2011 17:42 UTC (Wed) by realnc (guest, #60393) [Link]
What the hell is Adobe Air? I bet it was 0.5% out of a total of 90 downloads or something.
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 15, 2011 18:03 UTC (Wed) by kirkengaard (subscriber, #15022) [Link]
No kidding. I use Flash and keep Reader around for checking PDFs that I send out, but nothing I've ever needed to do requires AIR.
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 15, 2011 19:00 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] Just look at the Adobe AIR webpage. Apparently, it's something that allows you to do something cool that appears in the web browser, but somehow it's not constrained by the limitations of the said browser. If you want to see how it works, you can click on "See the benefits of Adobe AIR". You'll see a talking head and lots of flashy pictures. However, both are constrained in a rectangle within the browser's window. Apparently, it wasn't made with Adobe AIR, or the head would jump right at you.
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 15, 2011 20:05 UTC (Wed) by leoc (subscriber, #39773) [Link] Air is Adobe's version of Silverlight. :)Adobe is being very clever here. By claiming Linux "failed" on the desktop, they gloss over the fact that Air failed everywhere. Killing off the Linux client to redistribute resources is a pretty clear admission on their part that Air itself (like Silverlight) is in trouble.
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 18, 2011 16:22 UTC (Sat) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]
I thought Silverlight was Microsoft's version of Flash. So what does AIR offer over Flash?
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 21, 2011 13:27 UTC (Tue) by lambda (subscriber, #40735) [Link] It runs outside the browser, and can do things like access your local filesystem. That's pretty much it. The only time in recent memory that I've seen it in the wild is in Amazon's Cloud Drive MP3 Uploader, which requires Adobe AIR so it can grovel through your disk to find MP3s (or other music files) to upload to their "cloud." I declined to install Adobe AIR just to try out Amazon's cloud music thingy.
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 15, 2011 20:19 UTC (Wed) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
Now, be fair. For Linux to be at 0.5% there must have been at least 200 downloads. (Or, well, at least 182, assuming they rounded to 1 decimal digit.)
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 15, 2011 23:55 UTC (Wed) by lakeland (subscriber, #1157) [Link]
It's a language which uses the Flash VM but allows developers to develop desktop applications including some controlled hardware access.
It's considered a high level rapid application development language. I don't like it much, as far as I could see from a distance the developers spend longer fighting with the framework than other systems - I would have guessed Moonlight provides better support.
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 17, 2011 11:17 UTC (Fri) by wertigon (guest, #42963) [Link]
I myself have only encountered it for two applications, League of Legends [1] (a popular computer game which use it for their launcher) and Balsamiq Mockups [2] (which is a rather good mockup application, but shouldn't be impossible to find a replacement. Dia could probably do 90% already for example).
It works quite good in BM, but LoL is one of the buggiest products I've used in recent years. Every other day there's one problem or another with their client. AIR has failed to impress me.
[1] http://www.leagueoflegends.com
Dear Adobe, why is there AIR? Posted Jun 15, 2011 18:05 UTC (Wed) by ndye (subscriber, #9947) [Link] (Cue the old Bill Cosby routine.) But seriously, I routinely uninstall AIR, as bloatware, from every Windows box my friends choose to live with. Is it good for anything?
Dear Adobe, why is there AIR? Posted Jun 15, 2011 18:43 UTC (Wed) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
There was some casual MMORPG thing my wife wanted to try that needed it, so I tried installing it on her Linux desktop. But all it ever did was crash on startup, so, uh, not really any counter-evidence against your point.
Dear Adobe, why is there AIR? Posted Jun 15, 2011 18:43 UTC (Wed) by smadu2 (subscriber, #54943) [Link]
If I am not wrong BBC iplayer desktop requires Adobe AIR.
Dear Adobe, why is there AIR? Posted Jun 15, 2011 23:24 UTC (Wed) by moreati (guest, #5715) [Link]
You are right, and I never got it working - over 2 (ish) years and 3 Ubuntu releases. Nothing of value has been lost here
Dear Adobe, why is there AIR? Posted Jun 16, 2011 0:00 UTC (Thu) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]
Indeed. get_iplayer was, and is, considerably superior.
Dear Adobe, why is there AIR? Posted Jun 16, 2011 4:07 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]
The National Geographic Archive (they sell an archive of every magazine they every published for about $100) requires Adobe AIR.
I've used an AIR app. Posted Jun 19, 2011 16:23 UTC (Sun) by CChittleborough (subscriber, #60775) [Link] There is one AIR app I've used. It's simple and effective. It's provided for free by Good Old Games for downloading stuff you buy from them.But it only works on Windows ... grrrr! (I did at least one of the 182 (as estimated upthread) downloads of AIR for Linux, but have never used AIR on Linux beyond getting an error message from the GOG app.) So, yeah, AIR is useful on Windows (but not Linux) if you buy from GOG, at least until GOG write a better downloader.
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 15, 2011 18:20 UTC (Wed) by rilder (guest, #59804) [Link]
So be it. On a serious note, I don't think anyone installed AIR on their systems and not uninstalled it. Given a choice (on web pages), I don't think anyone would use flash either.
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 15, 2011 18:22 UTC (Wed) by Imroy (guest, #62286) [Link]
This shouldn't matter too much. Everyone seems to be moving to HTML5 for web applications; IIRC, it includes features for offline apps. Even Adobe is moving. And apparently Silverlight developers are frightened that Microsoft is moving to a HTML5+SVG/Canvas future.
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 15, 2011 19:08 UTC (Wed) by matthewdavis1 (guest, #66378) [Link]
Honestly, the only Adobe Air product I've even considered installing -ever- was Tweetdeck. I tried it one day, and couldn't get it to run successfully (granted this was back in F12 or 13 if memory serves me well).
But it does suck to see a product touted as cross-platform to remove support for such a large platform like Linux.
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jul 5, 2011 21:35 UTC (Tue) by XERC (guest, #14626) [Link]
Well, I guess Adobe also wants to make a fool of itself. They want to stay in the race with other bullies.
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 15, 2011 19:22 UTC (Wed) by nicooo (guest, #69134) [Link]
"So, with Adobe AIR, we see a basically flat growth curve hovering around 0.1%."
FTFY
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 15, 2011 21:05 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
Market share of a proprietary and horrifically bad framework running on Linux proves nothing other than that Linux users disproportionately dislike both proprietary applications and horrifically bad applications.
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 15, 2011 23:02 UTC (Wed) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]
I'm sure more Linux users use Evince instead of Adobe PDF-reader too.
I also enabled HTML5-video-support on Youtube so I don't need Flash as often either, just as an other example.
Well, I care... Posted Jun 15, 2011 23:29 UTC (Wed) by lakeland (subscriber, #1157) [Link]
My work uses Air and seem happy enough with it overall. It's incredibly similar to Flash but can run outside a browser and has some other advantages. We use it because we wanted something cross platform which can interact directly with USB hardware (specifically RFID readers).
I personally don't like it much - the language reminds me of Javascript and I never saw the advantages over a toolkit such as GTK, QT or even .NET but it never bothered me enough to raise any objections to our continued investment in Air.
Well, I care... Posted Jun 16, 2011 11:25 UTC (Thu) by job (guest, #670) [Link]
Flash can also run outside the browser. I've seen a few games that are distributed with a Flash runtime.
Well, I care... Posted Jun 16, 2011 12:03 UTC (Thu) by njd27 (subscriber, #5770) [Link]
It's unsurprising that the language reminds you of Javascript. AIR is basically Flash on the desktop, Flash is programmed in ActionScript, and ActionScript is just a dialect of ECMAScript, and ECMAScript is just another name for JavaScript.
If you keep on digging, it's powered by philosophy, of course.
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 16, 2011 1:05 UTC (Thu) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
This sounds like the kind of "more with less" pep talk that management hands out when a project is circling the drain. If this really had anything to do with Linux on the desktop, they would have cut support for Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash on Linux-- which they clearly haven't done.
At the end of the day, nobody really wanted Adobe Air to succeed except for its creators. Apple wants people to write Objective C code. Google wants people to write Android and HTML5 code. Microsoft wants people to use Silverlight. Application developers want applications that feel native to whatever platform they're running on. So they delivered something nobody wanted, and, not surprisingly, nobody adopted it.
If you are correct then why people are using Qt? Posted Jun 16, 2011 8:03 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] If people are so averse to cross-platform toolkits, then why there are tons of programs written using Qt? Most of them (like Google Earth) don't advertise the fact, but there are a lot of them. My own POV: AIR failed because of Flash. It's not just a toolkit to use in your program, instead it's the whole paradigm designed around insane runtime (Flash was designed to make art developers happy - and these people don't know the math and are organically incapable of making anything resource-constrained... because they don't even have appropriate concepts in their vocabulary). Sure, it is possible to write good, non-resource-hungry add with Flash and AIR... but this is constant fight with the platform. On the web you have no choice (well, in reality you had no choice till recently, but today HTML5 offers adequate replacements), but to use it to develop something outside of browser? Gosh. I'm pretty sure AIR will be even less popular in mobile world then it was on desktop: in a world where there are hundreds of thousands of programs you expect some adequate quality and Flash is not welcome. Later, when (and if!) mobile phones will be 1000 times more powerful we can see return of something like Flash and AIR, but not in the near future.
If you are correct then why people are using Qt? Posted Jun 16, 2011 15:52 UTC (Thu) by obi (guest, #5784) [Link]
In a previous life I was a Flash/Actionscript developer - and one of the reasons I liked it is because websites/webapps I made ended up in the range of 20KB-100KB, where trying to do the same in HTML/javascript I would easily end up in the 500KB range. And it was able to do asynchronous loading and a lot of other stuff (2/3D vector gfx, video) long before it was fashionable to do so in HTML.
That being said, I do believe we're better off now, with a lot of different browser providers supporting similar features in HTML5. Still I miss the 20KB websites - the jquery libs on their own take 200-300KB minimum.
Well, this is TOTALLY irrelevant for AIR Posted Jun 17, 2011 6:51 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Flash did a conscious decision to save filesize at the expense of computer power needed to play the result (incidentally the same decision was done by DOM/CSS developers although they did not as well because they wanted to stick with the textual format, too). This is important for Web, but hardly relevant for desktop. Actually it's not all that relevant for web, not anymore. We just don't have any sensible alternative (Java is BOTH large AND resource-hungry).
Well, this is TOTALLY irrelevant for AIR Posted Jun 17, 2011 18:25 UTC (Fri) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] Well, sending less data over the wire will continue to be important for a long time. Especially in the US, broadband speeds have kind of plateaued. Google's SPDY protocol should help a little bit here, since it does compression on HTTP headers.There are people out like Farbrausch writing 15-minute long 3D graphics demos that fit in 64 kb. They use procedural texture generation and other such tricks to trade binary size for CPU/GPU cycles. It's kind of sad that there is still no portable way to do anything like this using web technologies, where size really is much more important. Maybe someday browsers will just allow websites to send them bytecode to run in a standards-compliant and secure virtual machine. That's the way it should have been all along, rather than forcing them to use a specific language (ECMAScript.) I wouldn't hold my breath, though.
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 16, 2011 8:45 UTC (Thu) by dpc (guest, #74012) [Link]
The last time I needed Air, I couldn't get it to work due to some x64 issues. Maybe when Adobe stops doing crappy software and start doing software that actually runs on Linux without problems they will see some increase in Linux Desktop share.
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 16, 2011 16:13 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
"And since the release of AIR, we've seen only a 0.5% download share for desktop Linux"
I'm amazed it's that high. Over the last couple of years I've had numerous attempts to get AIR to install both on Debian and Ubuntu - the latter of which is supposedly a supported platform. But AIR is 32-bit only (hello Adobe, welcome to 2004) and even when you've worked around that problem it's basically impossible to get it to install and run. I consider myself to be reasonably competent at that sort of thing, but I'd always give up after an hour or two and decide I don't care about iPlayer desktop *that* badly.
Compared to AIR, Flash looks like the pinnacle of technical excellence.
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Jun 17, 2011 9:24 UTC (Fri) by gnb (subscriber, #5132) [Link]
They're counting downloads, remember, not succesful installs. So all those failed attempts boost their stats :-)
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Aug 9, 2011 14:59 UTC (Tue) by dag- (subscriber, #30207) [Link]
It's weird to see a company of that size confuse a new emerging Linux market in the mobile space for the Linux desktop market. Surely Linux is doing well in form of Android, but that is clearly not the Linux desktop market.
Although I can see Adobe not caring about the Linux desktop market as it plays out today. I simply wish they would do a better job at providing Flash players for Linux (and 64bit) but I can only hope that Flash renders itself useless over time.
It wouldn't be a bad thing if Android followed Apple's lead and dropped Flash support !
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Aug 9, 2011 18:00 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
the current version of flash does support 64 bit (as of about a month ago)
Adobe: Android is the Linux desktop Posted Aug 9, 2011 21:39 UTC (Tue) by dag- (subscriber, #30207) [Link]
Oh, I know. But it's not an officially supported version. The alpha version was unsupported for more than 8 months, despite a handful of security problems being fixed to the stable (32bit) Linux release in the meantime ! That doesn't make me very comfortable for the future either.
I guess you can see every new day as the start of something great, or you can look at the past to predict what the future looks like. I guess Adobe hopes you do the former, but I am realistic ;-)
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