I’d love to try out some of their products, but my government has banned them. So much for the land of the free.
even if you got them; you’re going to encounter some stupid rules:
i bought at xiaomi phone and i can’t use it on most cell phone carriers in the united states because they’re banned based on their imea to please uncle sam; so it doesn’t matter that it’s capable of working, it’s just not allowed.
same is true for hearing aids: when i connect them using ordinary bluetooth, they work fine on both my xiaomi and samsung phones; but when i use the recommended software, they only work on the samsung and their tech support told me that they don’t work on “banned” hardware like xiaomi or huawei.
i bet, in the near future, huawei’s hardware will be banned from connecting to wifi networks based on thier mac address and american smart phones will refuse to share data w then via hotspot for the same reason.
I’ve been running various distros off my Huawei Matebook 14 in the US for years with zero issues. They make really good laptops, TBH.
my xiaomi is clearly far superior than the other phones i’ve had at this price point and i want to stick with that brand for as long as i can now that i know what to do to get them to work in this country.
i got my xiaomi for free so even I wanted to do the same, but xiaomi and hyperos have alot of limitations
i haven’t noticed any and i learned yesterday that i’m must put a custom rom on it to get it to work in this country; so there’s room for modification if something doesn’t work for you.
This leak is really scetchy, tbh. If it’s real then it’s probably happening because of the HarmonyOS NEXT that came out late last year. With that they basically dropped the previously used custom android/linux kernel for their own totally own proprietary HarmonyOS kernel. However with that they also lost support for android and linux code sideloading in the process and replaced it with some linux translation layer.
I always thought that HarmonyOS was meant to be more of a Android replacement that also had it’s place in stuff like TVs, cars, IoT and smart devices, but they still tried PCs with it, but it was more like chromebook-like toy computer for web browsing and text editing than a full pc. It seemed like a competent product android and android smart device replacement, but I never saw it as a serious competitor for Windows, MacOS or Linux desktop. If them plan is just be self sufficient and ditch US code, then you can do more in the linux ecosystem and get more app support right out of the gate and not have to ask everybody to rewrite their code for your custom OS. With linux-laptops they will have global markets for their computers, when as Harmony OS and it’s still are best in China’s own ‘software lagoon’ where third parties care more about developing for Huawei app store.
what’s harmony OS?
Huawei’s android skin/variant, akin to OneUI for samsung, OxygenOS for Oneplus, HyperOS for Xiaomi.
It was a skin, now its a completely different OS. The initial version, HarmonyOS, was based on Android/Linux, the new HarmonyOS Next, is a proprietary version (or successor) of HarmonyOS based on an open source project/OS, OpenHarmony. It uses a new microkernel instead of the linux kernel.
OpenHarmony is essentially an open source base for making an operating system on top. Its not like the Linux kernel, in the sense that its not just a kernel (in fact you can use the linux kernel with it), but rather a bunch of components people can build upon. And since it uses a permissive license, you can build a proprietary OS on top of it (like the HarmonyOS Next).
Huawei actually launched OpenHarmony many years back but it was not ready for phone usage yet. It was only with the launch of the 5th version that Huawei was confident enough in it to start using it on their own phones.
A Huawei version of Android.
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.
Ah that makes sense, thanks!
the laptops mostly use Intel x86 chips
I mean, I’d be happy to see them ship ARM laptops in the vein of Apple’d M chips or Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
