It uses virtualization to run most/all Linux tools, I'm not quite sure if the functionality is bridged between the UI in Fuchsia yet, but the end product will likely end up looking something look Crostini on Chrome OS.
It does seem to be a trend nowdays. I think the most fitting analogy to what we are doing is "Desigining the album cover for the world tour, when we only have a few songs for it." It most definitely is a little overerpresented on the website, but i'd say the goals and features are completely attainable, they are represented to be high when they are really standard features that are relatively easy to implement.
The wording is definitely a little brash and market-y, but I don't think there is anything on the site that is explicitly false, but of course it probably comes across as represented to be more finished than it actually is, which is a fair understanding.
You can't install it, and this early on you shouldnt. My word alone probably does not carry much weight, but it is relatively safe, likely safer for usage than most current distributions where the only form of security is an up to date kernel. We opted to use a sort of stateful/stateless security model, where the system is stateless and varified on boot, and user files are stored inside an encrypted partition with relatively strict permissions for now.
Flutter's team is making efforts to improve it on other platforms, iirc it powers Stadia, and the new Google iOT hardware like the Home Hub (or whever they are calling that now) and the new Google TV.
With those benefits, there are also some major caveats that temporarily put a wrench in development. Fuchsia demands a system with a Kaby Lake CPU or newer, which were fairly hard to come by. Thanks to recent innovations in Fuchsia's emulator, it is easier to work on the UI and lower layers of the system, but it is still much easier to develop on and distribute Linux images for the time being.
We initially experimented with almost exactly what was described here, but it lacked one thing and that was third party expandablility. Sadly, I see no way for common and modern apps in their current form to be integrated into anything other than the traditional application format. If this changes, I hope to be the first to jump on board and get the ball rolling.
The builds are not neccessarily licensed, Fuchsia is Apache, and our source is Apache, I'm not quite sure legally about the final product of it. The underlying Linux system is licensed under various licenses, which are provided with the system. We release the GPL bits under the GPL, and the Apache bits under Apache 2.0, in addition to the other third party components which have miscellaneous licenses.
That's perfectly understandable, I even feel that I went a little too "slick marketing" with the website, but I have extremely high, maybe even too high goals for the project.
It definitely isn't an insult :). I attempt to keep more quality and professionalism now, the earlier days of the project were, as they say, "turbulent". I do enjoy seeing criticism, as it guides us and often shows us points to improve, especially the code quality, which is being completely overhauled as we progress.
It is a bit of a mess. It really shouldn't be able to run online, it just happens to be possible, so we decided to put it up. Flutter really isn't quite mature enough for production on the web, (Partially our fault for a decently messy codebase, a rewrite is underway to maximise efficiency).
Thankfully that's just around for layout reference, working with the Process class was absolutely infuriating. I have made more effort since then to be more verbose and keeping the code up to a decent quality.
Not sure exactly what it has to do with gnome or dbus, the desktop is backed by X11 (Migration to Wayland is underway but it's a pain to work with), the Flutter embedder itself renders with GTK. The project was started as a Fuchsia fork, and we intend to continue working hard on getting that ready, but sadly a lack of access to compatible modern hardware forced our hand to temporarily switch over to Linux as the development platform, so our layers of project would not stagnate while we wait for more polishing on Google's end.
Yeah, sorry about the performance. We kinda put that together as an impromptu web demo, like the old ubuntu tour. Flutter for the web is super sucky right now, and lacks a lot of things like accessibility and normal text interaction because it is backed by a canvas element. Ideally as Flutter matures we will be able to improve both the performance and accessibility aspect of it.
As a developer of a Fuchsia fork, I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, not all components are opensource ATM, (like the khadas VIM2 bootloader), but at least they are available.