Amazon Fire TV devices expected to ditch Android for Linux in 2025

a year ago by Alphane Moon to c/hardware

Ditching Google could help Amazon better monetize its streaming gadgets.

DemBoSain 7 points a year ago

Would these be easier or harder to 'hack'. I've currently got an NVIDIA Shield 2019. I love it, but it's beginning to show it's age.

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Dima 11 points a year ago

Depends how well they lock it down, Kindles are based on Linux and several of the recent models didn't have any jailbreaks available until winterbreak came out. Not sure if Amazon have managed to patch against it but I took the opportunity to jailbreak mine as soon as I found out about winterbreak.

Also worth noting that on the android based fire TV sticks, you can install android apps easily, not sure Amazon will give you that freedom on the Linux versions

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Kailn 2 points a year ago

Well, how would an average streaming user benefit from using linux to begin with? Most streaming apps are avaliable on G-Play Store with DRM for the mass adoption of the platform on both Mobile & TV-Boxes and to "lower" any sort of software expoit to extract media; yet offical support for them on linux is mostly limited to chrome(ium) & firefox with drm enabled.

Yes, anything amazon gonna do for customers are very likely to be locked down but it doesn't seem sensi?le of amazon to adopt linux just to make it useless

Unless amazon are gonna make a browserOS like chromeOS & rely on PWAs there's little to no benefit on the switch other than lowering power consumption... (atleast for the avarage user)

Etheramazon is after smh else with linux (AWS?? another amazon linux??) or next-gen firesticks are gonna be multi-purposed as linux desktop and be able to run more software, media & games (anything but more lockdown).

the article take about speculations; but an amazon-based distro for say, playing amazon prime games, optimised for amazon luna & run snaps & flatpaks is something that they would be actually into, if it profitable, and adaptable to mass medium of users...

edit: flatpaks

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Dima 4 points a year ago

Would be nice if they supported any old flatpak, but I expect they will have their own packaging format that can only be installed from their own store and not side-loaded. They certainly will want to lock down and control what applications can do.

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webhead 2 points a year ago

What a time to live in. Linux being used to give people less choice. Incredible. I'm not buying fire devices anymore. Fuck Amazon. Only reason I ever bought them to begin with was that they were cheap Android devices. I can just buy shit from Onn now I guess.

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