Mmmm hopefully it'll be buggy enough to be hacked and flashed with a proper distro
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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I know what they mean but technically Android is Linux too?
Android runs a Linux kernel, but it's not GNU/Linux.
It’s GNot/Linux
I only use GNU+Windows NT.
... do you mean GNU+Linux?
Could endanger side loading on Fire TV sticks which currently is as easy as installing an APK.
No, it would just start that whole process over.
Well, at least on a more positive side, if we can find out how to emulate these things we might finaly have 4k streams on Linux
These are really weak devices. They aren’t doing that in software. It’s hardware decode, which means a they will likely use a vendor binary blob.
How well does this type of emulation work?
For example, can you emulate a netflix certified device on an non-certified ARM device (if it's powerful enough).
On the surface this seems great. I trust nothing from Amazon though.
Maybe they’ll use and contribute to Plasma Bigscreen? Probably not, but I’d love to see Bigscreen get more love.
Nevermind, articles like this suggest it’s all going to be proprietary to give Amazon greater control, which honestly I’d be more surprised if they did make something more open: https://en.todoandroid.es/Amazon-Vega-OS%3A-Everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-Fire-OS-replacement/
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.
It’s in Amazons interest to lock it down as they’re selling the devices at a loss to drive subscription and purchases.
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
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.
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
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.
I mean, the amazon of enterprise is not the amazon of product manufacturing, Linux doesn't get usually mentioned in product applications so??
Also, sorry late reply :b
Personal opinion: Android is a locked down version of Linux, so it may become easier, also taking into account that this would be "new" software or would probably have more holes. In the end it depends on how much money they're going to pour on development
Probably not, see Wikipedia Tivoization
Waiting to see how normal Linux it is. Could be a boon for community Linux touchscreen distributions if they move Fire tablets to it as well. Amazon must regret giving up on phones after only one Fire phone