AsteroidOS 2.0 is here with a massive load of new features and support for many more watches.
Thank you to all contributors who made it possible!
Watch the visual demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6FiQz0yACc
Read the announcement: https://asteroidos.org/news/2-0-release/
Enjoy the wrist-sized Linux ride!
I would think Linux would be way too heavy for these watches. A lot of them use pretty lean MCUs, a far cry from the beefy Qualcomm phone chips that Post market runs on.
Even running zephyr on the NRF52840 can get heavy with adding a bunch of apps to it.
lol no, these smart watches are powerful as older smartphones, their stock os is already android/linux based.
Nah, it’s not “too heavy” the linux kernel is running on all kinds of tiny processors.
My limited understanding is, that usually the problem is a lack of support and assistance from the hardware manufacturer to optimise the OS for their hardware.
This is why GrapheneOS and similar have poorer performance on phones et cetera.
Generally correct, but,
FWIW my gOS gets 40-50% more battery, likely due to lack of parasitic (see what I did there?) google services.
AsteroidOS mostly supports watches that come stock with Wear OS, which is a modified version of Android, which, guess what, runs a Linux kernel. These watches are on the more powerful end of the computing spectrum. As you say, there are a lot of smart watches that use pretty lean MCUs, but those aren’t running AsteroidOS or Wear OS, as noted in this FAQ entry.
I would assume it’s highly stripped down similar to what Google does to android with watchos ?
I mean, look at the specs of a smart TV or smart fridge. The specs on them are shit and they run Linux.
Hell there are whole distros designed to run on minimal as fuck hardware.
Maybe not a good example because all TVs and Smart fridges run MCUs (or SBUs) that are 10x-20x more powerful than what is in any smart watch besides the apple watch (where the watch is mostly one gigantic custom IC).
They usually run NXP I.MX Arm M7 processors at the bare bare bare minimum, much more common is an ARM A7 or higher which is a completely different world than the tiny nrf52840 with 192KB of RAM and 1MB of flash that is standard across lower-end smart watches (and doesn’t go upuch with higher end) That is why I was confused. But I guess people get down voted to hell for asking a question lol