Huawei Unveils a HarmonyOS Laptop, Its First Windows-Free Computer (liliputing.com) 43
Huawei has launched its first laptop running HarmonyOS instead of Windows, complete with AI features and support for over 2,000 mostly China-focused apps. The product is largely a result of U.S. sanctions that prevented U.S.-based companies like Google and Microsoft from doing business with Huawei, forcing the company to develop its own in-house solution. Liliputing reports: Early version of HarmonyOS were basically skinned version of Android, but over time Huawei has moved the two operating systems further apart and it now includes Huawei's own kernel, user interface, and other features. The version designed for laptops features a desktop-style operating system with a taskbar and dock on the bottom of the screen and support for multitasking by running multiple applications in movable, resizable windows.
Since this is 2025, of course Huawei's demos also heavily emphasize AI features: the company showed how Celia, its AI assistant, can summarize documents, help prepare presentation slides, and more. While the operating system won't support the millions of Windows applications that could run on older Huawei laptops, the company says that at launch it will support more than 2,000 applications including WPS Office (an alternative to Microsoft Office that's developed in China), and a range of Chinese social media applications.
Since this is 2025, of course Huawei's demos also heavily emphasize AI features: the company showed how Celia, its AI assistant, can summarize documents, help prepare presentation slides, and more. While the operating system won't support the millions of Windows applications that could run on older Huawei laptops, the company says that at launch it will support more than 2,000 applications including WPS Office (an alternative to Microsoft Office that's developed in China), and a range of Chinese social media applications.
Finally (Score:1)
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Yes, now you can be monitored by the PRC just like Microsoft monitors the free world. One problem though, the PRC will Uyghur you if you say something naughty.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
The US is currently using the immigration system to target brown people for abduction and transport to foreign death camps without any due process. It's monitoring social media to see who says mean things about Dear Leader. It's taking steps to control campuses, the media, and even lawyers.
It's not a lot of people, yet. Regardless, the US has no moral high ground here.
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Moderate.
Then meta-moderate.
It's not a new system - it just needs users (i.e. YOU) to do a moderate amount of work for the common good.
If you don't like such socialist ideas, stop using international sites (slashdot.ORG) and try using slashdot.US or wherever they hide the US-specific version.
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With a 5-digit UID, I've been here since about week 2 or 3. ~I know who the user base is. And I reject the frequent blindness to non-American opinion, and have done since the 1970s.
It has been at "excellent" every time I've looked. Does it ever vary? Makes it a pretty useless characteristic if it's always "excellent". But no, I've never made an effort to post socialist or "TDS" clickbait - American's aren't worth that e
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Yeah, no shit.
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Is your position that this isn't a moral issue and that this is all something you support, or is it that it can't be happening because Fox News didn't show it?
Because if it's the former, then there's a reason Clinton called people like you (not all Republicans, just the half that supports Trump because he's a sexist racist asshole) a deplorable. If it's the latter, you need to move away from right wing propaganda outlets. The campaigns in question have been well reported on and the Trump administration has
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Brown people and tourists. And particularly brown tourists. And if you're a soccer fan, they've probably for some nefarious re-education camp for you to make you think properly before you leave.
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They are in the US illegally. What don't people get about that? As a US citizen try living somewhere else in the world without permission and see what happens. People like you love to stir the pot and watch the world burn. You want "Dear Leader"? Move to NK and see what a real Dear Leader is all about.
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Ignore NK - try move to Canada! Hordes of “asylum seekers” from anywhere but the U.S. are welcome with zero impediment, and millions are instantly sluiced onto the public dole. But attempt to go in the front door from the U.S.? Dozens of ludicrously tough and conflicting barriers instantly pop up, and they’re rigorously enforced.
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Fox isn't saying much about the legals who are being scooped up and denied due process, so I'm not surprised you're unaware. And you probably wouldn't care anyway because typically people like you use 'illegal' as a euphemism anyway.
Re: Finally (Score:1)
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Try getting your news from somewhere other than Fox or Joe Rogan.
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Why not just a Linux distro...? (Score:2)
HarmonyOS is one thing, but why not just a Linux distribution like Ubuntu, or perhaps do a downstream distribution of Debian or Red Hat? Something that provides a lot of functionality, well tested, and open source.
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Re:Why not just a Linux distro...? (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps a generation of Chinese computer science students grew up with the Torvalds-Tanenbaum debate, saw what Google was doing with Fuchsia OS and thought this was the way of the future.
[ c.f. Redox OS, if it had commercial backing from a major hardware vendor. ]
But in terms of Huawei, if you write your own kernel you don't have to concern yourself with being pestered to release source code under the terms of the GPL.
Re:Why not just a Linux distro...? (Score:4)
It's the same argument as for Windows: familiarity. A phone/tablet is the next thing everybody knows to use, and will spontaneously switch to as a backup if their Windows laptop isn't available. I have colleagues, 40+ y.o. with PhDs, who don't own a laptop, say after work all they need is a mobile phone. A "mobile platform" (Android, iOS) is where people find the thousands of idiotic apps and games they want.
I imagine, if a company policy said "everybody uses Ubuntu", many would feel humiliated into a nerd niche and complain daily. If they said "everybody uses a top-of-the line Samsung tablet with DeX" (laptop mode), I imagine they'd say "weird but ok".
Most people don't want/need full featured desktop applications e.g. cinema production software. They want the easy-to-use mobile apps with eye candy and magic cloud functions. Everything that's fun today is released as a mobile app. Everything that's a government-mandated application is released as a mobile app, as the likeliness of basic citizenry to own a smartphone is much higher than owning a laptop.
I personally started owning an Android platform in 2020. Before that I could not understood what would be the use case. Since then, I am forced into a mobile OS for every basic thing of modern life: managing my phone/cable subscription, book a doctor, check my government documents, pay something online, approve a login into the work platform.
As there isn't an alternative, and everything is becoming a mobile app, normalizing everything to one of the current mobile platform is their best choice.
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Why would Huawei want it to be open source?
Re:Why not just a Linux distro...? (Score:5, Informative)
Why would Huawei want it to be open source?
OpenHarmony is OpenSource IIRC is either BSD or MIT. Huawei donated as FOSS a krapton of HarmonyOS code around 2019~2020. And not the ASOP fork part, the HArmonyOS next part.
Also, the OS has a multikernel approach, and two of the kernels supported are FreeRTOS and Linux.
Then, Huawei puts some propiertary bits and bobs here and there, and that's HarmonyOS. Kinda like Apple putting a lot of propiertary bits and bob on top and around of the Darwin FOSS kernel and the FreeBSD USerland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
By the way, (Open)HarmonyOS has a multikernel approach, and two of the kernels supported are FreeRTOS and Linux.
There is even an european version called Oniro, one would guess the chinese backdoors (if any) would be detected by the europeans, and either patches or replaced by european backdoors.
Huawei has also signaled willingness to license the propiertary bits and bobs to other companies...
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Thank you, that is interesting.
Even with it's open source nature there will always be suspicions about how the PRC interacts with it, is there a separation of sorts or can it be as trusted as Linux is,
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Thank you, that is interesting.
Even with it's open source nature there will always be suspicions about how the PRC interacts with it, is there a separation of sorts or can it be as trusted as Linux is,
Again, if you distrust the PRC, use the Oniro flavour, as it is european.
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But if it's open source I don't have to "trust" them right? We should know right? More my question is what can see the PRC is doing in the code.
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what can see the PRC is doing in the code.
I assume you meant "who can see". I guess any Eclipse Foundation member can (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP...). The specific supporters for Oniro project https://oniroproject.org/ [oniroproject.org] include Linaro, Bosch, Capgemini, two Italian universities.
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https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/05/huawei-matebook-x-pro-2024-linux-edition-goes-on-sale
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Because no Linux distro has a viable business model? Well, except for Android, and Huawei has separate problems there...
However the angle I was looking for involves "paying for trust". Looking at the track records, I've (mostly indirectly) paid a lot of money to Microsoft over the years, but my degree of trust in anything Microsoft has declined pretty steadily. In contrast, I voluntarily paid quite a bit of money to Huawei for a period of about 15 years, and I never perceived the trust issues. Not that I tr
National Security (Score:5, Interesting)
Every nation serious about its communications infrastructure should have its own OS and business applications. Even just maintaining a fork of something open source.
Windows and Azure are waiting to be abused by the US government to hurt a perceived foe.
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Yes, every nation that is serious about total population control and lebensraum victories will encourage investment in the opposite of open source.
The more the totalitarian - the less the open.
Because open doesn't really lend itself to control.
Re:National Security (Score:4)
And ultimately, at any given scale, it's all about control.
Everything that is fundamental to a group's survival should be under that group's control. A viable, stable country needs to be able to defend its borders, maintain order, and keep its people housed, clothed, and fed. There's a lot more to making a NICE country and happy citizens, but those three things are the bare minimum.
These days, that means you need to keep the computers humming because they're controlling everything. If your nation can afford to make its own chips, it absolutely should, even if they're not as good as ones you can easily source from a trustworthy ally. Just like a country should always have enough food produced locally to keep people from malnutrition or starvation if its borders are blockaded.
International trade and interdependence should be for everything beyond the survival needs, because ultimately it's more efficient. But the survival-level stuff has to be under domestic control or you're existing at the whim of whoever actually controls it.
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Everything that is fundamental to a group's survival should be under that group's control.
Yes, that's the tribal idea of progress.
International trade and interdependence should be for everything beyond the survival needs
Spoken like a true MAGAT. Small wonder king trump rules your country.
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Unfortunately today is the day somebody has to tell you you're being an idiot. You've missed the point entirely, had an emotional reaction, and posted a really, really dumb response.
"Tribal idea of progress" is just a meaningless retort - though I'm sure you thought it was clever, insightful, and stinging - to the idea of securing critical resources. Making sure I have fresh water doesn't mean I can't cooperate with my neighbour even if they don't look like me or speak the same language.
Similarly, the id
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Do you mean from an aggressive military force, or from people fleeing a country so abused by the USA, they have less than the illegal aliens already living in the USA?
The US government will have to subsidize (through explicit welfare or tariffs) the manufacture of these low-tech chips, since everyone wants more powerful computers: The USA recently accused everyone else of doing that in every industry.
Can you leagally create a new OS? (Score:2)
No patent on context switching or something stupid like that?
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Patents expire. What new concepts in OSs exist that didn't exist 20 years ago (I'm sure there are a handful, but likely not a lot - and none critical for an OS as the OSs that existed 20 years ago were fully functional)?
HarmonyOS distributed architecture (Score:2)
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“Unlike a legacy operating system that runs on a standalone device, HarmonyOS is built with a distributed architecture [harmonyos.com] that uses a same set of system capabilities to adapt to a wide array of device forms, ranging from phones and tablets to wearables, smart TVs, and head units as well as PCs, smart speakers, headsets, and AR/VR glasses. It is adaptable to, among other things, the mobile office, fitness and health, social communication, and media entertainment.”
Sounds a lot like Apple's walled garden.
Ultimately (Score:2)
When the CCP deploy an OS, it is spying on you (Score:2)
This is all done so the government can spy on their civilians. That's what it is all about. The CCP having control and surveillance of citizens using these computers. The state is already a surveillance state and they disappear people and entire families all the time. When missionaries have to lie to enter the country and get picked up at the airport, change vehicles and clothing 5 times. Enter an apartment block where someone has tampered with the cameras and the lights. Enter a nondescript apartment to fi