Solid response.

What the heck does that have to do with watching viral videos on cell phones? We’re talking about a competitor to TikTok. With respect, Linux is like 3% of the desktop market, anything happening on Linux endpoints is noise to the big players.

The bitTorrent protocol is infamous for piracy, in fact you’ll hardly find a common man who doesn’t equate the two together (hearing torrents = pirated media) Even with the full copyright cartel doing their damnest, it’s still available world wide. Also, video streaming on mobile data is everywhere and ISPs responded by fattening up their networks with newer, better, faster tech, like 4g/5g.

Your concerns are reasonable, though there is no precedent. Might be, might not be. Hard to say when one lacks the rulebook.

Torrents have been around for over 20 years and most of the time infamous for its abundance of “linux distros”. Citation needed.

Peertube as you said is the closest equivalent as a video distributor. Technically a similar approach to Peertube would work by using both Torrents and Instance data storage. Now what makes Tik Tok so popular is its algorithm, which mind you, is a tiny wee bit manipulative. In future, Peer Tube might implement something like dedicated sections for vertical videos. But without a significant cultural shift, I’m not seeing an effective Tik Tok clone appear without a lot of noses being turned up.

Displaying images, truly a technological breakthrough for the modern era!

Pardon me if I may inquire, but how exactly does Xiaomi’s gallery fail, at being a gallery application? Morbid curiosity if you will.

I personally find it mildly amusing that picture 1 includes a post of Lemmyverse’s largest Instance announcing it was hacked. (I know it’s true and it’s a good thing that the announcement happened. But still…)

Anyways, with that out of the way. It could be an interesting browser flow, hope people like it!

While I’m not experienced enough to explain the full development stack of an OS. Let me throw my two cents.

It typically goes by writing changes. If its superficial ones, like modern UI in Windows 11, then all they need to do is relaunch explorer/the app etc. Every time they make a change in the code, they then build and try it out.

If its a more internal change, deep into the OS. Typically written in C or another low level language. Then its easier to test the changes in a virtual machine, you write your code, compile, build. And then load it up in the virtual machine to see if the OS doesn’t crash and burn.

Later, after it gets past quality control in the company, (but most often these versions sit in beta for a while to catch problems). It then gets put into the Update servers and rolled out in bulk for mass destribution.

Do note, updates don’t need to include the entire OS. Just packages including the file changes as well as general update busywork.

PS: If anyone replies, feel free to correct me. Details may be sketchy but this is the short of it.