Proven to be compatible with a wide variety of devices, from smartphones and tablets to smartwatches and even smart cars, HarmonyOS is taking the tech world by storm. But what really caught our attention was the discovery that a Chinese developer had successfully installed the open source HarmonyOS operating system on a PC platform, specifically an HP laptop running HarmonyOS 3.2 Beta 3.

In the video demonstration, the PC was shown to be running smoothly and fully responsive to all mouse inputs without any lag. However, it is important to note that while this setup shows that HarmonyOS can be adapted to a PC environment, it is not at an advanced stage where it can handle high-performance tasks. For further progress, the software will require significant optimization and commissioning capabilities.

So far, the developer has managed to adapt drivers for the USB, network port, SATA port, PCIE and other hardware interfaces of the HP laptop used in the demo. However, work on adapting drivers for the laptop’s built-in keyboard and touchpad is still in progress. The developer also hinted that they are working on adapting HarmonyOS for X86 architecture CPUs, suggesting that this adaptation is based on the Linux kernel.

In the future, it is planned to give priority to software adaptation over hardware. This means that the necessary drivers will be adapted first, followed by the desktop applications. However, the developer admitted that the optimization of the sound driver, video card driver and external display requires additional work. In particular, GPU acceleration is currently a weak spot for OpenHarmony, but the OpenHarmony project team has created a SIG (Special Interest Group) to address this issue in future releases.

While Huawei has yet to announce a HarmonyOS implementation for its laptops, this latest development could open the door to collaborations with PC manufacturers and software developers to bring HarmonyOS to the industry for both consumer and business devices. It’s very exciting to see how HarmonyOS will continue to grow and expand its reach.