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Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

The rumors expected this to run ChromeOS because its codename is apparently Ryu. If that's true, there are still changes being pushed to the ChromeOS codebase regarding this device:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/ec/+/1...

which tells me there's still more to know about this device. I'm curious what it is. Even though I'm typing this on my first generation Pixel, is there really enough of a difference between a Chromebook and Chrome for Android to justify porting both OSes to the same piece of hardware?

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I never understood why ChromeOS existed in the first place. To me, it would make much more sense if these devices ran Android. After all, there's no apps for ChromeOS -- other than glorified Chrome extensions, and it's not easy for developers to create ChromeOS apps (whereas if I could recycle my Android app, life would be good). Arc welder doesn't seem to work very well either.

Analogously, Apple only has iOS. There's no SafariOS.

Because it's the perfect Enterprise OS for companies, schools and other organizations that have moved to the web. Currently there's just no OS that would rival ease of deployment for large scale thin clients.

Android on the other hand has very limited provisioning tools and even iOS/OS X is orders of magnitude more expensive and harder to provision, keep updated and running.

> Android on the other hand has very limited provisioning tools

But Google could have improved Android provisioning instead of pushing another OS.

(Which would probably be sensible either way. There's billions of Android devices in enterprise environments that'd benefit from it.)

> Android on the other hand has very limited provisioning tools

It would be orders of magnitude more cost efficient to just create those tools, compared to creating an entire new operating system.

Considering that the "new operating system" is pretty much Chrome running over Linux without any Window Manager, I'm not that sure.

The cost is not just in the form of development expenses. It's about having to support two systems, creating a confusing message for consumers, having to foster and support two different app ecosystems, marketing two different competing platforms, etc.

> Analogously, Apple only has iOS. There's no SafariOS.

I'd say the Apple analogy would be iOS vs.MacOS. One could argue that the iPad Pro makes more sense if it ran MacOS.

Devtools and Crouton would make this a pretty interesting device

Key problem is it's ARM and not Intel processor. How much of a real developer experience a crouton style solution enables on ARM, I'm not sure. But I'm guessing it's a lot more limited.

Limited in what respect? There's plenty of Linux distros which run on ARM/ARM64.

I guess I was only referring to being able to install anything precompiled for Intel linux, which would include just about any proprietary software. I had a few problems running things in my past attempts with this (running Ubuntu on an Android tablet). However I was surprised to see from Googling around that people have indeed now got most common dev tools working on the Samsung ARM chromebook so I might be completely wrong about it

As voltagex_ pointed out you will have no problem with open-source packages, but I imagine you could try QEMU for running proprietary x86 bits in a pinch.

Limited in two respects:

1. The lack of a pointing device 2. Missing keys on the keyboard: escape, tilde, brackets.

Are there Linux distros that work well under those constraints? Honest question.

How do you know that it runs ARM?

It runs Tegra X1 SOC : http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-x1-processor.html

Sorry this is snarky but a quick Google search would have shown you some good short resources to data.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Linux+arm+support

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