Comment by jalami | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jalami | Hacker News Reader

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As I've written earlier, ChromeOS doesn't interest me. It's a tightly locked down linux-y distro as a vector to peddle Google services. It's not complicated, it's very cheap and almost impossible to mess something up because it's so easy to wipe and all your data is on the cloud. That's the appeal and why they're booming in schools, but I find it dangerous for multiple reasons.

I wrote at more length about it in yesterday's ChromeOS post[0]. I don't think it's the year of the linux desktop anymore than Android is the year of the linux phone. Sure, there's a kernel somewhere deep, but the userspace is locked-down, weak and anti-consumer.

I find the book itself more interesting. Netbooks were crap for a long time, but things have gotten cheaper and I enjoy the form factor. Writing this from an Acer C720 running GalliumOS as we speak, but I'm in the super minority of Chromebook users. Read the Amazon reviews once of a Chromebook and you'll see what they find irritating or glorious. Hint: It's not the lack of a good IDE or inability to install gvim. Also, anyone that says Chromebook sales are great because their such an 'open hardware ecosystem' is fooling themselves [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11735326 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11735762

> I don't think it's the year of the linux desktop anymore than Android is the year of the linux phone. Sure, there's a kernel somewhere deep, but the userspace is locked-down, weak and anti-consumer.

Perhaps Stallman has a point when asking people to talk about Linux as GNU/Linux.

This decade has shown that Stallman was about right about everything. And that’s not a good thing.

Especially Google’s actions have been quite literally towards unlawful-evil.

> Sure, there's a kernel somewhere deep, but the userspace is locked-down, weak and anti-consumer.

I don't necessarily think that an operating system being locked down is equivalent to anti-consumer. For the vast majority of consumers, I think that opening up the full complexity of linux would just be too much hassle and not worth the gains.

I think crippling systems is anti-consumer. Ubuntu is an example of an attempt to mitigate the hassle while allowing the user to control their own device. Is it perfect? No, and they have a very diverse audience to please with one offering, but its a more correct approach. Setting sane defaults and removing confusion in configuration is one thing, but that's not what Google is doing. Google limits software to their repo, makes it difficult, unintuitive and scary to opt-out of things (ctrl-d? insta-wipe ! warning on boot), biases all their software and services with no enable-able alternative and tracks absolutely everything. It's like a tricked out feature phone with a keyboard.

I'm all for standard accounts that have strict privilege boundaries, but with ChromeOS, the consumer can't even decide to be a true administrator. No one's saying everyone needs to be a sysadmin, but a user shouldn't have to enable Developer Mode and deal with usability dark patterns if they want to.

Mozilla used to let the consumer decide, but even they require you to run a separate build in order to install software without their blessing: User freedom is one of their core principles. If developer mode features and privacy opt-outs silently disappear from an entrenched ChromeOS, most wouldn't blink.

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