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Comment by stanleydrew | Hacker News Reader

It's now becoming very clear that the year of Linux will never come. It is obviated by a cross-platform free web browser that gives you access to an open web "OS." For now, Chrome (or Chromium) is that browser. Google snuck around the free operating system problem by changing what "operating system" means.

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I agree, but come to the opposite conclusion. The year of linux will come, but people want know or care what linux is (except the nerds).

That day will come as soon as we're all using Chrome OS.

I would argue that the age of Unix as an end-user OS is already here. See iPhone and Android sales figures. Also, WebOS, etc.

yeah, linux is too narrow. All of my devices are now Unix. Mac Desktops, Ipad, Iphone, and I use linux for servers.

I haven't touched a windows box in many years. I've never used vista or windows 7.

Maybe you should give Windows 7 a chance. I use a Mac at home, and I really like Windows 7 at work.

I can't live without a unix shell.

None of those are remotely Unixy from a user perspective.

Neither the iPhone nor WebOS ever expose a filesystem to the user. Neither Android nor WebOS expose Unix to App developers. Android doesn't even present a real Unix system to the OS developers!

I'm sure a lot of Unix old timers would claim that my Ubuntu desktop also isn't very Unixy. I'm not complaining though.

I wonder what will happen in the super long term. I think things sortof oscillate. We have desktop apps, people stopped buying them because of web apps, but then mobile web apps aren't as good as local mobile software so that started up again. Perhaps some day in the future we'll be talking about installing local apps onto ChromeOS like it's a brand new feature.

Chrome OS isn't a full Linux distribution, but it does use the Linux kernel with a new windowing system on top.

This is bringing Linux to the masses in the same way that Mac OS X brought Unix to the masses—by hiding it under a pretty UI.

And that Android brought Linux to the mobile masses.

I suppose you can just think of Chrome OS and Android as just another couple of distros among the thousands already available. Same kernel, customized UI & apps.

Fundamentally, that's what Linux is about - a FOSS platform that anyone can modify and redistribute.

Android uses a heavily hacked kernel and essentially ignores the standard interfaces for everything it's userland stuff touches. It's also less of a distro than Slackware was -- every update has to be ported to the existing hardware platforms! Google finally wised up and will soon start shipping all the user-facing stuff through the Marketplace instead of tied to a kernel release.

ChromeOS is better, it's just a spin of Ubuntu.

Neither of your points are really true:

ChromeOS uses X Windows, just without a reparenting window manager.

ChromeOS is not Unix 'hidden' under a pretty UI -- neither the filesystem nor the userland are exposed to the user or to application developers. There's no Finder as the main UI with a Terminal in the Utilities folder: both metaphors are simply gone.

There's a dev mod with full bash access.

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