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Comment by mav3rick | Hacker News Reader

Chromebooks now support a Linux installation officially in the form of Crostini. It runs securely in a VM and work is done to make your linux apps and sharing as first party options in Chrome OS. Crouton was never an officially released and supported product by Chrome OS. Crostini is.

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Some flagship Chromebooks do, not all of them.

So if one is paying flagship prices, then why not just buy a regular laptop from a Linux vendor?

First of all it's not just flagship devices, here you go - https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/c...

Also all Chromebooks produced 2019 and onwards will support Crostini. Flagship or not flagship. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/291185-all-chromebooks...

Chromebooks' update model, speed and security are way ahead of any Linux vendor. Security is the pride of this product. And the hardware quality is great too. What you buy is your prerogative but the ability to run both Android apps and also a Linux install makes Chromebooks a good value.

That just sounds like Google marketing.

First of all, speed is hardly a feature when compared with laptops on the same price range.

Specially when taking into consideration the VMs being executed, namely browser instances, gVisor and the Crostini hypervisor.

Then just like on Android devices, Chromebooks have a limited duration of updates, namely 6 years since device market release.

Hardware quality is debatable when I need to pay MacBook class prices for getting such quality.

You can get a Crostini supported device for around 400 Dollars. These are not MacBook class prices.

Chromebook's security story is far ahead. You can do your own research and you'll find ample links proving the same.

Yes I can, but that is hardly the quality and speed you are advocating versus what regular Linux laptops offer on that price range.

My Windows and Linux laptops are kept up to date since ever, with hardware encryption turned on.

Disk encryption protects you from somebody who steals your switched-off laptop.

This discussion is about the permissions that applications get. Desktop Linuxes don't have such an permission system in place - "just run as root" with ultimate trust in the application is quite common. Sandboxing isn't a thing either.

Sandboxing is surely a thing, you just have to configure it.

And that is where things fail. Expect all users to setup sandboxing on their own ? Don't make a mistake ? And "disk encryption" is not a catch all solution to security. Otherwise every OS would be secure.

Just like Chromebooks are a market failure outside the US school system, because a large target of the world population requires more than a browser manager OS on their laptops.

Amount of Chromebooks on sale across European electronic consumer stores, less than 1%.

The 1% is left for when they occasionally pop up under "deal of the day", when the shop decides to test waters and is more than happy when it finally goes away after a couple of weeks on display.

Nice, don't reply to the point on security and shift goal posts. So you admit that "disk encryption" doesn't work ? Year of the Linux Desktop wohoooo. Also did you see Windows announcement about a cloud based OS :) sounds familiar ? But sure hate a Google product. It's the fad these days.

I did answer, but you weren't paying attention.

GNU/Linux security is better than ChromeOS because the updates are guaranteed for longer than six years, if one buys a laptop from someone like System76, or plenty of small Linux shops, it can be properly configured with encryption, LinuxSE, Flatpak/Snap/whatever.

Windows is a proper OS and its cloud offerings are not new.

Have a look at all the ancient Linux routers everywhere. They have all kinds of nasty security issues up to RCE. Linux and open source doesn't solve anything by itself. It must be brought to the customer -- without interaction.

Security must be the default. Automatic updates, sane default configuration. And a user interface that supports security.

There are “wall into a store” devices at far less than MacBook/XPS/X1 prices that have good performance, stellar battery life, good displays, and run the web’s default browser alongside Android apps and almost all Linux apps (direct USB access and audio is tricky, but the Android development kit is directly supported).

It’s true that after some number of years, you switch the hardware to a different OS, including a 3rd party supported ChromeOS system or a variety of Linux distributions.

I’m not saying it’s for everyone, but I will say that it’s at least in the same class of consideration as “you could buy an old Thinkpad, and replace at least the hard drive, keyboard, display, and battery to get something similarly usable”.

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