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Comment by wazoox | Hacker News Reader

Typical Google move. I have a Chromebook. It was listed on the models that would support Android app, this support never came (it's still "planned", 2 years later...). Support for Linux apps didn't come, either.

So now I suppose my Chromebook will be soon a useless brick. Thanks, Google. Got the message, I'll never use any product with your badge again.

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> I have a Chromebook. It was listed on the models that would support Android app, this support never came (it's still "planned", 2 years later...)

You should be eligible for a refund, file a complaint with consumer protection. In most places it is illegal to mislead customers and market products with planned features that you do not deliver on in a reasonable timeframe.

I’m genuinely curious to hear how this would go.

If this was indeed a fact advertised on the marketing material or worse on the packaging/product page, then he can have a refund or at least a partial one, depending on the country. If it was talked about what could happen, or not mentionned in any official marketing material but in PR pieces, then nope.

See eg the PS3 claiming it could install a normal linux.

I don't know how the exact laws work in other countries, but in France it's also two different things that work differently, one is you sold me a product that isn't working, the other is your marketing lied. Both are illegal but on different terms. Thus if it's not on the box or product page, then it's a marketing material issue.

Wasn't the PS3 refund only like $10-$20? Why even go through that effort for a Chromebook?

It's not about the $10-$20, it's about sending the message.

Costing a many billion dollar multinational corporation $10-20 isn't sending a message at all. It's just a waste of your time.

Not if you expand the $10 into a class action. That however is a lot of work.

It still doesn't add up to a lot of money. The total class of people who were trying to run Linux on the PS3 and then weren't able to just isn't that big.

Once the class action is in motion, what's to stop many more PS3 owners to claim that they were interested in running Linux just to get the free ten bucks?

That winds up being a big payday for a law firm, and free identity monitoring for everybody else...

“file a complaint with consumer protection”

Can you clarify what you mean with this? What consumer protection?

In the United States:

For interstate commerce: FTC [1] or state/county AGs/consumer affairs bureaus, e.g. NYS [2], CA [3], WA[4]

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/bureaus-offices/bureau-consume...

[2] https://www.usa.gov/state-consumer/new-york

[3] https://www.usa.gov/state-consumer/california

[4] https://www.usa.gov/state-consumer/washington

It would be highly jurisdiction-dependent.

What model of Chromebook do you use? I've 2 chromebooks purchased around $120 each of which is at least 3 years old and I have had android apps since the day I first bought in 2017 and linux support (crostini) for at least a year.

It's an ASUS 300M. A pretty high end model when I bought it 4 or 5 years ago, and as a basic PC, running a standard Linux it would be fine for at least 5 more years. But running Chrome OS, it may become a doorstop any time.

Looks like your model should be compatible with GalliumOS: https://wiki.galliumos.org/Hardware_Compatibility

So you could go that route, if you like. I ended up doing something similar with my original Chromebook Pixel when Google stopped supporting it: I removed the write-protect screw from the motherboard, flashed a normal BIOS, and installed Linux Mint on it.

This [1] is a useful site for replacing the firmware on your Chromebook.

[1] https://mrchromebox.tech/

For what it is worth, my current chrome book that was about £150 12 months ago has both linux and app support.

From what I understand about it, it is a linux kernel + driver issue. I do not know if this means it is the manufacturer of the chromebook's "fault", or google's "fault" for not supporting these things. E.g. does the manufacturer need to do a new build for their hardware? I don't know.

Why is the manufacturer even involved in this? I thought all updates come straight from google? I have zero sympathy for Google at this point. It is one thing that the drivers are not all free and open source but Google should at least require that Google has access to the drivers or software it needs to keep devices up to date. If a vendor doesn’t do that, don’t do business with that vendor.

Well I think it is more "this feature requires kernel 4.x, but the drivers for this manufacturer's hardware do not support 4.x, so we cannot offer this feature without losing sound/WiFi/touchpad/etc"

The chromebooks do update themselves all the time but I gues there is some more fundamental stuff that requires more low-level changes.

For Android, they're proposing GKI module shims that a vendor can code against. So a vendor plugs a binary blob into, say a 5.4 GKI module, which is hopefully forward compatible with the interface to a 6.25 GKI module released sometime in 2026.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/google-outlines-plan...

They are, but it is only post Android 10, so it will take years before it matters at all.

As an example, Vulkan was added in Android 7 as optional API, the adoption was so low, with so many buggy drivers that as of Android 10 it became a compulsory API.

On Android everything that Google leaves the OEMs free reign hardly gets done.

(GKI = generic kernel image)

What I’m saying is Google should require access to the source code and the right to modify it. At that point, it is Google’s responsibility to make any changes to keep it compatible with the latest kernel.

Ok sure - you're welcome to your opinion. I feel like expecting endless maintenance builds from Google for any manufacturer's hardware forever is a bit of an optimistic expectation though, especially for old models. They guarantee at least 5 years support (1) for updates which I don't think is unreasonable considering that they are so cheap. If that is not long enough for you then I guess you are not the target audience (students and enterprise users are the target audience)

1 - https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en

Well,

Microsoft just ended support for Windows 7 - released July 2009 - yesterday. It’s currently running on my old 2006 era Mac Mini that my mom is using.

I also have a 2009 Core 2 Duo laptop that until early last year was my Plex Server. It is running a still supported Windows 10.

My Asus laptop bought with Windows 7 on it back in 2009, is running the latest Windows 10 version.

Both Microsoft and Asus keep having updates for it.

Google just needs to actually care.

The driver model for Windows is different than Linux, though. Realistically, most Linux drivers need to be open source and maintained as part of the kernel to continue working, whereas Windows offers a stable driver interface so its not uncommon at all to have drivers that haven't been updated in many years work just fine on current Windows releases.

Google as ChromeOS/Android owner can do whatever they feel like it, regardless of the driver model.

In fact, Android since project Treble has a driver model similar to Windows.

Linux drivers are considered legacy on Android.

Likewise they could have contracts in place that would force their suppliers to provide updates for X years.

> I guess you are not the target audience

Google always kills their products unexpected for all, don't matter which audience you are.

> What I’m saying is Google should require access to the source code and the right to modify it.

I guess there would be 0 hardware manufacturers left to choose from then.

> I guess there would be 0 hardware manufacturers left to choose from then.

Maybe I overestimated how much leverage Google has then :/

I guess it depends if they've done something funny when producing it? I've had the odd PC motherboard and laptop that won't work right with drivers from the manufacturer (intel/amd/nvidia), they need the specific gigabyte or asus provided driver package. Usually a sound problem. This might explain the wide range of bluetooth complaints.

My dell xps 13" touchpad drivers didn't work from synaptics, it had to be from dell. Something else needed realtek driver direct from their website, windows updates version were broken.

My understanding is Google certifies each chrome book. They should be able to say give me all the source code and the rights to modify them as I see fit or you won’t get certified.

You say that, but you got a Chromebook despite everything Google did in the past. If people had gotten any message they'd have abandoned Google back in 2008.

Speaking just for one, I haven't adopted a new Google consumer product in 7 years. I don't even click the links.

Pretty sure Reader had that effect on a large chunk of the technical base they previously relied heavily on.

Shutting down Reader really did an oversized amount of damage to Google's reputation. I always found it surprising that Google wouldn't devote the engineering resources just to maintain Reader and not upset the influential people who relied upon it.

No one is more influential than Google.

- Google

Indeed... I don't even consider using their development tools now.

Just the other day I met a guy who told me he wouldn't consider learning and using Go because Google will cancel it eventually

What a reputation issue they're developing. Even if their tech is pretty good, there's a growing number of people who won't even consider it (myself included)

Very reasonable concern. I like Go, but it's not sufficiently better than its competitors (Java/C#) to be professionally maintained or adopted. Then there's the huge chunk of people who use it just because of the Google halo effect. My guess, Go and its ecosystem would end up floundering like other ex-corporate languages like Object Pascal or Objective-C. Even more so if Google abandons Go because they made a brand new replacement.

That doesn't really make sense, though. Go is entirely open source. If Google dropped it tomorrow there are more than enough non-Google people invested in it to continue development.

Maybe, but how many of them are compiler engineers? Go does not strike me as a language, that a compiler engineer would love.

Eh, if google cancelled go, there's a good chance a bunch of go compiler engineers would move to other companies using go...

It would continue development, but how popular would it remain without Google blessing?

There used to be cheap linux notebooks, that what I used to buy, then Chromebooks appeared and replaced entirely cheap linux laptops. I stupidly hoped that it would be good enough, or easily convertible to straight Linux; it isn't. In fact the main problem is that Google Docs doesn't properly support OpenDocument format, making it crippled for me even as a basic desktop (it's only useful as a browser and nothing else).

Many of the Chromebooks are pretty simple to convert to a standard OS. I've got two chrome devices flashed with 3rd party firmware and running FreeBSD. It seems more likely if you get devices running Intel Core series chips (cpu model numbers like xxxxU or maybe xxxxY, but not Nxxxx), but it's good to confirm it's supported by your 3rd party firmware of choice before you buy.

I use firmware from https://mrchromebox.tech/ these days.

Unfortunately, since 2017, Google has been using a new security chip (CR50) that isnt supported in the upstream Linux kernel. So while you can flash 3rd party firmware and install your own OS, the security chip will throw the device into recovery mode if you ever suspend the computer.

AFAIK, there is no workaround for this - if anyone knows otherwise, please share details. I've got a chromebook that I'd very much like to be able to use something besides ChromeOS on.

+1, I'm on the Chromebook Pixel 2 (2015) and have been running Arch Linux for years now. I can't recommend it enough.

Was Google anywhere near as bad in 2008? I don't recall anything particularly awful back then.

No, I think that was around the launch of the first android, right? There was some serious interest in a Linux (!!!) based phone. They were seen as a savior of sorts, as I remember it. Now they’re a place where novel ideas go to die.

That's how I remember it - they were starting down their current path in privacy terms but hadn't hit the moral event horizon yet, and they were still in that unbridled optimism phase where they were launching moonshot projects rather than churning through web service offerings. I didn't get seriously concerned about them until later (around 2014-2015 iirc) and it took until the start of 2018 for me to completely de-google myself.

I don't remember all the little details, but it was the year I started to actively avoid anything they touch, starting with their search engine. I think the main concern was the privacy nightmare.

Chromebok was originally marketed as a simple, no-nonsense laptop and that's what it is. All iterations since have been useful but did anyone really believe it was going to be a ThinkPad killer?

Once they started selling $2k+ versions, yeh I kind of do think expect that actually.

Precisely. Though all the Google devs I've met weren't using them for development --> devs aren't the target market.

TBH I dont understand the developers preference for laptops, generally.

The laptops are good when you need to be mobile - but you can pry my multi-large-monitors desktop out of my dead hands, because I'm not giving that up for serious be-in-the-zone development.

Uh, my work device is a laptop and I use multi-large-monitors. With external keyboard and mouse.

I can unplug it (single cable) and take to a conference room if the need arises. I can take off early and plug it at home. It has a built-in UPS by the virtue of having a battery. Why would a desktop be better, unless you need crazy hardware?

I do have a desktop at home, but that's for my personal uses.

I can only speak for myself, but my development environment being mobile is precisely the point. I can work from home, I can commit changes while on business trips... it's valuable. I also have a large monitor at the office that I plug my laptop into, so I get the best of both worlds.

Yeah, I have no idea who those are for, but the cheaper ones are great for family members who only really need to browse the Web anyway. My tech support burden is way down, and so I love Chromebooks for other people.

Those high-end are amazing business machines for people who work with cloud/web software.

They're very easy to manage from a central location, easy to replace and very hard to break.

I've been recommending cheap Linux laptops like the Pinebook (as well as the Pro) for family members who just use their computers for email and Facebook. Turns out if they spend 99% of their time using Firefox, Linux is a good platform that can suit their needs just fine. Haven't had a tech support call in ages.

Fair point.

The ThinkPad Chromebook 13 is actually pretty nice: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/lenovo/student-chromebo...

Of course, Lenovo doesn't make those anymore, but you can find them used.

First they came for the Grand Central users, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Grand Central user.

In fairness, they've enabled Android apps on an awful lot of Chromebooks: https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chrome-os-systems-suppo...

All new Chromebooks support Android apps afaik.

What model do you have?

Chrome OS is Linux (it runs the Linux kernel) – you mean your Chromebook doesn't yet support the greater Crostini project? https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/c...

What part of the Quickstart: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/c... doesn't work for you? It says “Make sure you're running at least R72 (released Feb 2019).”

Even though there's a lot of abandonware from Google, Android apps and Crostini on Chromebooks are not two of them. In fact, Android apps is one of the migration paths away from Chrome apps, a fact this article fails to mention.

It's an ASUS C300M, I bought it around 2015. There is no "Linux (beta)" entry in ChromeOS settings, though it's running version R76, the C300 is listed in the "compatible" list, and it's powerful enough to run Linux applications (dual core x86, 4GB of RAM).

I'll have another look but I don't see why it should be any different today than it was last month.

>Android apps and Crostini on Chromebooks are not two of them. In fact, Android apps is one of the migration paths away from Chrome apps, a fact this article fails to mention.

So should someone buy a new Chromebook on the hopes that this new system of apps will continue to be supported down the road? I think once you're burned once, that's hard to buy into.

How in the world would it be a brick if you move some proprietary Chrome apps to PWAs?

How difficult is it to make that move?

If it's not trivial I wonder if there are many apps that will never make the move.

There was a guy releasing SeaBIOS ROMs so you can install regular Linux if your device is supported.

The project is dead now, but since your device is older, there's a fair chance it's supported.

I used it for a Chromebox and the process was pretty straightforward.

https://johnlewis.ie/custom-chromebook-firmware/rom-download...

Although he's done a lot of great work those aren't maintained now and they're a bit of kludge in my experience. Mr. Chromebox maintains a coreboot firmware[1] that is really good, and the maintainer is active on r/chromeos.

Chromebook hardware is pretty damn good for running linux, I've had zero problems with this firmware and xubuntu. Everything just works now for the most part.

[1] https://mrchromebox.tech/

I have a Chromebook C710 and C720 (about 5-6 years old) and I flashed the firmware on both. The C710 now runs Windows 10 and the C720 runs Fedora 31.

I'm running Fedora 31 on my C710 too as my daily driver. It's a surprisingly good experience! You've definitely got to manage your CPU expectations.

Never got my keyboard for my google Nexus tablet either, 8 years and counting, actually, reminds me, under UK consumer law I think you can get a refund or part refund if extra functionality was promised and never delivered, will have to look that up :)

If you have the time, install a real OS on it.

https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Samsung/ARMChrome...

why do you suppose your Chromebook will be a useless brick ?

which Chrome App(s) do you use that will cease to work in 2021 ?

I have a Chromebook Pixel (2013) and they stopped issuing updates a couple of years ago (os or security).

That’s essentially bricking for me because I don’t want to log into anything secure on a potentially vulnerable device.

So what have you done with the laptop? I love the build quality and lightness of the pixelbooks but spending so much for something to brick in 5 years is an issue.

Parent was making a tangential comment about their Chromebook, not related to chrome apps.

> So now I suppose my Chromebook will be soon a useless brick.

ChromeOS devices don't, in general, rely on Chrome applications any more than windows laptops do. The vast majority of the "apps" you might see on your home bar are, in fact, just web links. Is there a specific app you're worried about?

Some of your branding confusion is, in fact, exactly what Google is trying to treat here. "Chrome Apps" were a particular API for persistent web applications. It doesn't mean "apps on Chrome" and it doesn't mean standards-compliant progressive web apps.

Everything will still work right?

Which model? You bought a product for a feature that you do didn't exist?

"Chromebook" should be renamed to "Chromebrick"

I bought a Google branded LG phone about 8 years ago. It was complete garbage and they EOL'd it after 6 months and never delivered anything that they promised. I've never given google hardware a second look after that.

Ah, here's a review: https://www.engadget.com/2011/04/20/t-mobile-g2x-review

you need to recheck as some recent chromebooks are going to get fuchsia which will support the legacy android apps

Not sure what model you have but the Chromebook I own supports Android apps.

And on top of that you only get about 4-5 years of security updates from Google on a Chromebook before they give up on you. [1] That's should be an embarrassingly short amount of time even for a computer product, but alas.... Google doesn't care and most Chromebook users are none the wiser. I wonder how many would choose differently if they knew that Microsoft offers a bare minimum of 10 years of support on their products. How sad is it that "Embrace, extend, extinguish" provides support for their products for twice as long as Google does?

[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en

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