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Comment by skrowl | Hacker News Reader

2021 is going to be the year of desktop Linux... for sure this time! /s

j/k Chromebooks have been desktop Linux for years and they work great

It's more than being about what kernel our devices run. Android devices are Linux too, but we don't go around saying it's an era of the Linux Handheld. It is, sort of, but the "Linux Desktop" implies a wider free & open source stack of interlinked technologies, multiple disjointed entities working in different places but building towards some kind of intertwingularity. You can not get that endless-frontier expanding-ecosystem boon from a fixed monolithic consumer technology like Chromebook.

> Android devices are Linux too, but we don't go around saying it's an era of the Linux Handheld. It is, sort of, but the "Linux Desktop" implies a wider free & open source stack of interlinked technologies...

Or, you just can say that by "Linux" we actually mean GNU/Linux.

Except the sales numbers for Chromebooks are nuts at least in the education sector I'm in, linux on desktop is basically no where there (so far). Will be interesting if that changes. So there is some kind of boom happening even in these more locked down systems.

Indeed. It does seem like chromebooks are likely to be a great wonderful inroads to Linux, & overall a quite good experience at that. There's a lot to be hopeful here, & it definitely raises awareness.

I'm still not super enthused about a Linux where only one entity drives forward the overall desktop experience. Sure many distos historically have one desktop environment that they prefer, but it's almist always a) a generally compliant piece of the freedesktop standards environment and b) easy to switch out if you want.

If you had asked me a couple years ago, I would have recoiled & wretched at Chromebooks, seen them as another invading conquering anti-libre anti-Linux Desktop anti-option. For the moment, it seems we are much much better able to live in peace & coexist. Originally Chromebooks, like Android, used their own proprietary rendering stack, which was a huge immediate clear & present danger, that Chromebooks had no interest in working with anything or anyone else. These days, Chromebooks run the standard Wayland display server, & crouton/crosstini both seem like fairly good tooling to compute with. Wonderful on-ramps to have.

Many modern Chromebooks can literally run unmodified Linux apps. You can even install them via apt.

That sounds like Desktop + Linux to me!

The obvious "not with the program" schism between Chromebooks & 99.99% of Linux gui based PCs is that Chromebooks, to my knowledge, make no attempt to be Freedesktop compliant system[1], nor do they permit choice of UI.

It's much better than Android. Crosstini & Crouton do wonders to carve a good Linux environment out. Overall I'm for the most part fairly happy. It uses the Wayland display server now, which is fantastic. It's a good product & a pretty decent Linux.

But it's still not "the Linux Desktop" in any way anyone from the past would have recognized, & it stands apart from all the other Linux desktops, which stand together, even in their quite sizable differences. Some of the malleability & libre-ness is missing. That's ok! It's still great. But still like a 10x better version of WSL, & not entirely like a Linux Desktop, as how Linux users would recognize.

[1] https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/

I've found that if ChromeOS would suit a user's needs, so would a polished distribution like Ubuntu with a browser like Firefox or Chrome.

Yes but its cheaper and battery life is great and the user doesnt have to worry about upgrades.

If you want to get a Linux based laptop for casual users and dont want to maintain it, just get them a chromebook.

It is also a good everyday machine I can use to ssh into my desktop for real work.

In my experience, I haven't had to worry about updates or maintenance of Ubuntu installations for casual users.

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