Chrome OS overtakes Macs for second place OS market share for the first time | Hacker News Reader

Chrome OS overtakes Macs for second place OS market share for the first time

techspot.com

31 pointsrmason25 comments

I can say I am happier developing from ChromeOS than Mac. The Linux App is solid and doesn't have weird differences from CI or prod. Preferable to Linux because touchpad and external devices just work and the UI is much cleaner.

Is this one of those US market researches where US == world?

I hardly see Chromebooks anywhere in Europe, despite Google desperately trying to sell them.

Usually they get continously discounted until finally someone takes the poor unit away.

Chromebooks do not work in Europe. For example, Google has removed world standard DVB-TV-drivers from kernel and you cannot add them yourself. American proprietary TV-dongles work ok.

The IDC chart title says, "Worldwide market share."

Hence my question "Is this one of those US market researches where US == world?", like WWE and such.

> Many schools took advantage of deep discounts offered to educators for Chromebooks.

This has less to do with Chromebook’s popularity and more with schools buying cheap laptops.

It’s still a win for Linux, I guess. I wonder if the next generation of desktop users will grow up thinking our way of saving files and compiling software locally is crazy.

There is no win for linux. AFAIK the only linux thing is the kernel.

Linux is the kernel, nothing more.

It's notable that the two most popular consumer-oriented distributions of Linux (ChromeOS and Android) are distinguished by not shipping GNU tools or Gnome/KDE UIs.

The name "Linux" carries more than one semantic payload.

Linux in the technical sense is only the kernel, true. But in the social sense, it's also all the trappings of an underlying open source system that can be freely moulded by a user if desired. Android and Chrome OS fight against those things.

Nothing about using Linux implies the rest of the system is open-source, or even particularly customizable. Look at all the pseudo-embedded systems (routers, NAS appliances, TVs) that run Linux beneath a completely closed-source userland.

There's a small population of hobbyists who build open-source platforms that use Linux as a component, but those have their own names (Debian, Gentoo) and there's no reason to go around intentionally confusing the layers.

sommnelier is a wayland compositor built into chromeos which is quite capable & decent. there's been work in flight to make lacros, a chrome browser for chromeos that runs via wayland & is not part of the core os: this would allow the browser to be upgraded even after end of life for the device. but it also demonstrates that wayland support is quite good.

there is indeed a lot a lot a lot of freedesktop style userland that's missing in chromeos. but it is still a remarkably capable linux userland. turns out most programs just dont depend on a lot of other services to be running, usually?

Tl;dr - This is a crap article.

If ChromeOS + MacOS = 10.8% + 7.5%, why is it the graph on Windows shows it is about to touch 75% when the previous two add up to less than 20%? Something about the numbers in the article where they state windows at 80.5% doesn't add up.

Edit: Well it turns out the original article [1] doesn't hide the fact IDC numbers are unit sold. Which is normal for IDC. I dont think IDC even does installed base calculation report. But this article then mixes up all things together. May be somebody should push google to release ChromeOS installed base number like Apple does with Mac during Alphabet investor meetings. Apple is currently at >100M Active Mac User. ( And Apple never define the term what Active means. )

[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2021/chromebooks-outsold-macs-world...

At least Tim Cook still says "installed base" rather than "install base."

Despite the poorly-written article, the IDC report gives market share data, not installed base.

The good news for Apple is most of those Chromebooks will have disintegrated or otherwise found their way to the landfill in two years, which certainly helps Apple's chances.

The good news for Google is that they don't ship software that shreds your soldered SSD in 18 month's time.

Having helped my child with a school issued chromebook: anything Google may gain from students familiarity with ChromeOS is negated by the absolutely abysmal performance. Opening a new tab is a 10 second wait. I have to believe these kids will grow up associating chromebooks and chromeos with pure frustration.

I don’t know what, if any, minimum specs Google is enforcing but they need to at least double it.

Color me surprised, a $150 laptop is slower than a $900 one. What else is new? Has Apple stopped hoarding all the good silicon at TSMC, or do Chromebooks still have to settle with 14nm chips?

Huh, I've never used a Chromebook (even a cheap one from 2014) that had more than a second wait to open a tab. Sounds like there's something wrong with whatever ones your school particular issued.

The google workspace suite (gmail, docs, etc.) is quite heavy for school chromebooks, but a big part of the issue with school issued machines is they're running a monitoring solution on top of it. I've seen GoGuardian peg a 1/2 cores as well as the additional bandwidth that is probably a concern in a classroom with 20 other machines.

My Asus chromebook still going strong after four years (unlike my wife's Samsung laptop). Sure it cost a bit more than the average chromebook but the quality is excellent.

i guess 2020 was the year of the linux desktop

I'm curious what the best way to develop software for ChromeOS is that's not writing a web app. It can run Android apps, right? With the Linux support can it run anything else, like X apps, or is it restricted to Chrome and Android?

> I'm curious what the best way to develop software for ChromeOS is that's not writing a web app.

Get hired by Google to work on Chrome OS. Certainly the best way. Afraid is also the only way.

More seriously. Chromebook have several native apps. The browser, the file browser the gallery app, the movie player.. and that's all I guess.

There is chromebrew but it requires you to put the device in dev-mode and it very niche.

The are some PWA which seem to work only with Chromebooks, but that's different I guess.

The Linux support is basically Debian Buster/Bullseye aarch64 in a custom container. Basically you can use every Linux program. I used a low end Chromebook (4G RAM, 64G flash, aarch64) to run FEM simulations and Scheme, Common Lisp, and Interlisp programming. Performance wasn't at all bad for a EUR 150 device.

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