Hacker News Reader

Comment by pauby | Hacker News Reader

The average user isn't running a Linux desktop.

That may not be true any more.

ChromeBooks were outselling Macs from 2017-2021, although the pandemic meant hundreds of millions of people suddenly needed new computers for remote working and the kids to use for remote schooling, so sales spiked and have since collapsed.

But they sold ITRO 100 million units per year for several years.

China's 5-3-2 program is also nearing its end:

https://medium.com/technicity/chinese-3-5-2-policy-is-a-majo...

That means hundreds of millions more Linux PCs in the PRoC.

As such, that's somewhere around quarter to half a billion Linux desktops in the last few years, and maybe twice that.

Windows PC sales are struggling:

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3675895/pc-sales-fall-...

Still hundreds of millions of units, but they're falling.

More people are staring at Linux all day than you might think.

Chrome OS isn't Linux desktop.

Even if you mention Linux sandbox environment, it is only available in selected models.

I disagree.

It's a relatively standard distro up until the GUI layer, based on Gentoo.

I'd agree that Android is something else, but ChromeOS is mostly the usual GNU + Linux stuff, and a weird display server which is Chrome rendering direct to the screen.

Then have fun running GNU stuff on ChromeOS, specially the devices that don't support the GNU/Linux sandox (crostini).

Maybe take advantage of WASM for it.

And even if Crostini is available, the usual stuff

https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439

-- Cameras aren't yet supported.

-- Android devices are supported over USB, but other devices aren't yet supported.

-- Android Emulators aren't yet supported.

-- Hardware acceleration isn't yet supported, including GPU and video decode.

-- ChromeVox is supported for the default Terminal app, but not yet for other Linux apps.

> Then have fun running GNU stuff on ChromeOS

I do. My only ChromeOS device at present is an old Thinkpad T420 with a Core i5 and 6GB of RAM. It runs very quickly with ChromeOS Flex. Currently I have Firefox ESR running on it, and DOSemu. Inside DOSemu I have MS Word for DOS.

It's a Linux. It runs Linux stuff thanks to a built-in feature, and since Flex came out, the Linux support has improved visibly: so for instance Firefox now works properly with either a full titlebar or none, and this depends on the settings within Firefox not on ChromeOS.

It works, it runs, it's useful, now, today.

Personally I don't give a toss about any of the other things you mention. It plays videos smoothly, it's fast and responsive, and my webcam works. I've tried Skype, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger and Zoom in ChromeOS and all worked fine.

Sure it may be limited. I am not denying that. But it's selling well up against Windows and Mac, which is something no other Linux distro has ever managed to do. Despite all their fancy acceleration features and being free, ordinary consumers are not interested, even though they are FREE.

ChromeOS is not free: you can only get the full version by buying it on custom hardware, and you need a Google account to use it. Those are significant drawbacks compared to every free distro...

And yet 10x more Chromebooks sell per year than all the free distros put together can GIVE AWAY.

That is not just noise. That is no rounding error. That is massive.

The year of Linux on the desktop came, over half a decade ago now, and the Linux world was too busy with infighting and squabbling over Snap vs Flatpak and other pointless nonsense to even notice that the mainstream consumer world has adopted Linux bigtime.

A bit late to this party, but you are woefully, badly misinformed as to what ChromeOS is, and what you can run on it. Well over a decade ago, I was running a full suite of gnu-linux devtools, natively, within chromeos.

You don't even need to install a chroot from another distro. Just get a gcc (chromebrew was the first to package this), and the rest is just gentoo linux (with portage ripped out - and in the early days, you could run a shell script which PUT PORTAGE BACK IN).

And if you take the time to understand the wierd partitioning layout, a couple of bind mounts in the right places is all you need to get the chromeos gui file manager (which is rather crappy, btw) to see your stuff.

The average user isn't running a desktop.

Oof, that hits hard, but you're probably right: I expect there are more people who primarily (or even exclusively) use a smartphone or tablet than a general-purpose computer running a general-purpose OS.

It's a sad state of affairs, to be sure.

There are libre mobile devices, but approximately no-one uses them, just like approximately no-one uses Linux on the desktop. Unless some large vendors start shipping Linux by default on all their devices, or the current mainstream OS vendors become really obnoxious and people go searching for alternative devices with Linux installed by default, that isn't going to change since people really don't want to have to do installs themselves.

I have been running linux on various hardware since about 2003. Zero of those computers had discrete gpus.

The last Linux box I used that had a discrete gpu had a Matrox G400 (released 1999). Every one since then has been Intel onboard.

No, but the average Linux user has probably been bitten by nvidia compat issues so much in the past that they're even more likely than the average generic laptop user to be using Intel or AMD graphics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com