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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Somewhere inside Google:

"What if -- and stay with me here lads, this is a doozy of a brainwave -- what if we shipped ChromeOS as like a regular OS, a regular Linux distribution, with Chrome on top as an app?"

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To be fair, I remember "desktop Linux" when I got my cr-48 and Linux has come a long way since then.

I think you're being a bit cheeky but I see the ChromeOS devs as pretty pragmatic. They shipped functional Linux and built a lot to make it work. And seem smartly open to re-using standard Linux bits where possible. For example, this move, or them adopting Wayland for their own presentation layer now that is mature enough, etc.

it was genius, IT admins didn't deploy Linux laptops they deployed chrome browsers everything ran on already. The management on Chromebooks is great and instant. I'd be very worried the nix world hasn't learnt anything yet from the Chromebook ux

I tend to come up as UNIX critic, however during university I was actually a UNIX zealot for the most part.

My critics and re-focus on Apple, Google and Microsoft ecosystems, steam from having discovered the alternative universes happening outside Bell Labs, being a fan of UNIXes that went their own way like NeXTSTEP, NeWS, A/UX, Irix, Solaris, instead of being yet another UNIX System V clone in user/developer experience.

Not sure if GNU/Linux has learned much from ChromeOS/Android UX, given the current state of desktop fragmentation.

> Not sure if GNU/Linux has learned much from ChromeOS/Android UX, given the current state of desktop fragmentation.

Maybe after 3 decades it is time to stop viewing "GNU/Linux or Linux" as a single entity/organisation. This is such a naive view.

This rant all over again is like complaining that the IT industry is fragmented and we have Google, AWS and Microsoft fragmenting the cloud offering, or that Render and Fly.io should not exist because Heroku was already there and people should just work for Heroku and make it a better product. Or that Apple and Microsoft should be working together. Or that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo should stop duplicating their efforts and only offer a single, well made game console. Why have we so many cars brands? Why can I buy so many different yogurts?

That is why "The Year of Desktop Linux" has already happened, as VMs being shipped in macOS and Windows.

Interessly enough there are more of those at FOSDEM, than people carrying proper GNU/Linux laptops.

I went to fosdem for the first time this year. I had heard the stories, but most laptops I saw did appear to be running linux. Though maybe it is because I don't care about the big web dev and related rooms.

Natively, or as VM running full screen?

How many are using laptops from their employer (possibly with mandatory OS)?

How many of those attend FOSDEM with work laptops?

Would sound logical if their employer pay them to work on open source stuff?

Idk, but from the people I know that were there, most of them were running their own laptops, though that might not have been a representative sample.

Pretty sure most were running natively, but idk, I didn't ask them.

Well, it's semi-normal Gentoo that gets updated by replacing the OS partition :V

Current partition scheme would require updating to make way for replacing Chrome separately but is doable (I have non-Chrome but using same codebase setup that does swap components this way on OEM partition).

And then they'd say "wow yeah that's a great idea, it'll solve a couple of problems we have - but it's tricky, because the tight integration was how we got around the initial constraints we had, so it's going to take some time".

And then someone would write this article.

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