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Comment by asfgiaosnio | Hacker News Reader

People often claim that ChromeOS is versatile enough to replace a normal computer because it has these various compatibility layers. They often fail to mention that they work terribly. You wind up with the poor performance and annoying isolation that VMs give, but with an extra helping of instability and incompatibility. Running anything Google hasn't approved is gated behind "developer mode", and even for a developer the pseudo-Debian container "developer mode" unlocks is confusing. I regularly encounter problems (like needing to run Wireshark) that I believe are simply unsolvable.

I don't understand anything about ChromeOS. At one point it was a bad but clear idea: a machine with just a web browser, capable only of running web apps. Then at some point they decided to just make the world's most complicated and confusing Linux distro, with the vestigial browser-centric design kept around just to make things as inconsistent as possible.

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Test of if an OS is ready for regular users:

Does drag and drop work? Can I choose a random image/file somewhere in one tab/application and drop it into another.

Just testing that now...

* Drag HN logo to Whatsapp Web: Pass

* Drag from Google Photos to Photopea: Pass

* Drag a zip file from Google Drive to Dropbox: Fail.

* Drag an attachment from an email from gmail into an online hex editor: Fail

Conclusion: The web platform isn't yet ready.

You could just as easily construct an arbitrary usability test over interop that the web platform excels at while current desktop apps do terribly. For instance:

* Send a link to a Google Drive document to another person on WeChat: Pass

* Send a link to a Microsoft Word document to another person on Slack: Fail

The web has different paradigms and some of them are an improvement, one being hyperlinks, another being instant delivery just for example (no install time).

But you can drag and drop a word document to slack...

I've known "regular users" who don't even realize you can drag and drop between desktop applications.

Conclusion: this is an incredibly arbitrary metric.

I've never even considered doing many of those things, and I've worked in IT for ~10 years and been using computers for 25

> Running anything Google hasn't approved is gated behind "developer mode", and even for a developer the pseudo-Debian container "developer mode" unlocks is confusing.

This is mixed up. "Developer mode" is a firmware mode that allows you to run unsigned images. You use that if you want to hack your ChromeOS image itself. The Linux development environment feature (crostini) runs in a VM on any chromebook, it doesn't require developer mode or any firmware features. Technologically it's basically the same thing as WSL, though integrated much better with the OS UI.

Versatile is the opposite of what ChromeOS has become. I would argue that there was a time (beginning of pandemic) where it looked like Google might strike the perfect balance between web-reliant (PWAs and safer extensions) and legacy-OS supported (Android, Linux, and even some slight Windows compatibility).

Now, it just seems like a bad version of the legacy operating systems. Android, but in a VM, Linux, but in a VM, and Windows delivered via the cloud!

All of this is worse than just running any of those systems alone.

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