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Comment by janice1999 | Hacker News Reader

janice1999·

> but without the propriety limitations.

... that would just be Linux then? GalliumOS was Ubuntu for Chromebooks (with ChromeOS patches for touchpads etc). Mainline Linux is good enough nowadays for most things.

Several companies offer custom ChromeOS images with their own tools and one was even purchased by Google, but they focused on centralised management for classrooms etc.

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I think the point of the original comment is "take off". A non proprietary ChromeOS (that is browser first, simple to use for non techy people, easy to manage) sounds like a neat idea to me, but the names you mentioned achieved nowhere near the reputation/popularity of Ubuntu.

Maybe it is more about the business model. ChromeOS runs efficiently on low-cost hardware for a small license fee (?), and get almost guaranteed updates. In exchange, customers sell their souls (actually, data) to Google. Won't happrn with Linux. But undeniably it sells and works well enough for ChromeOS.

ChromeOS-like implies an immutable image with the AB partition scheme for me. Other than Fedora Silverblue there is nothing like it as far as I know.

There's MicroOS from the OpenSUSE corner, including its respins with GNOME or KDE. IIRC that uses BTRFS snapshots/filesystems instead of A/B root filesystems, but same broad idea.

Technically, the Gnome spin is now named Aeon: https://aeondesktop.github.io/

And the KDE version is Kalpa, but they're both still spins of MicroOS.

VanillaOS would be another great example (arguably cooler than silverblue imo).

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