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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

To the reports about "sunsetting" ChromeOS and/or merging it with Android I can only say: good riddance! I bought a Lenovo Ideapad Duet Chromebook back in 2020, but the performance (with the dreaded interminable Linux out-of-memory hangs when having too many tabs open in the browser) and battery life were consistently worse than comparable Android tablets, so by now it's mostly gathering dust...

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I've been taking the exact opposite view: Android is a messy, ugly OS, from the unmaintained hacked-up kernels to the user-hostile UI, and I've wished that they'd scrap it and rebase those usecases onto the shockingly vanilla Gentoo spin that is ChromeOS.

I agree, on ChromeOS it's entirely possible for their to be generic images that support a wide ranges of devices all sharing the same update path (like Windows, MacOS).

on Android? very much still in the embedded space on how it's built. Linux on ARM is generally still a shit show.

I'd rather ChromeOS get a Android runtime (not a VM) and replace Android, than the other way around.

I agree. On top of that Android apps are designed for use on phones. Some of them are not even particularly good on tablets, and they will be horrible on laptops.

Meanwhile I wish ChromeOS would pivot BACK to just being a browser window and nothing else. I didn't want the windowing experience that ChromeOS added down the line -- I wanted just that simple Chrome browser window, full screen, and nothing else.

As soon as they added a taskbar and made it behave like every other generic desktop environment, it became crap.

I'd just be happy if by law, security updates had to be updated monthly, with weekly and daily for certain criticals, for a minimum of 5 years.

And maybe a 10% revenue fine, yes revenue, for each missed metric.

In the EU, this will be the case from next year on (2025-06-20). No monthly security patch frequency requirement, but instead "security updates [...] need to be available to the user at the latest 4 months after the public release of the source code of an update of the underlying operating system" [1].

Complying with this new regulation and bumping the Linux kernel version during the device life cycle was also a topic at this year's Linux Plumbers Android MC. [2][3]. This is necessary because the Linux LTS support timeframe is shorter than the by law mandated minimum support period of 5 years.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41128358

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/1670/oj

[2] https://youtu.be/b9xXCNYMWjY?si=yxDJUbJHko8HvFTA&t=458

[3] https://lpc.events/event/18/contributions/1740/attachments/1...

Chrome OS devices (depending on release date) are good for up to 10 years.

https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en

Such a draconian measure for measly 5 years?

I'm with you on the sunsetting of ChromeOS, but I'd like to offer a counterpoint to your experience of the Duet. I've been using the newer Lenovo Duet 5 with PostmarketOS[0] (linux for ARM) as a daily driver for more than a year and it is almost always great (minus no functioning webcam, which is abysmal anyways)!

[0] https://postmarketos.org/

What makes you think it's a software bottleneck instead of the 4GB RAM

I'd say ChromeOS works fine with 4Gb RAM too. The problem with the Duet is it's 4Gb RAM and a lame 2020 smartphone processor which pushes memory reclaim latencies firmly into the noticable range.

And extremely cheap eMMC storage which makes every I/O access about the same speed as reading an SD card.

Some of these devices probably make nice Linux laptops if you can get them unlocked.

Iirc, it's very easy to run regular Linux on pretty much every Chromebook. Some of them have some driver issues, though.

I would personally say that "easy" depends a little bit; if your device is listed on https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/supported-devices.html then yeah it's dead easy to reflash the firmware and install any old distro and off you go. Anything not supported by that is a little more annoying because you need a distro that can deal with the default firmware's non-UEFI boot process. I'm very fond of my ARM Chromebook flashed with postmarketos, but it is a little less supported because of the boot process (and in some cases yeah hardware support isn't 100%).

TIL newer chromebooks are codenamed after Skyrim locations. Interesting

My understanding is that it's more generic than that; their codenames are apparently drawn from video games in general. Which, yes, is fascinating.

I have owned multiple chromebooks and they have all been fantastic.

Maybe limited in some regards, but still the best computing devices I have used.

Never used a chromebook. My very rough conception from when they first came out is that it's a cheap laptop with an OS that tries to present a web browser as the OS. Now, I'm reading comments here about getting them "unlocked" and about them having a non-UEFI (and I guess a non-BIOS) boot process, and that sounds awful, to put it kindly. It sounds like user-hostility and vendor lock-in. What other reason is there to forego a standard boot process for a proprietary one?

How are they the "best computing devices [you've] used"?

> What other reason is there to forego a standard boot process for a proprietary one?

Secure boot that actually works.

https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/...

It's even worse than you think. Chromebooks run open source Coreboot and you can get the code here: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/third_party/cor...

A number of kid environments depend on Chrome. Google is basically giving their pie back to Apple now.

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