Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS
theregister.com
theregister.com
That is not really popular in the open source world. Who finances the cloud, is it open, who can read or sell your data?
I really with Mozilla would get in this game. For most apps for most people, hosted PWAs make the most sense. But right now we're either stuck with local native software or only web apps from closed providers.
ChromeOS is a product designed to suck people further in to the Google ecosystem. All its limitations, like basically being a web browser with access to the Android Play store, are built around that. The simplicity of not having to worry about anything else is how Google sells that as a benefit of their platform to the masses.
I don't know any of my fellow nerds who want a ChromeOS kind of experience, so why would any of us dedicate our free time to making one?
Interesting perspective. Per the article, this is a method of circumventing the W10 issue coming up.. I would guess that you have family members or friends that might be caught up in that? Even ones that are not nerds?
https://yjs.dev/ seems like a useful building block.
In all honesty though, there's a tonne of easy to recommend distros which don't need set up if you are a "normie" just wanting to get online:
- Elementary - Mint - Ubuntu
I think the real "secret sauce" for ChomeOS' success is basically big coorporate backing and being from-a-store-buyable. I think the truth is that nobody other tham techies is likely to want to install an OS themselves.
I've had - and continue to have, a ton of minor and a few large problems.
First, wifi. Apparently there's often problems with Intel killer 6e laptop cards, which required me to enter loads of console commands that I didn't understand to fix. I did finally fix it, but I'm not sure exactly what did it. A couple of hours work over a few days to fix this.
I work from an external monitor plugged into my laptops HDMI port with the lid closed, and it seems Ubuntu is massively confused by this. I'm constantly having to open the laptop to get a login screen to show, then logging in and closing it, then opening it again because now the desktop doesn't show.
My laptop screen resets to minimum brightness every restart.
I did a driver update and suddenly my external monitor wasn't recognized at all so I had to roll back.
And at least several hours more on other issues. Oh yes, if I suspend then try to wake, I get a black screen or occasionally the Ubuntu startup screen but can never get back to the login screen until I do a hard reset.
The Bluetooth audio was set to headset quality (mono) and the only way to fix this, following 20 minutes research, was to install a different audio settings app.
All of these things, I can fix. I don't want to, but as a technically savvy user I can do it, with enough hours put in. But there's no way I'd suggest anyone else in my family or friends to use it unless they clearly tell me that they would enjoy tinkering with their operating system.
Windows also sometimes has these kinds of problems. Plus I usually have to dig up many commands to turn off user-hostile defaults or free up a quarter terabyte of disk space wasted. Was an obscure diskadm cli I’ve never heard of.
The perfect OS doesn’t exist, maybe not even a good one.
Undeniably, over many years of using Windows I've had many problems. But never this amount on a fresh install. And most windows problems can be fixed with driver updates or changed settings. Linux problems pretty much all require you to be comfortable entering console commands, which the vast majority of people are not.
Every OS I spend several hours setting up. At least with Linux I’ve automated it.
Well, I just run a tool like ShutUp10 once after installing Windows and 99% of these problems are gone.
However, I'm well aware of those problems with Windows. I switched, after all. However, you know what Windows doesn't do? Force me to keep opening my laptop screen to get a login on my external monitor, which I don't think is fixable. Or reset my laptop screen brightness to minimum every day so that I can't even see the login prompt without closing the curtains.
There might be a better solution, but I found this one first and stopped.
If I try out linux and it breaks my laptop, I'm mad at linux.
If windows stops supporting my laptop, or updates make it unusable, and linux makes it usable, I love linux.
Never managed to find a distribution that supported the UEFI bios, booting from an internal SSD, only from external storage via SSD, after so many attempts across a few months, I also managed to burn something on the motherboard.
Conclusion, 300 euros thrown into the local recycling center.
I know Linux systems since 1995's Summer, do regularly manage Linux servers at work, and still this thing failed on me, now imagine regular people.
I've been using linux on desktop for about 12 years and will always pick a laptop that's known to have good compatibility otherwise the endless hardware issues are a big timesuck.
Some distros are better than others for hardware support but I think it'd be disingenious to make out like any solve the problem.
If you have a laptop with good support, or even better, a linux specific one, it really is an experience that can work out of the box.
Maybe that's a big part the appeal of being buy-in-a-shoppable. Somebody has figured out for you what works, and you don't have to be your own guinea pig.
I did some reading around the and consensus seemed to be that Ubuntu should be one of these. Do you have any suggestions that are likely to have better hardware support than Ubuntu?
I ran Linux on the desktop and then laptop for 8 years ish when I was younger. It was a huge timesink. It taught me a lot about how systems actually work (what is a kernel, what is a kernel driver, why does crashing kernel code hurt worse than crashing user code, what is pid 1, why do daemons double fork, etc etc) but now as an adult with a busy life I don't see myself using Linux like this again. I can probably debug issues much faster than I could when I was younger but the last thing I want to do with my free time is figure out why runit couldn't spawn the log service to tail my logs for the service that I tried to run.
It is unfortunate that Ubuntu still has the mind share it does. I abandoned it a while ago as too unreliable. It is effectively Debian testing (they call it testing for a reason) with proprietary addons that have even less testing than Debian testing.
Originally, Debian making it difficult to get non open source firmware during installation was a reason for using Ubuntu, but now even that justification gone. Meanwhile Ubuntu anti-features like snap accumulate.
People keep suggesting that I try their favorite distro and that it won't have these problems. But when I dig a bit deeper into any of the suggestions there's plenty of recent threads like mine.
As someone else above said, people who plan to run Linux will choose hardware that's known to work, and won't have these problems. That's the key, it's not about the distro you choose, it's the hardware.
Saying "FOSS world" we need XXX is pretty useless. As a FOSS mainatinaer, the answer I always give people demanding their favorite pet feature is, "clean, maintainable patches are appreciated", ChromiumOS is free software; someone could take it use it as the basis for something like ChromeOS. But the author of the article has basically admitted that the derivitives of Chromium would quickly fail if Chromium stoped being something that they could free ride off of. Shouldn't that tell you everything about what the problem is with this picture?
Programmers often stop worrying about the details once they're satisfied, though, and there are a lot of details. Yes we could add thumbnails to the file picker, but we also need to support Nvidia hardware and the archive application is missing a few much more interesting compression formats, plus there are a bazillion logged bugs that actually crash software rather than being a minor inconvenience.
In theory someone could set up a collective of programmers, designers, and translators to create a usable Linux desktop for the Windows 10 refugees, but it'll require a lot of effort from a lot of volunteers and a lot of people who happen to share the same principles and preferences.
ChromeOS works because there's a single entity that can hire a small group of designers to tell an army of programmers what they want everything to look and work like.
There are actually projects and companies that fork ChromeOS, but they're pretty small and once Google stops maintaining the OS they're going to collapse pretty quickly.
And if you want something which just works, it means you need a huge number of people doing grunt work, and that's the kind of thing that people are less likely to want to do in their free time.
ChromeOS works because it's pre-installed on selected hardware devices where it's been configured and tested before any user even get it into their hands which would solve the majority of the problems no matter what OS you're using. Then they also take all power away from the user do make any changes to those systems which helps solve the rest. Ultimately though, most people who know anything at all about computers want the power to make changes to what's installed on them..
Everyone I know who got a chromebook did it first and foremost because they were inexpensive and every one of them at one point or another found themselves frustrated by the limitations. A privacy respecting linux system won't be able to use massive amounts of data collection to lower the price of the hardware like Google can.
Companies should be happy that there’s a FOSS community that lets them build up on top of it for free. It is a great deal! I wonder why there isn’t an EpicOS yet.
All the office were based on open source systems. DT wanted to make money mostly on their data plans + device management services. The project failed for one reason: Enterprise IT is the opposite of price sensitive. I had talks with a couple of CIOs who were interested in the idea, but realized that commiting to a solution that could slash their budgets by 80% would be career suicide.
Edit: answer below does not explain why price can’t be raised even higher.
> Many of our technologies are distributed together within Endless OS. This is not your typical Linux distribution. We don’t use rpm, apt, or any other packaging system. In our quest for simplicity and robustness, we use a read-only root file system managed by OSTree with application bundles overlaid on top. Most desktop Linux distributions are oriented towards tech-savvy users and developers, but we have a different target user.
I can and do all the time: KDE Plasma + Debian Testing
Debian in particular would not be my first choice, or my second, for people who can't do their own system administration.
(And this is a bit of the problem: nobody can agree on this stuff)
You look at Linux as an issue because someone you know can’t do system administration, something Debian almost requires none of. I look at Linux as an opportunity to rip people off their safe OS and introduce them to something that works but allows deep customization when they’re ready.
You’re operating out of fear, I’m operating out of faith. I really don’t care if the user “gets it”. They barely get their mobile device.
With Linux this is not the way. The closest I can get is unattended-upgrades.
For most non-gamers (modulo some workstation users doing number crunching, but that’s pretty niche), the iGPU is the way to go.
The best DE for switchers would be one that brings as few surprises as possible and has defaults good enough that the overwhelming majority feel no need to change them. Basically, there needs to be near-perfect clones of the two big commercial desktops that don’t try to be clever or shake things up in any way so the switch is close to seamless.
Debian Testing packages may also still be too old, depending on the user. Anybody having to work cross platform or collaborate with people using other platforms is going to wind up dealing with version mismatch issues, since commercial OS users have most of their apps auto-updated to latest without Testing’a lag.
Debian Testing KDE Plasma version: 6.3.5-1 [0]
Arch Stable KDE Plasma version: 6.4.3-1 [1]
[0] https://packages.debian.org/trixie/plasma-desktop
[1] https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/plasma-desktop/
I think mint+cinnamon is fantastic, my only gripe is that packages get old after a release has been out a year or two.
edit: specifics please.
I've been running Mint for ... longer than I care to remember, many years, and it's been flawless for me. I see windows users around me raging when it decides to just freeze, or has weird twitchy behavior, and I just keep on going.
And no, I don't spend hours upon hours tweaking and troubleshooting until it's "just right"; Mint convinced me because it was 99% "just right" out of the box.
Compared to when I used W10 and earlier, it's been sheer joy. It just stays out of the way and lets me do what I need to do.
For Cinnamon specifically I’m talking more UX/UI/visual polish sorts of things. There’s little papercuts all over that don’t make much difference individually but give an impression that it’s not quite finished. It isn’t unique in this regard though, you see this in all the DEs to some degree. It really just boils down to a lack of attention to detail and/or unevenly distributed attention (some things have been heavily iterated on, others implemented just well enough to check a box).
Some of the newer Wayland tiling WMs are better about this and are a lot more detail-oriented, but well, tiling WMs aren’t my thing at all. I’m much more in the traditional desktop camp.
Two things here.
One, OSs get adopted because of the package they arrive in. Laptops have Windows bundled, schools get computers with Windows on the cheap. Phones come with whatever they are integrated - often, not even a major upgrade is possible on them, let alone an alternative OS.
In my opinion, products like the Steam Deck are what get Linux adopted. They provide excellent functionality out of the box.
Two, PCs in this age thrive on interaction. Overwhelmingly, they are bought to interact with other PCs, either directly by network or through formats of specific software, like docx. Therefore, the functionality depends on how well they can participate in a network. This is where Microsoft really made it big with how ruthlessly they pushed Windows as an app platform and Office as the productivity software baseline.
Hence, in the end, what makes Linux really competitive today is the proliferation of web apps, because Linux has first class browsers, and the existence of Wine and its related software. Take these two away and the OS is not even talked about as an alternative to anything, just a specialty, or a curiosity.
Really, an alternative OS can do two things. It can either set the trend, which is not very likely, given that we are talking about alternatives. Or it can follow the trend, or "embrace" it, in MS lingo.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/4ewnoi/if_...
OEMs making custom distros didn't help.
If anything that was the precursor of the Android distros mess that we got afterwards.
They also did the same with CP/M, MS-DOS and Windows since forever, including UNIX clones, why wouldn't they do otherwise with GNU/Linux.
As former owner of an Asus Netbook 1215B bought with Linux pre-installed, even that way wasn't without issues.
OpenGL support was always lagging behind what hardware was capable, GL 3.3 vs GL 4.1, hardware video decoding only worked during Flash heyday, and wlan drivers always had issues with hardware when doing large downloads.
Valve has failed to convince studios already targeting POSIX like environments like Android NDK and Orbis OS (PlayStation), to port their games to GNU/Linux.
Had to switch translating Windows games, as plan B kind of solution.
It remains to be seen for how long Microsoft will tolerate Proton, or just like it happened with netbooks, will drive other handheld OEMs to use Windows and thus in a decade from now people will foundly remember Steam Deck.
That is why the netbook boom died. Because while they promised to make cheap Linux devices that anybody could use none of them actually delivered on it.
In fact the whole thing was a fiasco.
The classic Linux problem can be described as "9 clicks to shit". Meaning that a Linux desktop looks, on the initial viewing, as something that is actually usable and modern, but once you start clicking around things start going bad. Going bad quickly.
A major problem cause of the problem is "linux is about choice" mentality.
Another problem is that programmers specialize at being good at programming, but things like documentation and UI testing are their own disciplines that are separate and distinct in a lot of meaningful ways. So, in attempt to make up for this, they leave configuration and details up to user choice. It is effectively pawning off the last stages of development onto the end user, who are generally most ill-equipped to make technical decisions on software they are not familiar with.
Instead of presenting something that "just works" users are presented with a myriad of choices and options that they have to make decisions about before ever actually being able to use the software.
Having lots of choices in applications, widget libraries, desktops, ways to install software, init systems, etc etc... results in very significant complexity as it all has to work together.
And complexity breeds bugs.
So each and every user experience ends up being its own unique things. There is no "standard configuration" no "supported configuration" and no "documented configuration".
The end result is that each user is forced to find ways to make the desktop work for their specific use case. Essentially finding a magic combination of things that isn't broken for what they specifically want. The desktop will still be full of buggy behavior, but just not in the way that that particular user cares about.
This creates a extraordinary of frustration and friction when time comes to doing the things that the desktop is actually intended for... which is getting actual work done.
This isn't a problem for a certain class of highly technical users that love technical minutia and configuring things. Knowing how to carve a working system out of a OS riddled with historical artifacts and highly technical choices is a badge of honor for many people.
But this isn't how most people want to do things.
Netbook boom tried to fix this in certain ways, but all that ended up happening is that each little corporation tried to do their own thing and then abandoned it when they realized there was no money to be made and they really lacked the resources and expertise to make it work.
If you want a computer that does useful things and isn't just a locked down social media consumption machine, you end up with a lot of that baggage you've mentioned. Sure MacOS and Windows fare better (insert trillion dollar companies backing it spiel here...) but they are no smooth ride if you are doing anything more than consuming stuff or using a web browser.
And you can't really retreat to a more stable distro (Ubuntu LTS, numbered debian release etc) because you often get stuck with "outdated" software, missing hardware support and missing features (might be essential to your use case). Chasing the bleeding edge ends up being pretty essential in desktop linux but as the name entails it ends in lots of pain for the user. Nerds, hackers, developers and maybe even some power users can definitely have fun and thrive in that environment but the casual consumer.. yikes :(
Even having decent UIs is a problem for many Linux apps and many are often deeply unpleasant to use day-to-day. This is one thing that has started to slowly get better in the last decade or so, but I can always tell what applications were designed by programmers and which ones have had at least some UI work done on them.
Also, accepting feedback from users on UI improvements often gets either ignored or de-prioritized in favor of adding new features. It's very frustrating to see an otherwise really fantastic application with a lot of neat functionality hamstrung by a bad UI.
The first time was financed by Sun Microsystems in 2001 for Gnome 1.x and the result was Gnome 2.
The second time was financed by Novell around 2005 or so for their attempt to compete with Microsoft with Novell Linux Desktop. Unfortunately for them the real beneficiary of the improvements that results from their work was Canonical's Ubuntu.
Since then there have been numerous smaller/informal/ad-hoc attempts for both KDE and Gnome.
The results of all of this, of course, is that many "Linux users" believe that Gnome is the result of a conspiracy between IBM, Redhat, and maybe even Microsoft to "destroy the Linux desktop".
So that is fun.
The real success story, from what I can tell, is Blender.
They successfully revamped their user interface without a huge budget. Although it was still financed somewhat by some EU initiative, IIRC. They accomplished this by getting developers sat down next in a big room to actual 3D artists working together to produce a animated feature.
By physically placing users next to devs and having them work together, likely with a great deal of humility and openness, they managed to transform their UI into something that was actually decent.
This is probably a model that can be duplicated by other open source developers, although finding the right type of technical users not experienced in using said software willing to participate is going to always be a major challenge.
I get the sentiment, but honestly anytime I try to use a modern smartphone it almost takes a short flight. Hidden UI gestures, active sides, functionality limited to 'popular' cases, etc. Totally unusable and frustrating, IMHO.
This is probably the only part of the article that is compelling. I guess having a simple, immutable Linux distro that prioritises being hard to break over many other things could indeed be a good thing for getting less tech-savvy users over to Linux.
But even then, who do they expect to maintain it? I would guess that many distros are maintained by people who are passionate about using them, and I suspect the overlap of FOSS maintainers and people who want to use such a locked-down, stripped-back system is small. And if the distro really didn't have many native apps, then users would either need to rely on Google for all their services anyway (somewhat defeating the point), or the "FOSS world" would also need to produce (and maintain, and host) a full suite of browser-based apps to rival Google's. Which is very far from easy.
The idea of "friction" comes up again and again whenever we talk about open products (whether it's FOSS or open platforms like the ones in the Fediverse, etc). People want an experience that is completely smooth and frictionless, while remaining free and open. But IMO freedom is friction. Fundamentally it means being able to choose, and not being completely reliant on megacorps, and being able to tinker and explore, and all of these things are sources of friction. Like, the author complains that there are so many distros to choose from, but how would adding another distro to the mix address that?
Stop inventing wheels, stop offering esoteric wheels and start solving customer problems simply.
How many window managers are there? How many different package managers? Ways to prepare code for said package managers? Scripting shells? File systems? Hell, how many distros are there based on Debian and/or Ubuntu?
If the goal is "free the world from proprietary software", then the talent spent on scratching an itch for a few thousand users is talent wasted because that isn't moving the needle fast enough. The three things driving consumer-grade (read: not enterprise or hobbyist) adoption of Linux right now are ChromeOS, gaming and the fact that Windows 10 support is ending soon. It has nothing to do with the fact that you can find just the right set of utilities for your Arch install.
So if there's no money in something, then the only people who will show up to work on it are going to want to scratch their own itches because it's a hobby and fun/interesting to them.
Android shouldn't be a loss leader at this point, though maybe it is in certain companies, and it's not exactly what most people think of when they think GNU/Linux.
Valve failed to convince any major number of studios to bother about GNU/Linux, even when it would be relatively easy to port their games from Android NDK.
And that's exactly the problem. Linux is so focused on ensuring it works for every possible user out there, that it never makes the tough choices to be optimized for the 80% of users.
80% of people drive cars and need simple care wheels and tires.
But they're forced to think about 100 different types of wheels before they can go anywhere. My mom has never had to consider a flywheel in her life, and yet if her car were linux she's need to think about that, and everything from low power, high power, LED, gas powered, and oil powered headlights. She'd need to consider 50 types of seats, 7 seatbelt configurations,
Linux is what you get when engineers own a product and there is no PM around to say 'No' and force you to make the hard decisions. It's good for what it is, but nobody is making it actually easy. There are just "complex" and "less complex" flavors of linux. None are actually consumer level of simple - they're just "simple" compared to the other variants of linux.
Chrome OS is actually consumer level simple.
Rest is accidental, yet most effort is being spent on that. That's why even though we have more FOSS code than ever, users have least amount of freedom and agency.
Providing drivers for all the hardware and peripherals that all work together in all the permutations is properly hard. I’d argue it’s the root issue.
Google can test each ChromeOS release against their Chromebooks to make sure everything works. If something fails, someone in Google can root cause on a matching hardware configuration easily.
This is not feasible for a general desktop Linux distribution because there are too many permutations. If the distribution is targeted at non-technical users the matter of root causing an issue on a hardware configuration the maintenance team can’t replicate becomes intractable.
A solution might be to literally only support Google Chromebooks, to constrain the possibility space, but even that is a big undertaking if the goal is to match ChromeOS for quality.
Who wants to deal with a bunch of users who only switched because Windows 10 stopped updating? I’m going to have to switch my stupid gaming PC away from Windows because it stops updating, and I don’t even want to deal with myself in that context, because he’s a grumpy guy that just wants to relax and play videogames after working (in Linux) all day.
Valve might be able to do it, but it won’t really be a FOSS community project, it will be a proprietary layer on top of FOSS (maybe an Open Source layer on top of FOSS, but it will still be proprietary in the sense that they’ll mostly do the development in-house and in the service of their business model). Which is totally fine, but subservient to their business needs.
I mean… the Register reports on Free Software stuff a lot. Maybe they are the entity that should do it.
...But who would use that? If you know how to install an operating system on a laptop, you're already not the target audience for this. OEMs aren't going to ship this Linux any more than they would've shipped any others.
Chrome OS worked because it had the marketing budget of a megacorp behind it, one motivated to push people onto their cloud services to cement their monopoly.
I wonder if there were significant numbers of people who actually went out of their way to get a Chromebook over a regular laptop? I'd imagine those that did just did so due to the lower price without knowing the difference, or they had it forced on them by their school/employer.
This is why it was such a revolution when Ubuntu came out and quickly dominated the Linux desktop space. When it was new.
It took Debian and made it something approachable. But even then it was a 1/3rd of what is described as needed in the article.
An A/B partition scheme is very simple and the system as a whole is integration tested in CI. An OSTree based atomic system is pretty close, although there is some added complexity.
Not to mention Debian out-of-the-box is a pretty miserable experience for everyday users. Their Nvidia drivers won't work, they can't figure out how to install Chrome, videos won't play due to missing codecs, etc.
The author mentions this as well but there's no details there. We've been shipping chromeos-style images with universal blue for over 4 years and the ostree parts are invisible to end users. What do you feel takes away from the user experience?
I think my main concern is something like a known OSTree design issue around UID/GID drift, there was a bug that was partly fixed in 2023 but the issue comes from OSTree assigning known UIDs from the deployment once created, but this may not map to the proper UID on the system the deployment is being blasted to. You can get improper ownership out of this.
Not something I've ever encountered myself, but if I were developing an embedded device it seems like one less thing to worry about.
I'll bring it up during the next bootc meeting[1], which are public btw! Thanks for using bazzite!
1: https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc?tab=readme-ov-file#commun...
ChromeOS is dead simple. So much so that my otherwise computer-illiterate wife can (and does) use it regularly. There's no way that I'd get her to use debian, though, unless I set everything up for her in advance. Choosing the desktop, setting up PPAs / flatpack / whatever (if you don't want the stock firefox browser), tweaking power settings, there's all sorts of faffing about in comparison.
I'd have to set up syncing in Firefox for her (or whatever browser) but to be fair, I helped her set up her account in the chromebook too.
Hence, as my original post was meant to convey, a ChromeOS clone is a better option to set up a laptop for her than just grabbing debian.
edit: i'll add, link your image to a github repo with a readme describing how to get it on disk. there's the project.
The Chrome OS is running trusted boot and immutable partition, and completely closed host system, with no user-installable apt [0]. This means it's impossible to completely break the system - nothing that user does will escape browser sandbox. And, for defense-in-depth, even if browser sandbox got compromised, there is no sudo nor ~/.bashrc nor any other executable per-user configs, so malicious software will disappear after reboot. And if you compromise kernel and modify disk directly, there is verified boot...
And this is not just theoretical benefits, it's stops practical attacks. Are you sure that "bash | curl" command you typed was safe? Are you sure that "pip install" or "npm install" you did didn't actually install malware on your PC?
It is possible to build systems like this based on open-source Linux, but this will be quite a lot of work, and may even require separated trusted builder machine. Definitely out of reach of non-technical user.
[0] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/...