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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

For people complaining about battery control and android emulation on linux, ChromeOS is a boon.

You effectively get an actual Linux distro + most of android, with a side of Chrome. It's way closer to "a real computer" than an iPad for instance, and only loses to the Surface Pro/Z13 line in term of versatility IMHO.

It really wasn't bad, my only deal breakers were keyboard remapping being non existent and the bluetooth stack being flaky.

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I got a ChromeOS device a few years ago and it was great. I think they get an underserved bad reputation from being the locked-down devices you're forced to use in schools, but a personal ChromeOS device is a capable computer that can run any Android app or desktop Linux app.

Though having said that, in the past year I've replaced ChromeOS with desktop Linux (postmarketOS) and I love it even more now. 4GB of RAM was a bit slim for running everything in micro-VMs for "security," which is what ChromeOS does. I've had no trouble with battery life or Android emulation (Waydroid) since switching.

Not really any, Crostini has plenty of restrictions.

Cool if one wants to CLI stuff alongside Web and Android apps, but that is as far as it goes for GNU/Linux, with many yes but.

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/1792b43f...

Sorry, but "CLI stuff" is not "as far as it goes" with desktop Linux apps on ChromeOS. ChromeOS provides Wayland and PulseAudio servers to the apps as well so GUI and audio works too. It even synchronises file associations and installs a ChromeOS-like GTK theme into the container. The Linux GUI apps I had installed back when I used it felt completely native.

Without hardware acceleration and sound issues depending on the model, that is why I linked the page, as I was expecting such reply.

It worked on my device. The page you linked looks very outdated and doesn't have my device's board or any device made in the past 5 years. The lists of unsupported devices also look pretty reasonable - old kernels, CPUs that don't support virtualisation and 32-bit ARM. Since modern ChromeOS uses the same virtualisation to run Android apps, I doubt there's a modern device where it doesn't work.

Yes, looking at the FAQ, for example, it claims that USB is flat out unsupported on Linux which hasn't been true for 4+ years so it's very outdated.

I've used VS Code on ChromeOS with the GPU acceleration flag for many, many years without any issues on a couple different devices (x64 and more recently, arm64). It can even hide the window chrome so looks 1:1 with VS Code on any other platform. And many other GUI Linux apps where the Android version feels too much like a toy in comparison, it's an incredibly versatile feature for dev work.

Let's hope pKVM and other Android virtualization stuff can fill in the gap here.

ChromeOS (at least Flex) supports keyboard remapping now.

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