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Comment by montroser | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by open and closed? ChromeOS is based on ChromiumOS, which is open source. I guess macOS is based on Darwin technically, but the ratio of open source to proprietary is much higher for ChromeOS than macOS, no?

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I think they mean closed as in it is more difficult to install whatever you want on a ChromeOS machine as opposed to a MacOS machine.

What is it that you want to install on ChromeOS that you are unable to? All of the usual Linux and open-source stuff works fine on the built-in Linux environment on it. Possibly even a little better than MacOS in some cases, since you don't need to worry about Apple app signing. There's not literally nothing you can't do, but the list is a lot shorter than most people think, especially those who haven't really tried ChromeOS in a decade and think they're all a glorified web browser on $200 hardware.

You can technically run anything you want on both without resorting to hacks, it's just a question of how annoying it is.

On a Chromebook you can install the Linux Dev VM with 5 clicks in the settings and get a fully featured Debian VM.

I'm willing to bet it's easier to set up a Linux VM on a Chromebook than on a Mac. But the other side is that anything not explicitly requiring Linux will work natively in macOS, where you also get a nicer terminal. Like I've not needed a Linux VM in years, and the author doing web dev probably won't either.

pretty dang easy to run a Linux container on MacOS using Colima (https://github.com/abiosoft/colima).

Relative to native Docker and Crostini, my experience using Colima at work was like pulling my own teeth out.

Crostini is built into the Chromebook, vs macOS where I hear a different container solution every time someone asks about it. Colima is a new one to me. Maybe it works great and the others do too, but full 1P support is a step up.

Yes, however most of us don't really need to use Linux containers for our work, plain traditional UNIX works just fine.

But if I don't want to have to use a VM?

Well, then you can only put it in dev mode and use chromebrew. Which I am glad exists, but even installing node can be a pain and the way to get it running changed over the years.

But how? You can install Linux and android apps on chrome os. I understand this perspective might intuitively make sense, but we need to analyze if it's actually true.

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