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The author knows why but dances around it. Chrome OS exists to harvest user data. Linux operating systems just exist.
I have a long enough beard that installing debian is as easy as a chrome netbook. It's really no problem. I wish it was that easy for everyone but most people don't "get it"
The author is suggesting that a distro that's extremely locked down, reliable, and with very limited user choice would be desirable traits for mass adoption by non-tech enthusiasts.
There'd no reason that a community built version of that vision would have to include data harvesting as well.
I use Debian as well, but there's an incredible amount of previous knowledge required to understand what its doing and how to set it up that experienced users take for granted. An innate curiosity and lack of fear of breaking things can make learning all that knowledge seem trivial to us, but to someone without those traits, it's an impassable obstacle.
A mostly tech illiterate person being plopped in front of a Debian install would have to learn on the spot:
Huh, what's this root password thing for?
Partitioning? What's that mean? I guess I'll select guided.
XFCE, KDE, cinnamon, gnome? What are those? Guess I'll check them all.
Okay I'm logged in, ooh this is neat. How do I install something? Ah, a store! (Only if they happened to log into gnome or KDE), this app looks cool, let's install that. Huh? I'm not in the sudoers file? What's that? I just want to install an app! Ugh, this is way too nerdy for me. I'm done.
Oh no, my Windows is gone!
If we assume that they had figured out how to install software and continue to use it, there would be nothing to inform them their firewall is off, nor that they would need to install GUFW to configure it with a GUI.
All of that is trivial for us. We know much of the basic concepts already, know what sort of questions to ask and where to find trustworthy information, and don't mind learning new things.
But for the tech illiterate, what we're doing may as well be magic. A locked down, dumbed down experience is what they would feel comfortable with.
Well cool. Get with the author and do the work. Make the UnChromeOS
I'm just pointing out WHY it doesn't exist. No one cares and no one can make money from it.
A lot of Linux distros don't make money, I don't think that's a huge factor. A lack of interest so far is more likely (though I do recall there was a distro that was trying to be a 1 to 1 chromeOS replacement.
I just wanted to point out that us techies take a lot of our knowledge for granted, and it can be easy to lose perspective on what its like for tech illiterates.
Yeah, Linux is easy for me and you but the vast majority of people can't even factory reset thier phone. I help them as much as I can but I'm not skilled enough to make software. I just don't have the talent. Should someone make UnChome? Absolutely. Without a profit motive we are going to have to wait for some altruistic programmers to do it.
The idea of ChromeOS is simple: it's just enough Linux to get you online. It turns a PC into something akin to a tablet, with a full-screen icon-based app launcher. The desktop is very simple and vaguely Windows-like: there's a taskbar at the bottom, a file manager, drivers enough common hardware that most things just work out of the box, including a bunch of common GPUs, networking including Wi-Fi. In terms of apps, there's a built-in Google Drive client, and of course the Chrome web browser.
This is more or less describing one of the many immutable distros that only run programs with flatpaks. It's entirely feasible if someone wanted to make a distro with even less functionality, but why?
Oh boy where to even start with this one...
Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS
may we have a dead simple bulletproof all-free OS that gets old PCs online without a Google account, and does nothing else? How come there is no all-Free Software tool that even tries to do what ChromeOS does without needing an account with The Borg?
Yeah I mean we already have several of them. Android and Linux do everything ChromeOS does, and so much more. Matter of fact any OS with a browser can do anything Chrome can do.
ChromeOS has forks like FydeOS.
It's the number one thing non-Linux users complain about: too much choice.
I don't understand why anyone would complain about that. If you don't care for choice then just pick a random one. I mean you have to "choose" ChromeOS too.
ChromeOS does just one thing and it does it well enough that vendors sold billions of the things last year.
They sold billions because they're cheap as shit. They can do the same with the OSes above.
Productivity apps? Use Google Apps.
No thank you.
Messaging or video calling? Log in to your chat system of choice in a browser window.
Lots of messaging apps don't work in the browser.
what few settings there are are stored in your Google account.
You just said earlier you didn't want a Google account.
All the components are there, including a potential revenue model. Strip out absolutely all the complexity that can possibly be removed, and leave something which can run on any old PC from the last 15 years and gets the user online – and nothing else. How hard can it be? There are no optional extra native apps, and no way to add any.
Again, I can't understand why you would want to not have that option. If you don't want the "complexity", just don't use it.
no fancy add-on cross-distro package managers like Flatpak or Snap.
Oof. Yeah that is a complaint that I share.
The desktop is just Windows-like enough to be instantly familiar, unlike GNOME
I find GNOME far more intuitive than Windows.
There are a couple of projects forked from the basis of ChromiumOS, such as FydeOS, which adds a second authentication system so it can be used behind the Great Firewall of China. We plan to return to FydeOS and take a deeper look soon.
Not sure what "authentication system" they're referring to. FydeOS can be used with a Fyde account, a Google account, both or neither. I think when they take a deeper look it may be what they're looking for.
Feels kind of pointless. If you’re tech savvy enough to install an OS on your laptop, then you probably don’t need ChromeOS.
The thing with ChromeOS is that you buy it, turn it on, and it’s done.
But if something like this existed, consumer vendors such as Dell might pre-install it.
I’m doubtful. The market potential is too low.
The only ones who would raise an eyebrow are people who already are interested in Linux, and these people likely want to install Linux on their own.
Maybe? But also, maybe not? ChromeOS is not just for "people who are already interested in Linux." It's true that only techies are likely to care about ChromeOS vs some hypothetical non-Google OS/distro, but the vendors are techies, so if a vendor wanted to sell a Chromebook-like product without involving Google, they'd presumably be interested in an OS/distro like the one the article is talking about.
How they managed to write an article about easy to use Linux OSes without mentioning Ubuntu once is beyond me. :D
Yeah, it's weird to talk about OpenSuse MicroOS and Fedora Atomic when they are not even the flagship desktop distros of their respective families. I guess the author drank the atomic kool-aid and thinks that's a killer feature for a consumer OS.
That said, Ubuntu is not really aimed at beginners anymore. Canonical has shifted hard to enterprise offerings over the past 5 years or so. Take a look at their web site — they barely spare a word for desktop Linux anymore. This is what you'll see on the main page:
"The complete guide to RAG"
"Modern enterprise open source"
A "Products" dropdown with thirteen items, maybe one of which is comprehensible to a beginner.
For all the hate Snaps get (and rightfully so), they make a lot more sense in the context of enterprise deployment. It's like Flatpak but for headless servers and with professional support. It took me a long time to understand Canonical's game there, because I couldn't shake the idea of Ubuntu as a beginner's distro.
I guess it would be cool to have an atomic OS designed for beginners, since the current crop are more complex than traditional distros, not less. But I don't think atomicity itself really matters, especially if you're talking about systems that are mostly locked down to begin with.
Ubuntu isn't a good choice
Ubuntu is still too complex for the average idiot who just needs a web browser.
Most Linux distros, even Ubuntu, have a "it's up to you to figure it out" mentality. ChromeOS is a "we know better than you" mentality which is honestly needed for the average Joe to keep their machine safe. Everyone hates auto updates. But lets be honest, the average user isn't going to do them unless it's basically forced on them. Ubuntu can do live security updates, but only if you opt into Ubuntu pro or whatever it's called.
Eh, I would have agreed a few years ago. But now default Ubuntu boots up basically looking like MacOS with the browser (firefox by default, not Chrome) right there in your face ready to launch. For someone truly not aware how to use a computer beyond a browser it couldn't be much easier (except booting directly into the browser). The only thing preventing that from catching on is that those people don't even know what an operating system is, let alone that it could be changed.
And you can't stop the browser from updating, since it's deployed via snap. 😆
We are getting there, and snap auto updating is a great step for basic users. There just needs to be less asking of questions, and more assuming defaults and just doing it.
Everyone hates auto updates. But lets be honest, the average user isn't going to do them unless it's basically forced on them.
If there's auto-updates, they don't have to. This is what I don't understand about Linux, every distro requires you to go in and, at the very least, click several buttons. Then 5 minutes later another notification pops up to do it again. Why?
Basically every Linux distro that exists is designed for "enthusiasts". Nobody really makes a Linux distro targeted towards the tech illiterate that will handhold them the entire way.
Immutable distros with something like Snap or Flatpaks that auto update are a great first step. They just need to go a bit further with the hand holding before they're completely dummy friendly. The problem is that hand holding pisses off enthusiasts. And since nobody wants to piss off 90% of the existing Linux user base that's probably why something like this doesn't exist (yet).
My dad uses Ubuntu on his htpc and its always out of date when I visit. I think Mint or PopOS may be friendlier in that respect.
Hmmm, I wonder if Valve might, quite accidentally, end up turning SteamOS into a viable option. Immutable, flatpak app store, simple install, etc. But desktop mode would need a lot of work, so...maybe not.
But it would be funny as hell if it happens!
No.
You want it, build it yourself. Or pay devs to do it.
I've tried. They don't want to. They already have jobs. They make what they want to make. Only way to get them to make it is to convince them they want to.
Sounds like the devs have spoken then.
The immutable distros are very chromeOS-like. Bluefin GTS from UBlue in particular would probably fit the bill if it wasn't developer oriented.
Ah, I see they mentioned that in the article.
@ProdigalFrog @throws_lemy the article crying about ostree being "fearsomely complex" while it's literally the first real "install and forget" system I've ever used. Also BTRFS doesn't break nearly as much as some people believe.
Uninformed bullshit.
Yeah, I don't understand the fixation on BTRFS in the article. Nobody's going to have BTRFS problems unless they're doing advanced things that the documentation clearly says are experimental and unsupported. Nobody's going to accidentally set up a RAID5 array, or accidentally create a swap file on a non-swap-friendly volume. The average user won't see any difference between BTRFS and EXT4, except that BTRFS snapshots might save their butt in an emergency.
BTRFS is a perfectly reasonable choice as a default filesystem. Probably the best choice in general. Last year I thought bcachefs was the future, but now that's getting dropped from the Linux kernel so nope, guess I'll stick with BTRFS.
It is an odd thing to disqualify it as well, since the Ostree stuff is not used by normal users on those distros, and at least on uBlue distros, they are even replacing the DE store witg their own that only offers flatland, essentially making it as simple as android to use.
There are still some kinks to work out to make it a true replacement to ChromeOS (if there's still a single app on the store that needs flatseal to get working or fix some visual glitch, or allow to view a certain directory, then it wouldn't be as smooth as ChromeOS), but it's getting pretty close to what the author wants.
They still have root enabled
It would be better if we had a locked down os
also, are there not ungoogled distributions of Chromium OS? If there are not, maybe that could be the answer.
Where Google's team put innovative effort into ChromeOS was in making it robust enough to be sold to the masses in the hundreds of millions of units, with no tech support. It's immutable, with image-based updates. It has two root partitions, one of which updates the other, so there's always a known good one to fall back to if an update should fail.
Vanilla OS also uses a two root partition system, called ABRoot, for its atomicity. The author should look into that, as it seems to be exactly what they're looking for.
This is a more fault-tolerant design than SUSE's MicroOS-based systems, which use the rather fragile Btrfs. It's also much simpler than the Fedora Atomic immutable systems, including offshoots such as Universal Blue, which use the Git-like — for which, read "fearsomely complex" — OSTree. For added entertainment, Fedora also defaults to Btrfs, with compression enabled. If you don't believe us about the problems of damaged Btrfs volumes, refer to the Btrfs documentation. We recommend taking the orange-highlighted Warning section very seriously indeed.
Stupid fearmongering about BTRFS (and OSTree, I presume). I selected an OpenSUSE distro precisely because it uses BTRFS and Snapper for automatic and transparent snapshots by default, which simplifies undoing most things that can break a system.
Wtf
