I don’t understand the point of this article. It said all that it had to say with the headline alone. Everything else is filler.
“ChromeOS is Linux in disguise. But people already knew this.” Ok. And?
Welcome to journalism in 2023. You don’t write anything out of passion anymore, you’re just filling your weekly quota with random words
How much did you pay for journalism last month? And yet you expect quality and passion.
I don’t expect quality from them, that’s why I don’t really pay attention to corporate journalism. I get most of this kind of information from individual creators, and I do support those when I can
Good for you, and I’m impressed by your undefensive and unhuffy reply.
Because the amount of entitlement I see about professional journalism really pisses me off, personally. There is a reason that much (not all) journalism is not the quality it used to be. It’s because nobody is frigging paying for it any more. Journalists are not the perpetrators in this story, they are the victims. The internet has caused their profession to implode. It’s their jobs that have disappeared on a huge scale, their salaries that have shrunk, their career choice that turned out to be a catastrophic bad move. All because of a technical innovation, basically. Well, personally I think we may come to regret the demise of this profession which served society well for at least a century. But the least we can do is stop the victim-blaming.
Rant over. No, I am not a journalist. Very glad of that career choice.
literally, all Chrome OS / chromium OS needs to do for me to actually embrace it. is native out of box flatpack support
one issue I might see them having with flatpack, is the permissions right now are handled kind of stupidly IMO. but if those get solved I think flatpack would be a great addition to chromium os ecosystem
While this would definitely be useful and make linux software more accessible, I’m worried about something similar to Android’s Google Play Services eventually happening where almost every piece of software, despite being for an open source operating system, depends on proprietary google software
Im not too worried myself, it’s worth noting that I myself am perfectly fine using a fully foss android phone with the sole exception of discord, since even the webclient for that sucks. it is possible they could eventually go down that path, but as long as the option is there for foss I don’t really mind too much
As long as you have a Crostini-capable ChromeOS device, you can run flatpacks. This is actually the preferred way to run Firefox (via the Linux Flatpack).
crostini is still in a vm (albiet crosvm is really good) I would really prefer real native
The virtual machine adds valuable security isolation with hardly any performance penalty. What’s the drawback?
there is a noticeable perf penalty on devices I’ve tested, particularly around gpu (but that may change in the future) it’s also just kinda a bit annoying for normal folk to use i’ve found
Flatpak is still in the packager teething stage - it’s going to be a couple/few years before all of the packaging and permission kinks are worked out. There’s already progress, I’m spending a lot less time unfucking flatpak permissions with flatseal than I was in 2019.
The absolute last thing I’m going to do is use a Google product.
They have the best security of any desktop OS iirc
Forgot the /s
Security, not privacy
ChromeOS has sandboxing, which already puts it miles ahead of Windows and Linux (no, the Flatpak Sandbox doesn’t count)
It’s not the only desktop OS that has sandboxing.
windows sandbox is… getting there, macos is decent but iirc the app dev can choose to not use it. all Linux options require user intervention to ensure it’s set up properly. ChromeOS’ sandboxing technique is inherited from Android and is the strongest/strictest of any desktop operating system.
Does anyone actually buy Chromebooks apart from schools?
I sure hope not 😅
So sad and unfortunate that we’re indoctrinating children to be spied on.
Yes
I mean, it was for on campus use, but I bought one in college to have a cheap note taker and basic homework machine for on campus that wouldn’t set me back too far if it got stolen or broken. I had a gaming desktop at home and was in a non-technical major, so it worked out great.
Hilarious title. Can you install Firefox?
You can install from Android or from linux environment, but last one is a virtualization and it’s a bit slow.
Okay, aboutchromebooks.com
In my desktop at home the main OS is Ubuntu, basically since more than 15 years, but I own also 2 Chromebooks laptops. I have a Lenovo Duet which i use mainly because I can run both Android and Linux apps, and it allow me to watch streaming services in offline. I would prefer to use any “gnu-linux” distro on a portable device, but if you wish to watch Amazon Prime or Netflix offline, you can only use a tablet with Android or iOs but on linux pc you are limited on web app typically, except in Chromebook which has some extra flexibility. Also I don’t find invasive so far, more or less we have the same privacy settings as in Android. As benefit it’s supported for 10 years for OS updates. And, in the future I may also decide to install a pure linux distro if I need.
Some Chromebooks are pretty hackable. I’ve got an older one that I reflashed with tianocore UEFI firmware. It makes for a pretty decent cheap and lightweight low power laptop. You can run basically any standard ARM Linux distro on it.
