I agree with the sentiment but not the logic.

Chromebooks popularity is down to them being one of the cheapests laptops to buy in bulk for schools.

The “google” label is also somewhat attracting to them because familiarity and having plenty of experience, resources to build, update, support the platform, provide documentation. This for every language.

A new linux alternative would mean they have to source compatible cheap devices they can buy in bulk and have to install it themselves on every one. A class i personally would love but is beyond what most schools can do.

The few open source devs are also unlikely to provide that much support as schools may require. For (slightly bigger) reference my job is deep into the Microsoft ecosystem and we have “colleagues” paid by microsoft that provide consultancy on their stuff. (And to make sure they keep us as a customer)

I hate it, i think tech literacy is important but this isnt something a new distro can fix.

Slightly relevant xkcd

We don't lack easy to use distro... I never had to fiddle with the one I'm using and I'm not an expert, far from it ;)

There is a project trying to revive FirefoxOS: https://capyloon.org/ which is what inspired ChromeOS, but maybe I am taking the headline too literal 😅

Hear me out, docker based OS. More or less chromeOS but instead of apps they are containers

Windows isn't immutable either. And i had a lot of issues with Kinoite. Some flatpaks need workarounds, everything starts only after a second, can't really remove that one annoying software and too much rpm-ostree installs slows updates to a crawl, etc. Then you look into Universalblue's build-your-custom-image and see the bazillion steps and dependencies and walk away.

Now i look into plain old Fedora as a Windows 10 alternative for my mom.

Do we? Who's we?

It would need someone to set it up, but I have my non-techy family members on Silverblue and it suits the purpose as outlined. Also not sure why all the fear-mongering about btrfs, I would say it's ready and suitable for mainstream use now, or you don't have to use it.

You're being downvoted, but you're right.

People want something simple. Something that just runs the basics and automatically backs up online and invisibly.

The vast majority of people don't need to have the choice of 17 different browsers, or 43 office suites, and they certainly don't need the terminal or Powershell, or anything else. They just need a browser and a way to maybe write a letter and view photos. Maybe a way for the kids to do their homework. If their laptop spontaneously combusts, they want to be able to sign into a new one and have everything put back as it was automatically.

ChromeOS is perfect for them, apart from being a Google product. It's something we tend to miss because we're technically minded, but most people don't care about computers, and don't want what we want. They want an appliance. If someone created that system with privacy built in, it could be great :)

I read the article and it just sounds like they're praising ChromeOS for being web browser centric. Need office, open Google docs/drive. Pretty much a Linux distro but by default come with a bunch of progressive web apps installed for common applications?

Consumer expectations. On Linux you can just use the web browser just like most people already do on ChromeOS and I assume windows and mac's. But on regular Linux, Mac, and Windows people expect more. So I guess a distro that brands itself and markets to users to just use the web browser for everything and maybe a store of progressive web apps/preinstalled ones

Also out of the box support. ChromeOS is Google backed. Laptop makers sell mainstream ChromeOS boxes. Linux doesn't have major mainstream device support. It'd be far less fussy if hardware vendors were releasing plenty of Linux out the box hardware. Right now it's some workstation centric hardware from Lenovo and Dell and smaller companies like System76

On that note I'd place my hopes with System76 since they're currently focused on consumer experience. Cosmic DE is still not prime-time ready but maybe a couple more years. 26.04 release use as the default for their new hardware and it still effectively be early adopter phase for Cosmic DE. Then 28.04 ready for primetime. Keep trying to break into being a mainstream hardware brand. Other is what happens with KDE Plasma with Valve and SteamOS, Plasma Mobile, and maybe the TV interface. A bunch of consumer centric use cases driving development in KDE land. Maybe they'll come up with a way to get flatpak permissions work in a way that alerts users on need and makes it easy to do like on Android/iOS

"Please, world World, FOSS World Needs Funding for Something You Want"

Mint?

We really should have a FirefoxOS equivalent. Frankly, there’s little reason not to do this. The only thing really missing is Firefox support for PWAs.

I’d imagine a Debian based OS, with cage first showing a first-time-setup thing, then going to simper web first DE. You still need a panel at the bottom for managing multiple windows and the system tray and wifi and a desktop and start menu for pinned apps. Storage doesn’t even need to be local, it could just point to something in the cloud that you have execute commands on your behalf.

This is the ideal for tons of simple, lightweight users and there are a LOT of them.

Like Fedora Silverblue or OpenSuSE Aeon/Kalpa?

the existing immutables will do

AnduinOS?

I don't know that very many people would understand the limitations of it just like they didn't with ChromeOS. Just need a major hardware manufacturer to start putting a Linux distro on their machines and make a more stable application installation system than KDE Discover or shore up Discover a bit and it would be great to consolidate rpm, deb, etc., rather than adding new systems like Snap and Flatpak.

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?

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.

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"

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!

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.

How they managed to write an article about easy to use Linux OSes without mentioning Ubuntu once is beyond me. :D

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.

No.

You want it, build it yourself. Or pay devs to do it.

https://xkcd.com/927/

also, are there not ungoogled distributions of Chromium OS? If there are not, maybe that could be the answer.

Wtf