> Previously ChromeOS was using a homemade graphics stack called "Freon," but now with Wayland, it'll be on the new and normal desktop Linux graphic stack.
More interesting than I thought it would be. Hopefully this means better upstream GPU support for the plethora of ARM tablets/laptops that run ChromeOS.
Aside from some flags needed for screen sharing, what problems have you faced? I've found chrome to run significantly better on Wayland than X11- the last time I tried chrome in X, the screen tearing during scrolling was almost nauseating.
I'll admit, though, that it might be OS dependent. For some reason, chrome+Wayland+debian was more trouble to get screen sharing working right than on arch. Maybe I've mostly gotten lucky?
I'm hoping this means we will be able to run Linux binaries on ChromeOS at some point - I'm specifically interesting in being able to run Visual Studio Code (for Linux) and some dev environments and use Chromebooks plus a Linux-compatible OS as my dev machine.
I'm guessing GP means natively, not in a VM. I've been super grateful for the VM-based method, but I still prefer the native experience like that provided by Crouton[1]. With Crouton being "maintenance-only" now I share GP's hope that a similar thing will be possible and easy.
ChromeOS seems to consider it an anti-goal for users to be using the OS like a general purpose OS. Crostini allows them to keep the rest of the system locked down, where-as just running vscode on ChromeOS directly would mean giving Vscode more unconstrained access.
IIRC Crostini requires certain hardware CPU features, so you need a Chromebook model that supports it. Most Chromebooks released after 2019, as well as select earlier models in the list in the Wiki
The whole idea of the Chromebook is that its sort of an internet appliance that you is supposed to be automatically updated and secure, and if in doubt, rebooting will return it to a known good state. If ChromeOS can run any random thing it's just a normal Linux laptop at that point.
That's why Developer mode isn't for the average buyer of a ChromeOS device, you have to hold down keys and specifically enable it after a big warning screen saying it will delete all data.
The official ChromeOS Linux support is a container that is inside of a VM.
I don't think the person you replied to was asking for it to be enabled out of the box. Them talking about using a Chromebook as a dev machine makes me think they'd be okay with having to enable developer mode to run Linux binaries.
> treat a Chromebook as a regular laptop, install any Linux distro you wish to
Apparently this is via a VM, with limitations (no hardware acceleration, for example); presumably the original commenter wants to be able to run Linux binaries natively.
> ChromeOS isn't a general purpose Linux distro
But based on the article, it seems Google is taking steps towards making it one (switching to Wayland, using standard Chrome for Linux, etc.).
I should note I am no expert on anything of this, I have a Chromebook as a sort of backup/alternative. FlipC434
Developer mode basically unlocks the r/w firmware, so you can boot from USB and replace the firmware etc, but the Read-only Google Root of Trust stays there, however as far as I know the ChromeOS 'distro' exists only to support running the Chrome Web Browser, and also Android and Linux VMs, +audio/video/input/etc. So if you have root on a ChromeOS device in developer mode, and you are dropped into a shell and want to run firefox, how would you do that?
There are no packages for running on 'ChromeOS'. You can't just apt-get. I don't know if ChromeOS is self-hosted, ie. it is compiled and generated on itself and not some other Linux distro.
which
I don't think adopting Wayland or using the 'Linux' Chrome makes it move towards being a 'general purpose' distro. This just lessens the amount of change between ChromeOS and Linux so no more Freon library. It also seems to greatly reduce the difference between the CHROME_BROWSER_FOR_CHROMEOS and THE_CHROME_BROWSER_FOR_LINUX builds.
I guess I wasn't clear about how I thought this stuff worked.
WSL is like the Chromebook Official Linux Developer thing -(he last time I updated it), Debian, inside a container, inside a VM, running under ChromeOS. You can run what Debian can run. Inside the container.
I thought ChromeOS as a distro is more like a runtime - it has the stuff to let it boot a Chrome Browser and VMs. etc +hardware support. There wouldn't be much point (other than fun) for Running random software on ChromeOS. It would be like OpenWRT, but without the package manager.
You can already launch docker containers, lxc containers and windows, linux and even macos via KVM from crostini. You can even run nested virt inside those vms. Curious what the motivation is that those options do not address. Is it mainly resource allocation concerns?
The really stunningly good ecosystem ripple effect of switching to Wayland is that anyone who wants to make hardware for Chromebooks now needs driver support for the one clear obvious huge target they should have had been targeting anyways, Wayland.
More directly obviously useful to most people though is just the fact that the shelf life of these units should hopefully be a lot longer. The OS might not longer get updates, but Chrome can keep upgrading & just run on whatever Wayland compositor is there.
Well, Wayland doesn't really depend on any drivers, but most Wayland compositors (as well as modern X11, as far as I know) depend on the Direct Rendering Manager/Infrastructure and related features. I suspect that Chrome OS already uses these, so there may not be a bit ecosystem difference from that side.
The forrest I feel you are missing in calling out these trees is that Chrome already supports a good variety of options on Wayland & can be nicely accelerated there.
Where-as the old Skia based ChromeOS rendering made having actual hardware compositing support much more optional.
The bar is just clearly much higher for what drivers will be expected to do now. Passing off stunted barely working custom low level drivers will no longer be enough. I can't see how anyone could rush to defend other views, at this point.
I don't really understand the point of turning ChromeOS into Linux. The point of ChromeOS used to be a hardened secure browser only computer that would work identically with your login across systems on the platform. If you want a Linux laptop, why not just buy a Linux laptop. Why use do you want Google's dumbed down implementation of Linux.
They're not "turning ChromeOS into Linux." ChromeOS can and will still be a hardened secure browser-only computer that works identically with your login across systems on the platform. Having separate binaries for the UI shell and the Chrome browser doesn't nullify everything else. TFA even points out that users won't really notice any difference.
I remember when - and miss - the OS being "a single Chrome window, that's the shell, that's it". It was simple. Unbloated. Now it's an absolute mess that Google doesn't know what to do with - treat it like an Android device, or treat it like a computer.
One of the main points of the project was for security reasons.
Updates to the Chrome browser build for ChromeOS came out later than the standard Linux/Windows/Mac Chrome builds because the special chromeos build needed time to be integrated/tested with the rest of ChromeOS.
With LaCros, the browser can be updated independently from the rest of the OS.
idk if you've used a chromeos device, but they have an infuriating update schedule where it seems like there are updates daily, and they _always_ require a full system reboot. they apparently can't be consolidated either, so half the time i'll reboot to apply one and immediately get a notification of another
this presumably allows them to ease that a bit and apply some updates with the system still running, with maybe a quicker browser-only restart
> idk if you've used a chromeos device, but they have an infuriating update schedule where it seems like there are updates daily
This has been the opposite of my experience on the stable channel. Perhaps you're on one of the more volatile ChromeOS update channels? Or you use your device infrequently and put it to sleep when not in use, resulting in a similar UX issue that plagues game consoles: the appearance of always having updates when used.
Yes. The beta channel for ChromeOS seems to have a new release every week. I usually ignore it until the Linux shell or Steam stops working, then relent and let it reboot.
That…feels very plausible? Microsoft has to be peeved at how much of the education market has been taken over by Chromebooks. Providing some locked down OS, with minimal specs, friendly to corporate management software, Teams preinstalled, etc feels like a pretty good move. The Chromebooks only work though an app store, so this idea could feed into Microsoft’s as well.
Unless Microsoft would rather target the cream of the market through their tablets.
Edit: then again, maybe they have become hooked on the Win11 telemetry + ad revenue. Stripped down OS has a harder time justifying the need to include Candy Crush.
>how much of the education market has been taken over by Chromebooks.
Why is this even a ting wherever this is(US?)? Mandating school kids use a platform owned by Google, a corporation specialized in advertising and data harvesting, feels like letting McDonalds's and Coca-Cola be in charge of the school cafeteria and educating kids about a balanced diet.
Am I taking crazy pills, or am I missing something and I misunderstood the situation?
If you want kids to have laptops - which is really the questionable thing to begin with - then Chromebooks are safer and easier to secure against the typical kinds of threats a school cares about than Windows PCs and cheaper than Macs.
I think a bigger question is why kids need laptops at all..
It's pretty much this way anyway, the largest shareholders of CC and Mc Donalds are also the largest shareholders of largest outsource catering providers.
>a corporation specialized in advertising and data harvesting
You could be describing Microsoft in 2023, e.g. Chromium-based Edge, Windows 11 start menu ads, Xbox Live background services being integral to Windows even on government/corporate computers, the unholy marriage of Bing & OpenAI, Windows Live ID, outlook.com, every corporation being cool with putting their data into Azure/Office 365, etc.
In my country (and I assume it's similar in others), Microsoft has and traditionally always had schools, hospitals and governments, pretty much the whole public sector in tight grip.
There is a lengthy history behind that which includes numerous reasons.
Parent comment was making the comparison because GP pointed out the absurdity of forcing kids into Google ecosystem and exposing them to data harvesting.
When the original story was about MS and they behave in similar or the same ways, I believe that it's very relevant.
Two wrongs don't make one right though: students at a public school, their data as well as their mindshare, should not mandatorily be sold to the highest/lowest bidder.
Google, Microsoft, and Apple are all evil in their own ways. Chrome OS is significantly more reliable than Windows, macOS, or desktop Linux and Chromebooks tend to be cheap (although Windows craptops are catching up).
There's more important topics on the curriculum than 1970s OS design. Clear speech, thought, language skills, comprehension, critical thinking, mathematics, geography, history -- you know, life's syscalls.
> Clear speech, thought, language skills, comprehension, critical thinking, mathematics, geography, history
Aren't books and a bottom of the barrel PC with internet access all you need to learn those? Why a Chromebook? NUC PCs are cheaper and it's easier to replace the mouse and keyboard that kids break.
Because any second spent farting around with the machine instead of using it to learn about the topic at hand steals from the topic.
Because teachers aren't sysadmins, because even if they were they aren't going to admin 30 different laptops that the students have installed god-knows-what on.
This solution has to be military grade in reliability and simplicity and unless/until someone develops a hardware certification programme, a meaningful long-term-support plan, a remote administration solution, a security focused browser and a hosted identity system, all in a package that costs ~$200 new then it's going to be CrOS.
Don't forget the marketing spend needed even if you did tick the above boxes.
No one is complaining that their text-books are not turing complete, just stop viewing these devices as general purpose machines and view them as the child-focused-appliances that they are. Like Teslas.
Excuse me but how the hell is this a problem in Scandinavia? Don't you guys have the best schools in the world?
Even in Eastern Europe 20 years ago we had sys-admins in schools, and we were told that Scandinavian schools do it so much bater because they fund them the way the US funds its military.
Schools are ok. IT not ok. There is a mishmash of I hate/love google mantra. Some want to do local but most no have the skillset to run servers ZFS etc. Either some idiot in administration then does outsourcing to remote MSP that support Windows.
The startup I work for sells to education customers in Scandinavia. It is my impression that schools are either "Microsoft schools" or "Google schools" (these are the terms used).
The Danish data protection agency made some ruling against Google that ought to have meant, if the existing rules had been followed, that kids weren't allowed to use Chromebooks, but the schools said they couldn't teach kids without them, so the rules weren't followed.
Because schools need cheap laptops that are easy to centrally manage by a single platform. Google also has a Workspace for Education suite that includes all the Google Docs stuff and teacher tools (Google Classroom). They also have a no ads or data collected policy.
It's very enticing. There's no real competition. The closest is Microsoft but Windows machines are much more expensive to manage and have worse performance on low-end hardware.
Let's imagine what HN wants - a Linux laptop running Firefox and LibreOffice. You're not going to get fleet management features, collaborative document editing, or built-in classroom management tools. Kids are still going to Google to search for things (and use ChatGPT).
No mandate. However chromebooks when they came out were a HUGE improvement over low end windows laptops. They are crazy durable, include instructions for when you pour soda into the keyboard, are durable enough to be thrown, leave a mark on the ceiling, and still survive. They run well even on old hardware, 4GB ram is plenty. They also don't get viruses, don't require any local expertise, don't require backups, don't require any software licenses, no virus scanning, and have minimal requirements from central IT. If a student manages to kill one you can literally just hand them another and say login.
So the savings in hardware costs, reduced support costs, and the "it just works" design is pretty attractive to school districts. Who'd have thought a $180 laptop could be durable, useful, no crapware/malware/ransomware, and last a decade?
Sure it would be nice if it didn't depend on google, but nobody else was stepping up.
My kid has had three over the last decade, the last we paid $50 to keep when she graduated. It's still being used years later.
Here on this side of the pound, schools hardly give students laptops or similar, on the more fortunate ones there might be a computer room with desktops, and the really very fortunate ones might have some kind of tablets or laptops.
And it is up to the families to buy their own kids computers, eventually some kind of state support might be available.
Chromebooks are usually left as a curiosity among Saturn, Media Markt, Blue, Vobis, Public, .... that gets routinely rebated until someome finally takes them away.
> Chromebooks are usually left as a curiosity among Saturn, Media Markt, Blue, Vobis, Public, .... that gets routinely rebated until someome finally takes them away.
Seldom see them in public in DACH and southern countries, on planes, trains, coffee shops, only rich family schools have laptops like on US,...
I’ve recently used a Samsung galaxy book 5g that goes currently for $260 on Amazon running windows on arm64 and I feel this could be an indicator of how they easily could do this.
Microsoft has had the sense to let Linux become the dominant OS on its cloud provider. Where it's the right tool for the job at hand, I suspect Nadella's Microsoft would be perfectly fine with being built on Linux.
They will not convert whole system into native nabraries like gtk or qt. It is about dividing chrome binaries in order to get easier update process for developers.
87 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadMore interesting than I thought it would be. Hopefully this means better upstream GPU support for the plethora of ARM tablets/laptops that run ChromeOS.
This will certainly mean that Wayland will become a first class citizen and be less prone to random breakage.
I'll admit, though, that it might be OS dependent. For some reason, chrome+Wayland+debian was more trouble to get screen sharing working right than on arch. Maybe I've mostly gotten lucky?
ChromeOS and Chrome browser can/will be updated separately, with Chrome being the same as the normal Linux version.
One hell of a long and expensive refactor.
[1]: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton
ChromeOS seems to consider it an anti-goal for users to be using the OS like a general purpose OS. Crostini allows them to keep the rest of the system locked down, where-as just running vscode on ChromeOS directly would mean giving Vscode more unconstrained access.
https://chromeos.dev/en/linux/linux-on-chromeos-deep-dive
That's why Developer mode isn't for the average buyer of a ChromeOS device, you have to hold down keys and specifically enable it after a big warning screen saying it will delete all data.
The official ChromeOS Linux support is a container that is inside of a VM.
ChromeOS isn't a general purpose Linux distro, so in order to actually run a lot of things you'd need to install all their dependencies anyways.
Apparently this is via a VM, with limitations (no hardware acceleration, for example); presumably the original commenter wants to be able to run Linux binaries natively.
> ChromeOS isn't a general purpose Linux distro
But based on the article, it seems Google is taking steps towards making it one (switching to Wayland, using standard Chrome for Linux, etc.).
Developer mode basically unlocks the r/w firmware, so you can boot from USB and replace the firmware etc, but the Read-only Google Root of Trust stays there, however as far as I know the ChromeOS 'distro' exists only to support running the Chrome Web Browser, and also Android and Linux VMs, +audio/video/input/etc. So if you have root on a ChromeOS device in developer mode, and you are dropped into a shell and want to run firefox, how would you do that? There are no packages for running on 'ChromeOS'. You can't just apt-get. I don't know if ChromeOS is self-hosted, ie. it is compiled and generated on itself and not some other Linux distro.
which
I don't think adopting Wayland or using the 'Linux' Chrome makes it move towards being a 'general purpose' distro. This just lessens the amount of change between ChromeOS and Linux so no more Freon library. It also seems to greatly reduce the difference between the CHROME_BROWSER_FOR_CHROMEOS and THE_CHROME_BROWSER_FOR_LINUX builds.
"Linux for Chromebooks: Secure Development"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRlh8LX4kQI
https://chromium.googlesource.com/crosvm/crosvm/
https://chromeos.dev/en/posts/making-android-more-secure-wit...
WSL is like the Chromebook Official Linux Developer thing -(he last time I updated it), Debian, inside a container, inside a VM, running under ChromeOS. You can run what Debian can run. Inside the container.
I thought ChromeOS as a distro is more like a runtime - it has the stuff to let it boot a Chrome Browser and VMs. etc +hardware support. There wouldn't be much point (other than fun) for Running random software on ChromeOS. It would be like OpenWRT, but without the package manager.
The equivalent is linux/crostini
https://chromeos.dev/en/posts/making-android-more-secure-wit...
More directly obviously useful to most people though is just the fact that the shelf life of these units should hopefully be a lot longer. The OS might not longer get updates, but Chrome can keep upgrading & just run on whatever Wayland compositor is there.
Where-as the old Skia based ChromeOS rendering made having actual hardware compositing support much more optional.
The bar is just clearly much higher for what drivers will be expected to do now. Passing off stunted barely working custom low level drivers will no longer be enough. I can't see how anyone could rush to defend other views, at this point.
I remember when - and miss - the OS being "a single Chrome window, that's the shell, that's it". It was simple. Unbloated. Now it's an absolute mess that Google doesn't know what to do with - treat it like an Android device, or treat it like a computer.
Updates to the Chrome browser build for ChromeOS came out later than the standard Linux/Windows/Mac Chrome builds because the special chromeos build needed time to be integrated/tested with the rest of ChromeOS.
With LaCros, the browser can be updated independently from the rest of the OS.
this presumably allows them to ease that a bit and apply some updates with the system still running, with maybe a quicker browser-only restart
This has been the opposite of my experience on the stable channel. Perhaps you're on one of the more volatile ChromeOS update channels? Or you use your device infrequently and put it to sleep when not in use, resulting in a similar UX issue that plagues game consoles: the appearance of always having updates when used.
https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+log
Unless Microsoft would rather target the cream of the market through their tablets.
Edit: then again, maybe they have become hooked on the Win11 telemetry + ad revenue. Stripped down OS has a harder time justifying the need to include Candy Crush.
Why is this even a ting wherever this is(US?)? Mandating school kids use a platform owned by Google, a corporation specialized in advertising and data harvesting, feels like letting McDonalds's and Coca-Cola be in charge of the school cafeteria and educating kids about a balanced diet.
Am I taking crazy pills, or am I missing something and I misunderstood the situation?
I think a bigger question is why kids need laptops at all..
You could be describing Microsoft in 2023, e.g. Chromium-based Edge, Windows 11 start menu ads, Xbox Live background services being integral to Windows even on government/corporate computers, the unholy marriage of Bing & OpenAI, Windows Live ID, outlook.com, every corporation being cool with putting their data into Azure/Office 365, etc.
In my country (and I assume it's similar in others), Microsoft has and traditionally always had schools, hospitals and governments, pretty much the whole public sector in tight grip.
There is a lengthy history behind that which includes numerous reasons.
Parent comment was making the comparison because GP pointed out the absurdity of forcing kids into Google ecosystem and exposing them to data harvesting.
When the original story was about MS and they behave in similar or the same ways, I believe that it's very relevant.
Two wrongs don't make one right though: students at a public school, their data as well as their mindshare, should not mandatorily be sold to the highest/lowest bidder.
Only for the first 2-3 years, at which point it expires and the kids need a new laptop.
It's not like we're replacing healthy lunches with Coke.
It's either Chromebooks, or expensive, clunky, virus-prone, impossible-to-administer Windows PCs.
Aren't books and a bottom of the barrel PC with internet access all you need to learn those? Why a Chromebook? NUC PCs are cheaper and it's easier to replace the mouse and keyboard that kids break.
Because teachers aren't sysadmins, because even if they were they aren't going to admin 30 different laptops that the students have installed god-knows-what on.
This solution has to be military grade in reliability and simplicity and unless/until someone develops a hardware certification programme, a meaningful long-term-support plan, a remote administration solution, a security focused browser and a hosted identity system, all in a package that costs ~$200 new then it's going to be CrOS.
Don't forget the marketing spend needed even if you did tick the above boxes.
No one is complaining that their text-books are not turing complete, just stop viewing these devices as general purpose machines and view them as the child-focused-appliances that they are. Like Teslas.
Why you ask?
As a school teacher I can see
- for ages no proper trained IT staff in schools
- I know better linux, rpi than them. Heck they read IT news from cnet.com
- managing+ security in local servers is very difficult
- money for space
- google edu is/was almost free
- HIPAA equivalent rules
- though everyone will talk and tell linux, libreoffice
- the polishing and consistency of chromeos is great (for cheap $150 laptop)
- ideally linux foundation or some one should have made a 'school appliance' but ...
Excuse me but how the hell is this a problem in Scandinavia? Don't you guys have the best schools in the world?
Even in Eastern Europe 20 years ago we had sys-admins in schools, and we were told that Scandinavian schools do it so much bater because they fund them the way the US funds its military.
The Danish data protection agency made some ruling against Google that ought to have meant, if the existing rules had been followed, that kids weren't allowed to use Chromebooks, but the schools said they couldn't teach kids without them, so the rules weren't followed.
Yes, it's great.
It's very enticing. There's no real competition. The closest is Microsoft but Windows machines are much more expensive to manage and have worse performance on low-end hardware.
Let's imagine what HN wants - a Linux laptop running Firefox and LibreOffice. You're not going to get fleet management features, collaborative document editing, or built-in classroom management tools. Kids are still going to Google to search for things (and use ChatGPT).
So the savings in hardware costs, reduced support costs, and the "it just works" design is pretty attractive to school districts. Who'd have thought a $180 laptop could be durable, useful, no crapware/malware/ransomware, and last a decade?
Sure it would be nice if it didn't depend on google, but nobody else was stepping up.
My kid has had three over the last decade, the last we paid $50 to keep when she graduated. It's still being used years later.
Here on this side of the pound, schools hardly give students laptops or similar, on the more fortunate ones there might be a computer room with desktops, and the really very fortunate ones might have some kind of tablets or laptops.
And it is up to the families to buy their own kids computers, eventually some kind of state support might be available.
Chromebooks are usually left as a curiosity among Saturn, Media Markt, Blue, Vobis, Public, .... that gets routinely rebated until someome finally takes them away.
> Chromebooks are usually left as a curiosity among Saturn, Media Markt, Blue, Vobis, Public, .... that gets routinely rebated until someome finally takes them away.
Seldom see them in public in DACH and southern countries, on planes, trains, coffee shops, only rich family schools have laptops like on US,...
To be honest, what I think they lack is straightforward licensing in order to run an organization with these tools with high availability.
That would be an interesting move.