What a weird title and article. I was entirely confused until the very last paragraph:
> Google said that ChromeOS would allow users to stream legacy Windows and productivity applications, which will help deliver them to devices by running the apps on a data center.
So if I understand this correctly, Google won’t enable “OS upgrades”, they’re offering a version of ChromeOS where some Windows apps can be streamed, Stadia-style. (Guess how long before it’s canned?)
Google Cloud, and Google Workspace, are subject to different terms of service than the consumer offerings. For example: "Google does not collect, scan, or use your content in Google Workspace services for advertising purposes". Same for model training etc it seems.
Which leaves it open to using your content for anything else than advertising, whatever that is. And even "advertising" can be called another name, if they decide so.
When I was selecting a cloud provider at a previous company there wasn't any concern with using GCP or Azure. There was a minor concern (from some clients in retail) about using Amazon, but even that was overblown in my opinion. These businesses live or die on being trustworthy with infrastructure.
I think the view that cloud providers are screwing over their customers behind their backs is just not grounded in reality, experience, evidence, or how business contracts work.
Think about it this way: Google is offering enterprises an alternative to 1) thin clients (big investment), 2) PC refreshes (big investment), and 3) Microsoft endpoint licensing (big investment). They've done this by creating a fully managed version of ChromeOS that can be installed on any x86 PC, and by adding software on top of it that allows ChromeOS to run remote Windows apps (just like a traditional thin client).
It's very appealing in some industries (like manufacturing), which has already been doing very well with ChromeOS.
Knee deep? In the US, 90% of manufacturing is up to their earlobes in Windows.
The most popular HMI is an Allen Bradley Panelview which runs Windows CE 6.0.
The most popular PLC is an AB CompactLogix/ControlLogix, which can only be edited using an IDE that runs on Windows.
Ignition is making significant inroads with Linux servers on the SCADA side, and I have heard of people building machines with Beckhoff TwinCAT BSD, but Windows is everywhere.
I spent 15 years in high tech manufacturing IT, the latter half running test engineering and end user computing. Manufacturing processes will likely NEVER move off Windows and there are plenty of airgapped NT4 machines out there still, and millions of unsupported homegrown apps running on top of old versions of MSSQL or even Access. This is besides the fact that there are machine connectors for Windows that don't exist for anything else -- it's a no brainer.
But, that doesn't mean ChromeOS hasn't been making inroads in manufacturing. Sales of ChromeOS Kiosks for Digital Signage are strong, and so is the adoption of cheap Chromeboxes & ChromeOS laptops for things like digital work instructions, check-in/out, and all sorts of manufacturing-adjacent processes/controls that don't require a full Windows PC. 10-15 years ago there was a trend to move a lot of this to traditional VDI, and that's the market that Google has been targeting.
This is just a small fraction of the overall manufacturing IT market, but for Google -- starting from $0 -- it's meaningful.
PCs get refreshed because like anything else, they start failing when they get old and this is worse when they're also out of support. Dealing with a never ending stream of hardware failures, while trying to source parts from eBay is not made better by the fact that they run shiny Chrome. You also might not want to share the data you put in those apps with Google too.
So fine-ish if you have an old computer at home, probably not so much if you have thousands of client devices to support, and data confidentiality to maintain. And then you're at the mercy of Google and their not so stellar reputation to not can the whole thing just after you're done putting in the effort.
That starts to happen after ~10 years in my experience. I have seen PCs under high loads and working without any problems after 12-13 years, too.
Considering performance increases are minimal when compared to last decade, keeping a 5 year old fleet alive for another 3 to 5 years is a big win for any company.
10 years for a good PC. The problem is people and business buy shitty minimum spec computers that are borderline obsolete the day they arrive. My wife got a "new" laptop a few years ago. It had 8G of ram and a HDD.
It happens every 10 years at home. Not a single big company out there relies on 10 year old computers for general usage, not some niche case where only that works.
I'm thinking for example high end business line Lenovo, Dell, HP laptops where after 4-5 years they are out of any support and the failure rate is high enough that the best approach is to replace the whole thing with the newer model. Rolling out hardware takes time so you'll have 1-2 years of delay between when the new model hits the market and when it's in the hands of all users so eventually you just have a 4 year lifecycle with 25% of the hardware getting replaced every tear because the failure rate by then is anyway in the double digits (10+% of laptops in a company will fail one way or another in a year). You want to replace while it's still predictable and manageable, not when they cascade fail, because that also helps you stay modern, and not maintain a huge "just in case" stock.
You can't tell a user "wait while I quickly change your laptop's keyboard with this used one" because the manufacturer doesn't support the model anymore. It's not that much different with desktops although they split the failure rates across multiple different devices (separate screen, keyboard, the works). When you have (tens of) thousands of these you can't run around replacing memory modules, SSDs, screens, power plugs without it getting really expensive really fast. Not just the fix but the loss of productivity too. It's an experience I confirmed in every large company regardless what model or manufacturer they were using.
This leaves smaller shops, the kind that might buy no-name units, or even self assemble them, to look into "we can save by putting Chrome on these and maybe the later maintenance on that PC won't actually prove more expensive long term. Magically one PC will live for decades, I can confirm with mine :). But in bulk devices will fail at alarming rate after 4-5 years.
Agreed, ridiculous title. And this will be syndicated around the global reuters network making everyone think that Google has something to do with Microsoft/Windows OS operations.
ChromeOS Flex is ChromeOS but can be installed on most commodity PC hardware. It’s not new, Reuters seems to have picked up a PR push in the wake of Microsoft’s Win10 announcement.
This seems less like an announcement of anything new, and more of a reminder of what is already possible.
That said, training, reimaging and refurbishing devices to be redeployed is no small amount of work. Also, it is likely organization would use the device as a thin client to Windows 365, or Azure Virtual Desktop assuming they don't already have a VDI, so I am not sure what is in this for Google, unless they think organization are going to migrate to Google docs as well.
The long game here seems to be that if you can get new customers to deploy ChromeOS Flex on existing hardware and use cloud based solutions for their software, then when the customers go to refresh the hardware or renew their cloud software contracts they're more likely to choose Chromebooks and Google's cloud software offerings.
If you can test out moving to ChromeOS on hardware you already have, it'll make it clear if you can switch to a Chromebook when hardware refresh time comes. That could likely gain them some market share as then the risk of moving to Chromebooks would be very small.
I would've switched to W11 if not for the godawful new taskbar which doesn't have a list of drives and locations, aka you can't pin "this computer" and its children on the taskbar as a clickable list.
Why, oh why would they do a version bump and then REMOVE features.
Everything gets enshittified.
Why remove such a good feature? To look more like Apple does? Fail fail fail Microsoft. Now Goliath imitates David.
Windows' UX was always way better than any other OS'. Why copy a worse product and get rid of decades of progress smh
> Why remove such a good feature? To look more like Apple does? Fail fail fail Microsoft
Imitating Apple, not understanding why Apple does some of these things (not that they're always right eh, far from it), thus fumbling really badly.
My Apple Fan Card is long expired, I'm not even paying my dues (just a phone in the last 3 years) but Jobs was absolutely right already back in 1995: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiOzGI4MqSU
Because there is a cost in not moving to a supported platform. Windows 11 has various improvements and some inconveniences.
Of course, you have the option of remaining on Windows 10 since possibly for you that menu is much more important than the rest. I assume Linux/Mac are not options because the UI changes they bring are massive compared to Windows 10 -> Windows 11 and you mentioned that you don't want to adapt to UI changes.
But if Linux/Mac are options, it means that the real problem is not that the UI changed, but that you were not asked and didn't gave your consent to the change. So basically that you feel offended by Microsoft changing the UI without your approval.
Serious question. Other than continued security updates, what's something you consider better about Windows 11? Honestly, I'm not sure of any feature that has improved since Windows 7.
It's not that I can not adopt to UI changes, for example, when I context switch to OSX. The problem is that the UI changed so some UI designers could generate career bullet points. And in doing so are forcing billions of people to have to adopt to something that didn't need fixing in the first place.
I've been waiting 2 years for them to correct that, and I'm surprised it didn't happen right away. It seemed like such a widely-hated feature would warrant a windows 8 -> 8.1 level UX adjustment
Explorer? Or the actual task-bar? Either way, they're both a regression in Windows 11.
I don't really have a problem with Windows, and use it at work every day, but at home, I dumped it a decade ago in favour of Fedora/KDE, and never looked back. In fact I discovered a few weeks back that I could still boot my old Windows install, and updated it to 11, and hence my leading comment.
>Google will allow businesses to install an auto-updating version of the Chrome operating system to Windows devices, potentially preventing millions of PCs from hitting landfills after Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab ends support for Windows 10 next year, parent company Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab said on Wednesday.
If only there were another, open source, non-Google operating system that could be installed on these computers.
If only Microsoft had web-app versions of their Office "productivity applications" that worked perfectly well on that other operating system.
Perhaps 2024 will be the year of the ChromeOS Desktop, after all.
If they want people to try it out that current have Windows 10, then they should follow the lead of WSL and have some sort of options that allows you to download it from the Microsoft Store and run it on Hyper-V. I don't want to boot off a USB drive to play with this thing.
What would be the incentive compared to say, run any linux distro? The only time I tried chromeOS, I didn't find anything outstanding and the UI wasn't particularly ergonomic.
Probably fair to say you're not the target market for ChromeOS. Neither am I. But I put it on an old laptop for my mother in law and she loves it. It never breaks, it updates automatically without her knowing and if the hardware ever does fail we can install ChromeOS on a different machine and she'll pick up right where she left off, because all user stuff is mirrored in the cloud.
That's all nice and all but you are talking about ChromeOS, not what would be a an independent fork/build from oss source code. You'd most probably lose the automatic cloud mirroring for a start.
Most linux distros provide mostly unattended updates anyway and immutable ones like Fedora Silverblue can silently install them as well without the user knowing about it.
Web-first UIs, although not commonly appreciated (including by me), on a stable, immutable base system do have their own practical advantage in many cases, especially in commercial or organizational setups.
Install a Linux container. Can do this via Settings > Advanced > Developers > "Linux Development Environment". By default, you'll get Debian. You can then do your usual apt install to get Wine. Or, you can enable Flatpak and use an app like Bottles. There are tutorials for installing Flatpak on ChromeOS. It's fairly simple if you want to go that route.
I personally used Flatpak and Bottles to run Photoshop CS2 on my rather underpowered Chromebook. Seemed to work well. Should give Steam a try too. Others seem to have good luck with it.
> In modern x86 CPUs, POPCNT is implemented as part of the SSE4 instruction set. For Intel's chips, it was added as part of SSE4.2 in the original first-generation Core architecture, codenamed Nehalem. In AMD's processors, it's included in SSE4a, first used in Phenom, Athlon, and Sempron CPUs based on the K10 architecture. These architectures date back to 2008 and 2007, respectively.
One aspect of this I wondered about at the time is that it happened in the wake of Meltdown/Spectre. Ideally it required AMD/intel to produce new microcode for their CPUs and motherboard manufacturers to produce new BIOS firmware for all applicable boards if you wanted to reduce risk before the OS can upload firmware. Presumably everyone wanted to avoid the tech site headlines about patches to workaround vulnerabilities reducing performance in their products, and they don't want "knows enough to be dangerous" geeks staying unpatched so counterstrike gets 156fps instead of 123fps.
So, my guess is MS had discussions with AMD/intel on how much of their products they were willing to support for the lifespan of the OS, and likewise AMD/intel talked to motherboard manufacturers for a similar assurance as part of whatever partnership/licensing is agreed there. It's probably not helped by how on the consumer side ongoing support is a burden, they make money by selling new products.
It also sucks. I'm typing this on a MS Surface brand laptop and have to fight off the "you can upgrade now" prompts because it changes things I don't find acceptable, even if they're trivial. Sounds like next October I'll be diving into the Linux compatibility of this laptop.
Win10 support might end in 2025, but I hear the security updates support won't end until 28/29 or something. Most probably won't care about regular support ending, but would be more concerned about security updates ending. I can't see this ChromeOS workaround being very enticing.
Yeah, I was talking about organizations (seems like most of this thread was). They're more likely to just pay for security updates than to switch to a different OS or hardware.
Most individuals will upgrade to Win11 or not know/care and stay Win10. They probably aren't going to switch OS just to use MS products over the network.
> A report from Canalys Research suggests that the termination of Windows 10 support could send about 240 million PCs to landfills, as demand for devices without security updates could be low.
77 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] thread> Google said that ChromeOS would allow users to stream legacy Windows and productivity applications, which will help deliver them to devices by running the apps on a data center.
So if I understand this correctly, Google won’t enable “OS upgrades”, they’re offering a version of ChromeOS where some Windows apps can be streamed, Stadia-style. (Guess how long before it’s canned?)
https://support.google.com/a/answer/13881138
I think the view that cloud providers are screwing over their customers behind their backs is just not grounded in reality, experience, evidence, or how business contracts work.
I'm thinking how long is it before the latest/greatest subscription service is born from it?
Edit: Forgot a space.
It's very appealing in some industries (like manufacturing), which has already been doing very well with ChromeOS.
In Germany, 90% of manufacturing industry is knees deep windows.
The most popular HMI is an Allen Bradley Panelview which runs Windows CE 6.0.
The most popular PLC is an AB CompactLogix/ControlLogix, which can only be edited using an IDE that runs on Windows.
Ignition is making significant inroads with Linux servers on the SCADA side, and I have heard of people building machines with Beckhoff TwinCAT BSD, but Windows is everywhere.
But, that doesn't mean ChromeOS hasn't been making inroads in manufacturing. Sales of ChromeOS Kiosks for Digital Signage are strong, and so is the adoption of cheap Chromeboxes & ChromeOS laptops for things like digital work instructions, check-in/out, and all sorts of manufacturing-adjacent processes/controls that don't require a full Windows PC. 10-15 years ago there was a trend to move a lot of this to traditional VDI, and that's the market that Google has been targeting.
This is just a small fraction of the overall manufacturing IT market, but for Google -- starting from $0 -- it's meaningful.
PCs get refreshed because like anything else, they start failing when they get old and this is worse when they're also out of support. Dealing with a never ending stream of hardware failures, while trying to source parts from eBay is not made better by the fact that they run shiny Chrome. You also might not want to share the data you put in those apps with Google too.
So fine-ish if you have an old computer at home, probably not so much if you have thousands of client devices to support, and data confidentiality to maintain. And then you're at the mercy of Google and their not so stellar reputation to not can the whole thing just after you're done putting in the effort.
Considering performance increases are minimal when compared to last decade, keeping a 5 year old fleet alive for another 3 to 5 years is a big win for any company.
I'm thinking for example high end business line Lenovo, Dell, HP laptops where after 4-5 years they are out of any support and the failure rate is high enough that the best approach is to replace the whole thing with the newer model. Rolling out hardware takes time so you'll have 1-2 years of delay between when the new model hits the market and when it's in the hands of all users so eventually you just have a 4 year lifecycle with 25% of the hardware getting replaced every tear because the failure rate by then is anyway in the double digits (10+% of laptops in a company will fail one way or another in a year). You want to replace while it's still predictable and manageable, not when they cascade fail, because that also helps you stay modern, and not maintain a huge "just in case" stock.
You can't tell a user "wait while I quickly change your laptop's keyboard with this used one" because the manufacturer doesn't support the model anymore. It's not that much different with desktops although they split the failure rates across multiple different devices (separate screen, keyboard, the works). When you have (tens of) thousands of these you can't run around replacing memory modules, SSDs, screens, power plugs without it getting really expensive really fast. Not just the fix but the loss of productivity too. It's an experience I confirmed in every large company regardless what model or manufacturer they were using.
This leaves smaller shops, the kind that might buy no-name units, or even self assemble them, to look into "we can save by putting Chrome on these and maybe the later maintenance on that PC won't actually prove more expensive long term. Magically one PC will live for decades, I can confirm with mine :). But in bulk devices will fail at alarming rate after 4-5 years.
Yeah, a base model macbook air m2 is only $1100. You can't expect more than 8G of ram in that price range.
https://chromeenterprise.google/intl/en_au/os/chromeosflex/
And then HN picked it up and upvoted it to front :SMH:
Nearly 600 devices certified https://support.google.com/chromeosflex/answer/11513094
That said, training, reimaging and refurbishing devices to be redeployed is no small amount of work. Also, it is likely organization would use the device as a thin client to Windows 365, or Azure Virtual Desktop assuming they don't already have a VDI, so I am not sure what is in this for Google, unless they think organization are going to migrate to Google docs as well.
Oh Google, they are good at keeping me guessing.
If you can test out moving to ChromeOS on hardware you already have, it'll make it clear if you can switch to a Chromebook when hardware refresh time comes. That could likely gain them some market share as then the risk of moving to Chromebooks would be very small.
Why, oh why would they do a version bump and then REMOVE features.
Everything gets enshittified.
Why remove such a good feature? To look more like Apple does? Fail fail fail Microsoft. Now Goliath imitates David.
Windows' UX was always way better than any other OS'. Why copy a worse product and get rid of decades of progress smh
Imitating Apple, not understanding why Apple does some of these things (not that they're always right eh, far from it), thus fumbling really badly.
My Apple Fan Card is long expired, I'm not even paying my dues (just a phone in the last 3 years) but Jobs was absolutely right already back in 1995: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiOzGI4MqSU
Don't get ossified in your current way of doing things.
Of course, you have the option of remaining on Windows 10 since possibly for you that menu is much more important than the rest. I assume Linux/Mac are not options because the UI changes they bring are massive compared to Windows 10 -> Windows 11 and you mentioned that you don't want to adapt to UI changes.
But if Linux/Mac are options, it means that the real problem is not that the UI changed, but that you were not asked and didn't gave your consent to the change. So basically that you feel offended by Microsoft changing the UI without your approval.
It's not that I can not adopt to UI changes, for example, when I context switch to OSX. The problem is that the UI changed so some UI designers could generate career bullet points. And in doing so are forcing billions of people to have to adopt to something that didn't need fixing in the first place.
But it's not all positive, I'm annoyed by the removal of the month calendar when you click on the date.
> The problem is that the UI changed so some UI designers could generate career bullet points.
Even if true, it doesn't change the fact that Windows 10 will soon not be supported anymore.
As they say, the only constant is change.
https://www.stardock.com/products/start11
I don't really have a problem with Windows, and use it at work every day, but at home, I dumped it a decade ago in favour of Fedora/KDE, and never looked back. In fact I discovered a few weeks back that I could still boot my old Windows install, and updated it to 11, and hence my leading comment.
If only there were another, open source, non-Google operating system that could be installed on these computers.
If only Microsoft had web-app versions of their Office "productivity applications" that worked perfectly well on that other operating system.
Perhaps 2024 will be the year of the ChromeOS Desktop, after all.
I suspect most of the affected PCs reside in consumers' hands and small government offices, not in large corporations.
Maybe the article link should be changed to this?
I came across FydeOS (https://fydeos.io/) but it doesn't look like a community effort, rather a commercial product based out of Beijing.
Most linux distros provide mostly unattended updates anyway and immutable ones like Fedora Silverblue can silently install them as well without the user knowing about it.
I personally used Flatpak and Bottles to run Photoshop CS2 on my rather underpowered Chromebook. Seemed to work well. Should give Steam a try too. Others seem to have good luck with it.
Or is it different for enterprise licensing
> In modern x86 CPUs, POPCNT is implemented as part of the SSE4 instruction set. For Intel's chips, it was added as part of SSE4.2 in the original first-generation Core architecture, codenamed Nehalem. In AMD's processors, it's included in SSE4a, first used in Phenom, Athlon, and Sempron CPUs based on the K10 architecture. These architectures date back to 2008 and 2007, respectively.
So, my guess is MS had discussions with AMD/intel on how much of their products they were willing to support for the lifespan of the OS, and likewise AMD/intel talked to motherboard manufacturers for a similar assurance as part of whatever partnership/licensing is agreed there. It's probably not helped by how on the consumer side ongoing support is a burden, they make money by selling new products.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3695068/for-windows-10...
You can pay for security updates, but it's unlikely individuals will:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/windows-10-gets-thre...
Most individuals will upgrade to Win11 or not know/care and stay Win10. They probably aren't going to switch OS just to use MS products over the network.
Why would anybody throw away their Windows 10 computer instead of upgrading it to Windows 11 using a simple registry bypass (https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm-re...)? That's stupidity!
I'm on a 2012 macbook RN 16GB / 4TB SSD with open core legacy patcher.
I am truly baffled.