There were a bunch of these during the netbook boom and they were grandparent-proof. Sadly, all of my favorites (Moblin/Meego, Joli OS and xpud) are long dead.
The goal is banishing any and all questions of what to download, what desktop, what apps, packaging formats, software stores, user accounts, backing up, all of it: run the browser locally, sync the data – and only the data – to the cloud.
That is not really popular in the open source world. Who finances the cloud, is it open, who can read or sell your data?
I think project bluefin has a similarish philosophy of being a "cloud first os", would definitely recommend checking it out: https://projectbluefin.io/
In all honesty though, there's a tonne of easy to recommend distros which don't need set up if you are a "normie" just wanting to get online:
- Elementary
- Mint
- Ubuntu
I think the real "secret sauce" for ChomeOS' success is basically big coorporate backing and being from-a-store-buyable. I think the truth is that nobody other tham techies is likely to want to install an OS themselves.
> Many of our technologies are distributed together within Endless OS. This is not your typical Linux distribution. We don’t use rpm, apt, or any other packaging system. In our quest for simplicity and robustness, we use a read-only root file system managed by OSTree with application bundles overlaid on top. Most desktop Linux distributions are oriented towards tech-savvy users and developers, but we have a different target user.
Linux desktop in general suffers from not having good "default" options. I can't really recommend any single distro, can't recommend even a single desktop environment as good for most people. Mint is very good, but it looks painfully dated in many places. Fedora is very good, but Gnome Shell is not for everyone in the slightest and debian base is just too wide-spread to ignore. Ubuntu is very good, but actually it's not that good in 2025 because canonical spent 15 years reinventing the wheel and not finishing any.
I don't think this would work. A big part of why ChromeOS is so simple is the Google services backing it. Without the unified login, automated backups, verified app store, and hardware certification ChromeOS wouldn't be the easy to use system that it is.
Providing drivers for all the hardware and peripherals that all work together in all the permutations is properly hard. I’d argue it’s the root issue.
Google can test each ChromeOS release against their Chromebooks to make sure everything works. If something fails, someone in Google can root cause on a matching hardware configuration easily.
This is not feasible for a general desktop Linux distribution because there are too many permutations. If the distribution is targeted at non-technical users the matter of root causing an issue on a hardware configuration the maintenance team can’t replicate becomes intractable.
A solution might be to literally only support Google Chromebooks, to constrain the possibility space, but even that is a big undertaking if the goal is to match ChromeOS for quality.
I've been touting the chromeOS banner for years. It makes a huge amount of sense to have an OS optimized for the place most people are going to be spending 90% of their time - the browser - without any extra bloat. Then if you need more, just add those features. Gone are the days when you couldn't do certain things on a chromebook as well - assuming you have the hardware to support it, you can do almost anything you can do on a "proper" linux distro that you can on a chromebook, because you can run a full containerized distro and all the apps that come from it. I've got VSCode in my dock and can do web development easier than on a Windows desktop.
> 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.
This is probably the only part of the article that is compelling. I guess having a simple, immutable Linux distro that prioritises being hard to break over many other things could indeed be a good thing for getting less tech-savvy users over to Linux.
But even then, who do they expect to maintain it? I would guess that many distros are maintained by people who are passionate about using them, and I suspect the overlap of FOSS maintainers and people who want to use such a locked-down, stripped-back system is small. And if the distro really didn't have many native apps, then users would either need to rely on Google for all their services anyway (somewhat defeating the point), or the "FOSS world" would also need to produce (and maintain, and host) a full suite of browser-based apps to rival Google's. Which is very far from easy.
The idea of "friction" comes up again and again whenever we talk about open products (whether it's FOSS or open platforms like the ones in the Fediverse, etc). People want an experience that is completely smooth and frictionless, while remaining free and open. But IMO freedom is friction. Fundamentally it means being able to choose, and not being completely reliant on megacorps, and being able to tinker and explore, and all of these things are sources of friction. Like, the author complains that there are so many distros to choose from, but how would adding another distro to the mix address that?
This is ultimately a business model problem. There are FOSS projects out there; some of them are even listed in the article. The problem is that making it "Just Work(tm)" is hard; it's a lot of work, requiring a large number of engineers. And funny thing, engineers prefer food with their meals.
Saying "FOSS world" we need XXX is pretty useless. As a FOSS mainatinaer, the answer I always give people demanding their favorite pet feature is, "clean, maintainable patches are appreciated", ChromiumOS is free software; someone could take it use it as the basis for something like ChromeOS. But the author of the article has basically admitted that the derivitives of Chromium would quickly fail if Chromium stoped being something that they could free ride off of. Shouldn't that tell you everything about what the problem is with this picture?
Well there was that novel CloudReady solution, which would have allowed people to repurpose old PCs/laptops and replace them with ChromiumOS, but then Google acquired them, and it became "ChromeOS Flex". [0] Not sure where it went from there. Presumably once ChromeOS gets axed (or merged into Android), Flex would go away, too.
The basic problem of this line of thinking has always been (and always will be) that FOSS, in the end, is just a loose-knit community of people who do eachother the favor or sharing out the programs they made. There’s absolutely no reason for that community to go and try to attract a bunch of non-technical people who won’t be able to contribute back.
Who wants to deal with a bunch of users who only switched because Windows 10 stopped updating? I’m going to have to switch my stupid gaming PC away from Windows because it stops updating, and I don’t even want to deal with myself in that context, because he’s a grumpy guy that just wants to relax and play videogames after working (in Linux) all day.
Valve might be able to do it, but it won’t really be a FOSS community project, it will be a proprietary layer on top of FOSS (maybe an Open Source layer on top of FOSS, but it will still be proprietary in the sense that they’ll mostly do the development in-house and in the service of their business model). Which is totally fine, but subservient to their business needs.
I mean… the Register reports on Free Software stuff a lot. Maybe they are the entity that should do it.
A fedora atomic fork with nothing but Chrome/Firefox + Gnome or KDE would do this.
...But who would use that? If you know how to install an operating system on a laptop, you're already not the target audience for this. OEMs aren't going to ship this Linux any more than they would've shipped any others.
Chrome OS worked because it had the marketing budget of a megacorp behind it, one motivated to push people onto their cloud services to cement their monopoly.
I wonder if there were significant numbers of people who actually went out of their way to get a Chromebook over a regular laptop? I'd imagine those that did just did so due to the lower price without knowing the difference, or they had it forced on them by their school/employer.
FOSS world needs to realize that software and user freedom are political goals and can be only achieved through political action.
Rest is accidental, yet most effort is being spent on that. That's why even though we have more FOSS code than ever, users have least amount of freedom and agency.
22 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 53.6 ms ] threadThat is not really popular in the open source world. Who finances the cloud, is it open, who can read or sell your data?
In all honesty though, there's a tonne of easy to recommend distros which don't need set up if you are a "normie" just wanting to get online:
- Elementary - Mint - Ubuntu
I think the real "secret sauce" for ChomeOS' success is basically big coorporate backing and being from-a-store-buyable. I think the truth is that nobody other tham techies is likely to want to install an OS themselves.
https://www.endlessos.org/
> Many of our technologies are distributed together within Endless OS. This is not your typical Linux distribution. We don’t use rpm, apt, or any other packaging system. In our quest for simplicity and robustness, we use a read-only root file system managed by OSTree with application bundles overlaid on top. Most desktop Linux distributions are oriented towards tech-savvy users and developers, but we have a different target user.
Providing drivers for all the hardware and peripherals that all work together in all the permutations is properly hard. I’d argue it’s the root issue.
Google can test each ChromeOS release against their Chromebooks to make sure everything works. If something fails, someone in Google can root cause on a matching hardware configuration easily.
This is not feasible for a general desktop Linux distribution because there are too many permutations. If the distribution is targeted at non-technical users the matter of root causing an issue on a hardware configuration the maintenance team can’t replicate becomes intractable.
A solution might be to literally only support Google Chromebooks, to constrain the possibility space, but even that is a big undertaking if the goal is to match ChromeOS for quality.
This is probably the only part of the article that is compelling. I guess having a simple, immutable Linux distro that prioritises being hard to break over many other things could indeed be a good thing for getting less tech-savvy users over to Linux.
But even then, who do they expect to maintain it? I would guess that many distros are maintained by people who are passionate about using them, and I suspect the overlap of FOSS maintainers and people who want to use such a locked-down, stripped-back system is small. And if the distro really didn't have many native apps, then users would either need to rely on Google for all their services anyway (somewhat defeating the point), or the "FOSS world" would also need to produce (and maintain, and host) a full suite of browser-based apps to rival Google's. Which is very far from easy.
The idea of "friction" comes up again and again whenever we talk about open products (whether it's FOSS or open platforms like the ones in the Fediverse, etc). People want an experience that is completely smooth and frictionless, while remaining free and open. But IMO freedom is friction. Fundamentally it means being able to choose, and not being completely reliant on megacorps, and being able to tinker and explore, and all of these things are sources of friction. Like, the author complains that there are so many distros to choose from, but how would adding another distro to the mix address that?
Saying "FOSS world" we need XXX is pretty useless. As a FOSS mainatinaer, the answer I always give people demanding their favorite pet feature is, "clean, maintainable patches are appreciated", ChromiumOS is free software; someone could take it use it as the basis for something like ChromeOS. But the author of the article has basically admitted that the derivitives of Chromium would quickly fail if Chromium stoped being something that they could free ride off of. Shouldn't that tell you everything about what the problem is with this picture?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChromeOS_Flex
Who wants to deal with a bunch of users who only switched because Windows 10 stopped updating? I’m going to have to switch my stupid gaming PC away from Windows because it stops updating, and I don’t even want to deal with myself in that context, because he’s a grumpy guy that just wants to relax and play videogames after working (in Linux) all day.
Valve might be able to do it, but it won’t really be a FOSS community project, it will be a proprietary layer on top of FOSS (maybe an Open Source layer on top of FOSS, but it will still be proprietary in the sense that they’ll mostly do the development in-house and in the service of their business model). Which is totally fine, but subservient to their business needs.
I mean… the Register reports on Free Software stuff a lot. Maybe they are the entity that should do it.
...But who would use that? If you know how to install an operating system on a laptop, you're already not the target audience for this. OEMs aren't going to ship this Linux any more than they would've shipped any others.
Chrome OS worked because it had the marketing budget of a megacorp behind it, one motivated to push people onto their cloud services to cement their monopoly.
I wonder if there were significant numbers of people who actually went out of their way to get a Chromebook over a regular laptop? I'd imagine those that did just did so due to the lower price without knowing the difference, or they had it forced on them by their school/employer.
Rest is accidental, yet most effort is being spent on that. That's why even though we have more FOSS code than ever, users have least amount of freedom and agency.