ChromeOS is Linux with Google’s desktop environment

Post by septic-liqueur » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 8:19 PM UTC

Laremere wrote: post #33

maxamillion wrote: post #6

Google put in a ton of work to make all the Linux and Android sandboxing while still being able to do file sharing into the sandboxes, Wayland GUI app bridging, usb pass-through, and a bunch of other stuff. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/HEAD/con... ChromeOS got good and is wildly underrated for software development. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I loved Chromebooks. However I've been pretty turned off by them when my Chromebook which was working perfectly fine recently told me it's not getting security updates anymore. Now because the OS and browser are the same machine, the whole system is insecure. Next laptop will be a framework, so I guess I'll see how that goes.

Post by switch007 » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 8:19 PM UTC

septic-liqueur wrote: post #29

maxamillion wrote: post #6

Google put in a ton of work to make all the Linux and Android sandboxing while still being able to do file sharing into the sandboxes, Wayland GUI app bridging, usb pass-through, and a bunch of other stuff. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/HEAD/con... ChromeOS got good and is wildly underrated for software development. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Couldn't agree more. I recently bought a cheap $200 Chromebook and I have to say that it outperforms my high end Windows + WSL2 machine from work for programming related tasks. Linux just works without all the WSL issues, I can run Visual Studio Code, Docker and anything that I tried so far. It's actually a delight to work on. I can only imagine how much better yet it will be with a top tier Chromebook

Post by anonacct37 » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 8:20 PM UTC

westurner wrote: post #25

AJRF wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All new devs are given Chromebooks unless they need a specific device (like a MacBook for iOS devs)

But aren't devs also provided with: SSH, CI build minutes, and GCP budgets for containers and VMs? To actually dogfood Chromebooks internally like Chromebooks for Education and for Families, Google would need to deny its devs containers behind a greyed out "Turn on Linux" button and deny them access to Colab notebooks and AI platform etc (while only allowing Play Store apps); nothing to SSH to, no notebooks, no devpo…

Post by isp » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 8:21 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #42

isp wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChromeOS is wildly underrated in general, not only for software development. App sandboxing on standard (non-ChromeOS) Linux distributions is painful and finicky, while it "just works" on ChromeOS. I wish there was a non-hacky way to use Chromebooks without a Google account. The hacky options are: - "Switch to dev mode". But I don't want to be prompted to factory reset each boot. - "Create a dummy Google account and…

Chromium OS might be a good choice for you. I ran it on my Pinebook Pro for a bit and really liked it, and it's much more open.

Post by westurner » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 8:25 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #35

westurner wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But aren't devs also provided with: SSH, CI build minutes, and GCP budgets for containers and VMs? To actually dogfood Chromebooks internally like Chromebooks for Education and for Families, Google would need to deny its devs containers behind a greyed out "Turn on Linux" button and deny them access to Colab notebooks and AI platform etc (while only allowing Play Store apps); nothing to SSH to, no notebooks, no devpo…

I don't follow? Software developers... aren't students or children. It's a different market with different product segmentation and feature sets, it just happens to run on the same hardware and OS. And it's true that schools and parents often demand that their kids not hack stuff that the "admins" don't understand. And maybe that's bad or misguided or whatever. But it's not a statement about using a Chromebook as a d…