11–20 of 122 posts
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?
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.
Uhh…doesn’t a basic Debian install already do this? If you can’t be bothered to install basic af distro, then what is a ChromeOS clome going to do?
ChromeOS is dead simple. So much so that my otherwise computer-illiterate wife can (and does) use it regularly. There's no way that I'd get her to use debian, though, unless I set everything up for her in advance. Choosing the desktop, setting up PPAs / flatpack / whatever (if you don't want the stock firefox browser), tweaking power settings, there's all sorts of faffing about in comparison.
I'd have to set up syncing in Firefox for her (or whatever browser) but to be fair, I helped her set up her account in the chromebook too.
Uhh…doesn’t a basic Debian install already do this? If you can’t be bothered to install basic af distro, then what is a ChromeOS clome going to do?
The author's point is to use an immutable or atomic system. Debian uses a traditional package manager and over time those packages can get in a weird state. Battery runs out during package update? Third party repo disappears? GPG key changes? Distribution eliminates 32-bit library support? Nvidia drivers change? Distribution deprecates Xorg? Your everyday user doesn't know how to deal with that. An A/B partition sche…
The author mentions this as well but there's no details there. We've been shipping chromeos-style images with universal blue for over 4 years and the ostree parts are invisible to end users. What do you feel takes away from the user experience?
Uhh…doesn’t a basic Debian install already do this? If you can’t be bothered to install basic af distro, then what is a ChromeOS clome going to do?
The author's point is to use an immutable or atomic system. Debian uses a traditional package manager and over time those packages can get in a weird state. Battery runs out during package update? Third party repo disappears? GPG key changes? Distribution eliminates 32-bit library support? Nvidia drivers change? Distribution deprecates Xorg? Your everyday user doesn't know how to deal with that. An A/B partition sche…
> 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.
Uhh…doesn’t a basic Debian install already do this? If you can’t be bothered to install basic af distro, then what is a ChromeOS clome going to do?
> 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. ChromeOS is dead simple. So much so that my otherwise computer-illiterate wife can (and does) use it regularly. There's no way that I'd get her to use debian, though, unless I set…
Uhh…doesn’t a basic Debian install already do this? If you can’t be bothered to install basic af distro, then what is a ChromeOS clome going to do?
edit: i'll add, link your image to a github repo with a readme describing how to get it on disk. there's the project.
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…
I can and do all the time: KDE Plasma + Debian Testing