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Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

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Re: Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

#111

Post by benrutter »

esperent wrote: post #108
benrutter wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooof! That sounds rough and also makes me realise a huge oversight in my original comment. I've been using linux on desktop for about 12 years and will always pick a laptop that's known to have good compatibility otherwise the endless hardware issues are a big timesuck. Some distros are better than others for hardware support but I think it'd be disingenious to make out like any solve the problem. If you have a lapto…

> Some distros are better than others for hardware support I did some reading around the and consensus seemed to be that Ubuntu should be one of these. Do you have any suggestions that are likely to have better hardware support than Ubuntu?

maybe pop os in that I think they ship some additional drivers in top of Ubuntu's, but I doubt it'd make a difference. Ubuntu was a great choice for driver support, but like you found, that sadly doesn't mean everything will work on every machine.

Re: Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

#112

Post by pjmlp »

samspot wrote: post #61
esperent wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently (two weeks ago) decided to finally switch from Windows to plain Ubuntu as a daily desktop. I'm well experienced with it from managing servers and have used it occasionally at a desktop in the past. I've had - and continue to have, a ton of minor and a few large problems. First, wifi. Apparently there's often problems with Intel killer 6e laptop cards, which required me to enter loads of console commands th…

It's good to know that "Linux is only free if your time is worthless" still holds true after all these years. From the way many talk, I honestly thought it might have changed.

Not really, last year I was foolish enough to have bought a NUC without properly checking its Linux support, because I assumed usually the problems nowadays would only be laptop related, on desktop like systems we're pretty safe.

Never managed to find a distribution that supported the UEFI bios, booting from an internal SSD, only from external storage via SSD, after so many attempts across a few months, I also managed to burn something on the motherboard.

Conclusion, 300 euros thrown into the local recycling center.

I know Linux systems since 1995's Summer, do regularly manage Linux servers at work, and still this thing failed on me, now imagine regular people.

Re: Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

#113

Post by ranger_danger »

SirFatty wrote: post #81
babypuncher wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue it goes against the desires of the open source world. ChromeOS is a product designed to suck people further in to the Google ecosystem. All its limitations, like basically being a web browser with access to the Android Play store, are built around that. The simplicity of not having to worry about anything else is how Google sells that as a benefit of their platform to the masses. I don't know any of my…

"I don't know any of my fellow nerds who want a ChromeOS kind of experience, so why would any of us dedicate our free time to making one?" Interesting perspective. Per the article, this is a method of circumventing the W10 issue coming up.. I would guess that you have family members or friends that might be caught up in that? Even ones that are not nerds?

Yes but how many FOSS projects are fueled by volunteers that don't practice dogfooding? And would you want to use such products?

Re: Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

#114

Post by BoiledCabbage »

bradfa wrote: post #44
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that the customer just needs a vehicle to get to and from work, but they're offered tractor wheels and 50k RPM flywheels is exactly the problem. Stop inventing wheels, stop offering esoteric wheels and start solving customer problems simply.

But there are customers who are looking for tractor wheels and flywheels. Maybe not you or people you know, but there's definitely large industries for both. Just like there's a market for "vehicle to get to work". Same thing exists in software. Linux caters to all the uses, from low power embedded systems to huge high performance computing systems and everything in between.

> But there are customers who are looking for tractor wheels and flywheels. Maybe not you or people you know, but there's definitely large industries for both. Just like there's a market for "vehicle to get to work". Same thing exists in software. Linux caters to all the uses, from low power embedded systems to huge high performance computing systems and everything in between.

And that's exactly the problem. Linux is so focused on ensuring it works for every possible user out there, that it never makes the tough choices to be optimized for the 80% of users.

80% of people drive cars and need simple care wheels and tires.

But they're forced to think about 100 different types of wheels before they can go anywhere. My mom has never had to consider a flywheel in her life, and yet if her car were linux she's need to think about that, and everything from low power, high power, LED, gas powered, and oil powered headlights. She'd need to consider 50 types of seats, 7 seatbelt configurations,

Linux is what you get when engineers own a product and there is no PM around to say 'No' and force you to make the hard decisions. It's good for what it is, but nobody is making it actually easy. There are just "complex" and "less complex" flavors of linux. None are actually consumer level of simple - they're just "simple" compared to the other variants of linux.

Chrome OS is actually consumer level simple.

Re: Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

#115

Post by mixmastamyk »

esperent wrote: post #105
mixmastamyk wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fedora might support your hardware better, (newer kernel) and not have snap. Windows also sometimes has these kinds of problems. Plus I usually have to dig up many commands to turn off user-hostile defaults or free up a quarter terabyte of disk space wasted. Was an obscure diskadm cli I’ve never heard of. The perfect OS doesn’t exist, maybe not even a good one.

> Windows also sometimes has these kinds of problems Undeniably, over many years of using Windows I've had many problems. But never this amount on a fresh install. And most windows problems can be fixed with driver updates or changed settings. Linux problems pretty much all require you to be comfortable entering console commands, which the vast majority of people are not.

As mentioned, every windows install will want to run obscure disk cli to free up tons of disk space and probably a few powershells to stop ads, telemetry. Sometimes malware mitigations. Not all of them have gui options.

Every OS I spend several hours setting up. At least with Linux I’ve automated it.

Re: Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

#116

Post by mixmastamyk »

pjmlp wrote: post #112
samspot wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good to know that "Linux is only free if your time is worthless" still holds true after all these years. From the way many talk, I honestly thought it might have changed.

Not really, last year I was foolish enough to have bought a NUC without properly checking its Linux support, because I assumed usually the problems nowadays would only be laptop related, on desktop like systems we're pretty safe. Never managed to find a distribution that supported the UEFI bios, booting from an internal SSD, only from external storage via SSD, after so many attempts across a few months, I also manage…

The things you mentioned work fine in Linux. There’s one exception, in that brand new intel/amd hardware typically takes three to six months to get decent support. During that time one should use bleeding-edge Fedora which should get better every week.

Re: Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

#117

Post by esperent »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #115
esperent wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows also sometimes has these kinds of problems Undeniably, over many years of using Windows I've had many problems. But never this amount on a fresh install. And most windows problems can be fixed with driver updates or changed settings. Linux problems pretty much all require you to be comfortable entering console commands, which the vast majority of people are not.

As mentioned, every windows install will want to run obscure disk cli to free up tons of disk space and probably a few powershells to stop ads, telemetry. Sometimes malware mitigations. Not all of them have gui options. Every OS I spend several hours setting up. At least with Linux I’ve automated it.

> Not all of them have gui options.

Well, I just run a tool like ShutUp10 once after installing Windows and 99% of these problems are gone.

However, I'm well aware of those problems with Windows. I switched, after all. However, you know what Windows doesn't do? Force me to keep opening my laptop screen to get a login on my external monitor, which I don't think is fixable. Or reset my laptop screen brightness to minimum every day so that I can't even see the login prompt without closing the curtains.

Re: Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

#118

Post by mixmastamyk »

esperent wrote: post #117
mixmastamyk wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As mentioned, every windows install will want to run obscure disk cli to free up tons of disk space and probably a few powershells to stop ads, telemetry. Sometimes malware mitigations. Not all of them have gui options. Every OS I spend several hours setting up. At least with Linux I’ve automated it.

> Not all of them have gui options. Well, I just run a tool like ShutUp10 once after installing Windows and 99% of these problems are gone. However, I'm well aware of those problems with Windows. I switched, after all. However, you know what Windows doesn't do? Force me to keep opening my laptop screen to get a login on my external monitor, which I don't think is fixable. Or reset my laptop screen brightness to minim…

It is probably fixable. I had to write a script with xrandr run by lightdm at boot, to fix my monitor config. One is in portrait mode.

There might be a better solution, but I found this one first and stopped.

Re: Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

#119

Post by mixmastamyk »

rglullis wrote: post #90
mixmastamyk wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not charge more, then some funds could be sent upstream? Edit: answer below does not explain why price can’t be raised even higher.

"Not being price sensitive" does not mean "looking always for the most expensive solution".

I still don’t understand. There are things that could be done to raise the budget, no?

Re: Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

#120

Post by mixmastamyk »

rglullis wrote: post #65
mixmastamyk wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not charge more, then some funds could be sent upstream? Edit: answer below does not explain why price can’t be raised even higher.

Because the problem was any reduction in cost, and the status quo (Microsoft) was familiar and safe.

Familiar and “safe” might be it.
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