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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

#51

Post by rglullis »

joshmarinacci wrote: post #21

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.

FWIW, back in 2013 I was working at Deutsche Telekom in a project that was attempting to do "ChromeOS, but for Enterprise", built on top of Ubuntu and a heavily modified Firefox. We had a list of target devices to test against, but given the Ubuntu base it was pretty easy to get it running everywhere.

All the office were based on open source systems. DT wanted to make money mostly on their data plans + device management services. The project failed for one reason: Enterprise IT is the opposite of price sensitive. I had talks with a couple of CIOs who were interested in the idea, but realized that commiting to a solution that could slash their budgets by 80% would be career suicide.

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

#52

Post by jeroenhd »

tytso wrote: post #40

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 fa…

Programmers do stuff for free, all the time. People also donate to foundations so some programmers can be paid to make free stuff. It's how we got the Linux desktop as we know it.

Programmers often stop worrying about the details once they're satisfied, though, and there are a lot of details. Yes we could add thumbnails to the file picker, but we also need to support Nvidia hardware and the archive application is missing a few much more interesting compression formats, plus there are a bazillion logged bugs that actually crash software rather than being a minor inconvenience.

In theory someone could set up a collective of programmers, designers, and translators to create a usable Linux desktop for the Windows 10 refugees, but it'll require a lot of effort from a lot of volunteers and a lot of people who happen to share the same principles and preferences.

ChromeOS works because there's a single entity that can hire a small group of designers to tell an army of programmers what they want everything to look and work like.

There are actually projects and companies that fork ChromeOS, but they're pretty small and once Google stops maintaining the OS they're going to collapse pretty quickly.

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

#53

Post by mixmastamyk »

esperent wrote: post #29
benrutter wrote: post #12

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 bein…

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…

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.

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

#55

Post by jeroenhd »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #42

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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChromeOS_Flex

Once the Android+ChromeOS amalgamation becomes usable on laptops, it's a matter of time before the next CloudReady pops up its head. Androidx86 already does a job running Android on PC hardware, it just lacks proper desktop behaviour. If ChromeOS' desktop environment makes it into Android, that problem is pretty much solved.

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

#56

Post by [deleted] »

zdragnar wrote: post #13
righthand wrote: post #3

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…

[deleted]

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

#57

Post by bee_rider »

kbolino wrote: post #38
righthand wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't really recommend any single distro, can't recommend even a single desktop environment as good for most people. I can and do all the time: KDE Plasma + Debian Testing

Probably fine for most people, but not a good choice for low-hassle setup with "recent" nVidia cards (last ~10 years). That's almost all nVidia's fault, and I can't say any distro handles their cards flawlessly, but Debian is one of the worst: the drivers are (accurately) classified as "nonfree" and so not available by default, setup may require config file tweaking, and KDE Plasma prefers to support Wayland while nV…

Although gaming on Linux has come leaps and bounds, and is actually in a pretty good place with Proton and all that, it is still a hobbyist thing.

For most non-gamers (modulo some workstation users doing number crunching, but that’s pretty niche), the iGPU is the way to go.

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

#58

Post by mixmastamyk »

rglullis wrote: post #51
joshmarinacci wrote: post #21

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.

FWIW, back in 2013 I was working at Deutsche Telekom in a project that was attempting to do "ChromeOS, but for Enterprise", built on top of Ubuntu and a heavily modified Firefox. We had a list of target devices to test against, but given the Ubuntu base it was pretty easy to get it running everywhere. All the office were based on open source systems. DT wanted to make money mostly on their data plans + device managem…

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.

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

#59

Post by p1mrx »

bgwalter wrote: post #8

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?

It would probably make sense to build an end-to-end encrypted sync library using S3 for storage. Then users can choose which cloud to use, or self-host.

https://yjs.dev/ seems like a useful building block.

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

#60

Post by cosmic_cheese »

esperent wrote: post #29
benrutter wrote: post #12

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 bein…

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…

Hardware problems are a frequently understated barrier to switching, particularly for laptop users. Long time Linux users are generally selecting their machines with Linux compatibility in mind and so don’t see much of this, but the corpus of potential switchers haven’t, and it creates a lot of friction. It’s difficult to convince people to replace their perfectly good laptop with something else just for the sake of trying out an alternative OS.
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