How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops

Glad to see that they're planning on contributing more to the upstream. But considering the size and budget of Google, and the amount of free work they're getting from the Debian community, it would be utterly irresponsible not to. Not blaming the team that's doing this good work though - I'm sure they're working hard enough as it is.

Have to say I didn't expect much from it. I don't distro hop usually, and when I do it's Debian based distros so that I have the familiar package management tools. I also usually stick to XFCE + plank. But for the first time in over a decade I broke tradition and installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE. The config panel you get on first login has an extremely handy feature that lets you choose a layout for KDE, and there's one that almost perfectly matches my XFCE + plank setup. Several weeks on and really I'm happy with it. Wayland, PipeWire, everything up to date. Not a single issue! In thinking about using it as my daily driver in my work laptop.

I think there's a big misunderstanding as to what exactly gLinux _IS_.

Nearly every large company I've worked at worked hard to standardize the dev environment. Ensuring the right set of dev tools (and more) is available on every machine. It's not as simple as 'apt-get install build-essential' and you're done. For example many large companies use perforce, which also has a licensing requirement. Google in particular has a large set of custom binaries, remote file systems, unified login (think krb but maybe not exactly that), unified management, etc, etc.

That is what gLinux is. This isn't something you're going to want or need. In fact it doesn't even run outside of the Google hard wired VLANs really (for setup).

There are a LOT of net benefits for much of google to being on gLinux. It means, for example, that nearly every product works on Linux - google docs, spreadsheet, meet, etc. That's a huge win. Not only that, they are on par with Windows or Mac support (thanks browser as a platform).

Not to mention many of those things don't work outside the rarified environment that is a fully managed VLAN.

Regarding "security", remember plenty of security is things like auditing, remote logs, ability of remote admins to control machines, etc, etc. It's ultimately all boring, but essential, large fleet management stuff.

I actually evaluated whether it was plausible to use a ChromeOS derivative as a workstation OS while I was at Google. At the time the answer was "no" for a bunch of reasons, including the following:

1) Crostini didn't integrate with the ChromeOS accessibility infrastructure, so it wasn't practical for users who required assistive technologies which meant gLinux would have to be supported anyway

2) While there is some degree of support for graphics acceleration for Crostini instances, there's no real way to provide direct access to the hardware. A bunch of people needed to do work that required more direct GPU access (either very resource intensive rendering, or GPU-offloaded ML models and the like), which meant gLinux would have to be supported anyway

3) We were in the process of moving to using hardware-backed machine identity for Beyondcorp, and Crostini had no way of providing that and tying that identity to the host identity (you don't want a situation where a guest VM appears to be trustworthy when it's running on an unpatched host)

4) This was also before the acquisition of Neverware, which meant at the time that a team would need to be built to maintain a build of ChromeOS for generic workstation hardware

This was a few years back, and I left getting on for 18 months ago, so it wouldn't surprise me if this is reappraised at some point.