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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

#81

Post by SirFatty »

babypuncher wrote: post #41
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?

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?

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

#82

Post by lenerdenator »

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.

I'm talking about the wheels that are analogous to the software needed for a decent consumer desktop computer.

How many window managers are there? How many different package managers? Ways to prepare code for said package managers? Scripting shells? File systems? Hell, how many distros are there based on Debian and/or Ubuntu?

If the goal is "free the world from proprietary software", then the talent spent on scratching an itch for a few thousand users is talent wasted because that isn't moving the needle fast enough. The three things driving consumer-grade (read: not enterprise or hobbyist) adoption of Linux right now are ChromeOS, gaming and the fact that Windows 10 support is ending soon. It has nothing to do with the fact that you can find just the right set of utilities for your Arch install.

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

#83

Post by kbolino »

bee_rider wrote: post #57
kbolino wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, it's kind of niche to find someone who has an nVidia card, uses it for gaming/compute, has some reason to run Linux, and is afraid to dig into config files etc. But Microsoft's behavior of late is creating some demand here, and I too get tired of having to fix things after random kernel/driver updates.

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

#84

Post by bogwog »

A fedora atomic fork with nothing but Chrome/Firefox + Gnome or KDE would do this.

...But who would use that? If you know how to install an operating system on a laptop, you're already not the target audience for this. OEMs aren't going to ship this Linux any more than they would've shipped any others.

Chrome OS worked because it had the marketing budget of a megacorp behind it, one motivated to push people onto their cloud services to cement their monopoly.

I wonder if there were significant numbers of people who actually went out of their way to get a Chromebook over a regular laptop? I'd imagine those that did just did so due to the lower price without knowing the difference, or they had it forced on them by their school/employer.

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

#85

Post by npteljes »

pjmlp wrote: post #77
npteljes wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it particularly suffers from not having "good defaults", because it doesn't get adopted by word of mouth. And people are not shopping around The Best OS that they find, and sadly, they evaluate that Linux just doesn't have the juice. Two things here. One, OSs get adopted because of the package they arrive in. Laptops have Windows bundled, schools get computers with Windows on the cheap. Phones come with…

Netbooks had Linux pre-installed, and they became an OEM distribution mess, because OEMs can't stop to differentiate themselves.

Some do come with Linux preinstalled, but there is a lot of mess in this regard. "Windows tax" was one of such things, the Windows bundling went so hard[0] that it was more expensive to buy a computer without Windows than with[1]. Absolute nonsense, that more or less stopped now. But of course we are well past the Windows platform establishing itself, so now the network effect is a larger contributor I'd say.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/4ewnoi/if_...

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

#86

Post by cosmic_cheese »

righthand wrote: post #62
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE has its own problems, though they’ve been improving in recent years. Out of the box defaults still need some work for example, and settings can still be confusing and difficult to navigate for less technical individuals. It also still has some behaviors that aren’t found on other desktops that can put off switchers. The best DE for switchers would be one that brings as few surprises as possible and has defaults g…

Debian Testing packages are not too old. They are mostly very nearly bleeding edge, if not they’re a month or so behind. Ridiculous you would blindly say Debian Testing is outdated. Debian Testing KDE Plasma version: 6.3.5-1 [0] Arch Stable KDE Plasma version: 6.4.3-1 [1] [0] https://packages.debian.org/trixie/plasma-desktop [1] https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/plasma-desktop/

Based on what I’ve found it varies greatly between packages. Some are just a few weeks behind, others months or years.

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

#87

Post by pjmlp »

npteljes wrote: post #85
pjmlp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netbooks had Linux pre-installed, and they became an OEM distribution mess, because OEMs can't stop to differentiate themselves.

Some do come with Linux preinstalled, but there is a lot of mess in this regard. "Windows tax" was one of such things, the Windows bundling went so hard[0] that it was more expensive to buy a computer without Windows than with[1]. Absolute nonsense, that more or less stopped now. But of course we are well past the Windows platform establishing itself, so now the network effect is a larger contributor I'd say. [0] htt…

We all know about the Windows tax and Microsoft making Windows XP free for Netbooks.

OEMs making custom distros didn't help.

If anything that was the precursor of the Android distros mess that we got afterwards.

They also did the same with CP/M, MS-DOS and Windows since forever, including UNIX clones, why wouldn't they do otherwise with GNU/Linux.

As former owner of an Asus Netbook 1215B bought with Linux pre-installed, even that way wasn't without issues.

OpenGL support was always lagging behind what hardware was capable, GL 3.3 vs GL 4.1, hardware video decoding only worked during Flash heyday, and wlan drivers always had issues with hardware when doing large downloads.

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

#88

Post by msgodel »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #33

I've been touting the chromeOS banner for years. It makes a huge amount of sense to have an OS optimized for the place most people are going to be spending 90% of their time - the browser - without any extra bloat. Then if you need more, just add those features. Gone are the days when you couldn't do certain things on a chromebook as well - assuming you have the hardware to support it, you can do almost anything you…

I think the problem is that the way ChromeOS was originally sold it was extremely user hostile and also made it completely impossible to "just add those features" back so in most people's mind they hear "ChromeOS" and think "oh it's even more useless than Android."

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

#89

Post by [deleted] »

amlib wrote: post #34
lotharcable wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netbook boom happened and then people actually started trying to use them. That is why the netbook boom died. Because while they promised to make cheap Linux devices that anybody could use none of them actually delivered on it. In fact the whole thing was a fiasco. The classic Linux problem can be described as "9 clicks to shit". Meaning that a Linux desktop looks, on the initial viewing, as something that is actuall…

Can't you say most of these things about Windows or even any other useful desktop OSes? If you want a computer that does useful things and isn't just a locked down social media consumption machine, you end up with a lot of that baggage you've mentioned. Sure MacOS and Windows fare better (insert trillion dollar companies backing it spiel here...) but they are no smooth ride if you are doing anything more than consumi…

[deleted]

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

#90

Post by rglullis »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #58
rglullis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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