Stop Calling these “Chromebooks”

[Uttamattamakin]

5 hours ago, Kisai said:

This is still a proprietary Linux distro, and there can come a day where Google decides to switch to something else (something they've shown they will do, since maintaining multiple OS's is also kinda stupid, Android? Fushia? ChromeOS?)

The question is how much of it is proprietary.  Is it just drivers to make their devices work? I guess it's a ship of Thesyus question.  How much can a company customize the Linux on their devices and have it still be Linux?    IF it is just a matter of running the software then Windows with WSL2 is Linux ... heck windows with one of the older methods of running Linux software on it was Linux then.  Clearly this is not true. 

At the same time to say it's only Linux if it is Arch without any proprietary drivers isn't true either. 

I'll just put it like this.  If people still consider Mac OSX to be a Unix variant... then Chrome OS is Linux.  

[Brian McKee]

20 minutes ago, Skipple said:

I think you missed the point. The entire point is that it isn't dystopian and has potential if one embraces the Linux side of the house. 

It's absolutely dystopian. It is still a machine dedicated to stealing your information by one of the most evil companies on the planet lol. Apple would be/currently is lambasted for similar hardware/software decisions, and they support devices much longer than Google does... Just cause you use Linux as a backbone doesn't mean you should get brownie points, if they felt it was feasible they'd have made their own OS from the ground up. In fact they are/were, but the project has been severely crippled by layoffs and probably will never see the light of day on consumer PCs.

 

[Brian McKee]

18 minutes ago, sub68 said:

its not meant for everyone... do want to give your grandma a linux machine.

You don't need Google spyware baked in for an easy to use Linux experience eh? Plus they're not selling this to Grandmas, they're trying to raise a generation of kids on Google services like how Microsoft raised a generation on Windows and Microsoft products.

[sub68]

Just now, Brian McKee said:

You don't need Google spyware baked in for an easy to use Linux experience eh? Plus they're not selling this to Grandmas, they're trying to raise a generation of kids on Google services like how Microsoft raised a generation on Windows and Microsoft products.

Yeah, sure but do know any linux that needs minimal training for a education market.

Look at the average consumer most people dont even care, most are running a iphone with tiktok.

Heck most kids I know when in a school cyber class dont even pay attention

[Uttamattamakin]

3 minutes ago, Brian McKee said:

You don't need Google spyware baked in for an easy to use Linux experience eh? Plus they're not selling this to Grandmas, they're trying to raise a generation of kids on Google services like how Microsoft raised a generation on Windows and Microsoft products.

Define easy to use.  To many Linux apparatchiks easy to use is the command line only and editing in nano or vim. 

 

Just now, sub68 said:

 

Heck most kids I know when in a school cyber class dont even pay attention

I have computer science majors who in a year and a half didn't figure out how to print on campus.   As you said, not paying attention. 

 

[sub68]

2 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

I have computer science majors who in a year and a half didn't figure out how to print on campus.   As you said, not paying attention. 

Wow... I dont have words...

[Brian McKee]

12 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Define easy to use.  To many Linux apparatchiks easy to use is the command line only and editing in nano or vim.

 

For basically any office task you could think of even an Distro like Debian is ready to serve most people out of the box. Office suite, browser, etc... And extra programs are in what are essentially an "App store" on something like GNOME or KDE. One click and install. People who say Linux is hard are dealing with proprietary gamer hardware or are trying to work around other advanced issues, the baseline experience of Linux is easy and has been for years.

 

Installing something on a regular distribution of Linux is actually far easier than what was described in the video by LTT. If I want to install Blender for 3d work on a project all I have to do is go to Discover, type in "Blender" and install it. But obviously this isn't just a Linux thing, any OS would be easier in this regard than ChromeOS.

[sub68]

1 minute ago, Brian McKee said:

For basically any office task you could think of even an Distro like Debian is ready to serve most people out of the box. Office suite, browser, etc... And extra programs are in what are essentially an "App store" on something like GNOME or KDE. One click and install. People who say Linux is hard are dealing with proprietary gamer hardware or are trying to work around other advanced issues, the baseline experience of Linux is easy and has been for years.

Like using daily, not installing stuff could you teach a special needs kid how to use the OS.

[Skipple]

18 minutes ago, Brian McKee said:

It is still a machine dedicated to stealing your information by one of the most evil companies on the planet lol

The exact same can be said about Windows and OSX. I guess it's dystopian if you want it to be. To everyone else, it's a computer. 

[ToboRobot]

1 minute ago, Brian McKee said:

For basically any office task you could think of even an Distro like Debian is ready to serve most people out of the box.

It's not nearly as polished or consistent of an experience than ChromeOS.

I use Linux, but I am not going to recommend Debian over ChromeOS for non-technical people, especially kids.

[Skipple]

16 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

I have computer science majors who in a year and a half didn't figure out how to print on campus. 

As someone who worked on a Help Desk and later on the Sys Admin side of the house for a mid to large sized company, I can say with the utmost certainty that being a brilliant developer does not mean you work well with computers. There are guys who are borderline geniuses when it comes to programming and database management, and yet can barely function when it comes to Windows, it's astonishing. I'm talking about adults who didn't know how to plug in a HDMI monitor and yet are responsible for ensuring a multi-billion dollar corporation stays afloat. 

[ToboRobot]

Just now, Skipple said:

As someone who worked on a Help Desk and later on the Sys Admin side of the house, I can say with the up most certainty that being a brilliant developer does not mean you work well with computers. There are guys who are borderline geniuses when it comes to programming and database management, and yet can barely function when it comes to Windows, it's astonishing. 

The term you are looking for is utmost.  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/utmost

[Skipple]

1 minute ago, ToboRobot said:

The term you are looking for is utmost.  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/utmost

already corrected  

[Brian McKee]

3 minutes ago, sub68 said:

Like using daily, not installing stuff could you teach a special needs kid how to use the OS.

Why are we moving the goal posts? So ChromeOS is an OS for special needs? Not to mention even that is a poor generalization as if other operating systems are simply too hard for someone who has special needs lol. I don't get this reply, ask a special needs kid how to install a game on ChromeOS, I'm sure he'd have a good time.

3 minutes ago, Skipple said:

The exact same can be said about Windows and OSX. I guess it's dystopian if you want it to be. To everyone else, it's a computer. 

I mean yeah, Windows is absolutely becoming dystopian. Don't think I argued otherwise. However Windows at least isn't offering meager support and essentially making good hardware into e-waste for the layperson.

 

2 minutes ago, ToboRobot said:

It's not nearly as polished or consistent of an experience than ChromeOS.

I use Linux, but I am not going to recommend Debian over ChromeOS for non-technical people, especially kids.

I wouldn't either, just saying that even what is considered an advanced OS like Debian would be very easy to grasp for most people at a basic level. A more polished experience like Ubuntu would be very easy indeed.

[sub68]

Just now, Brian McKee said:

generalization as if other operating systems are simply too hard for someone who has special needs lol.

That is one of the things when looking at operating systems for the education market I guaranteed if I gave some kids a ubuntou they would have no idea how to open the web browser.

You either have in the special needs, one that needs help all the time or kid that knows it fully.

[Uttamattamakin]

1 minute ago, Brian McKee said:

Why are we moving the goal posts? So ChromeOS is an OS for special needs? Not to mention even that is a poor generalization as if other operating systems are simply too hard for someone who has special needs lol. I don't get this reply, ask a special needs kid how to install a game on ChromeOS, I'm sure he'd have a good time.

I don't think that's moving the goalpost.  To say an OS is ready for desktop use in general then it has to be able to accommodate anyone who can recognize an icon and click it.    It needs to be at least as accommodating as a general website is if not more so.   Plus in a school classroom with kids from age 7 to 14 one does not need to be asking them to fix a problem by typing.  

Sudo apt install curl wget gcc g++ make

bzip -x latestlinuxkernel.tar.bz

make x config and compile their kernel with the correct wifi driver. 

 

1 minute ago, Brian McKee said:

...

FWIW you are 100% right about all the dystopian data collection that goes on in the operating systems now.  All the commercial OS's are basically a way to pipe ads to us and gather telemetry on what we have been doing. 

[Monkey Dust]

19 hours ago, Senzelian said:

Google is the only company that's absolutely everywhere. No matter what you do, you're interacting with them and generating profit for them in one way or another. They're after Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and Meta all at the same time and I do not doubt in my mind that they can succeed and grab a massive chunk out of each company's market share.

I think you're overestimating them. They failed to muscle into gaming with Stadia. Microsoft failed to muscle into phones. Meta have failed to make a commercial success of the Metaverse. And most pertinently to this topic, Apple, despite selling Macs for 30+ years, are still only a tiny part of the market. The big tech giants can, and do, make big bets that they lose.

 

If you need to choose a device, for a tech-phobic elderly relative, a tablet is probably the correct answer. If you want a cheap laptop, I'd still go Windows, just for the software compatibility. I don't get who the Chromebook is for?  

[powertoys]

56 minutes ago, sub68 said:

Yeah? its still expensive as heck for a district to buy mass quantities comparble also chrome os doesnt need a lot to run.

 

 

I was talking about that specific Windows laptop

[Brian McKee]

Just now, sub68 said:

That is one of the things when looking at operating systems for the education market I guaranteed if I gave some kids a ubuntou they would have no idea how to open the web browser.

You either have in the special needs, one that needs help all the time or kid that knows it fully.

Having worked with plenty of kids in my line of work this is pretty insulting. You'd need to have a pretty severe disability for this to be the case. And if it were the case you'd be giving them an ipad wrapped in foam not a Chromebook. Not discussing this line of reasoning any further.

[sub68]

Just now, Brian McKee said:

Having worked with plenty of kids in my line of work this is pretty insulting. You'd need to have a pretty severe disability for this to be the case. And if it were the case you'd be giving them an ipad wrapped in foam not a Chromebook. Not discussing this line of reasoning any further.

I have worked it too. I am in special ed and tought other classmates that were in different places.

Usally it clicks within half a hour. But basically you need a OS were its up front and easy to access common stuff.

3 minutes ago, powertoys said:

 

 

I was talking about that specific Windows laptop

oh, still windows is intreasting to run for education I have seen it but it gets janky.

[Uttamattamakin]

2 minutes ago, Monkey Dust said:

I don't get who the Chromebook is for?  

Ideally since chromebooks do not need to pay for a Windows license that is money that can either be saved OR used to put more into the hardware. 

Plus at this point Chromebooks can run Linux software, Android apps, and enterprise ones even run Windows in a VM.  

FWIW if there was this product for standard Linux I'd get it.   It could perhaps take advantage of KVM and all the work that the open source community has put in to make a really good coherent experience. 

Basically Chrome has Linux's super power of being able to glue every other OS together and run whatever you want. 

[jre84]

128gb is alot of .doc and .jpgs what else would you need to store and why would you use a chromebook for work? I bought mine for the odd game like 8 ball pool/chess but the prices on great refurbished laptops with oled panels and 512gb have come down to 399 cad.

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

The question is how much of it is proprietary.  Is it just drivers to make their devices work? I guess it's a ship of Thesyus question.  How much can a company customize the Linux on their devices and have it still be Linux?    IF it is just a matter of running the software then Windows with WSL2 is Linux ... heck windows with one of the older methods of running Linux software on it was Linux then.  Clearly this is not true. 

At the same time to say it's only Linux if it is Arch without any proprietary drivers isn't true either. 

I'll just put it like this.  If people still consider Mac OSX to be a Unix variant... then Chrome OS is Linux.  

I don't consider Android, ChromeOS or SteamOS to be "Linux" because out of the box they require proprietary software or hardware parts that can't be replicated on a vanilla whitebox computer. 

 

Steam OS requires Steam and Proton to be stalled via Steam. Or you could go through the extra hell to install Steam on Ubuntu and/or then get extra fiddly with Proton if you want to avoid installing Steam. 

 

ChromeOS meanwhile is even more of a "will it, or won't it" work on a piece of hardware. If you want to play a (windows) game on it, you have to install steam and proton on it too.

 

This is pretty deceiving:

 

 

Yeah, you go right ahead and play starfield on a chromebook. I'd love to see how terrible that out of the box experience is.

 

Honestly, somedays it seems like Google and Microsoft are just piloting the PC experience off a cliff. Making things "responsive web apps" when they should be native HiDPI-aware desktop tools that more than one can be used at once instead of trying to be the smartphone/smartTV/tablet experience of only-one-app is running.

 

That drives me nuts already when (typically unity) games pause on desktop versions when you do anything else. There is no consistent experience from application to application, game to game, even from the same developers.

 

If "Chromebooks" is how google plans to get people hooked on using Linux, well, no. It's only going to get people who like it to want to keep using the Chromebook they were given, and they will reject UI overhauls just like Windows users do and stick to the oldest thing that still works. It's even worse on Linux since no two Linux installs have the same out-of-the-box experience. 

 

Only MacOS has been consistent for the last 30 years, and doesn't change the OS user experience for the sake of changing stuff that's working. Microsoft changes things even between different patch levels of the same OS, and it's quite frankly a straw too much for people who just want to sit down at their computer and have the same experience they've had for the last 10 years. Good gawd what was Microsoft thinking with Windows 8? 

 

Meanwhile I'm happy that google and steam have been building "Linux hardware" to run their LinuxOS's, but I'm not happy that I can't just install their OS's on any j-random-computer and have it work just like their OS's. You might say "oh, but don't you have to do fiddly things with Windows?", yes, but much of that fiddly crap is already done if you use an OEM system. Only when you build your own are you doing a lot of fiddly stuff. If you are on Linux however, you're doing extra amounts of fiddly things because of proprietary drivers like Nvidia's and encountering unsupported hardware features because the manufacturer of that part either doesn't support Linux, or supports Linux but only one flavor of Linux that is extremely old. Or you get stuck in the trap of having to recompile the kernel if the hardware is obscure enough, or tracking down firmware blobs.

 

If you want to run Linux, you should be able to install it on anything and have the same experience everyone else does, but that's not generally how the cat-hearders who run Linux distro's work, and there's often not-invented-here infighting over package management, build tools, and what licenses (eg GPL, BSD) are considered free enough to distribute. Kinda sucks when Linux vendors are just as bad as Microsoft and Apple when deciding what software you are allowed to run on your own hardware isn't it?

 

 

[Skipple]

48 minutes ago, Kisai said:

If "Chromebooks" is how google plans to get people hooked on using Linux, well, no.

I don't think this is anyone's argument, nor do I think it's in Google's best interest to drive their user base to Linux. 

However, what is likely to happen is that those "technically curious" young users, who start on ChromeOS, can, on their own volition, stumble their way into Linux package distribution. Google is giving those users the tools they need and that should be, unironically, praised.

[99_U-238]

5 hours ago, AndreiArgeanu said:

It's decent. Any work you typically do on one of these devices isn't storage intensive and is usually stored in the cloud. Plenty of space for documents if you want to store them locally and for quite a few apps.

I don't know about you but university lecture recordings pile up, a lot