Google Makes Linux Apps On Chrome OS Official

[Grim85]

You can already do that. Dell, HP, System 76, Talos (and probably many others, but these four come immediately to my mind) sell ready-to-use desktop and/or laptop computers with Linux preinstalled.

In my opinion the problem is not with pre-installation. There are, I think, two things that are holding Linux back on the desktop. Firstly, obviously graphics drivers. Even if your OS is preinstalled, your hardware is certified Linux compatible and everything works perfectly as a desktop out of the box, the Nvidia, AMD and Intel GPU drivers are *ALL* somehow broken, incomplete, crash prone and totally unreliable as far as games or other demanding 3D apps are concerned. There will be no sizeable progress of Linux on the desktop (outside of extremely niche applications) until graphics Just. Work. Every. Single. Time. With Wayland, Vulkan and the AMDGPU drivers, Linux is advancing in the right direction, but there is still a long, long way to go.

The second problem, as I see it, is a widening divide within the Linux community about what Linux should really aim to be. There are those who care primarily about FOSS and who, put simply, wish Linux was like Windows or MacOS, but open source. They would want Linux to be (among other things) a desktop OS where you play games, use office software and edit your photos just as easily, or more so, as you would on Windows or on Mac. On the other hand, there are those who care primarily about Unix and who would want Linux to be a more popular cousin to BSD where the primary user-facing apps are vi, xterm and iptables and whose purpose in a home is to be a headless NAS server or a firewall. This wouldn't really be a problem if those two communities just coexisted, but it's not always possible because it sometimes affects the fundamental design decisions regarding the lowest level components of the OS, including the kernel, systemd and Wayland/Xorg. A newcomer who is interested in trying out Linux finds himself between religious zealots from both sides, screaming at him which distro he "should" use, whether or not a particular piece of software is good or not because he "learns" or not how to do something, and so forth. Desktop is all about the wide public and Linux won't conquer it until it realises that to do that, it needs to respond to the expectations of desktop users, not the other way around.

Graphics Drivers: As an AMDGPU FOSS stack user, I believe we are there now, everything just works out of the box, except for compute - which is niche anyway

Desktop vs Appliance: I don't see these being an issue - those who want it to be an appliance aren't going to install the friendly desktop. Those who want to have a nice desktop are free to dev it how they want and it doesn't really step on the toes of the other group.



All that aside (and more on topic): Is this truely a Virtual Machine running the desktop Linux apps? Or is it more of a container like docker (or Anbox) - a VM seems like overkill with a lot of overhead when you could probably do it all with a containerised approach

[audir8]

Chromebooks have a foothold in education, so kids using android and linux apps on Chromebooks can only be a good thing. Apple announced education friendly iPads, and Microsoft is probably trying to do more than just give away licenses. This shows the value proposition for Linux, no licensing fees on a sub $500 machine matters. Google did spend a lot on doing UI for Chromebooks, which is really what I think has been missing from Linux desktop. The amount of fragmentation for a window manager or a window toolkit is nuts on Linux. The fact is they are all good for being free, but there is no alternative to standardization, and just having an app install that looks good. Case in point: how many tutorials would you need to set up 2 monitors, a screen saver timeout, and auto login on every distro? I'm really not sure if kdm/xdm/gdm/etc really all need to exist, can we standardize a bit here? The developer wanting to bring his app to Linux might decide on wxwidgets, or he may just say screw it when trying to pick from one of the other GUI toolkits.

Chromebook market share: https://www.zdnet.com/article/window...till-dominate/

[PackRat]

This might make more developers give some consideration to linux release of their games.

I'm not going to wait for someone else that could do something I am going to do something! Did you know that governments are giving out grants for game developers In Europe and the america's. Some of theses game companies are getting up to a million dollars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Media_Fund We happy few got a million they also had a kick starter and promised Linux support for Linux and mac.

Also a lot of game titles are making their way to Linux like Outlast on that wiki has a Linux release. A lot of games that they sell now are just mods.

Linux has a lot of great tools to make games with foss and proprietary software.

So while your waiting around I am going to make a game.

[unrulycow]

The programming support isn't for professional developers who might be better suited to a standard Linux system. Chromebooks are widely used in schools, this allows them to be used in CS classes.

[PackRat]

Graphics Drivers: As an AMDGPU FOSS stack user, I believe we are there now, everything just works out of the box, except for compute - which is niche anyway

Desktop vs Appliance: I don't see these being an issue - those who want it to be an appliance aren't going to install the friendly desktop. Those who want to have a nice desktop are free to dev it how they want and it doesn't really step on the toes of the other group.



All that aside (and more on topic): Is this truely a Virtual Machine running the desktop Linux apps? Or is it more of a container like docker (or Anbox) - a VM seems like overkill with a lot of overhead when you could probably do it all with a containerised approach

I
Niche? https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/co...se_tumbleweed/ Guess what Amd is niche next card will be nvidia! Amd zero support...

[SyXbiT]

Wouldn't this be a near perfect match for Flatpak?

[Grim85]

I
Niche? https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/co...se_tumbleweed/ Guess what Amd is niche next card will be nvidia! Amd zero support...

Yes - the sub set of end users that make use of compute is significantly smaller than the total

Eventually the compute support will be there, we were patient for the OpenGL and Vulkan

If compute is a big enough deal then use what works - Nvidia Blob, never said otherwise

[Awesomeness]

Technically yes, but ChromeOS isn't more "linux desktop" than Android, it's just an embedded device firmware. It's better than most, and is also easier to turn into something else, but still not "linux desktop".

If it runs on the Linux kernel, it's a Linux system. If it also runs on a desktop computer, it's a Linux desktop. Plain and simple. This is a Linux desktop: http://www.samsung.com/global/galaxy/apps/samsung-dex/

[jacob]

Graphics Drivers: As an AMDGPU FOSS stack user, I believe we are there now, everything just works out of the box, except for compute - which is niche anyway

Not really. I use the AMDGPU FOSS stack too and while it's a huge step forward, there are still many issues. It's still noticeably slower than the proprietary driver on Windows. I also experienced some stability problems with it. But the worst point is that in a typical hybrid GPU configuration, it has always been impossible to use the discrete GPU (AMD) after waking up from a suspend. That alone disqualifies Linux from any graphically intensive task on a laptop and it's a terrible shame, especially since no-one seems to be working on trying to fix this.

Desktop vs Appliance: I don't see these being an issue - those who want it to be an appliance aren't going to install the friendly desktop. Those who want to have a nice desktop are free to dev it how they want and it doesn't really step on the toes of the other group.

The trouble is that a friendly desktop is not really friendly unless it can rely on desktop-oriented features pervasively through the entire underlying stack, which are in turn supported and relied upon by apps. Just recently, look at the flames about systemd, where the opponents (largely identified with the "appliance" side) wouldn't have any of it because Linux, in their view, must follow the Unix "philosophy" and should be all about writing init scripts by hand. A couple years before that, when it became possible to run Xorg without any xorg.conf file, there was a similar uproar about how this is "dumbing down" Linux because reasons. Etc etc. I don't want to bash the "appliance" side, Linux has prospered very well as an appliance OS and it's definitely tremendously useful, but there are many people - including many developers - who need to understand that for Linux to succeed on the desktop, it must take a number of turns that are radically at odds with any Unix heritage, and that the purpose of a desktop is not to run xload and write your letters with latex.

[andyprough]

Brilliant.

An OS that runs on top of the Linux Kernel, running a Linux VM so that it can run basic Linux apps.

What will the incredible minds at Google think of next? A java virtual machine for smart phones?