Chrome OS Switches To "Freon" Graphics Stack To Replace X11

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Chrome OS Switches To "Freon" Graphics Stack To Replace X11

Released this past week was Chrome OS 41 and besides having improved WiFi stability, updates to the guest mode wallpaper, and other changes, some Chrome OS devices have been updated to Google's new "Freon" graphics stack. Freon further removes X11 dependencies from Google's world and will yield performance improvements in the future. Freon isn't based directly on Wayland nor Mir...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Chrome-OS-Freon-Graphics

[Maxjen]

I dislike the whole idea of a web OS. I don't want to trust a company with my data. At the same time I do see the appeal of having your bookmarks, ebooks, emails and everything else synchronized with the "cloud" (I hate this word, btw) so that you can't loose anything and have it all ready when you reinstall your OS. I just wish it was implemented in a decentralized way so that you can easily change the place where everything is saved. Then you could use e.g. your own webserver instead of the Google servers.

[ucepit]

I dislike the whole idea of a web OS. I don't want to trust a company with my data. At the same time I do see the appeal of having your bookmarks, ebooks, emails and everything else synchronized with the "cloud" (I hate this word, btw) so that you can't loose anything and have it all ready when you reinstall your OS. I just wish it was implemented in a decentralized way so that you can easily change the place where everything is saved. Then you could use e.g. your own webserver instead of the Google servers.

At one point I eagerly hoped Google would be a viable alternative to Micro$oft. I was prepared to give up some privacy if the service offered was compelling enough, I was prepared to give a try at being a part of an experiment in server centric computing over a public network.

But along the way I noticed Google capriciously launching & dumping services, acting like our data & our services were just a nerd science project to be just played with. Also I noted with great concern, the creep of "Chrome required" i.e. same old Micro$oft nonsense of vendor lockin. Buy a new Android phone running the new versions & try to add a NON Google account to it, good luck with that.. Same thing on iPhone is trivial & works fine. Google maps on your Android used to let you directly add a new contact from your map query, long gone. Google suddeny decided that Google+ should be forced on you whether you want it or not. etc etc. Post Snowden the value proposition with Google is just not there for me. I have urged Google from my computing repetoir.

This change in Chrome OS just forks it off into a more proprietory Google OS. Thats fine for them, I'll pass thanks.
I house my own data & take responsibility for my own backup strategies.

[scionicspectre]

This makes perfect sense to me. If you have so few external technologies to support, you might as well cut out everything in the middle to have a greater impact on overall performance. While I agree that a 'web OS' isn't a great idea in terms of being connected at all times, I do think that web technologies themselves are now wonderful for building performant interfaces. I think of it more like a graphical toolkit on steroids than simply a way to give companies personal information. You could certainly have a robust application suite that never connects to an external server and works offline. Firefox OS is probably the best example of this in practice.

Honestly, I've been hoping people could ditch GTK and Qt for a few years now in favor of HTML5 frontends. I know that's a crazy idea, but in the near future it may make a lot more sense than what we've been doing.

[Xaero_Vincent]

Chromebooks are a dumb investment because you can buy a Windows laptops just as cheap; Look at the HP Stream 11 with 1 year of Office 365 for $199.

However, Chromebooks can make sense if you put a proper Linux distro on it either natively booting it via SeaBIOS or with a Crouton chroot. You can then run Chrome OS apps on a proper Linux distro via the Chrome and Chromium web browsers, along with all the other software available on regular Linux.

Will the switch to the Freon graphics stack have any negative impact on Crouton Ubuntu spawning an X11 server instance inside the chroot environment?

[dungeon]

We can ditch words, so there would not be languages... without that we can start from scratch and don't never ever search, look for or invent unusable thing... and we wouldn't need to have what to save or even need any thing like batteries

[justmy2cents]

Honestly, I've been hoping people could ditch GTK and Qt for a few years now in favor of HTML5 frontends. I know that's a crazy idea, but in the near future it may make a lot more sense than what we've been doing.

i really hope my future will diverge from yours. yours is going into place where 3/4 of computer is taken over by ram

[nerdopolis]

Seems to be really really tiny. There are only 24 files
common.mk dbus.h font.c input.c keysym.h main.c Makefile shl_pty.h splash.h term.h util.c video.c
dbus.c dbus_interface.h font.h input.h LICENSE main.h shl_pty.c splash.c term.c term.o.depends util.h video.h
all taking 372k, where the largest file is font.c at 208k, which appears to be a really simple font format for a terminal...

Someone on the Wayland IRC said it appears to be a small wrapper for the Direct Rendering Manager, and I have to agree... ...it appears that there is no client server abilities in this at all

...and reading the Google+ comment from one of the developers, he said it's not a display server...


I guess they're running chromium bare metal...

[scionicspectre]

i really hope my future will diverge from yours. yours is going into place where 3/4 of computer is taken over by ram

Haha, I certainly don't mean a total takeover. Just where it makes sense, to the point that everyone's experience is roughly the same as it is now, but the developer side of things is much more manageable.

[johnc]

Honestly, I've been hoping people could ditch GTK and Qt for a few years now in favor of HTML5 frontends. I know that's a crazy idea, but in the near future it may make a lot more sense than what we've been doing.

Yes... that's a crazy idea.