The End of Windows 10 is looming. The world needs a simpler, easy, quick, snackable alternative
More like it just needs a company to grow as a non-server OS vendor. Intel dual core era as the Ultrabook is long over as well as the spinning disk HDD laptop era. The bottom performance is incredibly good now for what chromebooks are meant for. No we don’t need a new ChromeOS or a new FirefoxOS. Web apps have not displaced native applications on desktop nor mobile nor television. They all coexist.
Stop acting like users need something as handholdy and restrictive as ChromeOS. People can do as they’ve done for decades, use the web browser if thats all they wanted with a laptop/desktop. And recent times, they can stick to the pre-installed application store. Its life exists as an easy to manage/restrict solution for primary schools. It’s literally on the path to deprecation for a standard Android desktop mode. Chasing ChromeOS is chasing a design that its backing company isn’t even hiding their plans to replace
The most popular desktop OS that individuals choose to buy is Windows. The second is MacOS. Why would you target a ChromeOS analogue rather than just improve a standard Linux’s fleet management software? Far third place is not the model to aspire too. It did not succeed how Google wanted. It’s high end Chromebooks did not lead to them being competitive with MacBooks. It did not bloom a great software ecosystem of ChromeOS specific applications.
On desktop people browse the Internet with Chrome and Firefox. They play video games off Steam. Kids want to get into art. They edit videos with Davinci Resolve, Premiere Pro. They grow up wanting to get into video games studios regardless of how ill advised that is. They learn after affects, blender, FL studio, krita, Photoshop, illustrator, InDesign, Maya, etc. Some want to learn tech stuff. They’ll learn podman/docker, they’ll learn how to program, they’ll learn verilog or something. 3D printers, again desktop software to model stuff to print.
Desktops don’t need to be mobile OSs with windowing applications. People haven’t seemed to want that. They buy Windows and Mac’s. Peoples primary Internet browsers are their phones. Chasing ChromeOS is like trying to pitch a revolutionary idea for the desktop in 2010
Here’s what would be good. A company focusing on OS support for other companies general consumer hardware devices. Focus on streamlining Flatpak permission management. Maybe like Fedora atomic distros in structure. Company focuses on bug fixes regarding hardware support and capability to distribute driver updates as they come in. That will earn hardware platform wins for the OS. That will lead to more famous commercial software to port over
Really emphasize that chasing ChromeOS or FirefoxOS is a waste of time. The casual user is on mobile. The laptop/desktop market is work - school or professional, high hardware requirement entertainment like games, aspirational stuff like professional creation software
Do we? Who’s we?
You’re being downvoted, but you’re right.
People want something simple. Something that just runs the basics and automatically backs up online and invisibly.
The vast majority of people don’t need to have the choice of 17 different browsers, or 43 office suites, and they certainly don’t need the terminal or Powershell, or anything else. They just need a browser and a way to maybe write a letter and view photos. Maybe a way for the kids to do their homework. If their laptop spontaneously combusts, they want to be able to sign into a new one and have everything put back as it was automatically.
ChromeOS is perfect for them, apart from being a Google product. It’s something we tend to miss because we’re technically minded, but most people don’t care about computers, and don’t want what we want. They want an appliance. If someone created that system with privacy built in, it could be great :)
You’re absolutely right. We need to have many different options for many different people.
I think you’re still missing the point though. People that see a computer as an appliance don’t want or need many different options and can be overwhelmed by the choice. We need a Linux Basic of some sort that all of us coalesce around to recommend to non-technical users, that is designed to be absolutely bulletproof and unbreakable. I’d say it should be immutable to prevent any accidental fluffery, have flatpaks as the main software installation method (snaps can go to hell and appimages just suck for updating) and come with a productivity suite pre-installed as well as typical codecs so things like streaming services work OOTB. Mint could have been such a choice, but it’s just still too niggly for users with no technical skills and no inkling to learn them. We need an “it just works” distro goshdarnit!!
No, we shouldn’t be encouraging people to use tools they don’t bother to understand how to use.
People have lives ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s awesome that us tech-minded nerds can get under the hood, mess with it and customise to our preferences. We can then make it simple and easy for the folks that just need a computer.
If we want Linux to succeed more broadly, than it needs to be accessible to everyone.
It’s already in datacentres all over the world. It’s the primary server platform. Linux doesn’t need to succeed more broadly, it already has. If you’re talking about Windows users and gamers… we are way better off without those simple people.
we are way better off without those simple people.
ew.
It would need someone to set it up, but I have my non-techy family members on Silverblue and it suits the purpose as outlined. Also not sure why all the fear-mongering about btrfs, I would say it’s ready and suitable for mainstream use now, or you don’t have to use it.
BTRFS is fine for most people as long as they are using 1 drive.
What are the issues with multiple drives?
i also need to know for my setup 😅
I think there are a lot of people that confuse Btrfs with Bcachefs, which is definitely not ready for primetime.
“Please, world World, FOSS World Needs Funding for Something You Want”
Mint?
Bazzite and PopOs are also very good options
I read the article and it just sounds like they’re praising ChromeOS for being web browser centric. Need office, open Google docs/drive. Pretty much a Linux distro but by default come with a bunch of progressive web apps installed for common applications?
Consumer expectations. On Linux you can just use the web browser just like most people already do on ChromeOS and I assume windows and mac’s. But on regular Linux, Mac, and Windows people expect more. So I guess a distro that brands itself and markets to users to just use the web browser for everything and maybe a store of progressive web apps/preinstalled ones
Also out of the box support. ChromeOS is Google backed. Laptop makers sell mainstream ChromeOS boxes. Linux doesn’t have major mainstream device support. It’d be far less fussy if hardware vendors were releasing plenty of Linux out the box hardware. Right now it’s some workstation centric hardware from Lenovo and Dell and smaller companies like System76
On that note I’d place my hopes with System76 since they’re currently focused on consumer experience. Cosmic DE is still not prime-time ready but maybe a couple more years. 26.04 release use as the default for their new hardware and it still effectively be early adopter phase for Cosmic DE. Then 28.04 ready for primetime. Keep trying to break into being a mainstream hardware brand. Other is what happens with KDE Plasma with Valve and SteamOS, Plasma Mobile, and maybe the TV interface. A bunch of consumer centric use cases driving development in KDE land. Maybe they’ll come up with a way to get flatpak permissions work in a way that alerts users on need and makes it easy to do like on Android/iOS
You could probably make a small Arch install, add LibreOffice and something either like the GNOME browser or Firefox. What people using ChromeOS want is something light (for cheaping out on hardware to schools), and basically just a way to access a browser. Plus, something something permissions. ChromeOS is marketed towards enterprise, like education. Just need the bare minimum to get on the 'net, and no more.
Why the hell would you use arch for browser centric use? Literally any stable distro would work perfectly fine, and doesn’t risk failing to boot because of an update…
Because arch btw 🙄
I think an immutable distro like Bazzite’s cousins Aurora (KDE) and Bluefin (GNOME) would be far more appropriate. Combined with automatic rollback (if the system fails to boot, rollback to previous version) and it’d be practically bulletproof in education.
I honestly never tried them as they don’t fit my use case, so I can’t comment. The concept does sound good though.
I don’t know too much about distros, but you want something quite light. Let’s be real, enterprise like schools won’t pony up everything for Debian, especially when they just use Chromium and maybe Libreoffice. Schools are cheap, and if you can hacksaw together an Arch-based thing, they WILL buy miserable hardware, that can just barely run it, and an 8 gig SSD is much more stomachable for them than a 32-gig for Debian. SteamOS doesn’t completely crash, and that’s infinitely more complicated. This is basic Arch, plus a WM, plus Firefox/Chromium/Whatever.
the existing immutables will do
We really should have a FirefoxOS equivalent. Frankly, there’s little reason not to do this. The only thing really missing is Firefox support for PWAs.
I’d imagine a Debian based OS, with cage first showing a first-time-setup thing, then going to simper web first DE. You still need a panel at the bottom for managing multiple windows and the system tray and wifi and a desktop and start menu for pinned apps. Storage doesn’t even need to be local, it could just point to something in the cloud that you have execute commands on your behalf.
This is the ideal for tons of simple, lightweight users and there are a LOT of them.
That actually sounds like a fun afternoon with Blue-Build.
I actually see a market for this the more I think about it. install the OS free, have the account hosted at the provider of your choice which will provide all the storage and cloud apps and email you want. You could have a cheap subscription that hosts a session elsewhere, or us selfhosters could host our own sessions for friends and family.
Like Fedora Silverblue or OpenSuSE Aeon/Kalpa?
EXACTLY. But nobody’s searching for it, and nobody’s telling. So no one’s knowing.
AnduinOS?
I don’t know that very many people would understand the limitations of it just like they didn’t with ChromeOS. Just need a major hardware manufacturer to start putting a Linux distro on their machines and make a more stable application installation system than KDE Discover or shore up Discover a bit and it would be great to consolidate rpm, deb, etc., rather than adding new systems like Snap and Flatpak.
I don’t think that would work. The reason for things like flatpak and snaps to exist is because they don’t interfere with the host package manager. Combining debs and rpms would be a disaster. Unless it would be possible to create a package manager that can track all of those different formats, but i don’t know about that.
Windows isn’t immutable either. And i had a lot of issues with Kinoite. Some flatpaks need workarounds, everything starts only after a second, can’t really remove that one annoying software and too much rpm-ostree installs slows updates to a crawl, etc. Then you look into Universalblue’s build-your-custom-image and see the bazillion steps and dependencies and walk away.
Now i look into plain old Fedora as a Windows 10 alternative for my mom.
Check out Blue Build for building custom Fedora Atomic images.
You create a GitHub repo using their helper website and use yaml. They even have some useful modules specific to desktops (that would have been a huge pain to do in Dockerfiles)
