ChromeOS is splitting the browser from the OS, getting more Linux-y

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/google-is-finally-separating-chrome-from-chromeos-for-easier-updates/

by mfiguiere • 3 years ago

108 83 3 years ago

smoldesu• 3 years ago

Previously ChromeOS was using a homemade graphics stack called "Freon," but now with Wayland, it'll be on the new and normal desktop Linux graphic stack.

More interesting than I thought it would be. Hopefully this means better upstream GPU support for the plethora of ARM tablets/laptops that run ChromeOS.

nerdix• 3 years ago

This is good because Chrome on Wayland has been an adventure and not in a good way.

This will certainly mean that Wayland will become a first class citizen and be less prone to random breakage.

zdragnar• 3 years ago

Aside from some flags needed for screen sharing, what problems have you faced? I've found chrome to run significantly better on Wayland than X11- the last time I tried chrome in X, the screen tearing during scrolling was almost nauseating.

I'll admit, though, that it might be OS dependent. For some reason, chrome+Wayland+debian was more trouble to get screen sharing working right than on arch. Maybe I've mostly gotten lucky?

hollerith2• 3 years ago

I remember bugs last year, certainly, but Chrome on Wayland on Fedora Workstation 38 has been working perfectly for 36 days here.

sillywalk8• 3 years ago

Project LaCros looks to be finally finished.

ChromeOS and Chrome browser can/will be updated separately, with Chrome being the same as the normal Linux version.

dmazzoni• 3 years ago

I hope it was worth it. I worked at Google when the project was started, I think it was around 5 years ago.

One hell of a long and expensive refactor.

unixhero• 3 years ago

Chromeos was Gentoo based at one point I believe.

anonacct37• 3 years ago

As far as I know it still is. Just like the default image used for Google Kubernetes nodes, CoS.

NoZebra120vClip• 3 years ago

Microkernel architecture FTW.

qbasic_forever• 3 years ago

ChromeOS is still using the plain old monolithic mainline Linux kernel.

femboy• 3 years ago

Hopefully running Firefox becomes easier ;)

1MachineElf4• 3 years ago

Want to try a browser-focused OS experience that uses Firefox? Try Tails OS. It's the Tor Browser based on Firefox.

podgib• 3 years ago

It would be hilarious if the European Commission forced Google to add a browser choice screen to Chrome OS like they did on Windows ;)

samspenc• 3 years ago

I'm hoping this means we will be able to run Linux binaries on ChromeOS at some point - I'm specifically interesting in being able to run Visual Studio Code (for Linux) and some dev environments and use Chromebooks plus a Linux-compatible OS as my dev machine.

Laremere• 3 years ago

This is already a thing: https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en

freedomben2• 3 years ago

I'm guessing GP means natively, not in a VM. I've been super grateful for the VM-based method, but I still prefer the native experience like that provided by Crouton[1]. With Crouton being "maintenance-only" now I share GP's hope that a similar thing will be possible and easy.

[1] https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

jauntywundrkind3• 3 years ago

Crostini should already host a fine vscode. https://chromeos.dev/en/linux

ChromeOS seems to consider it an anti-goal for users to be using the OS like a general purpose OS. Crostini allows them to keep the rest of the system locked down, where-as just running vscode on ChromeOS directly would mean giving Vscode more unconstrained access.

cbhl• 3 years ago

IIRC Crostini requires certain hardware CPU features, so you need a Chromebook model that supports it. Most Chromebooks released after 2019, as well as select earlier models in the list in the Wiki

https://chromeos.dev/en/linux/linux-on-chromeos-deep-dive

sillywalk8• 3 years ago

Very doubtful as running random binaries under ChromeOS would defeat the entire security model for ChromeOS.

calgarymicro3• 3 years ago

You can already sideload APKs on Chromebooks with developer mode enabled, so I don't see why they couldn't allow the same thing with Linux binaries.

moondev• 3 years ago

You can already launch docker containers, lxc containers and windows, linux and even macos via KVM from crostini. You can even run nested virt inside those vms. Curious what the motivation is that those options do not address. Is it mainly resource allocation concerns?

jauntywundrkind3• 3 years ago

The really stunningly good ecosystem ripple effect of switching to Wayland is that anyone who wants to make hardware for Chromebooks now needs driver support for the one clear obvious huge target they should have had been targeting anyways, Wayland.

More directly obviously useful to most people though is just the fact that the shelf life of these units should hopefully be a lot longer. The OS might not longer get updates, but Chrome can keep upgrading & just run on whatever Wayland compositor is there.

solarkraft• 3 years ago

Well, Wayland doesn't really depend on any drivers, but most Wayland compositors (as well as modern X11, as far as I know) depend on the Direct Rendering Manager/Infrastructure and related features. I suspect that Chrome OS already uses these, so there may not be a bit ecosystem difference from that side.

jauntywundrkind3• 3 years ago

The forrest I feel you are missing in calling out these trees is that Chrome already supports a good variety of options on Wayland & can be nicely accelerated there.

Where-as the old Skia based ChromeOS rendering made having actual hardware compositing support much more optional.

The bar is just clearly much higher for what drivers will be expected to do now. Passing off stunted barely working custom low level drivers will no longer be enough. I can't see how anyone could rush to defend other views, at this point.

daft_pink• 3 years ago

I don't really understand the point of turning ChromeOS into Linux. The point of ChromeOS used to be a hardened secure browser only computer that would work identically with your login across systems on the platform. If you want a Linux laptop, why not just buy a Linux laptop. Why use do you want Google's dumbed down implementation of Linux.

freedomben2• 3 years ago

They're not "turning ChromeOS into Linux." ChromeOS can and will still be a hardened secure browser-only computer that works identically with your login across systems on the platform. Having separate binaries for the UI shell and the Chrome browser doesn't nullify everything else. TFA even points out that users won't really notice any difference.

kotaKat• 3 years ago

It's pretty much turning ChromeOS into Linux.

I remember when - and miss - the OS being "a single Chrome window, that's the shell, that's it". It was simple. Unbloated. Now it's an absolute mess that Google doesn't know what to do with - treat it like an Android device, or treat it like a computer.

sillywalk8• 3 years ago

One of the main points of the project was for security reasons.

Updates to the Chrome browser build for ChromeOS came out later than the standard Linux/Windows/Mac Chrome builds because the special chromeos build needed time to be integrated/tested with the rest of ChromeOS.

With LaCros, the browser can be updated independently from the rest of the OS.

fivre• 3 years ago

idk if you've used a chromeos device, but they have an infuriating update schedule where it seems like there are updates daily, and they _always_ require a full system reboot. they apparently can't be consolidated either, so half the time i'll reboot to apply one and immediately get a notification of another

this presumably allows them to ease that a bit and apply some updates with the system still running, with maybe a quicker browser-only restart

sangnoir• 3 years ago

idk if you've used a chromeos device, but they have an infuriating update schedule where it seems like there are updates daily

This has been the opposite of my experience on the stable channel. Perhaps you're on one of the more volatile ChromeOS update channels? Or you use your device infrequently and put it to sleep when not in use, resulting in a similar UX issue that plagues game consoles: the appearance of always having updates when used.

nektro• 3 years ago

what about fuschia?

sillywalk8• 3 years ago

They laid of a lot of the developers of Fuchsia.

2112throwaway• 3 years ago

Not as many as you may think. It is doing fine.

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+log

1MachineElf4• 3 years ago

It would be ironic if Microsoft took the OS, added Edge, and released EdgeOS running on Edgebooks, Edgeboxes, etc.

0cf8612b2e1e• 3 years ago

That…feels very plausible? Microsoft has to be peeved at how much of the education market has been taken over by Chromebooks. Providing some locked down OS, with minimal specs, friendly to corporate management software, Teams preinstalled, etc feels like a pretty good move. The Chromebooks only work though an app store, so this idea could feed into Microsoft’s as well.

Unless Microsoft would rather target the cream of the market through their tablets.

Edit: then again, maybe they have become hooked on the Win11 telemetry + ad revenue. Stripped down OS has a harder time justifying the need to include Candy Crush.

FirmwareBurner4• 3 years ago

how much of the education market has been taken over by Chromebooks.

Why is this even a ting wherever this is(US?)? Mandating school kids use a platform owned by Google, a corporation specialized in advertising and data harvesting, feels like letting McDonalds's and Coca-Cola be in charge of the school cafeteria and educating kids about a balanced diet.

Am I taking crazy pills, or am I missing something and I misunderstood the situation?

pjmlp4• 3 years ago

In US mostly.

Here on this side of the pound, schools hardly give students laptops or similar, on the more fortunate ones there might be a computer room with desktops, and the really very fortunate ones might have some kind of tablets or laptops.

And it is up to the families to buy their own kids computers, eventually some kind of state support might be available.

Chromebooks are usually left as a curiosity among Saturn, Media Markt, Blue, Vobis, Public, .... that gets routinely rebated until someome finally takes them away.

jasonjayr• 3 years ago

Microsoft Windows has all the pieces already to actually make this happen right now. AD, Group Policy, device lock down policies, "S Mode", etc.

To be honest, what I think they lack is straightforward licensing in order to run an organization with these tools with high availability.

zer0zzz2• 3 years ago

I’ve recently used a Samsung galaxy book 5g that goes currently for $260 on Amazon running windows on arm64 and I feel this could be an indicator of how they easily could do this.

verdverm• 3 years ago

would that make them our Edgelord?

KRAKRISMOTT• 3 years ago

Gates must have been quite Edgy back in the day

happymellon2• 3 years ago

Microsoft selling consumer Linux?

That would be an interesting move.

1MachineElf4• 3 years ago

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

TrueSlacker0• 3 years ago

Will that result in longer than a 5 year support life? A LTS Chromebook or EdgeBook would be wonderful.

cykros• 3 years ago

Microsoft has had the sense to let Linux become the dominant OS on its cloud provider. Where it's the right tool for the job at hand, I suspect Nadella's Microsoft would be perfectly fine with being built on Linux.

zer0zzz2• 3 years ago

This is terrible. I use chromeos because I want a secure locked down browser not another shitty Linux distro.

biblbroxxx• 3 years ago

They will not convert whole system into native nabraries like gtk or qt. It is about dividing chrome binaries in order to get easier update process for developers.

pentagrama• 3 years ago

Wondering if they will let you uninstall Chrome now, I don't think so. Currently you can't even remove the Chrome icon from the task bar.

deafpolygon• 3 years ago

Probably needs to add more telemetry to the OS.

ChromeOS is splitting the browser from the OS, getting more Linux-y

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