Another Longtime Intel Linux Engineer Joins Google

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Another Longtime Intel Linux Engineer Joins Google

Ben Widawsky who had been at Intel for the past seventeen years, most of which were spent improving their open-source Linux graphics driver as well as other Linux kernel contributions, has joined Google...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ben-Widawsky-Leaves-Intel

[timofonic]

Is Google into something evil? It's hiring a lot of engineers related to hardware drivers.

[FLHerne]

Is Google into something evil? It's hiring a lot of engineers related to hardware drivers.

Chromebooks probably, especially the new "ChromeOS Flex" initiative where they're supporting aftermarket installation of ChromeOS on a variety of old Windows/Mac hardware:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/chrome-enterprise/chromeos-flex-ready-to-scale-to-pcs-and-macs

They're also working on Steam games support for ChromeOS.

[kylew77]

Chromebooks probably

That was my thought exactly. Chromebooks are becoming some potent Linux laptops. SystemD free, Gentoo based, sandboxing, privilege separation, easy upgrades, decent hardware, good OOM management. I almost swear by my Chromebook. My FreeBSD and OpenBSD and Windows 10 computers hardly see the light of day anymore. I am thinking of migrating more family to ChromeOS Flex in the coming year too. Now that you can buy Chromebooks with 8GB and 16GB and in the HP Dragon's case 32GB of RAM and AMD putting out the first 8 core 16 thread Chromebook processors you can get a powerful laptop designed from the ground up for Linux!