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  • Google Makes Linux Apps On Chrome OS Official

    Phoronix: Google Makes Linux Apps On Chrome OS Official

    Alongside a plethora of other announcements in kicking off Google's 2018 I/O event, following recent rumors and indications in their dev channel, Google has officially confirmed support for "Linux Apps" on Chrome OS...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Often people will point to some event and say that "this is the year of the linux desktop" and they are always proved wrong. The reality is that while linux may be very well capable of doing a lot of what people want, and even may be able to do it well, linux desktop will never take off until I can walk into a store and buy a computer with linux pre installed easily and reliably. Chrome os solved this isssue, and if this new feature makes it easy to install a full blown linux distribution without having to go into the bios or re partition a drive that 99% of users are too scared to do, you may just see a decent uptick in linux usage. If it's easier to do this than it is apple people to dual boot windows, you will have a lot of people that go into busy buy and buy a cheap and stylish chromebook, take it home and want to play games on it, find out that if they install a disro they can install steam and go from there.

    Usualy these chromebook aren't powerhouses, but the intel chips they usualy have can play most light to medium weight games on moderate settings. This might make more developers give some consideration to linux release of their games.

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    • #3
      Originally posted by benjamin545 View Post

      Usualy these chromebook aren't powerhouses, but the intel chips they usualy have can play most light to medium weight games on moderate settings. This might make more developers give some consideration to linux release of their games.
      I believe there is a Chromebook with an AMD APU in the works. ChromeOS is now an unbreakable and easy to use Linux distro - good for family members of all kinds

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      • #4
        Few apps exist for Linux. Most of them are programed for GNU-Linux.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by benjamin545 View Post
          Often people will point to some event and say that "this is the year of the linux desktop" and they are always proved wrong. The reality is that while linux may be very well capable of doing a lot of what people want, and even may be able to do it well, linux desktop will never take off until I can walk into a store and buy a computer with linux pre installed easily and reliably. Chrome os solved this isssue,
          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".

          and if this new feature makes it easy to install a full blown linux distribution without having to go into the bios or re partition a drive that 99% of users are too scared to do, you may just see a decent uptick in linux usage. If it's easier to do this than it is apple people to dual boot windows, you will have a lot of people that go into busy buy and buy a cheap and stylish chromebook, take it home and want to play games on it, find out that if they install a disro they can install steam and go from there.
          Quite frankly I don't see this happening at all. People that can't repartition a drive won't really learn how to do anything more than basic device operation. Their issue is mental, they won't look up how to do stuff (because of various reasons), so unless the device does that by default, and holds their hand, and forces them to, they won't do that.

          I'm personally fine with this, I really like that people on normal Linux distros comprehend that they can actually look for and read a tutorial from the internet, or post in a forum or on stackexchange/overflow/whatever to learn something, and don't just freak out and run away from anything they don't immediately understand.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by Filiprino View Post
            Few apps exist for Linux. Most of them are programed for GNU-Linux.
            And we have a winner for the "Mr Smartypants comment of the day" award.

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            • #7
              Google probably went this VM route instead of chroot-like solution (like Crouton) so that it can pave way for replacing the Linux kernel in Chrome OS with Fushcia's kernel and software stack in the future.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by benjamin545 View Post
                ...you will have a lot of people that go into busy buy and buy a cheap and stylish chromebook, take it home and want to play games on it, find out that if they install a disro they can install steam and go from there.
                Maybe you didn't pay attention to the fact that this is about running Linux inside a VM, so forget about gaming. This is merely about allowing developers to use Chrome OS for development, which is quite silly, considering you can buy proper Linux machines online that work perfectly, or simply buy a Mac Book which is Posix compliant so you can do your development on it easily. You can also go and buy one of plenty of Windows laptops and install a Linux distro on it the same way Chrome OS is now offering, only a lot faster than what Chrome OS is offering.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by sarmad View Post

                  Maybe you didn't pay attention to the fact that this is about running Linux inside a VM, so forget about gaming. This is merely about allowing developers to use Chrome OS for development, which is quite silly, considering you can buy proper Linux machines online that work perfectly, or simply buy a Mac Book which is Posix compliant so you can do your development on it easily. You can also go and buy one of plenty of Windows laptops and install a Linux distro on it the same way Chrome OS is now offering, only a lot faster than what Chrome OS is offering.
                  Supposedly Google is working to port QEMU's Virgil to Crostini to enable acceleration OpenGL and ES to Linux apps running in the VM. I'd be curious to see how Virgil performance compares to bare-metal.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by benjamin545 View Post
                    linux desktop will never take off until I can walk into a store and buy a computer with linux pre installed easily and reliably..
                    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.

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