Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market
theregister.comChromeOS seems very interesting to me because it has managed to achieve a degree of security that no other desktop OS (Windows, macOS, and of course other desktop Linux, which are the least secure of the bunch) can even approach. It has been designed from the ground up to be secure: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/HEAD/sec...
- Verified boot backed by TPM.
- System services are heavily sandboxed: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/HEAD/san...
- New userspace is written in Rust: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/HEAD/dev...
- Web pages loaded on Chrome have no access to the device's filesystem, nor to user files.
- Android apps run inside a restricted container.
- Linux apps run inside a VM, which leverages KVM and a custom Rust VM monitor.
I think it'd be great if someone made a de-Googled fork of ChromeOS without all the Google telemetry and bloatware, because it'd be the perfect Linux distro for security-conscious individuals.
A rock is also pretty hard to hack.
The hard problem of security is giving the user the power of a general-purpose machine without exposing them to the risks. "Don't run your favorite software lol" is not a valid approach to security. ChromeOS remains totally unsuitable for even casual usage, let alone anything serious.
Someone will, I'm sure, claim that the use of virtual machines is a solution. It isn't. The layers of virtualization in ChromeOS lead to atrocious performance, reliability, and functionality. I am not willing to tolerate half my programs living in a different universe from the other half, nor am I willing to tolerate uptime measured in hours.
I'm not sure what you mean by uptime measured in hours, it seemed fine to me in the years where I used it.. It also provides all of the common computing including all of the browser debuggers, etc, the state of common computing might not be that impressive but that is Windows, OSX and Linux' fault.
One could argue that anything you can't do on a ChromeOS machine (or an equivalent Firefox one if that project were more complete) without running a VM is proprietary garbage. The other Apps you will run will work on some percentage of machines, the device you use have incomplete drivers, the window environments they developed for were not worth standardizing such that a browser has to provide the standards layer.
Secure, performant, execute any code - choose 2. You have to choose an edge on this triangle.
Is security an actual practical concern for desktop users savvy enough to know what a container is?
The only people I know who've had any sort of malware infection at all in the last 15 years are the ones who download and install random .exe files from spam emails and pirated TV streaming sites.
Sadly ChromiumOS still requires Google. ChromeOS to me feels like an attempt to make laptops more like smartphones. The security is there to protect what's running on your machine from you than you from bad actors.
I feel a bit similarly. I'm torn these having very cool and interesting security properties but this way of using computers, for a lack of a better description, is just not what I'm after.
The system design is unique and interesting. It's a shame that the user experience doesn't align with how I want to use my computer, so I'll keep using desktop Linux and implement a bit of sandboxing myself. For the average consumer it could probably replace Windows for a lot of use cases and improve security due to its strict locked down and hard to exploit nature.
How, pray tell, are you getting to "Desktop Linux, the least secure of the bunch?"
https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html
https://privsec.dev/posts/linux/linux-insecurities/
https://bjornpagen.com/en_US/desktop%20linux%20is%20insecure
Maybe someone with more knowledge than me can explain - flatpaks seem way more secure than anything you would ever install in Windows by a long shot. It's also fairly trivial for me (and I'm by no means a hardcore user) to use a completely immutable version of linux such as Silverblue. The other complaints in these links also seem suspect. If the Linux kernel is insecure due to it being monolithic doesn't that make ChromeOS just as insecure? What about android? What about the "96.3% of the top one million web servers [that] are running Linux"?
Also there's something to be said for security through obscurity. My bet is I could go through my entire junk mail folder opening all attachments on Linux without a problem, but it'd take me less than 10 on windows to be fully owned. If you're careful on Linux aren't you far, far safer than if you're careful on Windows?
The first article links to this [1]:
Almost all popular applications on flathub come with filesystem=host, filesystem=home or device=all permissions, that is, write permissions to the user home directory (and more), this effectively means that all it takes to "escape the sandbox" is echo download_and_execute_evil >> ~/.bashrc. That's it.
This includes Gimp, VSCode, PyCharm, Octave, Inkscape, Steam, Audacity, VLC, ...
To make matters worse, the users are misled to believe the apps run sandboxed. For all these apps flatpak shows a reassuring "sandbox" icon when installing the app (things do not get much better even when installing in the command line - you need to know flatpak internals to understand the warnings).
I guess I just don't buy it completely. Given that I myself have had a hard time giving permission to Flatpak to access even an unimportant network drive (Flatseal is a godsend for giving/denying permissions in any way you please) while the same app on windows will happily write anything to C:\Windows\System32 , I feel like we're talking about entirely different beasts. But perhaps I'm naive. I also feel like there would be a very large vested interest in making people feel more unsafe in linux than they do in Windows/MacOS for obvious reasons.
And given that the version of Fedora I use is immutable and even I have a hard time messing with it to the point of pain/exploit with full access to the system (and I've tried for fun in VMs) I feel like a trusted flatpak app I download from a trusted source is going to have a damn near impossible time doing much of anything. While I feel like a simple website hack that serves me a bad .exe could/would cripple every single file it can find on my network on a Windows machine.
You're right. I'm entirely unconvinced by anyone in this thread on that Linux isn't still WAY safer all around.
You can come up with theoretical threats all day that Linux is susceptible to, sure.
But at the end of the day, there is not a single serious cloud company (or just about any tech company that isn't MS) genuinely looking at "we should switch to Windows or MacOS for the backbone of our company," And it's Linux that gets the downstream security that comes with that.
Whole lotta cope in this thread.
Flatpak permissions are very broad by default in most applications. Even if you manually override them by using Flatseal, some permissions like X.org or PulseAudio sockets are very problematic because these legacy protocols are not designed to be secure. Even if you manage to lock down permissions and only use modern apps that support Wayland and Pipewire, the Flatpak sandbox still exposes a lot of kernel attack surface because it blocks very few syscalls. I think they should add something similar to Win32k lockdown (ProcessSystemCallDisablePolicy) on Windows and disable insecure components like io_uring.
As for immutable distros, AFAIK Silverblue and others are immutable in the sense of package management, but there is actually no process to ensure the integrity of the full boot chain because initrd can be trivially modified by the host and is unsigned. There is a UKI (Unified Kernel Image) proposal that will likely be the path going forward (at least on the Red Hat world), but I think it's still years away.
In my opinion, if you want to use Linux desktop securely, just use Qubes.
I fully agree with using Qubes, but I also think for most people in most cases that's akin to putting a bank vault door on the front of your house. I guess the question I would ask is: gun to your head you have a choice between running a random Setup.exe in Windows, a .sh/.deb/.rpm in linux, or a Flatpak. Which one are you choosing? 10/10 times I'm choosing the Flatpak myself. It might not be perfect, but it does seem better than most alternatives everyone uses all day every day.
> for most people in most cases that's akin to putting a bank vault door on the front of your house
If we are talking about a device in which you do banking, shopping, manage sensitive or work data, etc. then I think security should be a priority. For more casual use, I agree Qubes would be overkill.
> Which one are you choosing?
I'd rather execute Setup.exe inside Windows Sandbox or denying UAC prompts, or a random macOS binary (provided SIP is not disabled) than a Flatpak. To be clear, I think Flatpak is an improvement, I'm glad it exists and I hope it continues evolving. But in my opinion, the Linux desktop still has a long way to catch up to Windows and macOS on security.
This tells me imperfect, which, sure. It doesn't tell me "the worst of the bunch."
Compared to the other desktop operating systems (Windows and macOS), it absolutely is. It might have other advantages, but security is not one of them, and users should be aware.
huh? Linux security is is soo annoying it won't let other apps spy on key strokes so no way to have push to talk or have OBS on a keybinding.... mean while on windows all apps are key loggers
This the first I'm hearing of this, you should respond more substantially than repeating the assertion that's specifically being questioned.
In my previous reply, I linked three articles which discuss the technical details extensively:
https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html
https://privsec.dev/posts/linux/linux-insecurities/
https://bjornpagen.com/en_US/desktop%20linux%20is%20insecure
A brief summary: No trusted boot, no clear security boundaries between system and applications, no application sandboxing, lack of mitigations (both on kernel and userspace), large kernel attack surface, insecure-by-design legacy systems (X, PulseAudio). Windows and macOS perform comparatively better on all of those.
Again, you're talking about a ton of mostly theoretical problems that haven't caused much in the way of widespread problems, which to me don't come close to the following fact:
No serious cloud, perhaps tech generally, company, is like "We're switching to Windows/MacOS to run the backbone tech of what we do."
That's Linux, and Linux will get the downstream security benefits of that. Given actual, real life history, I trust this far more than those other two, especially Windows, which just shat the bed ALL THE TIME. Your real life track record is far more reliable that a parade of imaginary horribles, even when they may be little things that only are on the Desktop.
>No serious cloud, perhaps tech generally, company, is like "We're switching to Windows/MacOS to run the backbone tech of what we do."
True, but it is also true that practically all the other companies, governments and NGOs in the world--the ones that do not have providing services over the internet as one of their core competencies--chose Windows and keep on choosing Windows.
There are strong economic incentives that keeps an OS or other piece of infrastructure dominant for decades once it becomes dominant in some sector of the economy--if that piece of infrastructure requires many specialists for its deployment and maintenance--even when that piece of infrastructure has major problems if a hobbyist or an individual were to install that piece of infrastructure on their personal computer.
>Linux will get the downstream security benefits of that.
Linux would be able to derive security benefits from that if Linus cared, but a reading of his writings on the subject reveals that he does not care much about security.
I'm using Linux to write these words--a distro I chose and installed. I am however aware that because I'm using Linux, it is significantly easier to pwn me than it would be if I were using iOS, Android, ChromeOS, MacOS or Windows, which used to be a joke security-wise in the 1990s, but which has become much better security-wise.
Actually I believe that Qubes is pretty good security-wise, but it is the only Linux distro that is.
I have no reasonable basis to believe your "Linux is easier to pwn" argument.
Saying that all those other non-techy big things "choose Windows" is a really stretchy definition of "choose." It's been long enough, we know the story, robber baron Bill Gates was able to jump ahead and cement Windows mindshare. It is what it is.
Again, I don't get what you're relying on when you say "desktop linux is the worst?" Sure, windows claims to be better, etc. But, and here's the important part, they've ALWAYS been cagey. You just can't ever REALLY know.
Now on the Linux side, sure -- there are lots of visible issues. That's good, because they are visible.
No one knows "all the code," and more importantly, no one can easily predict what Windows (and perhaps Apple) will do tomorrow to screw up the desktop, but we know they have the capacity to.
No thanks, I'll trust the thing that doesn't come with such possible arbitrary baggage.
>robber baron Bill Gates was able to jump ahead and cement Windows mindshare.
I agree and that is one of the thing I meant by my "strong economic incentives that keeps an OS or other piece of infrastructure dominant for decades". But Linux retains its niche in internet services the same way!
Linux became dominant in internet services in the 1990s when the only alternative was Windows (and unlike today, in the 1990s Windows was no more secure than Linux). Apple wasn't even trying to compete in this market (or in the "enterprise" market that Microsoft has dominated since the 1990s): there a nice transcript about an internal meeting at Apple where Jobs tells some engineer that Apple sells its products to consumers and if he want to learn how to sell to IT departments, he should go work for HP or something. The internet-services industry ended up using Linux on its server farms basically because in the 1990s, Microsoft didn't sufficiently appreciate the advantages of open-source licensing, so they ended up disqualifying themselves in the eyes of the Dot Coms.
Also, this conversation is about desktop Linux. What part of a typical Linux desktop (such as my Fedora Workstation install that I'm using to write these words) do you think runs on Google's servers? My guess is that it is just the kernel and a few libraries like libc. How dominant Linux is on servers at Google and Facebook has no bearing on the security qualities or lack thereof of all the other code (Wayland, Gnome, GTK, graphics drivers, media players, codecs, font and typography libraries) running on a typical Linux desktop.
>I think it'd be great if someone made a de-Googled fork of ChromeOS without all the Google telemetry and bloatware, because it'd be the perfect Linux distro for security-conscious individuals.
Since such a thing is currently unavailable, I'm inclined to try running ChromeOS, then having a headless Linux box next to it in the hopes that my customizing the headless Linux box will satisfy my need to customize my software environment.
For example, I'm inclined to try to keep most of my personal files on the headless Linux box.
The article mentions Chrome OS Flex, which is a version that doesn't require the Google security chip so it runs on a regular Intel PC. That is "de-Googled" I suppose, though I am not sure about the security implications that you mention.
De-googled as in not tied to a Google account and its web services. Look at something like ungoogled-chromium.
Has been bought out by Google though and it's now part of their enterprise products to install ChromeOS on non-Chromebooks.
You lose secure boot when using ChromeOS flex. It's also not "degoogled".
FYI Android apps are also in a VM now.
https://chromeos.dev/en/posts/making-android-more-secure-wit...
Yeah, ChromeOS is actually pretty good for nearly everyone. Perhaps most importantly, they're incredibly popular in schools right now and have been for a few years. Google has definitely been working towards a long play with shifting the younger generations mindshare towards ChromeOS and away from Windows for productivity. It's interesting because it does actually have some of the necessary holes punched through to allow for serious power/dev usage, but is also secure by default and as usable as the websites you go to.
> ChromeOS is actually pretty good for nearly everyone.
It's been a while since I've given it a try, but I dislike ChomeOS for the same reason that I dislike MacOS. They make me feel like I'm wearing a straightjacket and get in my way.
And, of course, any OS that requires me to have an account on any other server is not fit for purpose (to me).
And you're absolutely right about that - But it's a great OS for devices that you don't own. Leaving aside the (frequent, ugly, and probably illegal) times that school districts require parents to purchase children chromeOS devices that get joined to the school's domain, it's a very common problem to want to have devices that are locked down according to organization policy. When you are giving a device you own to someone else to physically control, the ChromeOS Straight Jacket is a great tool.
There's a distinct problem with it being the only tool around, though.
ChromeOS is actually "pretty good" for someone who only looks at websites like facebook and reads email. It's also extremely confining and spies on you which makes it unacceptable for a lot of people and it's a sin that students are often stuck with them.
US Schools, they are almost unseen in the rest of the world.
> Ignoring all the commercial Unixes as they are effectively all dead now,
Ironic that this article would ignore Mac OS, a somewhat notable commercial Unix.
Which has nearly 34% of desktops in the US! (world wide only 22%)
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
Those numbers don't look right. IDC says it's more like 10% worldwide which seems more believable. (It's presumably higher in the US and it is growing faster than the overall market.)
Macs and PCs might have different lifecycles that might explain some of the difference; if Macs are used on average twice as long as PCs then 10% of shipments might turn into 20% of running computers. Furthermore I suspect far more PCs end up in places that never browse web and become counted by statcounter but are counted in shipments.
Or the customers of websites that use statcounter are more likely to use Mac, distorting the results.
i highly doubt that the average mac users keep their devices twice as long as PC users. based on spending habits i'd rather suspect the opposite.
The Mac may well continue to be used for longer, even if it's by a child of the original owner, or sold to someone else.
And what stops a PC from doing that? Lots of people on here using 8+ year old PCs for daily workloads even.
Indeed, they do it better. Apple drops support for old hardware comparatively quickly and incentivizing new purchases, while Windows has longer support lifecycles with usually (not always, before you get on me about TPMs) good support for old hardware, and it's especially long for Linux.
When my colleagues return their average PCs to me after 4-5 years of use, they are almost always in a worse state than when Macs of the same age are returned. The cases are damaged or worn, the screen might flicker, ports may be broken. Software means the PC "seems slow".
A PC costing as much as the Mac would fare better, but all Macs are high-quality hardware, and only a fraction of PCs. The average PC is discarded before the average Mac.
I don't disagree* but it's mostly irrelevant for computers that don't travel much, which is desktops and honestly a lot of laptops, too.
*Caveat, I can't agree or disagree with the claim that most PCs are discarded faster. We still have a software problem with Macs. I don't know.
Maybe, maybe not. Point is that there are lot of factors at play that can make the market-share diverge depending on what you measure.
The 10% is its share among the computers shipped to customers whereas the 22% is its share among requests (term?) made by desktop OSes to web servers.
These figures are consistent if we assume that the average Mac makes 2.2 as many requests to web servers as the average desktop computer does--which I am ready to believe: some people use the web much more intensively than others do, and I can easily believe that such people are more inclined (specifically, more than twice as inclined) to chose a Mac than the average computer buyer is.
If a person does not care about computers or the internet and uses them only occasionally, then simply based on the differences in purchase price, they are probably much more differentially likely to buy a Windows machine than a Mac.
That while including Linux in the list, which is not a Unix.
> Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market.
I don't understand this headline, was it written by a bot?
The author used a deliberately confusing title to make the point that ChromeOS should be considered as a Linux OS rather than a distinct category. The actual stat is "Linux (excluding ChromeOS) has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market".
It's The Register being pedantic and a bit argumentative.
There's a reasonable argument that Chrome OS is Linux--or at least more so than Android is. But it's not so much that it's "the wrong kind of Linux" according to purists as the article says but that it mostly addresses a different use case than installing Fedora or Ubuntu and therefore, IMO, it generally makes sense to treat them separately unless your point is that some form of Linux (and *nix generally) has a pretty large market share on both desktop and mobile.
The ChromeOS use case is a strict subset of the use case of a normal Linux laptop. There is nothing stopping you from treating an Ubuntu installation as if it's as limited as a Chromebook. It's every bit as lightweight and can be every bit as locked down.
> can be every bit as locked down
I've never seen the security stuff from ChromeOS be ported to live outside of ChromeOS. When I looked at it (trying to build the inside-container agents for acustom container image), the error messages for setting it up incorrectly were.. let's charitably say hard to understand. I doubt anyone outside of ChromeOS developers understands it, really.
It's pretty intricate, e.g. giving Wayland access to virtual machines in a safe way.
I'm not sure it addresses a different use case than Fedora or Ubuntu. Fedora and Ubuntu on the desktop are likely mostly used for internet browsing and productivity applications. This is the same for ChromeOS.
Pretty soon, SteamOS will be separated out. Then Linux will makeup an even smaller portion of the "desktop Linux market."
I feel that it could have been made clearer by writing "GNU/Linux has nearly half.. [etc..]", maybe?
That's not a joke though and the whole point is made with the weird title
But ChromeOS is also GNU/Linux
No, that would exclude Alpine and I don't know any purist claiming that Alpine isn't Linux.
I guess, reading the linked article would explain this, it's what the article is about.
> We feel that a more accurate reckoning would be that Linux has now reached 7.23 per cent of Statcounter's usage figures, with ChromeOS at just over half: 57.4 per cent of the total.
I guess that's more Chromebooks (laptops) than true desktops.
I'm probably missing something subtle in this comment.
Linux laptops are as Linux as Linux desktops. I had a Linux desktop in the 90s but all my Linux boxes have been laptops since then.
I think they're quibbling with the term "desktop" in the article title.
You are probably right but for me the desktop in Year of the Linux Desktop has always been one of the several DEs inside the screen.
Read the article.
Usually title should be understandable without reading the article. The point of the title is to summarize the article.
If the title is confusing, the least someone could do before taking the time to write a comment with a basic question is to read the article. The point of the title is not always "to summarize the article".
And that is one recurring problem I see across HN in recent times, where people merely make comments/claims based on only reading the title and completely disregarding the contents of the article shared.
It might be that the title may be clickbait-y, but that is I guess to be expected in this day. Someone reading has the choice to just not interact if that title is too much bait.
I have been on HN a lot more since ditching Reddit recently and somehow I think it's actually worse than Reddit with commenters not reading the article
At least on Reddit people make jokes. At one point the most-gilded comment ever was a (honestly, pretty funny) one-line joke reply to a paragraph long heartfelt comment about grief and loss.
Here it's a loose game of word association. For example, title says "GNU" in any context so we get 300 comments with unrelated anecdotes about Stallman. The comments section becomes stories about whatever random nonsense is in the top 2-3 comments. When it was being published, n-gate[0] was great at highlighting this.
It has nothing to do with "in recent times," people have been doing it here for well over a decade.
At slashdot it was assumed that no one read the article before commenting.
On the other hand, my first thought was, “If the title is that confused, how much worse is the article gonna be?” so I browsed the comments first and discovered that the weird title was purposeful. Which made me more inclined to read the article than I was beforehand.
Unless the title is a joke which it is. The whole point of the article is that linux blowhards try to ignore ChromeOS as Linux.
The Economist print edition, for exxample, routinely uses puns and wordplay in their headlines (though the subtitle is generally more straightforward). But there is a subset of people who firmly believe that headlines should be "just the facts."
Interestingly they are those people that don't read the article. Thus proving the worth of opaque curiosity piquing titles.
Sounds like a boring world to me!
I run ChromeOS, and it is logical in some sense to exclude or at least separate it from Linux classification.
The Linux VM has limited availability. I believe it depends on your processor (I have an i5, some Chromebooks have ARM.) It needs to be enabled as a "developer option" and yes, it is labeled as a developer tool, which means it could break. It will not work if you're logged in with multiple users. (Neither will the Android subsystem.)
ChromeOS will not run graphical Linux applications out of the box. I haven't experimented enough with the VM, but it does not have X11, Gnome, KDE, or Wayland dependencies installed; it is a minimal package list.
The Linux CLI runs in a VM (and a container too, I believe.) So you're running Linux in the sense that WSL runs Linux. ChromeOS Linux has limited access to the rest of the system. You need to configure each shared folder, for example.
That's userland. There aren't any Linux drivers to install, uninstall, or corrupt. You can't look through /proc or do meaningful system monitoring that you would find on Linux. There's no crontab or any scheduled tasks, for that matter.
I'd say it's one notch up from your Android phone in the hierarchy of "what is Linux?"
The point of a title, just like the point of any other bit of writing or any other bit of creation of any kind, is whatever the author wanted.
The point of most publication titles is more to grab attention than merely a dry summary.
The point of this one was to grab attention by being funny and curious through being seemingly illogical.
The readers are expected to be humans not robots. Humans understand and enjoy this. They even have a term just for it. You may google the term "wordplay" for more information.
In straight reporting, the title, or "headline," is a story summary. But there are many kinds of writing where the title is a teaser, something to get the reader to turn their attention to it. The worst of the them are "clickbait," but this one is something different. It encourages the reader to click, but not by misleading. Instead it teases, begging the reader to look at the article to make sense of it.
> Usually title should be understandable without reading the article.
I agree with you. It's just that this case is unusual.
> The point of the title is to summarize the article.
This title does just that.
At most publications, yes. But this is El Reg. They have their own way of doing things.
it took some thinking, but i did manage to figure out that they must be talking about chrome OS even without reading the article, so i approve
No...
Sorry but this is rewarding bad behavior by giving the article a click instead of pointing out how this is a bad headline.
We should not be excusing headlines like this by simple saying that the article has the answer.
This comes up most times the register is posted. It's what they do. It's their style. It's humor.
My problem is less the article and more the response to just read the article.
While yes I have an issue with the article headline, the person I am responding to just saying "read the article" is just feeding into clickbait.
I really don't think we should be saying "it's their style" as a defense for bad clickbait headlines when we are actively spreading those headlines. Clickbait is a serious problem on the internet and here we are defending it? No... it deserves to be called out. I don't care how funny it is, they are not the onion.
Wordplay in headlines has been a common feature of some British newspapers and magazines for decades.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/may/13/guardian-200-m...
My English teacher has this on the wall of his classroom: https://www.ambaile.org.uk/asset/49730/
There is nothing wrong with the title. It IS their style, and their publication, and their right to write in whatever style they choose, including ones that are perfectly understood and appreciated by some people, even if you are not among them.
Its a clickbait headline...
You're right, they can do whatever they want to do. That doesn't mean they are free from bring criticized for doing it.
I do not understand how we are defending a clickbait headline right now.
The headline was intentionally written in a way that it does not make sense to get someone to click it. By saying "read the article" we are rewarding that behavior.
Are you also going to defend the clickbait of Kotaku?
I understand why these companies do it, but I refuse to give them a free pass encouraging clicking a clickbait headline when talking about the fact that the headline does not make sense.
Clickbait is different from intriguing. If you don't know how to articulate the difference, that is a consistent pattern with also being unqualified to judge writing quality.
This title, at least not with the cover image included, did not artificially and pointlessly withhold information. The title doesn't mention chromeos or any other linux-based systems, but the picture includes a chromebook, and from that I knew the article was going to be about chromeos, and the title was a joke about chromeos being arguably both a linux system and not a linux system.
If you didn't, assuming you don't happen to be blind and assuming the images alt tag doesn't happen to be specific enough, the deficiency is in you not the article.
Myself, I would not be so eager to advertize that I don't get simple things like this.
No it isn't clickbait. It's wordplay. It's fun. Some humans enjoy that.
And it's one of the things I love about them.
Then don't read it, jsut scroll over. And yes, you should read the Fing article before compaining about it. Thats basic stuff.
The point is that there is a semantic quibble about the word "Linux" in data gathering contexts.
The article is about whether ChromeOS counts as a "Linux desktop OS".
The whole article seems confusing, and as if it's written by a bot. Not really what I'd call quality journalism.
The headline is just a bit of British humor
It's a "we checked the Linux desktop share and you won't believe what we found out!" type of headline.
"Is that running Linux?" is a question that's becoming harder and harder to answer.
Have an Android phone? Technically yes. It runs the Linux kernel but not GNU (probably, unless you've installed a layer with gnu).
Have a Chrome OS device? It runs GNU/Linux and most have a user layer that can run Debian.
Have a Windows device? wsl exists and is quite nice. Lots of developers use it.
Is Windows Linux too now?
Don't forget Alpine Linux, which almost everyone will call Linux because it has "Linux" in the name, but also doesn't use GNU, instead running the Linux kernel with musl and busybox as the C library and userspace system utils. It seems technically less "Linux" by this metric than Chrome OS and equal to Android.
I don't think this is principled really beyond the fact that Google chose to use different branding whereas FOSS distro vendors actually called what they distributed "Linux." Sort of how Hyenas are phylogenetically feliform but most people consider them dogs.
> Sort of how Hyenas are phylogenetically feliform but most people consider them dogs.
Do you have some reference for this? I just did a quick survey of the people in the horse barn I'm typing this from and none of them consider hyenas to be dogs. I imagine some people do consider them to be dogs since in some cases they can have a passing resemblance, but I'm dubious that most people consider them dogs.
I consider them to be "dog like".
Mind you I'm not in a horse barn.
"Is that running Linux?" previously meant "Is that running Linux?"
Now, I think most people mean "Is that running something that markets itself as Linux, at it's core?"
Even that disambiguation isn't great, though.
I think the article makes a good point. ChromeOS is very much a Linux desktop in most ways. Over 7% of desktops is a much nicer number too :)
> But that's not the case for ChromeOS. Underneath its unique GUI layer – which, unlike the one in macOS, is open source – it's a relatively standard Linux which can run standard Linux apps, out of the box, on both x86 and Arm.
How? Last time I looked at this, I needed to install a dedicated Linux-Environment, which came with its own hiccups. That's not really what I would call out-of-the-box. The Android-Integration made a better impression.
ChromeOS is an immutable Gentoo installation. The offered additional Linux environment is, understandably, based on Debian in order to allow for the most compatibility with .deb packages. Of course you can't natively install .deb packages on Gentoo and especially so if you don't have the rights to install spurious packages on the system, so Google "has to" offer the Linux experience in a roundabout way.
Of course, they could base ChromeOS on Debian directly and be done with it, but then they'd lose the incredible ease of custom tailoring to the hardware that Gentoo offers.
Yes, but that's the reason for the distinction. The linux-user experience is coming from the debian-cointainer, with limitations which are not comparable to the user experience of a full debian installation from my understanding. The core is isolated from the user, and irrelevant.
In the same way one should ask, are ChromeOS-Installations also counted for the android-marketshare? Do WSL-Installations on windows count to the desktop-linux-share too? Does wine-usage count for windows-installations? They all are important, but also a bit special on their own. How do statistics handle them?
ChromeOS is quite literally desktop Linux. If instead of a custom immutable Gentoo distribution they chose to base on Fedora Silverblue would it be any different? They would still need to offer Debian software through a layer of containerization and the user would still not have root level access.
Since ChromeOS is for casual users who will never need to install tools system-wide, I don't really see that much of a limitation in being able to only use things as non-root.
> ChromeOS is quite literally desktop Linux.
Yes it is, but AFAIK it's still a walled garden. The user has no control over what's going on under the hood. This is different from what most people understand as desktop Linux. Linux is a synonym for full control from the device owner, which in case of ChromeOS is not given.
This is a shortcoming in the naming, and it might be better to find a better term, but this is still the current situation we have.
I mean, you can install native Linux on lots of chromebooks, they run open source firmware (Coreboot), allow powerusers to disable secure boot with a strong security stance (e.g. it requires resetting device keys so you can't just physically steal a laptop and bypass it), most of the code is open source, has a high security profile beyond other desktop OSs, etc.
> Linux is a synonym for full control from the device owner, which in case of ChromeOS is not given.
It really is not, either in theory or more importantly in practice (cf the billion devices that ship Android or shitware ARM trinkets that ship Yocto builds with forked kernels that can't be updated, userspace blob binaries, etc.) One of my last companies had an opts team that provisioned immutable cloud VMs for developers where persistent updates had to go through CI and be deployed/rebooted. Does this mean we weren't "Using Linux?" or that our VMs were "Walled gardens?" Is it a walled garden if I distribute a .deb for my FOSS project and not an .rpm or PKGBUILD for Arch Linux? If anything, the fact of the matter is that you can just install Chrome or $FAVORITE_BROWSER on your favorite distro and then use 98% of the same apps ChromeOS users do -- they're mostly webpages!
The real distinction people need to make is who controls the project and what direction it has, and whether that matters to them. The other stuff are just random goalposts that people make up. ChromeOS is Desktop Linux, it's secure, it's highly successful, and it's also lead by Google. The "Google" part is what makes everyone uneasy. But it's unquestionably a productionized Linux Desktop.
> It really is not, either in theory or more importantly in practice (cf the billion devices that ship Android or shitware ARM trinkets that ship Yocto builds with forked kernels that can't be updated, userspace blob binaries, etc.)
Android is not desktop, and as I understand it, neither are yocto-devices?
We are specifically talking here about market share of desktops, not market share of linux-kernel or the gnu-userland. And while there is some overlap, I don't think it makes much sense to mix those statistics as both have different purposes.
We are clearly not talking about the market share of desktops because you are making a personal distinction between the Linux Desktop and the Linux Desktop Experience™.
ChromeOS is objectively Linux Desktop. RHEL desktop machines where only the IT department (and not the employees) has root access are objectively Linux Desktop.
As I already said, yes it's technically a desktop, running on Linux, thus a Linux desktop, but this is not what many people except under the term "Linux desktop". So bringing in any other device which just happen to also use the Linux kernel, is pointless for the question what people consider a "Linux desktop" or not. Especially when those other devices are not even desktops...
ok, but i am not interested in the linux kernel on the desktop, but FOSS on the desktop. just like android, it doesn't look like chrome OS is that.
you can just install Chrome or $FAVORITE_BROWSER on your favorite distro and then use 98% of the same apps ChromeOS users do -- they're mostly webpages
you could do that on windows too. which just shows that chrome OS is not linux or GNU/Linux on the desktop, but it is actually a web OS. like android, linux and even GNU is only there under the hood and not on the actual desktop.
It can't. There is a compatibility layer. It is limited and works shockingly badly.
The only reason I care about Linux market share is because that’s the metric that hardware manufacturers and software vendors use to decide whether to provide Linux support.
This is why android and chrome os don’t count. Those operating systems are different enough from my fedora workstation installation that proprietary drivers and software won’t be useful to me.
On the other hand someone using another distro like Debian or Arch does help.
But Android and ChromeOS do pull in lots of open source driver code too; the situation is not so black and white.
Do the ARM, POWER/PowerPC, MIPS, or RISC-V architectures, also count, to this mystical, and seemingly gate kept definition, of the “Linux Desktop”?
Because when you write about about hardware manufacturers, and software vendors, “supporting” Linux - it is seemingly apparent, that “Linux”, consists of only computers of the “Intel” variety - from my experience.
I agree with the author here, and quite frankly as much as I like GNU/Linux it is a long way from being a usable operating system for my parents and other non-technically inclined people (to the point that I'm writing this on a Mac because I'm in uni and I don't have time to deal with getting the some of the software I have to use to work) I personally hate Chrome OS, but it is a Linux desktop. Now do we want a FOSS GNU/Linux desktop? Yes, and this isn't it. But it is a Linux desktop and should be credited as such.
personally setup an Ubuntu LTS for the worst offender class -- daily email, zoom calls, attachments with important documents.. doesnt know what a folder is, doesnt know what browser they have, doesnt quit get the difference between RAM and disk space.
three years+ daily solid operation, no tech support problems except very rare microphone problems.
If you do not change the peripherals, and the client uses a browser mostly, then "long way away" is just false in 2020s.
Right, my dad could barely use his iPhone, but never had problems using his Ubuntu desktop. He used Ubuntu for like the last 10 years and was never technically-minded. He was a two-finger typer even.
Like, click Firefox to browse the web. Click the folder to see your files. Click OpenOffice to write a document. Click yes to run updates. He even somehow installed Zoom himself and set it all up to make calls to his doctor.
Getting him to learn how to swipe, click the hamburger menu, and do basic shit on a smartphone was a pain in the dick.
I develop cross-platform desktop software. I have one backend/set of build flags for Linux binaries, and another very distinct one for ChromeOS. For me, it makes sense to differentiate the two.
On ChromeOS, does the software you develop run in Crostini?
If it has Linux kernel, then it is Linux. And if it is Linux and has a GUI on top of it, I consider it a Linux desktop. I definitely think that ChromeOS is Linux desktop and even the Android should be considered a Linux desktop.
The experience of using Linux is extremely similar across Ubuntu, CentOS, and Arch. The level of required knowledge and skill per distro varies, but the overall idea remains the same. That experience, and the experience of using ChromeOS, and Android, and MacOS, and Windows, and a Nintendo Switch, are all mutually distinct to about the same degree. The people saying 'Linux market share' are not talking about the kernel. They are talking about the degree to which the Linux Experience is a palatable one that the average consumer chooses to engage in. There is nothing Desktop Linux about ChromeOS. It uses the Linux kernel because writing their own would have been annoying. You can say that there is a definition of 'Linux computer' that includes ChromeOS, but it's not a definition that's useful for anything except feeling smug for inscrutable reasons.
NB: I dislike Linux.
Sure, linux (the kernel, the ABI, etc) is at the heart of many things, but I think to be 'a linux' you have to be free, open, malleable, etc, and chromeOS just isn't, really. And the fact that it's more successful than 'real' linuxen is kind of damning of the whole relationship commercial entities have to FOSS.
It's different because the userspace experience is differnt and incompatible. It's an operating system on its own kind of like how MacOS is Unix based but an OS of its own.
This is a "ship of thessius" problem. At what point does the ship become a new ship? When it is no longer recognizable as the old ship.
The word they're looking for is "GNU".
ChromeOS, unlike Android, uses glibc and other GNU userland.
Exactly. By using the word "GNU", it makes it clear how silly the distinction is. Their use of the word "Linux" does not help their point, because as you point out, there are distinct operating systems (GNU, Android, and Alpine for example) which all use Linux in the same way.
It's nonsense to argue that Ubuntu and Fedora are "Linux" and Android is not. It is not nonsense to want to put Ubuntu and Fedora in the same bucket, which does not contain Android or Alpine. That bucket is GNU.
When we use the words to mean what they are (not using Linux to mean software other than Linux) the point that the author is trying to make becomes obvious.
Why, if I run with musl and MIT/Apache userland, eg. rust replacements for coreutils, it's not Linux?
That doesn't make up half of the desktop marketshare of Linux-based operating systems.
No, but "so, it's not necessarily GNU" was the point.
It's basically "Linux proper" (whether is the GNU libc/musl + GNU/whatever userland breakdown) vs "Linux that's a backend for Google's ChromeOS GUI and for which Google could replace the Linux part and noone will be any wiser". Rare or not, the exotic combination I mentioned would still qualify.
Besides, I'm pretty sure ChromeOS still has the whole GNU userland installed.
How long will they insist that we genuflect to them for the few pieces of legacy software that they bring to a typical Linux system?
You mean the rock solid userland foundation and the state of the art compiler? (Insert a modified "What have the Romans ever done for us?" sketch here.) I'll happily acknowledge their work I enjoy every day, GNUflecting doesn't seem a high price to pay ;)
The state of the art compiler has been LLVM for 10 years already.
Only until Google and Apple stop caring, now they have an honorable 3rd place in ISO C++ support, and are yet to support as many platforms.
> for the few pieces of legacy software
Linux is just one piece, and also quite old; by your logic we should really just call it a GNU system. In fact, from a user perspective, a GNU/HURD or Debian GNU/kFreeBSD system far more closely resembles what you're calling Linux than, say, Android which literally uses the Linux kernel.
I think the naming debate is silly, and I just say "Linux", but (with notable exceptions) tons of the core software on an average Linux system is part of the GNU project, e.g. glibc, GCC, coreutils, make, emacs
The article is basically saying that a non-gnu Linux distribution, like Alpine, is less linux than ChromeOS, just because it uses GNU.
And while being pedantic about this, they still called Linux a Unix (which it's not) while ignoring the commercial unixes because they're dead (which, as much as I'd like it to be true, it's not in the case of MacOS).
The person who wrote this article was dishonest or ignorant in so many levels.
> they still called Linux a Unix (which it's not)
Uhhhhhhh, on what basis ? The only arguments I can see for this would be either of:
- Pedantry, as technically the Linux kernel itself isn't UNIX certified by the Open Group, who owns the trademark - though multiple distributions have been certified to past standards, with no meaningful changes necessary. As an additional note, if you want to only count implementations conforming to the latest standard as being "real UNIX", then AIX is literally the only UNIX in existence.
- Purity, as Linux doesn't directly use any of the original code from AT&T-created UNIX OSes. But by that standard, it seems like modern BSDs wouldn't qualify as "UNIX", given that all of the AT&T code was stripped out a long time ago, and MacOS would qualify even less given it uses a non-AT&T kernel and only a few parts of some BSDs in the userland. Also, if including AT&T-produced code suffices to be "UNIX" then I must ask whether a Linux distribution that comes with ksh qualifies (...or even if Windows with UWIN or Cygwin+ksh qualifies). Generally though, the argument just reeks of ancestor worship to me.
...and neither of them are satisfactory to me.
Forever, and furthermore they request you spell it ge-gnu-flect from now on.
Gen-gnu-flect
No