Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS
- Reference: 1753106715
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/07/21/foss_chromeos_please/
- Source link:
There are a lot of desktop Linux distros out there. It's the number one thing non-Linux users complain about: too much choice. One of them only comes bundled with hardware, and yet, it has [2]more users than all the others . It's ChromeOS, and it [3]could be facing the chop soon . How come there is no all-Free Software tool that even tries to do what ChromeOS does without needing an account with The Borg?
Even if it may soon be replaced by a desktop flavor of Android, ChromeOS does just one thing and it does it well enough that vendors sold [4]billions of the things last year.
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The idea of ChromeOS is simple: it's just enough Linux to get you online. It turns a PC into something akin to a tablet, with a full-screen icon-based app launcher. The desktop is very simple and vaguely Windows-like: there's a taskbar at the bottom, a file manager, drivers enough common hardware that most things just work out of the box, including a bunch of common GPUs, networking including Wi-Fi. In terms of apps, there's a built-in Google Drive client, and of course the Chrome web browser.
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And that is about it. Anything else that you want to do, you do in a browser window. Productivity apps? Use Google Apps. Messaging or video calling? Log in to your chat system of choice in a browser window. The file manager can show images, but not much more. Your bookmarks, passwords, and what few settings there are are stored in your Google account.
All the components are there, including a potential revenue model. Strip out absolutely all the complexity that can possibly be removed, and leave something which can run on any old PC from the last 15 years and gets the user online – and nothing else. How hard can it be?
There are no optional extra native apps, and no way to add any. If you have branded ChromeBook hardware, there's the Google Play store and it can run some Android apps in a built-in compatibility environment. Around the Irish Sea division of Vulture Towers, we mostly just use ChromeOS Flex on whatever spare laptop is lying around, which works very nicely indeed. There's no app store, but you can open a Debian VM and install Debian apps in there. We installed VLC so that it could play movies or audio files, and it automatically integrated with the desktop – suddenly, clicking on a movie in the file manager just worked.
This is the sort of simplicity that we feel a desktop Linux for the masses should aspire to. There are no local apps and no questions: no choice of desktop, no dual boot, no fancy add-on cross-distro package managers like Flatpak or Snap. The desktop is just Windows-like enough to be instantly familiar, unlike GNOME; on the flipside, it's not cluttered with a hundred options to tweak, plus two Help/About menu entries, three text editors, menu bars in some apps and hamburger menus in others, as in KDE Plasma.
Where Google's team put innovative effort into ChromeOS was in making it robust enough to be sold to the masses in the hundreds of millions of units, with no tech support. It's immutable, with image-based updates. It has two root partitions, one of which updates the other, so there's always a known good one to fall back to if an update should fail.
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This is a more fault-tolerant design than SUSE's MicroOS-based systems, which use the rather fragile Btrfs. It's also much simpler than the [9]Fedora Atomic immutable systems, including offshoots such as [10]Universal Blue , which use the Git-like — for which, read "fearsomely complex" — [11]OSTree . For added entertainment, Fedora also defaults to Btrfs, with compression enabled. If you don't believe us about the problems of damaged Btrfs volumes, refer to [12]the Btrfs documentation . We recommend taking the orange-highlighted Warning section very seriously indeed.
It seems to us like there's nothing to rival this in the non-Google world. There have been ready-rolled web-kiosk OSes such as [13]Webconverger . It was [14]open source , based on Debian, with [15]updated over Git . It was end-of-lifed a couple of years ago.
Like Chrome itself, the upstream project behind ChromeOS, [16]ChromiumOS , is open source. There are a couple of projects forked from the basis of ChromiumOS, such as [17]FydeOS , which adds a second authentication system so it can be used behind the Great Firewall of China. We plan to return to FydeOS and take a deeper look soon. [18]NayuOS is comparable: it's broadly ChromiumOS, with some added tools for developers. It's mainly intended for use in guest-login mode, but it can also talk to [19]Nexedi's SlapOS back-end servers.
[20]
If Mountain View does decide to stop developing ChromeOS, expect both of these to stop being maintained very soon afterwards.
At the UI and functionality level, there is nothing in ChromeOS that would be difficult to replicate for any distro vendor. All the bits are there: an embarrassment of desktops, networked authentication via [21]LDAP or something, network file sharing over [22]Seafile or the like, umpteen email servers and webmail systems, such as OwnCloud and NextCloud.
There are even all-in-one servers such as [23]Zentyal , which we [24]looked at in 2010 . These could serve as the back-end and offer a revenue stream: paid subscriptions for extra storage, for instance – or selling private servers for customers to run their own fleets of clients.
Nothing in this is really difficult. All the pieces are there. For our money, Btrfs is just too fragile for remote unsupported client devices, but if it's locked read-only in normal use that might make it resilient enough. If for some reason updates and rollback must be performed using a single boot volume, we'd rather see it use OpenZFS, but redundant partitions and fail-over, as used in [25]Valve's SteamOS , seems a simpler answer.
[26]Remember it'll cost ya to keep the lights on for Windows 10
[27]Microsoft patches failed to fix on-prem SharePoint, which is now under zero-day attack
[28]Microsoft offers EU cloud providers fresh commercial terms, staves off risk of litigation
[29]Microsoft's on-prem Exchange and Skype for Business Server go subscription-only
The goal is banishing any and all questions of what to download, what desktop, what apps, packaging formats, software stores, user accounts, backing up, all of it: run the browser locally, sync the data – and only the data – to the cloud.
And all the components are there, including a potential revenue model. Strip out absolutely all the complexity that can possibly be removed, and leave something which can run on any old PC from the last 15 years and gets the user online – and nothing else. How hard can it be?
The ideal time would have been long enough before the [30]End of 10 to work the bugs out beforehand, but it's still not too late. Distro vendors can still offer their rich local clients for those geeky enough to want them. This is alongside existing offerings, not instead of them.
Simplicity is key. Long before there were such things as personal computers, [31]Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. But there's an even pithier version than that. [32]Mies van der Rohe put it best: Less is more. ®
Get our [33]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/05/windows_10_esu_program/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/18/linux_desktop_debate/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/16/android_replacing_chromeos/
[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1188651/chromebook-shipments-vendors/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aH5kCOfv4Vt4M14MboO8QwAAAFA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aH5kCOfv4Vt4M14MboO8QwAAAFA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aH5kCOfv4Vt4M14MboO8QwAAAFA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aH5kCOfv4Vt4M14MboO8QwAAAFA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/
[10] https://universal-blue.org/
[11] https://ostreedev.github.io/ostree/
[12] https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-check.html
[13] https://webconverger.com/
[14] https://github.com/Webconverger/webc/
[15] https://webconverger.org/upgrade/
[16] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/
[17] https://fydeos.io/
[18] https://nayuos.nexedi.com/
[19] https://slapos.nexedi.com/
[20] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aH5kCOfv4Vt4M14MboO8QwAAAFA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[21] https://ldap.com/
[22] https://www.seafile.com/en/home/
[23] https://www.zentyal.com/
[24] https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/18/zentyal_review/
[25] https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/27/osseu_steam_os_3/
[26] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/05/windows_10_esu_program/
[27] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/21/infosec_in_brief/
[28] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/11/microsoft_offers_eu_cloud_providers/
[29] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/02/exchange_skype_subscription_versions/
[30] https://endof10.org/
[31] https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/antoine-de-saint-exupery
[32] https://www.archdaily.com/350573/happy-127th-birthday-mies-van-der-rohe
[33] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
There is no shortage of existing, easy to use Distros such as LMDE6 and Ubuntu.
Kindly stop begging to have the world handed to you on a platter just the way you want it and learn to use what is avalable already!
Lazy-assed S.O.B....
You missed the point
I *am* using what's available, for my personal and professional computing needs.
What was made quite clear in the article but which you seem to have missed, is that the request is not for the tech-savvy but rather for the gazillions of poor sods that don't inhabit the tech bubble that you (and I, and other Reginauts) live in. Come October they'll be either hapless users of an unsupported OS or have shelled out for ridiculously up-specced machines shoving Windows 11 and Clippy.AI down their throats.
They could use our help, not your scorn.
Perhaps Canonical could step up.
I'd agree that Ubuntu, Mint etc are all pretty easy to use, and could fit the bill. But (having upgraded my Tosh Chromebook 2 to Mint) I can assure you the primary problem is the process of making that change. There's usually a need to flash the BIOS with a non-OEM one, possibly a need to dabble in the gubbins and remove hardware write protections, you'll probably need to nuke the built in drive and its contents, the command line interface is most unfriendly for the overwhelming majority of consumers. There's quite a lot of online help, but often that help is not being updated, so users may need to make some educated guesses about how to get the outcome they want. Once done, there's few challenges in running any sensibly chosen distro on a Chromebook, but getting there, that's interesting, with various moments where you're pretty sure that your next key press is going to only have a binary outcome, either (a) it worked and you're on to the next step, or (b) you just bricked your Chromebook.
Re: replacement OS for old Chromebooks
I also have a Toshiba Chromebook 2, which I originally selected because it was one of the few Chromebooks available at the time that had an upgradable SSD and the bonus of having a backlit keyboard. I did put a bigger SSD in it and replaced the battery, which sadly needs replacement again.
I have yet to undertake the process of updating the BIOS to allow me to install a Linux distribution for some of the reasons you mentioned. I have gone through this process on another Chromebook (I forget which model) and I agree, it's not something the average non technical person could normally manage without encountering a fairly steep learning curve.
All that said, I believe the main thrust of the article was regarding an easy to use replacement OS for Windows machines, not Chromebooks.
We need a new OS, but we do not need a dumb terminal.
We need to move away from SaaS and the cloud.
Re: We need a new OS, but we do not need a dumb terminal.
Yes, the clue is in the name: Personal Computer
It's why they prospered in the first place, rather than an array of minis and mainframes serving up sessions. The user was in control. And yes, the user did (does) need a little bit of grey matter. But that's the price of both inspiration and freedom.
> There are a lot of desktop Linux distros out there. It's the number one thing non-Linux users complain about: too much choice.
True... but let's just look over the fence for a sec. There are, say 100 car manufacturers with say 25 models each, give or take. That makes 2500 models to chose from... and yet most people seem to be perfectly able to manage these many choices. There must be more to it than just too much choice. Lazyness? Can't-be-bothered-ness? Too much FUD? Fear of tech you don't understand?
Lack of knowledge?
When you go buy a car, there's someone holding your hand throughout the process explaining the differences. You can easily hop in and go for a test drive to experience what it is like, and when things don't go right, you go back to the garage and let them help you out. None of that is possible for less tech-savvy people when it comes to OSes (unless they know someone willing to do the hand-holding).
Also: people simply don't care. When you don't care about what car you drive, you go to a used car lot and just get whatever gets you from A to B, and this article posits that this option doesn't exist for Linux distros.
@SVD_NL - If people don't care
then maybe they should stick to Windows.
Re: @SVD_NL - If people don't care
Pray tell, how will they get Windows installed as a replacement for out-of-support Chrome OS?
In the case of cars, they are buying a product. If it was the same with computers you would be buying a computer with your OS of choice installed - and most laptop manufacturers offer few or no Linux options, and those which exist are not directed and the non-specialist channel.
An equivalent with cars would be if you were asked what engine management system you wanted on the car, and you would need to install it yourself in many cases.
100 car manufacturers with say 25 models each, give or take. That makes 2500 models
But they all have the steering wheel, accelerator, brake and gear lever in the same place. And they all have the doors in the same place - mind you, the locking mechanisms can get a bit esoteric.
Minor controls and "infotainment" are another matter.
Re: 100 car manufacturers with say 25 models each, give or take. That makes 2500 models
It's my latest motor which automatically decided it needed to roll the seat back as I opened the door and then gently bring me forward as I started the car which struck me things have gone too far.
I'm a couple or three years into middle age and don't need to be reminded of my tummy thank you very much.
Well...
I'm still waiting for a fully polished SteamOS, but for now Bazzite does fine for my brain-dead needs. Other machines include Kali, Ubuntu, and Windows 11. I think we're close to "point and drool" again but I'm waiting for Valve to really sort it out for the masses.
The elephant in the room
... is that most people are highly resistant to change - of any kind. I have experience of occasions when I've (diplomatically) shown people an easier way to to perform some (non-computer) task, and they simply don't want to bother.
Re: The elephant in the room
This is the only issue. This and of course the complete, utter dependance of everyone on the MS ecosystem.
Re: The elephant in the room
I absolutely second your point.
I was once involved, as IT support, in a project that was supposed to be a non-profit organizing IT trainings for the poor in order to help them get positions in the workplace. A laudable goal, I thought, so I participated gladly.
At one point, the lead responsible made an off-hand remark about how expensive MS Office was and I immediately offered to install LibreOffice for them, explaining that it was free and had all the functionality they needed. I was showered in thanks and installed LO on their five admin laptops (admin because they were the non-profit management, not because they had any particular IT skills).
A few weeks later I went back to configure this and that, par for the course for a non-profit project, and the lead responsible commented on the fact that everyone had gone back to Excel and Word because LibreOffice was "too complicated".
I kept my mouth shut and made a noncommittal "hm hmm" noise.
From what I've heard since, that non-profit has dissolved into nothing.
The trouble with endof10.org is its step 1
Download the operating system you want to install. Search for Linux distributions for beginners to get some suggestions.
They are asking a user, who presumably knows zilch about Linux, to search and do not give any clues what to search for or what makes a good distribution.
They should have chosen one (I suggest Linux Mint, Mate desktop) but if they had they would have been flamed by all the other distros and desktop users.
Re: The trouble with endof10.org is its step 1
Yup.
That's the problem I find with the penguin community. They all laugh at you when you're on Windows, but choose one distro and you get yourself a barrage of insults because you didn't choose their preferred distro.
For all the holier-than-thou behavior of the Linux community, there is a whole lot of pre-teen testosterone behavior in a lot of them.
Google used to have a version of ChromeOS for old notebooks. They didn't make much noise about it (less than the company who originally made it used to before they acquired them), so probably it's shut down by now because nobody used it. :(
Of course, being Google they would also have shut it down if loads of people used it.
What about FreeBSD based GhostBSD Desktop distro?
Everyone yammers on about `Linux` like the second coming, but there are far too many choices (false prophets) and niche distros to choose from. There are ***other*** FOSS OSes beyond `Linux`. The BSDs for example have far ***fewer*** choices yet equally capable OSes:
* FreeBSD for more current main stream hardware.
* OpenBSD for the security conscious.
* NetBSD for a variety of current, extremely old, or odd hardware.
`FreeBSD` is often used as base for desktop distros such as `GhostBSD`; there is `NomadBSD` a live desktop distro on a USB stick; also `DragonFly BSD` and `MidnightBSD`.
`NetBSD` might not have any desktop distros, but it has all the packages and instructions necessary to setup an X11 desktop. Similarly for `OpenBSD`.
My sister's elderly laptop stopped working the other day, and she emailed me to ask what replacement she should buy. I pointed out that Windows 10 was on its way out, and Windows 11 laptops would likely be more expensive htan she was expecting. "Would a Chromebook suit your purposes?" I asked.
A hour later, she had gone to Currys, bought a Lenovo Chromebook, and was on line. She is completely clueless about technology, and has only ever used Windows.
I, on the other hand, have been using Linux almost exclusively for 25 years, and I bought a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 and camera module to use as a security camera. Apalled at the amount of bloat in Raspberry Pi OS when I did a test install, I decided to use Alpine instead. It took me 4 goes to get it right.
That's the difference between ChromeOS and Linux.
EndlessOS
Thought this was aligning with EndlessOS?
How difficult is it? Actually : not at all easy
What seems to being asked for is a ChromeOS replacement that still leverages Google's infrastructure. It's possible that might work in the rather short term, but it's basically unsustainable when your project depends on a service that isn't under your control.
The only way to have a sustainable OS and ecosystem is to have free, locally installed applications. You could *potentially* also do the same with free, non corporate controlled server hosted applications but that has a cost that needs to be accounted for, and access needs to work seamlessly.
Then, even if there's a straightforward desktop with Firefox (obviously not Chrome), LibreOffice, GIMP etc users will still not want to switch because they have a friction free experience with Google Apps, Reddit, Discord, and Whatsapp. All of those are at the risk of being unusable at any moment, and for messaging apps such as Whatsapp the web interface needs linking to a proprietary mobile app on a corporate controlled platform.
You'll need to do better than a 'potential revenue model'. It needs to be a *definite* revenue model, and note that people have extreme reticence to paying for something they currently do not pay money for even when it's in their future best interests. As ChromeOS is 'free' to an end user that's a hard thing to ask.
There needs to be a sea change in end user attitude, but that ship has long sailed. If you use something, pay for it, even (especially) if it is free as in beer. The other alternative is finding a friendly multi millionaire, but as that doesn't seem happen often I'm not about to hold my breath.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Much like the way that the Gnome devs work then.
Personally I don't think Gnome is anywhere near perfection, though they do seem to keep trying to achieve it.
FOSS world: Sure. Great idea. Here are 37 versions of what you ask for, all different and if you choose the wrong one you can die, heretic scum[1]
[1] Thanks, Emo.
Who's going to pay for it? Not the development, or the packaging and distribution/hosting aspects, but the cloud aspect.
If you want the decentralised aspects of Chrome OS (i.e. things like remote password storage) without using one of the large providers (who all have other revenue streams.), who do you use?
You have to be signed up with someone if you want the centralisation that makes these devices convenient.
I wouldn't want to run a system like that. Even if it just stored passwords (let alone any other PI) you'll have a lot of regulations and legal obligations that won't be cheap to police, that's before you've started paying for the hosting or the hardware. (and whatever infrastructure you've got to set up). This is not the kind of thing you can set up without a known revenue stream. Will people actually pay for it? Will you get enough donations if you go down the charitable foundation route?
Conversely I wouldn't want to trust my information to a provider that I could see just vanishing one day due to lack of funds.
I'm getting old...
I've used Linux since SLS came on infinity floppies, and was a SunOS admin when a single pizzabox with a 68K cpu ran a lab of green screens.
But it does occur to me that my home non-development / laptops only need to run Brave+Firefox and an ssh shell.
They would be Chromebooks except for signing into Google and yes of course all my phones run Grapheneos.