NayuOS is an ongoing project at Nexedi: We are mainly using Chromebooks for our daily development work and wanted to have more customizable, secure and privacy-compliant devices – not running any proprietary software, because we love Free Software. A few experiments later NayuOS – our free alternative to Chrome OS – was born. NayuOS is currently on a good enough way to meeting most of our needs, so we decided to spread the word and share what we have done so far.
I have ben waiting for this for long time: a chrome os style OS free of any major company trying to tie you in their ecosystem.
I hope this project will trigger enough community traction to become mainstream
There are a few, actually. Chromixium, Salix, Elementary are all great projects that offer a clean and minimalist Linux distro for limited machines like Chromebooks and basic laptops/PCs. My personal favorite of the above is Elementary, and I model my Slackware desktop after its style.
All the chromeos knockoff distros I tried run very laggy compared to neverware cloudready. I was testing on an older intel atom system and it was noticeable.
Isn’t ChromeOS supposed to be going the way of Windows CE, with Google attempting to bring Android in desktops?
We don’t really know. Certainly some combination of the platforms is coming but exactly what for it takes is quite a bit more up in the air. They’d have to re-jig how some things in android work to make it properly ready for desktop use
I don’t think any combination is going to be a hit anyway. They’re both good platforms but they don’t go well together.
It’s going to be OS/2 Warp all over again but worse. At least OS/2 and windows apps were both for desktops.
Bodhi Linux also has support for some Intel Chromebooks. You can get info on installing on Chromebook here:
http://www.bodhilinux.com/w/chromebook-install-instructions/
It’s great though having more choices in all cases, and better still to have options supporting ARM Chromebooks.
I would love to see a really alternative OS, specifically targeted for the desktop. This is not a place where Linux or the BSDs are going .. it’s a market dominated by Windows and the best competitor I can think of is Haiku.
Haha… no. Not without a massive investment, so massive it would make taking Darwin and re-implementing the whole OS X on top a more attractive option.
kurkosdr,
New opportunities for newcomers in the OS market (both desktop and mobile) are over. It’s not so much that developers haven’t been trying to develop alternatives (like webos, etc), but the market for anything different is too weak to displace the incumbents and establish a truly viable ecosystem.
This is what happens when the distribution economic power is highly skewed towards the incumbent multinational corporations. The industry becomes stale, and we become deprived of smaller startups, which are the true engines of innovation.
Windows is a pretty good OS for the desktop. Trying to turn any other operating system into Windows would result in something resembling a bad copy of Windows.
This is (among other reasons) why the classic Linux distributions remain marginal on the desktop to this day. If you want to gain any share you don’t make a “better” Windows. Instead you have to attack Windows where it is weak, and this is precisely what Google has done with Chrome OS.
chithanh,
I’m curious, what are you referring to specifically?
Not to dismiss their merit, but it really seems that Android/ChromeOS owe a great deal of their success to the fact that they were backed by google’s strong branding and endless resources. In hindsight, had they been forced to compete as outsiders using an independent business model, it’s not at all clear to me how they would have escaped the fate of becoming underfunded & marginalized like so many others.
Edited 2016-02-01 21:27 UTC
ChromeBooks+ChromeOS are extremely strong at being “just hardware+OS that always work”. With Windows you need to setup a huge serverpark (or use Azure) to store everything “off-disk” to accomplish the same thing. ChromeBooks give you that for free out of the box.
So if you need to get something done…grab some hardware, login, start your software, access your data.
What you can do is much more limited, but how you can do it is much easier…there is a market for that…called education
^^All of the above is what I keep hearing from others. I have never used or even seen a ChromeBook in real life. And I accomplish basically the best of both worlds with a customized “Windows ToGo Workspace” on a 240 GB SSD-USB-Stick (Mushkin Ventura)
Edited 2016-02-02 09:59 UTC
If the Crome extension you depend on for your software doesn’t crash. This is the trouble my Chromebook (Acer C720P) has been giving me for a while. Chrome extensions seem to load in a chain, so if any link in that chain dies everything else after that fails to load as well. Consistently, it’s been Hangouts that crashes the most often and prevents most of my extensions from loading. And before anyone asks… yes, I’ve reinstalled ChromeOS from scratch and it hasn’t helped.
I have no idea how stable extensions work on ChromeOS. On Chrome they seem to work just fine. Having them “chainload” instead of “independently” is probably done so extensions can rely on other extensions but seems like overengineering (just load extensions async because they shouldn’t rely on other extensions) or underengineering (if extensions sometimes rely on other extensions, have those chainload but load async otherwise, the way daemons/services do it)
I do worry a lot about what Google is doing with Chrome. Since I started using it they have expanded it from just-a-browser to the-platform-for-everything. From several startup tasks, that “apps-square” and other “google framework” parts to ChromeOnly hardware like ChromeCast (I would like to cast from other browsers as well)
The areas where Microsoft is weak are simplicity, running on lowest-end hardware, and central management. avgalen pointed out some things already.
If all you need is a browser, then a Chromebook is the most simple device you can use.
When you get a new Windows computer, there is a host of things you typically have to do before it becomes usable. Then you have to take care of backups, securing your system, updates, and whatnot.
When you get a new Chromebook, you turn it on, connect to your Wi-Fi and log in to your Google account (or register one). You will be up and running within a minute.
If your device breaks or is lost or stolen, no problem. Just take another one, all your data will be there. And the thief cannot extract any data from your old Chromebook because everything is encrypted by default.
Microsoft has recognized some of these problems and started to address them with Windows 10, but they still have ways to go before they reach the Chrome OS level of simplicity.
Running on lowest-end hardware is quite an unpleasant experience on Windows. On the other hand, Chromebooks with lowly Celerons and Atoms, or even ARM SoCs intended for tablet PCs, 2 GB RAM and 16 GB SSD work fine. The lack of storage doesn’t matter because the operating system itself is pretty small, and there is a smart combination of cloud storage with local caching.
chithanh,
But this seems to overlook the fact that MS has a very similar product: MS Surface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Surface
Like a chromebook, it is a lightweight device with web/cloud enabled services, they are similarly locked down with similar management & provisioning capabilities.
Neither the Chromebook nor Surface interest me personally, but arguably they are both contenders for the market you are describing.
http://betanews.com/2012/10/17/the-debate-is-now-chromebook-vs-surf…
The Surface RT devices were a horrible hybrid between a Windows computer and what Microsoft observers call “Apple envy”.
It was even priced the same as an iPad. So not even close to lowest-end market.
Central management? Haha. You couldn’t even join a Windows Domain if I recall correctly.
The user interface sucked. You had two (or was it three?) different places where to get updates from. Then you had Office on the classic desktop, while everything else was supposed to use the modern interface. This was highly confusing and anything but simple.
So no, the Surface RT was neither simple to use, nor particularly affordable, nor easy to centrally manage.
chithanh,
You know what, I dislike it myself, but in terms of real capabilities they still seem very similar to me.
As an aside, I find it very interesting how there’s a tendency to judge a product by who makes it rather than based on actual features (although not you or I of course!). For example, if “metro” was made by apple, and “chrome OS” was made by MS, and IOS was made by google, I think a substancial share of people would be using a different platform just to align with their preferred company, even if they have the same needs as today. Our brains go to great lengths to cover up cognitive dissonance.
Edited 2016-02-02 18:13 UTC
The stated simplicity of setting up a Chrome OS system, ease of loss/failure recovery anywhere in the world, and low-end hardware capability are leading me strongly to consider such system for my next one.
That will have to do until Haiku reaches R1.
MS are doing a really good job of turning windows into a really bad copy(W10) of something that worked(W7)