Support for Linux will enable you to create, test and run Android and web app for phones, tablets and laptops all on one Chromebook. Run popular editors, code in your favorite language and launch projects to Google Cloud with the command-line. Everything works directly on a Chromebook.
Linux runs inside a virtual machine that was designed from scratch for Chromebooks. That means it starts in seconds and integrates completely with Chromebook features. Linux apps can start with a click of an icon, windows can be moved around, and files can be opened directly from apps.
It’s official now.
’cause running linux with an alternate userland layer that launches VM linux instances to run native linux apps makes sense.
This was my initial thought too. It does isolate those apps away from the core system, and that may make sense if they think the security model isn’t strong enough or something similar.
I wonder if it’ll have the same I/O performance issues as Windows Subsystem for Linux does.
Since ChromeOS is Linux I guess the “VM” will be a variant of native Linux container which means the performance should be good.
Open linux apps by clicking an icon? Only took how many years? I remember seeing people skewered for suggesting this back in the day, followed by a suggestion to go back to Windows.
Not sure what you mean– I’ve been clicking on icons to launch Linux apps for over 15 years.
.desktop files have been a standard for a long time at this point.
Granted, it’s nice to be able to type the command as well, and sometimes it’s easier to hit alt-f2 and type “localc” than it is to browse my apps menu to “LibreOffice Calc”, but “icons to launch apps” is nothing new under linux.
I thought at first the guy you were replying to was referring to having icons for linux apps in Chrome, but I think you are right in saying he was thinking Linux didn’t have any icons for launching things, which is absurd.
The .desktop format is, as with everything, better than anything they have on Windows, handling categories for applications as well, so you can actually have a menu for ‘Internet’ or ‘Games’ instead of the janky crap that has been the Windows ‘Start’ menu for decades.
It quacks like a duck, it looks like a duck, so why not get the real duck instead of sponsoring an ugly duck in Google’s walled garden
Exactly. Weirdly I think there is some weird aversion to people using Linux as a desktop system. Something I don’t get.
I’ve been using Gnome since it was version 0.20. Yeah it was pretty crap then and crashed all the time, then got stable through the 1.x and 2.x branch, then dropped so much from going to 3.x, but after quite some time became extremely usable.
You have Gnome for people who want the DE to just get out of their way and let you launch things. Then you have KDE for the people who want to be able to configure every last thing in the universe. So there is a perfect blend of what everyone wants with a ton of options in between.
So why this huge aversion? Probably because some people somewhere installed some distro that was broken, or didn’t hold their hand installing things (guess what until about Windows 8, it was pretty much the same thing with installing Windows on generic hardware, a lot of times worse).
So yeah, I don’t get the point in this, just use a Linux distro.
What I would find interesting is the opposite of this: a Linux distribution with support for Android applications.
The article didn’t say what the used, maybe they are using this ?:
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/05/Open-sourcing-gVisor-a-…