Just a small personal touch -- my coworker is constantly pushing me to use Chrome because it "just works", but I'm stubborn as hell. Used Firefox from early 2000s. Oh how I will love to twist his nerve even more once I will switch to Ladybird. Saying this because there has been more harder days to counter these pushes. And to be honest I think we are overthinking about how much this last 3-5 % actually matter for huge crowds.
I understand that your argument still stands in big picture, but in this big world there is plenty of room for Firefox and Ladybird and there is more than enough room to grow. Firefox mostly is being held back with their organization. I'm not convinced that it is technical problem.
But then again, I'm still believing that there will be a year of desktop Linux coming. Maybe even sooner than we expect.
I'm still believing that there will be a year of desktop Linux coming. Maybe even sooner than we expect.
It started 9 years ago.
That's the year ChromeBooks first outsold Macs in the USA. And note, that is by value, not units, meaning at least 4-5x as many Chromebooks were sold as all Mac hardware put together.
By 3-4y later this was worldwide.
So desktop Linux computers are now comprehensively outselling macOS machines and have been for nearly a decade… even with Apple's migration to Arm, which means better small machines but worse big machines.
But it's the wrong sort of Linux and so the Penguin taleban don't count it and are still arguing about... oh, systemd vs SysVinit, or glibc vs musl, or Emacs vs Vim, or something.
It's still a Linux distro. Ext4 partitions, glibc, upstart as the init. The GUI is weird but it's just another desktop.
I don't use it myself but my wife's laptop does. So, example: it has no video player. Solution: Ctrl+Alt+T, just like Ubuntu. In the terminal, `apt install vlc`. Done. File associations and things just happened automatically. Once VLC was there, double-click a movie file on the local drive and it opened and played.
It's based on Gentoo but the bundled container-VM thingie is Debian.
ChromeOS is a lot more like any other distro than Android, which is different from the libc and entire userland on upwards.
Comments
Just a small personal touch -- my coworker is constantly pushing me to use Chrome because it "just works", but I'm stubborn as hell. Used Firefox from early 2000s. Oh how I will love to twist his nerve even more once I will switch to Ladybird. Saying this because there has been more harder days to counter these pushes. And to be honest I think we are overthinking about how much this last 3-5 % actually matter for huge crowds.
I understand that your argument still stands in big picture, but in this big world there is plenty of room for Firefox and Ladybird and there is more than enough room to grow. Firefox mostly is being held back with their organization. I'm not convinced that it is technical problem.
But then again, I'm still believing that there will be a year of desktop Linux coming. Maybe even sooner than we expect.
It started 9 years ago.
That's the year ChromeBooks first outsold Macs in the USA. And note, that is by value, not units, meaning at least 4-5x as many Chromebooks were sold as all Mac hardware put together.
By 3-4y later this was worldwide.
So desktop Linux computers are now comprehensively outselling macOS machines and have been for nearly a decade… even with Apple's migration to Arm, which means better small machines but worse big machines.
But it's the wrong sort of Linux and so the Penguin taleban don't count it and are still arguing about... oh, systemd vs SysVinit, or glibc vs musl, or Emacs vs Vim, or something.
Eh of course we don't count a totally locked down walled garden as Linux.
It's still a Linux distro. Ext4 partitions, glibc, upstart as the init. The GUI is weird but it's just another desktop.
I don't use it myself but my wife's laptop does. So, example: it has no video player. Solution: Ctrl+Alt+T, just like Ubuntu. In the terminal, `apt install vlc`. Done. File associations and things just happened automatically. Once VLC was there, double-click a movie file on the local drive and it opened and played.
It's based on Gentoo but the bundled container-VM thingie is Debian.
ChromeOS is a lot more like any other distro than Android, which is different from the libc and entire userland on upwards.
Yeah, but it will be a Pyrrhic victory for desktop Linux if it conquers the desktop. You can't even use it normally without Google account.
Very true and an excellent point.
There is a fork that doesn't need Google accounts. It's called Fyde OS. I tried it:
https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2025/08/21/fydeos-offers...