Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

ChromeOS 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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromium.googlesource.com&#x2F;chromiumos&#x2F;docs&#x2F;+&#x2F;HEAD&#x2F;security&#x2F;chromeos_security_whitepaper.md" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromium.googlesource.com&#x2F;chromiumos&#x2F;docs&#x2F;+&#x2F;HEAD&#x2F;sec...</a><p>- Verified boot backed by TPM.<p>- System services are heavily sandboxed: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromium.googlesource.com&#x2F;chromiumos&#x2F;docs&#x2F;+&#x2F;HEAD&#x2F;sandboxing.md" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromium.googlesource.com&#x2F;chromiumos&#x2F;docs&#x2F;+&#x2F;HEAD&#x2F;san...</a><p>- New userspace is written in Rust: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromium.googlesource.com&#x2F;chromiumos&#x2F;docs&#x2F;+&#x2F;HEAD&#x2F;development_basics.md#Rust" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromium.googlesource.com&#x2F;chromiumos&#x2F;docs&#x2F;+&#x2F;HEAD&#x2F;dev...</a><p>- Web pages loaded on Chrome have no access to the device&#x27;s filesystem, nor to user files.<p>- Android apps run inside a restricted container.<p>- Linux apps run inside a VM, which leverages KVM and a custom Rust VM monitor.<p>I think it&#x27;d be great if someone made a de-Googled fork of ChromeOS without all the Google telemetry and bloatware, because it&#x27;d be the perfect Linux distro for security-conscious individuals.

&gt; Ignoring all the commercial Unixes as they are effectively all dead now,<p>Ironic that this article would ignore Mac OS, a somewhat notable commercial Unix.

&gt; Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market.<p>I don&#x27;t understand this headline, was it written by a bot?

&quot;Is that running Linux?&quot; is a question that&#x27;s becoming harder and harder to answer.<p>Have an Android phone? Technically yes. It runs the Linux kernel but not GNU (probably, unless you&#x27;ve installed a layer with gnu).<p>Have a Chrome OS device? It runs GNU&#x2F;Linux and most have a user layer that can run Debian.<p>Have a Windows device? wsl exists and is quite nice. Lots of developers use it.<p>Is Windows Linux too now?

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 :)

&gt; But that&#x27;s not the case for ChromeOS. Underneath its unique GUI layer – which, unlike the one in macOS, is open source – it&#x27;s a relatively standard Linux which can run standard Linux apps, out of the box, on both x86 and Arm.<p>How? Last time I looked at this, I needed to install a dedicated Linux-Environment, which came with its own hiccups. That&#x27;s not really what I would call out-of-the-box. The Android-Integration made a better impression.

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.<p>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.<p>On the other hand someone using another distro like Debian or Arch does help.

I agree with the author here, and quite frankly as much as I like GNU&#x2F;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&#x27;m writing this on a Mac because I&#x27;m in uni and I don&#x27;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&#x2F;Linux desktop? Yes, and this isn&#x27;t it. But it is a Linux desktop and should be credited as such.

I develop cross-platform desktop software. I have one backend&#x2F;set of build flags for Linux binaries, and another very distinct one for ChromeOS. For me, it makes sense to differentiate the two.

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 &#x27;Linux market share&#x27; 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 &#x27;Linux computer&#x27; that includes ChromeOS, but it&#x27;s not a definition that&#x27;s useful for anything except feeling smug for inscrutable reasons.<p>NB: I dislike Linux.

Sure, linux (the kernel, the ABI, etc) is at the heart of many things, but I think to be &#x27;a linux&#x27; you have to be free, open, malleable, etc, and chromeOS just isn&#x27;t, really. And the fact that it&#x27;s more successful than &#x27;real&#x27; linuxen is kind of damning of the whole relationship commercial entities have to FOSS.

It&#x27;s different because the userspace experience is differnt and incompatible. It&#x27;s an operating system on its own kind of like how MacOS is Unix based but an OS of its own.<p>This is a &quot;ship of thessius&quot; problem. At what point does the ship become a new ship? When it is no longer recognizable as the old ship.

The word they&#x27;re looking for is &quot;GNU&quot;.