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> Sure, there's a kernel somewhere deep, but the userspace is locked-down, weak and anti-consumer. I don't necessarily think that an operating system being loc
by gizmo385 10y ago
> Sure, there's a kernel somewhere deep, but the userspace is locked-down, weak and anti-consumer.
I don't necessarily think that an operating system being locked down is equivalent to anti-consumer. For the vast majority of consumers, I think that opening up the full complexity of linux would just be too much hassle and not worth the gains.
- jalami 10y agoI think crippling systems is anti-consumer. Ubuntu is an example of an attempt to mitigate the hassle while allowing the user to control their own device. Is it perfect? No, and they have a very diverse audience to please with one offering, but its a more correct approach. Setting sane defaults and removing confusion in configuration is one thing, but that's not what Google is doing. Google limits software to their repo, makes it difficult, unintuitive and scary to opt-out of things (ctrl-d? insta-wipe ! warning on boot), biases all their software and services with no enable-able alternative and tracks absolutely everything. It's like a tricked out feature phone with a keyboard. I'm all for standard accounts that have strict privilege boundaries, but with ChromeOS, the consumer can't even decide to be a true administrator. No one's saying everyone needs to be a sysadmin, but a user shouldn't have to enable Developer Mode and deal with usability dark patterns if they want to. Mozilla used to let the consumer decide, but even they require you to run a separate build in order to install software without their blessing: User freedom is one of their core principles. If developer mode features and privacy opt-outs silently disappear from an entrenched ChromeOS, most wouldn't blink.