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> it's often a lot of work to disable the "press Space to erase your operating system" prompt That's not what this article is about. Yes, you can put the Chro

> it's often a lot of work to disable the "press Space to erase your operating system" prompt That's not what this article is about. Yes, you can put the Chromebook in dev mode, disable secure boot and deal with that prompt. But today you can install Debian or Ubuntu or other distros in a container without enabling dev mode, and without disabling secure boot. Containers were only available on selected Chromebooks until now, and they'll be enabled on all new devices from here on. You can easily share files between Linux containers and the ChromeOS filesystem, with USB and SD cards, and with Google Drive. There's one-click backup and restore of containers. Linux apps like Firefox, LibreOffice, Gimp and VS Code are fully integrated into the ChromeOS window manager side by side with ChromeOS apps and Android apps.

hundchenkatze 8y ago
I think that's what p1mrx is saying as well. You can install Debian and Ubuntu in the containers, reaping the benefits of secure boot. However, after 6.5 years the devices are EOLd and stop receiving updates making secure boot useless since you're securely booting into out of date software. p1mrx wants secure boot to be disabled once the device is EOL so that they can install a distro without dealing with dev mode.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  I agree, the real problem is after (and in my opinion ethically also before) EOL, we can't sign new distro's and bootloaders... All we need that is currently missing is for end-users to be able (by law) to sign their own boatloaders, by entering their own public key into the most minimal inspectable ring infimum bootloader... Otherwise it's just a long and slow road towards either fab at home, or alternatively blind computation on the host, and encrypted communication with a minimal IO system attached to the host...
  - acqq 8y ago
    One should always be able to sign one's bootloader. If it's only 6.5 years later it can be that not even Linux support for that hardware would exist then?
    - yellowapple 8y ago
      > If it's only 6.5 years later it can be that not even Linux support for that hardware would exist then? On the contrary; Linux continues to have pretty darn good support for hardware that's 10 or even 15 years old.
      - acqq 8y ago
        On the contrary, I have direct experience with more notebooks that disproves your claim. Linux support for the hardware of the notebooks was never as good as Windows. Experienced users, to be sure that they won't have problem with hardware, tend to buy either Thinkpad or Dell notebooks. Everything else is a lottery. From three non-Dell, non-Thinkpad notebooks that I've bought since 2000 only one had enough hardware support to be even usable for more than five years. Moreover, the first one, an AMD-based Sony (also not cheap) worked better under Linux under the versions which were less than 5 years old than the model's introduction. Only since that point the problems with the drawing on the screen became so bad that it was not usable at all for anything but being used headless. I was installing every new Ubuntu version every 6 months there, and the hardware support for the video card came to be progressively worse. I've reported the bug behavior but was never contacted to help the investigation, the bug was closed unsolved eventually. Recently, only two months ago, my Dell notebook, 2 years old, after an update stopped working with an external monitor under kernel packed in the 18.04 LTS Ubuntu (where everything worked for a year before that). It took only days to fix that, but the bug was wide spread enough to strike most users of external monitors. So no, Linux won't magically work on a machine which is not continuously directly tested by enough developers. It will also even less work after 6.5 years of machine's introduction, again, unless there was a constant work to keep it working. Linux is not a magic pixie dust, but a product by humans that also needs active contributions to even keep working with the old hardware.
        yellowapple 8y ago
        > On the contrary, I have direct experience with more notebooks that disproves your claim. On the contrary, I also have direct experience with notebooks across a wide variety of makes, models, and eras (though most were from the Windows XP era, since a lot of my Linux installs were from migrating folks off XP). > Experienced users, to be sure that you won't have problem with hardware, tend to buy either Thinkpad or Dell notebooks. Well yeah. That tends to hold true regardless of operating system. The laptops that still manage to be terrible on Linux (which in my experience is constantly shrinking, even - and especially - for old ones) - were typically worse under Windows. > So no, Linux won't magically work on a machine which is not continuously directly tested by enough developers. Of course not. My point is that once it is working, it's typically unlikely that it'll regress all that much unless there's an explicit push to deprecate old hardware. The old laptops ain't popular now, but that doesn't mean they weren't popular enough 10 years ago (or similar enough internals-wise to popular notebooks from 10 years ago) to end up getting enough attention by Linux driver devs to still be usable to this day. Maybe someday bitrot will set in, but my experience with Linux support on old laptops suggests that to be relatively rare.
  - JDW1023 8y ago
    I really agree on the user signed bootloader part. I think we should also have this for Android devices, since most Android devices only have two years of system/security update.
nh2 8y ago
The container stuff can be very buggy. A few weeks ago I tried to run Debian and Ubuntu on an older Chromebook with Crouton (also a container solution). Systemd failed booting, because the last published Chromebook kernel for that device had an incorrectly applied backport of some patch, which made nonexistent system calls return garbage data instead of erroring out. You can read the details here: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/11974 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/11974 https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton/issues/3914#issuecomment-471798036 https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton/issues/3914#issuecommen... This kind of stuff took me many tens of hours to debug, and I am relatively experienced with tasks like that. If you want to have an easy time with Linux, better run the kernel provided with the OS. Containers don't do that.
- samuraiseoul 8y ago
  They're talking about Termina and the Google provided Linux solution. It's misleading to people who haven't been in the ChromeOs ecosystem before to compare your Crouton setup to Termina. Crouton is not an officially supported Linux on Chromebook solution and requires you to turn on developer mode on the Chromebook which warns you that you are in unsupported land and things may not go as planned. If you know how Debian works, the new solution Google has for Linux on Chromebooks should work fine for most people. There's only a few gotchas at all anymore. Snaps even work if you know what you're doing.
tomxor 8y ago
> today you can install Debian or Ubuntu or other distros in a container This is far far from the title's promise of being a "Linux laptop"... you might as well also claim all Windows PCs are now Linux PCs because of WSL. I know I'm not alone when I expect a computer that claims to support Linux to mean running it on the hardware, without a hypervisor, outside of a container or any other kind of virtualization.
- skybrian 8y ago
  Okay, but how does a laptop user benefit from that? What do you get over running Linux in a container?
  - tomxor 8y ago
    Better resource utilisation, control, freedom, not requiring google's permission to do anything. When you are inside a container you are still under the control of another OS... the lack of a bunch of other practical limitations of running inside a container that I'm not familiar with because I don't run my frickin desktop inside a container! why would I do that, it's an unnecessary limitation and increases complexity - maybe some people do if they benefit from containers for a very specific use case, but this does not make it a "Linux Laptop" first and foremost.

hundchenkatze 8y ago

I think that's what p1mrx is saying as well. You can install Debian and Ubuntu in the containers, reaping the benefits of secure boot. However, after 6.5 years the devices are EOLd and stop receiving updates making secure boot useless since you're securely booting into out of date software. p1mrx wants secure boot to be disabled once the device is EOL so that they can install a distro without dealing with dev mode.

DoctorOetker 8y ago
I agree, the real problem is after (and in my opinion ethically also before) EOL, we can't sign new distro's and bootloaders... All we need that is currently missing is for end-users to be able (by law) to sign their own boatloaders, by entering their own public key into the most minimal inspectable ring infimum bootloader... Otherwise it's just a long and slow road towards either fab at home, or alternatively blind computation on the host, and encrypted communication with a minimal IO system attached to the host...
- acqq 8y ago
  One should always be able to sign one's bootloader. If it's only 6.5 years later it can be that not even Linux support for that hardware would exist then?
  - yellowapple 8y ago
    > If it's only 6.5 years later it can be that not even Linux support for that hardware would exist then? On the contrary; Linux continues to have pretty darn good support for hardware that's 10 or even 15 years old.
    - acqq 8y ago
      On the contrary, I have direct experience with more notebooks that disproves your claim. Linux support for the hardware of the notebooks was never as good as Windows. Experienced users, to be sure that they won't have problem with hardware, tend to buy either Thinkpad or Dell notebooks. Everything else is a lottery. From three non-Dell, non-Thinkpad notebooks that I've bought since 2000 only one had enough hardware support to be even usable for more than five years. Moreover, the first one, an AMD-based Sony (also not cheap) worked better under Linux under the versions which were less than 5 years old than the model's introduction. Only since that point the problems with the drawing on the screen became so bad that it was not usable at all for anything but being used headless. I was installing every new Ubuntu version every 6 months there, and the hardware support for the video card came to be progressively worse. I've reported the bug behavior but was never contacted to help the investigation, the bug was closed unsolved eventually. Recently, only two months ago, my Dell notebook, 2 years old, after an update stopped working with an external monitor under kernel packed in the 18.04 LTS Ubuntu (where everything worked for a year before that). It took only days to fix that, but the bug was wide spread enough to strike most users of external monitors. So no, Linux won't magically work on a machine which is not continuously directly tested by enough developers. It will also even less work after 6.5 years of machine's introduction, again, unless there was a constant work to keep it working. Linux is not a magic pixie dust, but a product by humans that also needs active contributions to even keep working with the old hardware.
      - yellowapple 8y ago
        > On the contrary, I have direct experience with more notebooks that disproves your claim. On the contrary, I also have direct experience with notebooks across a wide variety of makes, models, and eras (though most were from the Windows XP era, since a lot of my Linux installs were from migrating folks off XP). > Experienced users, to be sure that you won't have problem with hardware, tend to buy either Thinkpad or Dell notebooks. Well yeah. That tends to hold true regardless of operating system. The laptops that still manage to be terrible on Linux (which in my experience is constantly shrinking, even - and especially - for old ones) - were typically worse under Windows. > So no, Linux won't magically work on a machine which is not continuously directly tested by enough developers. Of course not. My point is that once it is working, it's typically unlikely that it'll regress all that much unless there's an explicit push to deprecate old hardware. The old laptops ain't popular now, but that doesn't mean they weren't popular enough 10 years ago (or similar enough internals-wise to popular notebooks from 10 years ago) to end up getting enough attention by Linux driver devs to still be usable to this day. Maybe someday bitrot will set in, but my experience with Linux support on old laptops suggests that to be relatively rare.
- JDW1023 8y ago
  I really agree on the user signed bootloader part. I think we should also have this for Android devices, since most Android devices only have two years of system/security update.

nh2 8y ago

The container stuff can be very buggy. A few weeks ago I tried to run Debian and Ubuntu on an older Chromebook with Crouton (also a container solution). Systemd failed booting, because the last published Chromebook kernel for that device had an incorrectly applied backport of some patch, which made nonexistent system calls return garbage data instead of erroring out. You can read the details here: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/11974 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/11974 https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton/issues/3914#issuecomment-471798036 https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton/issues/3914#issuecommen... This kind of stuff took me many tens of hours to debug, and I am relatively experienced with tasks like that. If you want to have an easy time with Linux, better run the kernel provided with the OS. Containers don't do that.

samuraiseoul 8y ago
They're talking about Termina and the Google provided Linux solution. It's misleading to people who haven't been in the ChromeOs ecosystem before to compare your Crouton setup to Termina. Crouton is not an officially supported Linux on Chromebook solution and requires you to turn on developer mode on the Chromebook which warns you that you are in unsupported land and things may not go as planned. If you know how Debian works, the new solution Google has for Linux on Chromebooks should work fine for most people. There's only a few gotchas at all anymore. Snaps even work if you know what you're doing.

tomxor 8y ago

> today you can install Debian or Ubuntu or other distros in a container This is far far from the title's promise of being a "Linux laptop"... you might as well also claim all Windows PCs are now Linux PCs because of WSL. I know I'm not alone when I expect a computer that claims to support Linux to mean running it on the hardware, without a hypervisor, outside of a container or any other kind of virtualization.

skybrian 8y ago
Okay, but how does a laptop user benefit from that? What do you get over running Linux in a container?
- tomxor 8y ago
  Better resource utilisation, control, freedom, not requiring google's permission to do anything. When you are inside a container you are still under the control of another OS... the lack of a bunch of other practical limitations of running inside a container that I'm not familiar with because I don't run my frickin desktop inside a container! why would I do that, it's an unnecessary limitation and increases complexity - maybe some people do if they benefit from containers for a very specific use case, but this does not make it a "Linux Laptop" first and foremost.