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In practice, full, stable hardware compatibility and battery life. The Linux experience on the Framework Laptop on recent distros (e.g. Ubuntu 22.04.1) is soli

by nrp 4y ago

In practice, full, stable hardware compatibility and battery life. The Linux experience on the Framework Laptop on recent distros (e.g. Ubuntu 22.04.1) is solid, but battery life will still generally be better running Ubuntu on top of ChromeOS.

r-w 4y ago
Interesting. Do we have a concrete reason why, e.g., TLP[0] falls short of the power management features offered on other OSes? [0]: https://linrunner.de/tlp/ https://linrunner.de/tlp/
- jeffbee 4y ago
  One reason is all the binary artifacts are peak-optimized for the platform and this yields significant, often 10-20% lower CPU usage than plain vanilla binaries offered by all other Linux distributions. This includes the kernel, which in ChromeOS is built with LLVM with profile-guided optimization. Faster software translates directly to longer battery life. Every other distribution is years behind Google in terms of tooling.
  - binkHN 4y ago
    > Every other distribution is years behind Google in terms of tooling. Can you expand on this? Perhaps a URL with more detail?
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      I'm not sure if there are any single good URLs I can give you. The best way to learn is to read the chromiumos repo and see how they build the image, how they collect and deploy profiles, etc. You can also look at the mailing list of clang-built-linux to see how their kernel is built with clang and how they integrated that with their profile pipeline. In the end though it is cultural and not technical. Debian will bend over backwards to make sure That One Guy can still install the latest version on his old Centaur CPU, from floppies. ChromeOS is laser-targeted for specific, allow-listed hardware platforms. If you are philosophically committed to the eternal comfort of That One Guy, the Debian way makes more sense. If you just want software that's faster and more secure, ChromeOS has the better way.
      - pksebben 4y ago
        I'd just like to put a vote of confidence in for That Guy, I think we should absolutely have an option for them. Which is a roundabout way of saying; it's critically important that we don't over-optimize for the central, happy path (just wanna browse securely on whatever hardware ya got). The most interesting things (and the most valuable) frequently come from the edge cases, which are absolutely supported by keeping an eye on the needs of "That One Guy". Unix interoperability has given us a bounty of awesome shit and I anticipate it will continue to do so.
- caskstrength 4y ago
  We don't because it doesn't. Battery life of ThinkPad that supports Linux with TLP installed and properly configured will be very similar to Windows. And to address FUD from other reply to your question: AFAIK official Firefox builds for Linux use PGO as well, however PGO has quite less impact on battery life than what another commenter suggests.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
The usual reason for a lot of those boil down to "poor driver support", but this is the same hardware with what I would presume is the same Linux kernel so same drivers, so what's the difference?
- duped 4y ago
  The usual reason is that you can't enable hibernate with disk encryption
  - cbsmith 4y ago
    It tends to specifically be an issue with encrypted swap, because encrypted swap uses a random ephemeral encryption key. Honestly, I think in a lot of cases it makes sense to simply There are solutions for this: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnableHibernateWithEncryptedSwap https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnableHibernateWithEncrypt... I think the real challenge here is for distro vendors to figure out how to provide a better user experience around this. There's no reason that the ephemeral key can't be stored in a sealed state that can be recovered as the machine wakes. There are obviously some security implications to this, but I think it's fair to say that a lot of users would prefer making that trade-off.
    - r2binx 4y ago
      Why use another encrypted partition instead of putting a swap partition/file on the same with LVM/btrfs?
      - cbsmith 4y ago
        There's a lot of security models that rely on RAM being more difficult for an attacker to access than disk (as you can imagine it is much easier to ensure things stored to disk are resistant to compromise than to ensure that nothing in working memory is usable by an attacker). Swap is that in between case where storage is memory, so that creates a unique challenge. What you want is that if someone steals your hibernated laptop, that absent a way to securely authenticate themselves as you, they can't restore the working memory of your laptop. If you think about it, if they could, much of the point of many security precautions would be lost.

by nrp 4y ago

r-w 4y ago

Interesting. Do we have a concrete reason why, e.g., TLP[0] falls short of the power management features offered on other OSes? [0]: https://linrunner.de/tlp/ https://linrunner.de/tlp/

jeffbee 4y ago
One reason is all the binary artifacts are peak-optimized for the platform and this yields significant, often 10-20% lower CPU usage than plain vanilla binaries offered by all other Linux distributions. This includes the kernel, which in ChromeOS is built with LLVM with profile-guided optimization. Faster software translates directly to longer battery life. Every other distribution is years behind Google in terms of tooling.
- binkHN 4y ago
  > Every other distribution is years behind Google in terms of tooling. Can you expand on this? Perhaps a URL with more detail?
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    I'm not sure if there are any single good URLs I can give you. The best way to learn is to read the chromiumos repo and see how they build the image, how they collect and deploy profiles, etc. You can also look at the mailing list of clang-built-linux to see how their kernel is built with clang and how they integrated that with their profile pipeline. In the end though it is cultural and not technical. Debian will bend over backwards to make sure That One Guy can still install the latest version on his old Centaur CPU, from floppies. ChromeOS is laser-targeted for specific, allow-listed hardware platforms. If you are philosophically committed to the eternal comfort of That One Guy, the Debian way makes more sense. If you just want software that's faster and more secure, ChromeOS has the better way.
    - pksebben 4y ago
      I'd just like to put a vote of confidence in for That Guy, I think we should absolutely have an option for them. Which is a roundabout way of saying; it's critically important that we don't over-optimize for the central, happy path (just wanna browse securely on whatever hardware ya got). The most interesting things (and the most valuable) frequently come from the edge cases, which are absolutely supported by keeping an eye on the needs of "That One Guy". Unix interoperability has given us a bounty of awesome shit and I anticipate it will continue to do so.
caskstrength 4y ago
We don't because it doesn't. Battery life of ThinkPad that supports Linux with TLP installed and properly configured will be very similar to Windows. And to address FUD from other reply to your question: AFAIK official Firefox builds for Linux use PGO as well, however PGO has quite less impact on battery life than what another commenter suggests.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago

The usual reason for a lot of those boil down to "poor driver support", but this is the same hardware with what I would presume is the same Linux kernel so same drivers, so what's the difference?

duped 4y ago
The usual reason is that you can't enable hibernate with disk encryption
- cbsmith 4y ago
  It tends to specifically be an issue with encrypted swap, because encrypted swap uses a random ephemeral encryption key. Honestly, I think in a lot of cases it makes sense to simply There are solutions for this: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnableHibernateWithEncryptedSwap https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnableHibernateWithEncrypt... I think the real challenge here is for distro vendors to figure out how to provide a better user experience around this. There's no reason that the ephemeral key can't be stored in a sealed state that can be recovered as the machine wakes. There are obviously some security implications to this, but I think it's fair to say that a lot of users would prefer making that trade-off.
  - r2binx 4y ago
    Why use another encrypted partition instead of putting a swap partition/file on the same with LVM/btrfs?
    - cbsmith 4y ago
      There's a lot of security models that rely on RAM being more difficult for an attacker to access than disk (as you can imagine it is much easier to ensure things stored to disk are resistant to compromise than to ensure that nothing in working memory is usable by an attacker). Swap is that in between case where storage is memory, so that creates a unique challenge. What you want is that if someone steals your hibernated laptop, that absent a way to securely authenticate themselves as you, they can't restore the working memory of your laptop. If you think about it, if they could, much of the point of many security precautions would be lost.