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I always loved the premise of the Chromebook: disposable device with a disposable OS; secure by default; your data is always backed up; if you have any doubts o

I always loved the premise of the Chromebook: disposable device with a disposable OS; secure by default; your data is always backed up; if you have any doubts or problems you can always restore to the factory image and be back in action within minutes, etc. I would love to see these principles implemented in a privacy-respecting manner: bring your own device, choose your identity provider (including self-hosted options that integrate with e.g. email or even plain old SSH), choose your storage backend (including other clouds but also e.g. Syncthing, SFTP...). Immutable / secure-by-default OS would also be interesting, but nothing else out there is quite like ChromeOS. NixOS/Guix would be good candidates, but the underlying scaffolding is quite complex. Alpine & OpenBSD are both radically simpler, but lack the aspect of trivially reproducible builds. Then of course there's the question of providing a good UX on top of that base: I want to connect to Wifi, select the ID provider, type my username/password, and start working. That's an enormous gap to close.

varispeed 3y ago
> I always loved the premise of the Chromebook: disposable device with a disposable OS; secure by default; your data is always backed up; if you have any doubts or problems you can always restore to the factory image and be back in action within minutes, etc. As long as device can be reused, wiped completely and supplied with new OS etc. otherwise "disposable device" we should avoid at all cost as that is not green.
- ikurei 3y ago
  I see disposable as having several meanings here. If it means crappy quality and unreparable, something that will last for a couple of years tops, I agree that is terrible. It could also mean decent quality that will last, but is cheap enough that you won't worry too much about it being damaged or lost or stolen. I love my Macbook, and my previous one is still going strong after 8 years, in the hands of a family member with lower need for computational power, but I hate carrying around a device so expensive. I don't dare eat near it, and I wince whenever my backpack bumps on something. I miss the careless freedom of carrying around a cheap, crappy linux laptop.
  - bzzzt 3y ago
    If the result of making hardware inexpensive is people getting careless about damage that's a loss imo.
    - balder1991 3y ago
      It’s not about being careless, it’s about not being overly worried and limited on what you can do with it.
  - varispeed 3y ago
    Maybe we should use word "reusable" instead. It still carries those points, but does away with suggesting that device may be tossed to the bin once you are done with it: > reusable device with a replaceable OS; secure by default; your data is always backed up; if you have any doubts or problems you can always restore to the factory image and be back in action within minutes, etc.
  - themadturk 3y ago
    I have a nice stiff leather sleeve I bought when I had a Surface Pro 3, which now fits my M1 MacBook Air perfectly and does a more than adequate job of protecting it in my backpack. I eat around it all the time (but keep liquids well away.) I love this machine, but it's meant to be used, and by golly I don't baby it.
- rollcat 3y ago
  u-24tb1.112xlarge in us-east-1 is $218.40/h and you can dispose of it after a few minutes of use. Does AWS physically throw away the hardware?
- rchaud 3y ago
  In this case (Linuxifying Chromebooks), it would be green because the supported Chromebooks are pretty ancient and available in large quantities from refurbishers.
londons_explore 3y ago
A few UEFI firmwares support netboot from a URL over wifi. With that, you could set up a special secret URL which you'd type in on system boot, and have your personal OS loaded for you, complete with your settings and data, on any machine. The local hard drive could be used as an encrypted cache so that it's only slow the first time you boot up. Sadly, support for wifi from UEFI is rare, and bugfree booting over the network is tricky to get working on a wide variety of hardware.
- rollcat 3y ago
  The URL wouldn't have to be secret. You should not be baking secrets into an OS image anyway. But this is a very cool idea! Just specify e.g. https://start.example.com https://start.example.com as your boot URL to get to the installer; you can point the system at your personal data later. macOS (at least on Intel) is able to download and start the installer from the Internet, straight from the UEFI environment - you just have to hold the right magic button combination. I've only done this once, but it felt like one of those ideas, "why isn't every computer in the world able to do this".
- _joel 3y ago
  iPXE allows you to do this too, with some hackery. I've also done this with wired connection and menus for remote VM installs.
moffkalast 3y ago
> I want to connect to Wifi To quote that xkcd, I'll need a research team and 5 years.
shortrounddev2 3y ago
I coded on a chromebook throughout college. It was the crucible of learning software development in the mid-2010s because you had to improvise. Most assignments were in Java back then (from what I understand, colleges teach mostly python now) and I couldn't run eclipse (the standard IDE used in college at the time). I ended up renting a VPS from Vultr for $5/mo and SSH'ing in. I coded everything in vim with no debugger or code completion, and compiled everything with makefiles. Classes usually only required a single java file to turn in your work, which was then compiled and run automatically with the results being verified by another program, so as long as your individual java file output the same results as what was expected, it didn't matter what build system (if any) you used. The only other class that didn't use java was systems programming, where we did C. I had been doing C since I was 12 at that point, and since I was already using ubuntu server via ssh, it wasn't a difficult class at all for me. For my OS final, we had to write an operating system simulator (a program which simulated the kind of events that would occur in an OS: new processes, processes being deleted, memory paging, single process multi-tasking with pre-emption). I didn't actually read the instructions and ended up writing a kind of hypervisor(?) which ran programs in an 8080 emulator with some of my own custom instructions for memory banking and forking to meet the requirements of the class (your program had to be able to do memory paging up to something like 512mb of RAM). You had to have some kind of user interface, so I wrote it as a web server in C with a custom HTTP server implementation. The program returned an HTML page which looked like a desktop. You could spawn terminal windows and run specific programs. I wrote a few long-running programs which printed out numbers to demonstrate memory paging and process pre-emption. There was a special instruction I made to fork the program so you could clone a process from another process, and I used one of the unused flag register bits to signify which fork the program was. The professor was impressed by the implementation (and I implemented all the algorithms required to get 10 points extra credit), but because I didn't actually write an OS simulator (closer to an actual OS, but not quite there), he gave me 100%, but no extra credit. I was happy with that, because I'm not a grade chaser. Unfortunately, I failed the class because I couldn't answer trivia on the exam like "What does GRUB stand for" because I spent the whole semester working on the hypervisor and not actually going to any of the lectures. I just read the textbook and coded in C at the library. Here's the very rough code, with a slightly buggy 8080 emulator implementation: https://github.com/ShortRoundDev/8080-Remote https://github.com/ShortRoundDev/8080-Remote
fsflover 3y ago
> secure by default; your data is always backed up; if you have any doubts or problems you can always restore to the factory image I found that Qubes OS provides all of that for me, without any reliance on megacorporations. All software runs in VMs, which are automatically backed up and can be restored to a state before reboot easily. VMs run Linux and Windows, so all apps are working as expected (except those relying on GPU). And the UI is great.

varispeed 3y ago

> I always loved the premise of the Chromebook: disposable device with a disposable OS; secure by default; your data is always backed up; if you have any doubts or problems you can always restore to the factory image and be back in action within minutes, etc. As long as device can be reused, wiped completely and supplied with new OS etc. otherwise "disposable device" we should avoid at all cost as that is not green.

ikurei 3y ago
I see disposable as having several meanings here. If it means crappy quality and unreparable, something that will last for a couple of years tops, I agree that is terrible. It could also mean decent quality that will last, but is cheap enough that you won't worry too much about it being damaged or lost or stolen. I love my Macbook, and my previous one is still going strong after 8 years, in the hands of a family member with lower need for computational power, but I hate carrying around a device so expensive. I don't dare eat near it, and I wince whenever my backpack bumps on something. I miss the careless freedom of carrying around a cheap, crappy linux laptop.
- bzzzt 3y ago
  If the result of making hardware inexpensive is people getting careless about damage that's a loss imo.
  - balder1991 3y ago
    It’s not about being careless, it’s about not being overly worried and limited on what you can do with it.
- varispeed 3y ago
  Maybe we should use word "reusable" instead. It still carries those points, but does away with suggesting that device may be tossed to the bin once you are done with it: > reusable device with a replaceable OS; secure by default; your data is always backed up; if you have any doubts or problems you can always restore to the factory image and be back in action within minutes, etc.
- themadturk 3y ago
  I have a nice stiff leather sleeve I bought when I had a Surface Pro 3, which now fits my M1 MacBook Air perfectly and does a more than adequate job of protecting it in my backpack. I eat around it all the time (but keep liquids well away.) I love this machine, but it's meant to be used, and by golly I don't baby it.
rollcat 3y ago
u-24tb1.112xlarge in us-east-1 is $218.40/h and you can dispose of it after a few minutes of use. Does AWS physically throw away the hardware?
rchaud 3y ago
In this case (Linuxifying Chromebooks), it would be green because the supported Chromebooks are pretty ancient and available in large quantities from refurbishers.

londons_explore 3y ago

A few UEFI firmwares support netboot from a URL over wifi. With that, you could set up a special secret URL which you'd type in on system boot, and have your personal OS loaded for you, complete with your settings and data, on any machine. The local hard drive could be used as an encrypted cache so that it's only slow the first time you boot up. Sadly, support for wifi from UEFI is rare, and bugfree booting over the network is tricky to get working on a wide variety of hardware.

rollcat 3y ago
The URL wouldn't have to be secret. You should not be baking secrets into an OS image anyway. But this is a very cool idea! Just specify e.g. https://start.example.com https://start.example.com as your boot URL to get to the installer; you can point the system at your personal data later. macOS (at least on Intel) is able to download and start the installer from the Internet, straight from the UEFI environment - you just have to hold the right magic button combination. I've only done this once, but it felt like one of those ideas, "why isn't every computer in the world able to do this".
_joel 3y ago
iPXE allows you to do this too, with some hackery. I've also done this with wired connection and menus for remote VM installs.

moffkalast 3y ago

> I want to connect to Wifi To quote that xkcd, I'll need a research team and 5 years.

shortrounddev2 3y ago

I coded on a chromebook throughout college. It was the crucible of learning software development in the mid-2010s because you had to improvise. Most assignments were in Java back then (from what I understand, colleges teach mostly python now) and I couldn't run eclipse (the standard IDE used in college at the time). I ended up renting a VPS from Vultr for $5/mo and SSH'ing in. I coded everything in vim with no debugger or code completion, and compiled everything with makefiles. Classes usually only required a single java file to turn in your work, which was then compiled and run automatically with the results being verified by another program, so as long as your individual java file output the same results as what was expected, it didn't matter what build system (if any) you used. The only other class that didn't use java was systems programming, where we did C. I had been doing C since I was 12 at that point, and since I was already using ubuntu server via ssh, it wasn't a difficult class at all for me. For my OS final, we had to write an operating system simulator (a program which simulated the kind of events that would occur in an OS: new processes, processes being deleted, memory paging, single process multi-tasking with pre-emption). I didn't actually read the instructions and ended up writing a kind of hypervisor(?) which ran programs in an 8080 emulator with some of my own custom instructions for memory banking and forking to meet the requirements of the class (your program had to be able to do memory paging up to something like 512mb of RAM). You had to have some kind of user interface, so I wrote it as a web server in C with a custom HTTP server implementation. The program returned an HTML page which looked like a desktop. You could spawn terminal windows and run specific programs. I wrote a few long-running programs which printed out numbers to demonstrate memory paging and process pre-emption. There was a special instruction I made to fork the program so you could clone a process from another process, and I used one of the unused flag register bits to signify which fork the program was. The professor was impressed by the implementation (and I implemented all the algorithms required to get 10 points extra credit), but because I didn't actually write an OS simulator (closer to an actual OS, but not quite there), he gave me 100%, but no extra credit. I was happy with that, because I'm not a grade chaser. Unfortunately, I failed the class because I couldn't answer trivia on the exam like "What does GRUB stand for" because I spent the whole semester working on the hypervisor and not actually going to any of the lectures. I just read the textbook and coded in C at the library. Here's the very rough code, with a slightly buggy 8080 emulator implementation: https://github.com/ShortRoundDev/8080-Remote https://github.com/ShortRoundDev/8080-Remote

fsflover 3y ago

> secure by default; your data is always backed up; if you have any doubts or problems you can always restore to the factory image I found that Qubes OS provides all of that for me, without any reliance on megacorporations. All software runs in VMs, which are automatically backed up and can be restored to a state before reboot easily. VMs run Linux and Windows, so all apps are working as expected (except those relying on GPU). And the UI is great.