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Comment by wazanator | Hacker News Reader

I'm willing to bet crouton runs on it out of the box so you can get a dev environment up fast.

But the developer mode notification on bootup kills the laptop :(

It warns you that you're in developer mode, makes a beep, and prompts you to push spacebar if you want to turn off dev mode, deleting everything on your computer.

Maybe you know to never make this mistake. Maybe you almost never turn off your computer. All that needs to happen is for you to reboot the computer once (say, it ran out of batteries while you were gone on vacation). Maybe it's you pressing spacebar on autopilot or a family member who mis-read the warning. The spacebar is pushed and now all your data is deleted.

I love crouton, but the dev mode warning is the most unfortunate user interaction design I've experienced in a product :(

If believe if you run GalliumOS vs Crouton it doesnt do that.

This may have changed, but when I used GalliumOS a year ago I still dealt with the white screen

What version? Ive been using 2.1 it for about a year on my Acer C910 (i5) and has been flawless. It maxes at 4GB of ram which is the only bummer, but that makes the pixelbook appealing.

I was still on 1.0 I believe I loved the OS, it was as good as you can get on a chromebook, I was just commenting about the white dev-mode screen at bootup. Did they get around that now?

No, Ive never gotten that. After the firmware flash and OS install, it boots right up, sleeps and resumes perfectly, just like a normal OS. Ive actually never seen the white dev-mode screen on this on, but I started with 2.0

I don't understand why it's not possible to run a Docker image that has the whole development environment, without turning on developer mode.

ChromeOS doesn't want to expose these syscalls to ChromeOS apps? I can understand wanting to sandbox the actual OS environment, but a Docker container should be totally isolated from that?

Docker is not designed for security, and shouldn't be mistaken for a secure border. It can, with painstaking effort, be made semi-secure for particular audited recipes, but this isn't a FreeBSD jail we're talking about.

Totally agree. I had this thing's immediate predecessor, the second-gen Pixel. I used crouton and the integration was fantastic. Alt-tab between ChromeOS and a real Linux desktop. Clipboard integration. ChromeOS driver stability plus all of my familiar Linux tools. Fantastic battery life too.

However, that developer-mode "hit Crtl-D or lose everything" misfeature always made me super-nervous too. Whoever implemented that must have never read any one security-UX book, because they all mention the evils of taking irrevocable action in response to a password failure. Or maybe they were just brain damaged. Either way, what a horrible mistake.

Agreed, I bought a used $100 chromebook and installed linux to set up some emulators for my ~6 year old at the time son..

I explained to him how to get around it, but forgot to give his mom the same instructions

It is funny how the "press spacebar" part jumps out at you, but the "to wipe this machine" isn't as obvious to the novice user.

>But the developer mode notification on bootup kills the laptop :(

Yeah, you can turn this off via boot flags, and even replace the bitmaps for the warning so its a little less garish. Requires removing the write protect screw, though. See: https://mrchromebox.tech/#fwscript

Crouton experience is very bad. so many bugs.

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