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Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

Wait - does this mean that if Steam ships on Chromebook, and Steam can be made to run arbitrary software via proton, that Chromebooks have become regular laptops?

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It is worth noting that ChromeOS runs Linux software in a neat way to isolate it from the host OS.

It runs it in Debian-based KVM VMs, and it uses virtio-wayland[1] to pass the applications through to the host compositor, making them feel as if they are not running in a VM.

This architecture means that ChromeOS can preserve its readonly system partition, delta updates, and fast boot times while being able to run any Linux app. Very similar to Qubes, actually.

[1] https://alyssa.is/using-virtio-wl/

Does virtio-wayland support accelerated graphics? It's not clear to me how that would work, since accelerated graphics drivers typically include hardware-specific userland code that has to run in the application.

Since it is running in a VM and the host needs the GPU as well, it likely uses virtio-gpu to do paravirtualization. The latest iteration involves emulating a Vulkan device, serializing the commands, and passing them through to the host:

https://docs.mesa3d.org/drivers/venus.html

Not sure if this is a joke, but you can already "officially" install a Debian environment from within ChromeOS.

https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en

Indeed, this is just a more convenient and user friendly support layer than installing stuff through Crostini.

hey interesting - new to me.. (checks models) yep, the Chromebook on the desk is one of "the ones that have Linux" ..

"Camera not supported yet" .. feature!

That's just par for the course for Linux.

Write the support yourself! Publish it under the GPL! Share and enjoy! ;)

The irony here is that this is a ChromeOS-specific issue, not really related to typical desktop Linux.

Of course, it can and hopefully will be improved by improvements to desktop Linux. I haven't kept up, but ChromeOS will probably be able to adopt newer open source desktop technologies like Wayland and Pipewire/XDG portals in order to get a better Linux multimedia experience, if they care to.

To be clear, chromebooks have for a few years been able to be regular labtops since crouton [1] allowed installing linux distros on them. (And could even use wine to run windows games on the x86 chromebooks.)

[1] https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

Or go a step further and flash a modified UEFI firmware on it, then natively run a Linux distro. My HP Chromebook from 2013 is rocking still, almost a decade after release. I run Gallium on it, for optimal compatibility with all the hardware.

They've always been able to run Linux things through dev mode, or installing a different distro, etc...

Chromebooks can already run arbitrary software, via a full Linux VM running alongside ChromeOS.

Regardless, last time I was in Walmart Chromebooks where the only laptop available. For better or worse (mostly worse IMO) as far as a large portion of the population is concerned "regular laptops" are specialized equipment that they won't have.

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