Hacker News Reader

Comment by wiseowise | Hacker News Reader

Why not ChromeOS?

I actually evaluated whether it was plausible to use a ChromeOS derivative as a workstation OS while I was at Google. At the time the answer was "no" for a bunch of reasons, including the following:

1) Crostini didn't integrate with the ChromeOS accessibility infrastructure, so it wasn't practical for users who required assistive technologies which meant gLinux would have to be supported anyway

2) While there is some degree of support for graphics acceleration for Crostini instances, there's no real way to provide direct access to the hardware. A bunch of people needed to do work that required more direct GPU access (either very resource intensive rendering, or GPU-offloaded ML models and the like), which meant gLinux would have to be supported anyway

3) We were in the process of moving to using hardware-backed machine identity for Beyondcorp, and Crostini had no way of providing that and tying that identity to the host identity (you don't want a situation where a guest VM appears to be trustworthy when it's running on an unpatched host)

4) This was also before the acquisition of Neverware, which meant at the time that a team would need to be built to maintain a build of ChromeOS for generic workstation hardware

This was a few years back, and I left getting on for 18 months ago, so it wouldn't surprise me if this is reappraised at some point.

Isn't Crostini just a Linux VM inside ChromeOS? So you'd still be running some other Linux distro (I'm guessing gLinux itself) and not actually using ChromeOS for development?

They use ChromeOS as well, this article focuses on those people who want to use a mainstream Linux Distro at Google.

Pretty much everyone has a gLinux workstation or logs into a gLinux VM - they were, traditionally, the only devices that had access to the main source repository, so it's not so much about whether people want to or not.

Googler and ChromeOS engineer here. Opinions are my own, etc etc.

This has changed/is changing. It heavily depends on your team (especially if you're not in engineering, I don't think most non-engineers would have a gLinux machine or a workstation out of the box). We've developed tools for crostini that would let people access a gLinux environment, I don't know how much I can talk about it so I won't go into details (although it's nothing super secret either), but the bottom line is that more and more engineers these days are able to do 100% of their job on a ChromeOS machine, including dealing with google3 stuff.

I mean, you can always use the web-based Cider to do your work. It's not great, but it gets the job done.

Likely because these are not end-user machines but developer machines. Most Google engineers don't checkout/write/build/test/run code on their machines (they either do these tasks through a browser or SSH to another machine).

I believe gLinux can be installed on trusted machines that you connect over SSH as well as client laptops (where you can't checkout code etc).

That said many engineers/non-engineers at Google use ChromeOS on their client laptops (same with macOS).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com