Apparently this is via a VM, with limitations (no hardware acceleration, for example); presumably the original commenter wants to be able to run Linux binaries natively.
> ChromeOS isn't a general purpose Linux distro
But based on the article, it seems Google is taking steps towards making it one (switching to Wayland, using standard Chrome for Linux, etc.).
Developer mode basically unlocks the r/w firmware, so you can boot from USB and replace the firmware etc, but the Read-only Google Root of Trust stays there, however as far as I know the ChromeOS 'distro' exists only to support running the Chrome Web Browser, and also Android and Linux VMs, +audio/video/input/etc. So if you have root on a ChromeOS device in developer mode, and you are dropped into a shell and want to run firefox, how would you do that? There are no packages for running on 'ChromeOS'. You can't just apt-get. I don't know if ChromeOS is self-hosted, ie. it is compiled and generated on itself and not some other Linux distro.
which
I don't think adopting Wayland or using the 'Linux' Chrome makes it move towards being a 'general purpose' distro. This just lessens the amount of change between ChromeOS and Linux so no more Freon library. It also seems to greatly reduce the difference between the CHROME_BROWSER_FOR_CHROMEOS and THE_CHROME_BROWSER_FOR_LINUX builds.
"Linux for Chromebooks: Secure Development"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRlh8LX4kQI
https://chromium.googlesource.com/crosvm/crosvm/
https://chromeos.dev/en/posts/making-android-more-secure-wit...
WSL is like the Chromebook Official Linux Developer thing -(he last time I updated it), Debian, inside a container, inside a VM, running under ChromeOS. You can run what Debian can run. Inside the container.
I thought ChromeOS as a distro is more like a runtime - it has the stuff to let it boot a Chrome Browser and VMs. etc +hardware support. There wouldn't be much point (other than fun) for Running random software on ChromeOS. It would be like OpenWRT, but without the package manager.