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Comment by uggedal | Hacker News Reader

> Driver support will likely be a weak point. We’ve heard at various times that Google has a legion of engineers working on the not so glamorous task of building hardware drivers.

I was under the impression that Chrome OS would be Linux based (which would make this a non-issue).

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Graphics drivers under Linux are not a "non-issue", as I for one know from painful experience. And as I understand it, Chrome OS is not running X, so they need specific graphics drivers.

There was a very interesting article on LH a while ago about the problems of linux graphics. A bit (very) offensive though, so if you're a fanboy who gets upset easily, don't read it: http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/nitty-gritty-shit-on...

Most of netbooks like EEE PC based on i945G or its relatives, and it works well. And it's always possible to get drivers from intel's moblin2.

But I think it will be something like chromium on frame buffer or even directfb.

no kidding. I'm running Ubuntu Jaunty and I still can't get decent drivers for my Radeon X1550

How do you know it's not running X?

Linux does have some minor issues still in the Netbook arena. So this could be where it stems from.

Personally if this is true:

> nd we’ve also heard conflicting rumors that Google is mostly relying on hardware manufacturers to create those drivers.

That's awesome! Even if that is all Google manages to achieve with Chrome it would rock - getting manufacturers to produce Linux compatible drivers is something barely anyone else has managed!

That is what I thought. Do you think that Chrome OS will help to improve the availability of drivers for other GNU/Linux systems?

No. Every device that you might find in a netbook either already has a driver or will never have a working driver (FSVO never).

No, that's terrible — do you have any idea how ridiculously terrible these Taiwanese companies are at driver development?

I think power management will be an issue. Personally I've never had an acceptable experience with Linux on laptops. Not sure how much progress has been made here over the last few years. It definitely helps that netbooks use such similar hardware across the board. If OEMs can be bothered to do some QA testing when the bundle Chrome OS it should be fine. Installing it on "unsupported" hardware could be more of a problem.

If they had the Chrome browser also take over most of the functions of the Window Manager, then they'd get most of the kind of functionality a user would consider a "Chrome OS"

I think you might be abstracting simplicity in where none exists.

I don't see why you can't merge browser tabs and a taskbar together. Especially if items in the tabs are really processes.

That is not the realm of graphics drivers, that's just window management.

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