for those who dont know, crostini is a feature available for chromeos that lets you install a debian container and has a cute terminal and lets you install linux software (can be from flathub, github, etc!!! woa!!). i love it so much and use it daily for programming python on my chromebook and crostini is what i mean when i say that google loves open source and linux, they know debian is the greatest and they use gentoo to make chromeos
I tolerate stuff like this on other systems. But I prefer to have full access to the real deal.
Anything that supports Flatpaks is good in my book. The more things that use Flatpaks, the more companies see them as worth supporting for their products. Improved Flatpak support and adoption really helps “traditional” distros like Mint, which can use the same software without modification.
I wouldn’t say they “love” open source though. IMO it’s like Microsoft where it’s more of a political move to make themselves seem better. Recently, in some areas, Google has been trying to clamp down on people daring to run software they don’t approve on their devices.
Google has been trying to clamp down on people daring to run software they don’t approve on their devices.
“Google” isn’t. ChromeOS is actually providing more and more flexibility then ever. Android however is the exact opposite. One must keep in mind that google isn’t some monolithic company, it’s very fractured and has many independent teams, the best showcase of this is JXL. 3/4 top contributors to libjxl are google employees, and yet chromium decided to remove JXL support citing bogus reasons generated by obviously flawed testing and analysis.
Nobody is hosting JXL images because we don’t support JXL so we removed JXL before we launched it since no one was using it. #chromelogic
not to mention the totally bogus comparison they preformed which is an insult to anyone who has a even an inkling into how image metrics and comparisons work and more then 30sec to compare
Sounds like distrobox is more useful
Chromebooks suck in many ways so no, I don’t care what features they may have
Personally, I like crostini with a little balsamic vinegar and olive oil on top. Its great when Italian restaurants give you the little bread before your meal
The chrome is crostini is cool too! I wish Google would just make full fledged Linux laptops, but it’s a step in the right direction
If you have a Chromebook and that’s what you need sounds like the ticket! Glad you enjoy it.
When I was in highschool I could only afford a Chromebook and I chrooted mine, which meant putting Linux on it. I believe that’s changed in years past though.
thank you so much!! its awesome because i can have gimp, krita, vs code and more running natively so thats nice, and without ever turning on developer mode
How often do you think about crostini?
well always because i have to use it whenever i use my chromebook n.n
crostini is pretty damn great but it’s important to know what it IS and it’s actually really simple. Crostini is two things combined into one
Firstly A VMM
Crostini uses the crosvm VMM which is can be thought of kinda like an inhouse version of qemu but designed to explicitly run natively integrated and high performance VMs safely instead of being a swiss army knife (KVM acceleration, virtio peripherals etc) (PS. it’s written in rust too) They use it for chromeOS to integrate android support (on select newer devices) and linux. It runs a supervisor distro which can run containers inside of it.
ChromeOS calls the VM termina. Im not sure what distro is running in the VM, or if its a specialized one. I forget
Next is the containerization
It is a lot like distrobox, It can run a myriad of distros but the key part of it is sommelier. A wayland compositor designed to render windows through virtio-wayland, an extension of virtio-gpu. In practice very similar waypipe which rendering wayland windows to a remote wayland client using network/sockets (Yes, it does support AV_VSOCK so it can work with qemu.)
Sommelier is run in the containerized Distro, running on the TerminaVM. Using termina provides excelent security and performance, and then using LXD inside of termina provides excellent flexibility
The guts of “crostini” crosvm, virtio-wayland, sommelieris all open source, you can actually (with some degree of hassle) set this up entirely yourself, or do what I do, and run qemu + waypipe for a similar experience. Waypipe is much easier to setup however it comes at a preformance detriment since qemu virtio-gpu perf is worse then crosvm (no vulkan support in qemu yet still)
EDIT: s/Architecturally/in practice/ I have no idea why I said Architecturally. they are quite different things. I must have had a brain fart
It’s like WSL, but LSL (Linux subsystem for linux)
I wouldn’t buy a Chromebook, but at least they let you use non web apps on it.
I still don’t get why every Chromebook has a preset expiration date for when it will stop getting updates. That really seems like a great way to make lots of ewaste. Especially since they lock down the bootloader so well.
They don’t care about e-waste; they care about money. And of course, you can sell a lot more bargain basement laptops if they have an expiration date.
But at that point as much as I hate to say it you’re probably better off with a cheap windows laptop.
As at least you can get updates till the hardware no longer supports it.
That’s a lot less wasteful then making something and planning when it won’t work anymore.
Crostini sucked as so hard that I just wiped chromeos from my chromebook duet 3 anf installed Debian 12 on it. Much much faster too btw and it just doesn’t kill itself because its not a container anymore that suddenly Crostini can’t access and needs to be wiped.
As an Arch Linux user on every thinkpad I own: what the heck is a chromebook?
