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Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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I read the article and it just sounds like they're praising ChromeOS for being web browser centric. Need office, open Google docs/drive. Pretty much a Linux distro but by default come with a bunch of progressive web apps installed for common applications?
Consumer expectations. On Linux you can just use the web browser just like most people already do on ChromeOS and I assume windows and mac's. But on regular Linux, Mac, and Windows people expect more. So I guess a distro that brands itself and markets to users to just use the web browser for everything and maybe a store of progressive web apps/preinstalled ones
Also out of the box support. ChromeOS is Google backed. Laptop makers sell mainstream ChromeOS boxes. Linux doesn't have major mainstream device support. It'd be far less fussy if hardware vendors were releasing plenty of Linux out the box hardware. Right now it's some workstation centric hardware from Lenovo and Dell and smaller companies like System76
On that note I'd place my hopes with System76 since they're currently focused on consumer experience. Cosmic DE is still not prime-time ready but maybe a couple more years. 26.04 release use as the default for their new hardware and it still effectively be early adopter phase for Cosmic DE. Then 28.04 ready for primetime. Keep trying to break into being a mainstream hardware brand. Other is what happens with KDE Plasma with Valve and SteamOS, Plasma Mobile, and maybe the TV interface. A bunch of consumer centric use cases driving development in KDE land. Maybe they'll come up with a way to get flatpak permissions work in a way that alerts users on need and makes it easy to do like on Android/iOS
You could probably make a small Arch install, add LibreOffice and something either like the GNOME browser or Firefox. What people using ChromeOS want is something light (for cheaping out on hardware to schools), and basically just a way to access a browser. Plus, something something permissions. ChromeOS is marketed towards enterprise, like education. Just need the bare minimum to get on the 'net, and no more.
Why the hell would you use arch for browser centric use? Literally any stable distro would work perfectly fine, and doesn't risk failing to boot because of an update...
I don't know too much about distros, but you want something quite light. Let's be real, enterprise like schools won't pony up everything for Debian, especially when they just use Chromium and maybe Libreoffice. Schools are cheap, and if you can hacksaw together an Arch-based thing, they WILL buy miserable hardware, that can just barely run it, and an 8 gig SSD is much more stomachable for them than a 32-gig for Debian. SteamOS doesn't completely crash, and that's infinitely more complicated. This is basic Arch, plus a WM, plus Firefox/Chromium/Whatever.
Because arch btw 🙄
I think an immutable distro like Bazzite's cousins Aurora (KDE) and Bluefin (GNOME) would be far more appropriate. Combined with automatic rollback (if the system fails to boot, rollback to previous version) and it'd be practically bulletproof in education.
I honestly never tried them as they don't fit my use case, so I can't comment. The concept does sound good though.
In reality, what Chromebooks provide is a reinvention of the good old mainframe and terminal principle. In theory (like my recent - half joking - 9front comment) this is something that would be really easy to set up with nearly all Linux systems and especially immutable ones.
My take would be:
Put an sign up / sign in form as a "first boot" message in a distribution of your choice where you can specify (or have pre-filled by an organisation) a central server (could be something fancy like Nextcloud or something simple rsync based) where your whole profile folder gets synced to. After that: If anything goes kaputt just roll back the sync. Or "powerwasch" (to keep the ChromeOS terminology) the system to a clean state and re-sync your home folder.
In theory something that could all be implemented with a little scripting in an afternoon.