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Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS
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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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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...
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.
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.
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.