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specproc 2 days ago

Absolutely. The year of linux on the desktop was probably somewhere around 2020.

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lproven 2 days ago | parent [-]

I'd argue 2017: that was the year Chromebooks first outsold Macs in the USA.

(I know, the fanboys and penguin Taliban will rage that ChromeOS is not the True Linux, etc., but ignore them.)

Two things are non-obvious about this info.

1. The numbers are by value not by units. An average Mac is about 5x the cost of the average Chromebook.

2. This is long pre-COVID. The pandemic was very good for Chromebook sales and they've slackened off since, but the boom began well before.

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rstuart4133 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, I'm with you - Chromebooks are the first successful Linux Desktop.

To anyone doubting it - Google supports installing Debian apps on Chromebooks, via crostini. That's how I run Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice and a number of other things on a Chromebook. The integration is pretty good - when you install a Debian desktop app, it's ICON appears in the list of apps you can run from the Chromebooks launch button.

It's a very good setup for my wife. The Chromebook is cheap, the UI is simple, the Google ecosystem just works when you need it, and all the desktop apps are still available.

It's not perfect, and it needs at lease 8G of RAM which is a high end Chromebook. This years crostini release was a big leap in stability. It went from the occasional Debian application crash (requiring a restart of the VM) to not stopping as far as I can tell. It's a pity the upgrade destroyed the VM, losing every file in there. Not nice, Google. There are still paper cuts, but a future were I choose "Chromebook" as my window manager for a 16GB Snapdragon X looked possible.

Or it did, until Google announced they were replacing ChromeOS with Android. But now, maybe, using Android as a Windows Manager for Debian on Snapdragon X might be in my future.

	▲	lproven a day ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks for that. Yep, I have given my wife an old (but high-spec: i7, 16GB) Dell Latitude with ChromeOS Flex as her desktop. She seems to like it more than the MacBook Pro she had before, because it's simpler. I discovered ChromeOS Flex can't play movie files. So I installed VLC in the Debian session. Now, when she clicks on any movie file, VLC opens automatically and it just plays. I didn't have to do any configuration; ChromeOS just knows that there's an app installed that can play filetypes including .MOV, .MP4, .AVI etc and it Just Works™. I also agree re the Android move. I wrote about it: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/16/android_replacing_chr... I like the current ChromeOS. I am concerned by the change.