ChromeBooks were outselling Macs from 2017-2021, although the pandemic meant hundreds of millions of people suddenly needed new computers for remote working and the kids to use for remote schooling, so sales spiked and have since collapsed.
But they sold ITRO 100 million units per year for several years.
It's a relatively standard distro up until the GUI layer, based on Gentoo.
I'd agree that Android is something else, but ChromeOS is mostly the usual GNU + Linux stuff, and a weird display server which is Chrome rendering direct to the screen.
I do. My only ChromeOS device at present is an old Thinkpad T420 with a Core i5 and 6GB of RAM. It runs very quickly with ChromeOS Flex. Currently I have Firefox ESR running on it, and DOSemu. Inside DOSemu I have MS Word for DOS.
It's a Linux. It runs Linux stuff thanks to a built-in feature, and since Flex came out, the Linux support has improved visibly: so for instance Firefox now works properly with either a full titlebar or none, and this depends on the settings within Firefox not on ChromeOS.
It works, it runs, it's useful, now, today.
Personally I don't give a toss about any of the other things you mention. It plays videos smoothly, it's fast and responsive, and my webcam works. I've tried Skype, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger and Zoom in ChromeOS and all worked fine.
Sure it may be limited. I am not denying that. But it's selling well up against Windows and Mac, which is something no other Linux distro has ever managed to do. Despite all their fancy acceleration features and being free, ordinary consumers are not interested, even though they are FREE.
ChromeOS is not free: you can only get the full version by buying it on custom hardware, and you need a Google account to use it. Those are significant drawbacks compared to every free distro...
And yet 10x more Chromebooks sell per year than all the free distros put together can GIVE AWAY.
That is not just noise. That is no rounding error. That is massive.
The year of Linux on the desktop came, over half a decade ago now, and the Linux world was too busy with infighting and squabbling over Snap vs Flatpak and other pointless nonsense to even notice that the mainstream consumer world has adopted Linux bigtime.
A bit late to this party, but you are woefully, badly misinformed as to what ChromeOS is, and what you can run on it. Well over a decade ago, I was running a full suite of gnu-linux devtools, natively, within chromeos.
You don't even need to install a chroot from another distro. Just get a gcc (chromebrew was the first to package this), and the rest is just gentoo linux (with portage ripped out - and in the early days, you could run a shell script which PUT PORTAGE BACK IN).
And if you take the time to understand the wierd partitioning layout, a couple of bind mounts in the right places is all you need to get the chromeos gui file manager (which is rather crappy, btw) to see your stuff.
Oof, that hits hard, but you're probably right: I expect there are more people who primarily (or even exclusively) use a smartphone or tablet than a general-purpose computer running a general-purpose OS.
There are libre mobile devices, but approximately no-one uses them, just like approximately no-one uses Linux on the desktop. Unless some large vendors start shipping Linux by default on all their devices, or the current mainstream OS vendors become really obnoxious and people go searching for alternative devices with Linux installed by default, that isn't going to change since people really don't want to have to do installs themselves.
No, but the average Linux user has probably been bitten by nvidia compat issues so much in the past that they're even more likely than the average generic laptop user to be using Intel or AMD graphics.
This isn't nearly as true as it used to be. I regularly game on KDE Plasma on Wayland on a 3080 Ti with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, and it works fine.
