alt Hacker NewsI’m not sure I understand the customer use case for this.
1- Chromebooks have made huge inroads in schools because they’re easy to maintain, share, upgrade, and they’re very cheap.
2- Obviously, running desktop software is a huge new piece of the ecosystem, but isn’t this customer already opting for Windows/Mac, who have extremely robust 30-year ecosystems and suites like Office, iLife, Adobe, etc that will obviously never build for this platform
There’s no way Google OS ever hits any kind of parity of exclusive software that is unavailable on Windows/Mac. Best they can do is run Android apps. This also introduces a high new threat vector to their existing customers who might not want it.
Lastly, what will this do to Chromebook buyers who are now wondering which OS will be actively developed in 5 years?
There's now a Photoshop web, and Google has their own office suite. Canva and Figma are websites. iLife is discontinued. Are there specific things in "etc" that you're thinking of? Davinci Resolve and Blender are available for Linux and thus Crostini on a Chromebook/Googlebook. ChromeOS came out in 2011, 15 years ago. So not 30, but it's been around a while now.