On Vi, 19 iun 20, 09:58:40, to...@tuxteam.de wrote: > On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 05:54:38AM +0300, Andrei POPESCU wrote: > > On Mi, 17 iun 20, 10:55:55, to...@tuxteam.de wrote: > > > > > > Making things user friendly (something we *gotta* do) means sometimes > > > taking decisions for the user. Where's the limit? Where's too much > > > (authoritarian software)? Where's too litle (RTFM software)? You'll > > > be wrong most of the time for some users, and some of the time for > > > most users. > > > > In my opinion Chrome OS (and I assume Chromium OS as well) gets many > > things right, Debian could learn a lot from it. > > That's the point. In Sally's opinion it's Mac. In Betty's, it's Windows > (but not after '95). In Sue's, OTOH... > > (BTW. for all I've seen of Chrome OS, I'd either run away screaming or > scrub it from the computer, depending on my momentary mood).
Chrome OS itself is definitely not something for the typical debian-user subscriber, as it is "just enough OS to run Chrome" ;) What would be interesting to at least consider for Debian (in my, not so humble, opinion): By default it is using secured boot (signed kernel, etc.) with the user data partition fully encrypted and no root access whatsoever. It can be switched to "developer mode" with full root access by a special (documented) boot procedure, which involves full erasure of all user data (for privacy reasons). Robust and user friendly auto-update mechanism. There is just one notification informing you to reboot to upgrade. On the next reboot you are running the upgrade, not additional waiting time involved. As far as I know it uses two "boot" (system?) partitions. The upgrade is written to the "other" partition and marked to be booted from next time. The "current" partition is kept as backup with an automatic fall-back mechanism (never seen it trigger as far as I could tell). During the lifetime of my Acer Chromebook R13 I've had countless updates, including a "firmware" upgrade (u-boot?) and a filesystem change (to ext4 I think, don't recall what it had before), all without a glitch. These did involve some (one?) additional confirmation and the filesystem change did take a while (unavoidable). For a while I was also running the "beta" channel, similar to Debian's testing, no issues with the upgrades. Too many apps installed? Some things appear to now work properly? Are you selling / giving away the Chromebook? No problem. Just use "Powerwash" (something like a "factory reset") to restore the OS to its basic state (with all updates applied) and erase all user data. Sounds quite similar to what was recently discussed here on the list. As I wrote above, it's not for the typical debian-user subscriber. It is however a really good option for the kind of users that spend 95% of the time in a browser. The other 5% are most likely covered by Chrome and Android Apps, if the user is willing to ignore / doesn't care about the privacy issues. Building something similar with just Debian is mostly doable, though by far not easy. Kind regards, Andrei -- http://wiki.debian.org/FAQsFromDebianUser
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
