alt Hacker NewsWould prefer a 'Google Linux'—a native desktop OS with a unified UI philosophy, similar to a macOS experience but built on a standard Linux foundation. Instead of ChromeOS or Android as the base, treat them as subsystems for compatibility.
The real 'next big thing' would be integrating an engine like Gemini with OS-level hooks (similar to the OpenClaw approach) so agents can manipulate app windows and state directly. Resurrecting Web Intents as 2-way App Intents would be the key to making this work.
Also, keeping prompts as local .md files with an Obsidian-like system editor would be a huge win for power users. Simply gating Gemini behind 'premium' Chromebooks feels like the old 'licking the cake' strategy from the Google+ days—trying to force a new product's success by coopting existing hardware rather than building a superior platform.
I can imagine having Gemini + local Gemma working with Agents, which have access to my e-mail (ideally on GMAIL, but also supporting outlook), keeping local history of my visited sites and messages... and using RAG or something even better, ideally with looking also on repos I have checkouted to my file system, and maybe even whole file system....
Work related e-mail about "sending invoice to customer"... it may suggest proper content for e-mail. Having "dashboard" with summary of todays communication to you, your tickets (at work) and so on....
Can Google build such thing? If somebody can - it will be them. Will they build it? Probably not, they would prefer to build 3rd version of Google Pay.
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> similar to a macOS experience but built on a standard Linux foundation.
From a security perspective, this cannot exist. MacOS is fundamentally superior to classical GNU/Linux distros. Android/ChromeOS are the only Linux systems that make a serious attempt to close that gap.
I think the closest thing I can imagine is a system that goes all in on a Snap/Flatpak type platform (basically, like Fedora Silverblue, plus throw ~50 million dollars at fixing all the sandboxing, improving the SELinux policies or whatever, cranking up the system integrity story, getting some kernel hardening in place, stuff like that). With Google's funding I do think that's technically viable, I would love to see it. But, I dunno if it would count as "standard Linux foundation". And, kinda a weird thing to do for a company that's already spent billions over the last 20 years to build several existing Linux OSs.
(BTW, this is a totally security-brained take. I do actually run classical GNU/Linux on all my personal computers, the fact that it's a fundamentally insecure OS doesn't actually bother me that much. But I don't think Google can realistically ship a "product" like that. If it really took off and gained the kinda adoption they are presumably hoping for, it would honestly be quite irresponsible of them).
I don't know, but they do let you run Linux in a VM already on Chromebook. Hopefully that will continue.
I just made a comment to the same effect. They should be trying to compete with MacBook mini.
Google literally already sells Coral usb inference engines, so they’re most of the way there already: https://www.coral.ai/products/accelerator
I mean, I'm sure they absolute could build it and do a great job of it, but their incentives are all aligned to having you use web apps or buying from their store. A real linux would be absolutely counterproductive to those goals.
I can't see how this would be meaningfully different from ChromeOS. Google cannot force GNOME and KDE to stop clashing, there's no opportunity to "unify" the UI philosophy of Linux any better than the current efforts do. And upstream Linux has no big selling point for most users - the people that do care about that stuff will typically avoid Google's distro altogether.
If you want an upstream Linux kernel with folders of markdown prompts and virtualized ChromeOS/Android containers, just use Linux. You don't need to wait for Google to build that experience for you.
I would honestly switch from a Macbook to this Google Linux
gLinux already exists. Its meh.
ChromeOS was honestly the best they could do.
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They would never build something so open.
> The real 'next big thing' would be integrating an engine like Gemini with OS-level hooks (similar to the OpenClaw approach) so agents can manipulate app windows and state directly. Resurrecting Web Intents as 2-way App Intents would be the key to making this work.
I think for something like this, it will only work if you can allow you local files to get messed up by the LLM but then, because everything has been synced to the cloud, there's a safe "revert" option.
I'd love that built on a Linux foundation too, but realistically reckon if they're going down that path they've got the core of "all your app state can be backed-up/transferred" already in Android so they'd likely lean heavily on that.