Challenging Developer Contributions

“I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems I hope not! Outside of the Chrome part, ChromeOS is a mess of awkwardly attached virtual machines. If you want a &quot;native&quot; app (unless your native app is Steam), your best option is Android, which means you&#x27;re inside an Android VM, your webview component is an <i>Android</i> Chrome webview, you can&#x27;t see other things on the network (because you have a virtual network device), permissions are granted via the Android Settings panel which is distinct from the Chrome OS Settings panel and an even more user-hostile experience than it already was, and your widgets are all slightly wrong. It is bloat all the way down. Running plain old Linux apps is a similar problem, except it&#x27;s a &quot;developer feature&quot;, so you can&#x27;t expect an end user to use your app on their Chromebook.<p>It is exceedingly difficult for a developer to contribute any kind of improvement to this because the bug tracker is a black hole and the source code is a gargantuan monorepo with multi-page build instructions that basically require you to sacrifice a computer if you want to get anywhere.<p>Sandboxing is great and all, but the thing is a glorified hypervisor. It has no vision of its own for app distribution, user experience, or developer experience. It boggles my mind that they are doing this with <i>ChromeOS</i>: the OS that runs on the cheapest, slowest, most under-specced computers on the market.”