sometimes The Register really hit
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in reply to @ticky's post:
It will be a dark day for actual tech industry news if El Reg ever folds
The whole line about "no package manager" being a plus for usability and accessibility is very odd? There's nothing about the Windows model of "double click some random file and hope it works" that's usable, it's just something folks have gotten used to — indeed, the rise of app stores over the past twenty years shows that having package managers at the user level is a good idea, it's just the presentation of those managers that's the problem?
My reading - and not intending to take away from your interpretation, just providing my own - I read it to be that ChromeOS happens to be the most used Linux distro and doesn't have a package manager (along with everything else we associate with a Linux distro), but it still should be considered Linux.
I don't believe the article is setting out that the package manager is part of the issue with Linux adoption, but rather it's something we typically think of when it comes to Linux that ChromeOS just doesn't do.
But! Just my reading, and yours is totally fair too
double clicking an installer.exe is absolutely fine and normal, and arguably one of the closest things windows has ever gotten to doing something correctly. going directly up to the file where a program lives and saying "get to work bitch" is the most natural thing in the world
it only feels strange if you're used to the many layers of abstraction that windows normally uses to hide the existence of notepad.exe from a person wishing for notepad to appear. you hit the windows key and type "note" and you've just searched the contents of a menu that's generated from several different directory paths where every subdirectory contains an alias to the actual binary that you want.
that level of convolution only exists because in the 80s microsoft thought a program should live in a directory full of scattered shit like "coxsmal.dll" and "butfuk.ini" and then in the 90s realized laypeople don't like that, panicked and tried to hide it by making it stand in the corner with a lampshade on it's head instead of starting over and doing this all properly
meanwhile on a macintosh you were welcome and actually expected to browse the boot disk from it's root. if you wanted microsoft word you opened the microsoft word directory and clicked the microsoft word binary. you installed it in the first place by just copying it off the cd onto your hard disc.
as much as i like being able to 'pacman -Syu' the package manager exists not as technical superiority but because linux is a hundred times worse at this than windows. it is basically impossible to install software manually on linux, because if you attempt to do so you'll discover the developer only releases it as source code that fails to compile with 40,000 undecipherable dependency errors. you will then ask in the developer's IRC and they tell you you're using the wrong distro and ban you.
none of this really concerns an app store, because they weren't meant to solve these inherited problems. an app store is an advertising service that sees downloading and installing things for people as a loss making side business
There's nothing about the Linux model of "run this command and hope it works" that's more or less usable than Windows or macOS, though. Just different flavours of the core problem: software management is really tricky.
I suppose this would hit different if Google would not be an evil company hell-bent on causing as much monopoly as possible.
The things is that people know that if Chrome OS would be more successful that it already is, it would mean that we would be having the same problems that we are now having with Chrome and manifest 3 and DRM and all of that.
An I can see some people thinking "With all that, now you are telling me that chrome OS is actually good and Google would not try to sabotage the Linux ecosystem like he's doing on the web?" I believe those hypothetical people (do they exist though?) would want to disassociate with that, hence the disctintion. (This also assumes that these hypothetical people believe that Linux is good and they are the good guys of course).
I'm personally ambivalent on the whole thing. Like whatever.l call it Linux or not, who cares.
So yeah, the article is true, and yes chrome OS is Linux. but certainly there is a political position on why you want to distinguish Chrome OS from GNu/Linux. (I guess sometimes it's useful to say the GNU thing).
Now, wherever you think this difference is valid or not is up to you.