In reality, what Chromebooks provide is a reinvention of the good old mainframe and terminal principle. In theory (like my recent - half joking - 9front comment) this is something that would be really easy to set up with nearly all Linux systems and especially immutable ones.

My take would be:

Put an sign up / sign in form as a “first boot” message in a distribution of your choice where you can specify (or have pre-filled by an organisation) a central server (could be something fancy like Nextcloud or something simple rsync based) where your whole profile folder gets synced to. After that: If anything goes kaputt just roll back the sync. Or “powerwasch” (to keep the ChromeOS terminology) the system to a clean state and re-sync your home folder.

In theory something that could all be implemented with a little scripting in an afternoon.

9front (with enough volunteers and a modern browser) could be exactly that.

I use Devuan and TDE because the setup is so incredible boring and dusty that i do not have to get acquainted with anything new (SystemD, Wayland… whatever hipster WM is currently cool) and keep working with the tools i like.

Devuan + Trinity Desktop

Moved over there since Debian switched to Sytemd. It is boring, dusty… but it works and stays out of my way.

I still doesn’t like it…

Flatpaks together with “immutable” distributions, Wayland and systemd are a heresy, a crime against the UNIX principles, a disgrace in the eyes of of SED and AWK. REPENT! Save your immortal core dumps and return to the one true /home !

Well regarding plan9port, it is really, really easy to acquire… just clone the Github repo (https://github.com/9fans/plan9port), run ./INSTALL and everything else sorts itself out ;-)

Why ed? Well, it keeps my brain from rotting 😀 just half joking… i have noticed that whenever i use a somewhat more “user friendly” software my mind starts to wander off more easily and instead of being more focussed on the programming task i shortly after find myself doing… $THING instead of being productive. So, being the only jack-of-all-trades-computer-guy in a small-ish company i tend to chose the tools that work for me, even if they are a bit… anachronistic.

I think the best maintained version of Sam would be the one included in 9front (if you want some truely special experience) or if you want to stay (somewhat) in the realm of the sane you can use plan9port which also brings in many nice tools out of the Plan9 ecosystem.

Honestly: Yeah, i was trolling (kind of), but:

I DO like to code via ED because the design and workflow of ED (or even better: Sam) makes folding unnecessary because you only put on the screen what is needed right at that moment. Want to see two functions 1000 lines apart? No problem, just print them right below each other on the screen.

ED IS THE STANDARD EDITOR

Not everywhere! Our accounting department uses a self written toolset based on APL

Well, it’s easy… just be born in the early 80s and grow up with home micros!

I had an account on reddit, about five years old until I finally decided to leave it because i spend an ungodly amount of time there. Knowing myself and my habit to flake on self set goals I thought out the ultimate strategy to keep me from coming back: Over a couple of weeks I intentionally posted atrocious stuff on my main and my two alt-accounts to get me permabanned and burn every single bridge.

For now it has successfully stopped me from wasting time there any longer.

Well, Brave is -regardless of the companies decisions- still a damn good browser with many build in essentials (TOR, IPFS, Bittorrent…), so, while I PERSONALLY don’t use this anymore (currently I use an heavily patched suckless surf and Dillo) I don’t see much wrong in including this in a distribution especially catering to users switching from windows.

Well, for me it would be the setup i am now using since about 15 years:

WM: flwm Filemanager: ROX-Filer Background: feh

… and a ton of tools i accumulated over the yesrs

Is this the appropriate point to reference the suckless community? I mean, that’s THE point of the movement…