It's useful outside of Chrome OS if you have a security perimeter based on TLS with ACLs and auditing already in place and you want to use it for SSH as well:
I've got this crazy idea. Since "Linux Desktops" are generally running GNU under the hood for providing user land services, why don't we call those systems... I don't know... "GNU/Linux"? That way we can distinguish them from systems that use the Linux kernel, but have a completely different user land infrastructure.
How many of them actually intimately use the GNU userland as opposed to Xorg and whatever libc's installed? GNU's an increasingly irrelevant portion of unix and unixlike systems -- most of the actually important userland portions are python, ruby, the aforementioned Xorg, etc.
I actually don't think you are incorrect. GNU is not nearly as big a piece of the puzzle as it used to be. It's just that when most people say "Linux Desktop", the part where they say "Linux" usually means the part that GNU makes up. As far as I know, GNU libc is still by far and away the most popular libc installed on those kinds of systems.
So it was just kind of a snarky joke because the parent said that to be a "Linux Desktop" you had to be able to get ssh running (presumably they meant openssh). And while that's not GNU, GNU is what the vast majority of "Linux Desktops" will use to get you there -- so the implication really was that "Linux Desktop" == "GNU/Linux Desktop".
I thought it was funny, but probably I was being too obscure. Also, I should know better than to dive into politics for no good reason.
Yes, I know what it means and includes. Android, which is one of the biggest unixes right now, doesn't use GNU. iOS, which is another one of the biggest unixes right now, doesn't use GNU. Most embedded linuxes don't use GNU. So yes, for the parts of unix which are visible to most people, the gnu parts are not very relevant at all.
You can choose what kind of laptop you want. ChromeOS is one of the options, and security (+ trivial exchange-ability) is one of the selling points for using a Chromebook.
I tried it for a while, but I'm too used to the Mac to have made the switch more easily, so I moved back. But I know quite a few folks who use and love them. Opinions, as I'm sure you can guess, vary widely. It was surprisingly not-bad, even for a diehard mac user, and that was on a model from two years ago.
Niels Provos himself is a Chromebook user (not sure if he needs to access production these days...) and he talks about locking down privileged access to Chromebooks with security keys:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec...
It's useful outside of Chrome OS if you have a security perimeter based on TLS with ACLs and auditing already in place and you want to use it for SSH as well:
https://github.com/zyclonite/nassh-relay
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/assets...
Google uses a similar setup internally.