[montroser]

What do you mean by open and closed? ChromeOS is based on ChromiumOS, which is open source. I guess macOS is based on Darwin technically, but the ratio of open source to proprietary is much higher for ChromeOS than macOS, no?

[galleywest200]

I think they mean closed as in it is more difficult to install whatever you want on a ChromeOS machine as opposed to a MacOS machine.

[ufmace]

What is it that you want to install on ChromeOS that you are unable to? All of the usual Linux and open-source stuff works fine on the built-in Linux environment on it. Possibly even a little better than MacOS in some cases, since you don't need to worry about Apple app signing. There's not literally nothing you can't do, but the list is a lot shorter than most people think, especially those who haven't really tried ChromeOS in a decade and think they're all a glorified web browser on $200 hardware.

[traderj0e]

You can technically run anything you want on both without resorting to hacks, it's just a question of how annoying it is.

[nolist_policy]

On a Chromebook you can install the Linux Dev VM with 5 clicks in the settings and get a fully featured Debian VM.

[traderj0e]

I'm willing to bet it's easier to set up a Linux VM on a Chromebook than on a Mac. But the other side is that anything not explicitly requiring Linux will work natively in macOS, where you also get a nicer terminal. Like I've not needed a Linux VM in years, and the author doing web dev probably won't either.

[QuercusMax]

pretty dang easy to run a Linux container on MacOS using Colima (https://github.com/abiosoft/colima).

[lukan]

But if I don't want to have to use a VM?

Well, then you can only put it in dev mode and use chromebrew. Which I am glad exists, but even installing node can be a pain and the way to get it running changed over the years.

[array_key_first]

But how? You can install Linux and android apps on chrome os. I understand this perspective might intuitively make sense, but we need to analyze if it's actually true.