ChromeOS Will No Longer Support Ext2/3/4 On External Drives/SD Cards

An anonymous reader writes Chrome OS is based on the Linux kernel and designed by Google to work with web applications and installed applications. Chromebook is one of the best selling laptops on Amazon. However, devs decided to drop support for ext2/3/4 on external drivers and SD card. It seems that ChromiumOS developers can't implement a script or feature to relabel EXT volumes in the left nav that is insertable and has RW privileges using Files.app. Given that this is the main filesystem in Linux, and is thereby automatically well supported by anything that leverages Linux, this choice makes absolutely no sense. Google may want to drop support for external storage and push the cloud storage on everyone. Overall Linux users and community members are not happy at all.

Comments

Are those Amazon sales legitimate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever Chromebooks and ChromeOS comes up, somebody always points out those Amazon stats.

But are they actually legitimate sales?

By that, I'm asking if people actually bought these devices because they wanted to use them as Chromebooks running ChromeOS.

How many were technically-naive purchasers merely buying the cheapest laptops available, thinking they were typical Windows laptops, and not realizing that ChromeOS is actually so crippled?

How many were technically-savvy purchasers merely buying them so they could replace ChromeOS with a real Linux distro or some other OS?

Did anyone actually buy them intending to use ChromeOS?

Re:Are those Amazon sales legitimate?

[Ksevio]

I bought one to try it out with the knowledge end expectation that I could install Mint on it. I've switched it to developer mode (and back), but I haven't found any need for running actual applications on it. What I wanted was a very light laptop with a reasonable screen/keyboard (no netbooks), and it fits the bill perfectly (plus 6 second cold-boot time).

It does everything that a normal person could want - I use it for email, browsing the web, uploading pictures from a camera SD card, streaming music, editing powerpoint (through google presentations). It even has a built in SSH client for remoting into other machines via terminal as well as a remote desktop app.

Re:Are those Amazon sales legitimate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Somewhere, somehow those programmers must be paid.

Now it can either be by people buying the product, or it can be by moneytising your information for adverts.

Given that Apple, Microsoft, Google etc a re large contributors to open source they are not "gifting" their staff time, they see money in it.

So one way or another, you ARE paying for it.... call it a tax if you will,, but you ARE paying it.

Re:One huge customer - schools

[Retron]

I work in a school's IT department and we won't be touching Chromebooks with a 50-foot bargepole. We use a mixture of desktops and laptops running Windows 7 and Office 2013 - which costs far less than it would commercially. We also use SCCM to manage the 1,000 or so PCs and laptops (generic i3s and Core2 Duos from the likes of Lenovo and HP) we have in the school.

Data is kept locally and is backed up in various ways (ranging from blu-ray to SANs), with the data stored in various parts of the site. Nothing gets stored on the pupils PCs other than temporary data when they're using the PC - their work is all accessed from our network servers.

Cloud access is something we work against for pupils, as it's an excellent way of them wasting time with Flash games etc - kids are very inventive when it comes to playing games (I know, I was exactly the same at school in the 90s!) and it's easier to curtail games on our system than it would be with Chromebooks.That's leaving aside the privacy situation, which doesn't fill me with joy: on a personal level I won't put anything of importance in the cloud, as I simply don't know who'll have access to it. Whereas data on my own network here is much easier to keep tabs on...