When I decided to leave Manjaro, I gave a try to Tumbleweed, it’s a great distro, but the problem was I had no access to so much software as I have through the AUR.
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OH how unfortunate for Windows users. I hope they’re OK
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The Open Build Service has just about everything I need from my testing, to be honest. If it isn’t there, it is likely on Flatpak.
so many blue screens 
and I am traveling next week 
I told ya to use linux…
even better title
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Just read this one, and it is quite fitting:
Or, in other words: The problem with Capitalism is that Capitalism works.
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My problem was mainly the availability of some CLI software.
Reminds me the old oxymoron “Microsoft Works”.
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I was less smug when I learned that Crowdstrike did this to a bunch of Debian and RHEL servers back in April: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41005936, https://access.redhat.com/solutions/7068083
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great, interesting find.
"Crowdstrike took a day to respond, and then asked for a bunch more proof (beyond the above) that it was their fault. They acknowledged the bug a day later, and weeks later had a root cause analysis that they didn’t cover our scenario (Debian stable running version n-1, I think, which is a supported configuration) in their test matrix. "
no retort necessary; that speaks for itself.
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Yeah Crowdstrike seems like malware that breaks your system and incidentally prevents other malware from infecting you.
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I guess if you try hard enough it can work, but I don’t know how practical it will be since after 2 years, if I remember correctly, Chromebooks become e-waste because they stop being supported.
This is a thing of the “remote” past. As also still many people think that Chromebooks come with some 1 GB Ram and 16 GB eMMC storage.
Nowadays most big manufacturers like Asus, Lenovo, HP are marketing machines with highend specs and Google has steadily increased the support for them.
If I remember correctly, on some devices produced since a couple of years back, they will give up to 10 years of updates. I believe this stands a fact check 
Edit:
I fact-checked myself:
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You can also do the “screw trick” on some old Chromebooks and install Linux.
But since I now have an old Thinkpad, the Chromebook with its 32GB EMMC isn’t appealing anymore.
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I did convert a Chromebox just recently to a Linux only system.
It has though relatively good specs: i5 8th Gen Intel, 16 GB (upgraded from 8) and 256 GB M.2 SATA drive (up from 64). It runs already a dualboot CachyOS-Fedora pretty nicely.
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The reason for the outage is a single software update originating from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The faulty update has caused some computers running Windows to experience the Blue Screen of Death. In other words, instead of booting up as normal, affected computers are crashing. The update did not impact computers running Mac or Linux. 
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I see. That’s great then and I think these machines will be better endpoints than Windows PCs.
Taking out of the article I have a question how would ChromeOS helped in this scenario.
- Security Fortified: ChromeOS is built on a foundation of security. Sandboxing isolates processes, verified boot ensures system integrity, and automatic updates swiftly patch vulnerabilities. Malware and rogue drivers have a much harder time infiltrating these defenses.
- Immune to the Chaos: ChromeOS wouldn’t have been affected by the faulty CrowdStrike update. It doesn’t rely on the same Windows-specific drivers and 3rd-party cyber security needs, dodging the bullet entirely.
- Swift Recovery: Even if a ChromeOS-specific issue did occur, the cloud-based recovery tools would have enabled a rapid response, minimizing downtime. With devices being fully backed up to the cloud, re-deployment of the system is far simpler.
Not affected by windows drivers - ok, but the fault can be created to chromeos specific configuration.
Antivirus software has kernel level execution to function properly - or is it different on chromeos so that it does not require such low level access to the system?
How does cloud recovery help when the OS does not boot (or is stuck in boot loop)?
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I am not aware of any Antivirus software for ChromeOS, the OS, itself.
There are, however, antivirus apps available, via Play Store for the Android “subsystem” in ChromeOS.
As far as I know, the Android subsystem runs in a sandboxed container and only has specific permissions to access the specific parts of the hardware, like keyboard, camera etc. This should prevent malicious code running in the container to affect the Chrome operating system itself.
If worst comes to worst, one could always “destroy” the Android container and create it afresh again.
I don’t know how this is deployed in enterprise surroundings but I know that some devices support network-based recovey.
You would then need to boot into recovery mode and choose the option. However, I believe that this would install a fresh image of the OS. I don’t know if this would wipe out your configurations and data or not as have never had to deal with it.
If there are other options for Enterprise level ChromeOS devices to recover from a backup image in the cloud, I don’t know. I have never looked into it but you got me curious.
At any rates, good questions worth reflecting upon.
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I am no expert on the topic but an enterprise solution would require some kind of endpoint protection which scans every file on the system. It does not matter that it is isolated from other apps or kernel. You cannot have one container causing havoc to your network (sure the OS will survive but the company’s servers will not be happy).
That is the thing. You have to force it to some recovery mode. Now the question is how much user interaction it requires or if you can trigger it remotely. And if the bootloader is robust enough that the remote access is not blocked by a faulty update.
Exactly what happened with CrowdStrike update.
You can netinstall windows and even recover backups of User directory from a company servers if you do backups. In our company we use sort of package manager with each user list of installation so a full recovery (even to new computer) is “easy”. The recovery installation just require a day or so to fully reinstall the system. Most of the user’s configurations are recovered as well.
It just feels to me that promoting ChromeOS/Linux/MacOS just because of this fault is pointles since the same thing can happen there as well if you put trust into 3rd party software with anivirus levels of execution and poor update policy. (it’s like grub vs systemd-boot topic 
)
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I agree. I think you hit the nail on the head here.
This has been the main actor of the whole of the recent drama.
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