Category: Chrome

my little linux computer

whbeebe

I have a Lenovo IP Flex 5 Chromebook with a real processor (an Intel i3), 8 GiB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. I picked it up at my local Costco back in 2020 for $400. Over time I came to realize that this specific machine was the precursor to the Google+ machines with real compute power. As a consequence of its advanced features this machine is now running the Chrome browser split from the operating system so that the updates to both aren’t in lockstep anymore. That means the Chrome browser on my Chromebook is now following the regular PC browser, because my Chromebook is for all practical purposes a full personal computer. And that underlying operating system is — wait for it — Linux. How do I know this? Because I have a virtual machine with Debian 12.6 running in it.

As you can read on the screen capture above I’ve got a Debian 12.6 VM running under crosvm (Chrome OS VM). What’s very interesting is that the Linux kernel is 6.6.30, but Debian 12.6 is supposedly released with Linux kernel 6.1. I suspect that the kernel in my version of Debian is 6.6 because that’s the version running on my Chromebook. And that’s another surprise, because the version of the Linux kernel underpinning Android is 4-dot-something, or maybe 5-dot-something with the latest Android release. But it damn sure isn’t the same version as the kernel in Chrome OS.

The Linux purists will look askance at what Google has done with Linux to make it work in a Chromebook and refuse to concede that this Chromebook is indeed a Linux success. I don’t know how many hundreds of millions of Chromebooks have been built and sold since Chromebooks first started shipping in June 2011, but the only personal computer with a Linux kernel that has shipped more has been Android, which can be counted in the billions. This is yet another example of the overwhelming power of open source. But I digress…

This little machine keeps ticking along. It has ten years of support, which means I can depend on updates out to at least 2030, six years from now. As I noted in my last post, I should live so long. This little machine is so flexible, capable of satisfying all-around needs such as writing and web surfing for most folks, to tinkering with a Linux shell for tinkerers like me. The only thing it won’t do is play a AAA game that demands a multiple-thousand dollar rig capable of consuming enough power to keep a middle-class home powered and lit up. And I don’t care.

What I am waiting on with considerable trepidation is if I’ll get any of that Google AI goop that Chrome Plus Chromebooks are now supposed to support in the coming months and years. Frankly I dread the slathering of this AI bullshit all over everything, and I’m now looking for ways to beat it back and keep it from gumming up the works on everything I own and use. *sigh*

what browser should i use on linux?

whbeebe2 Comments

The changes that Google is getting ready to roll out for Chrome, that will effect add blocking via third party extensions, is growing close. I’ve placed links at the bottom to help explain many of these issues in greater detail. Meanwhile, I’ll discuss why I see it effecting my browser choice.

Google Chrome uses the Blink browser engine. So do other browsers, including but not limited to, Microsoft’s Edge, Vivaldi, Brave, and Opera. I’ve been an almost exclusive user of Vivaldi on macOS, Linux and Windows (while I ran Windows), falling back to Safari (macOS) and Chrome when I needed to check an odd behavior. One browser that does not use Blink, but that I’ve avoided for some time now, has been Firefox. I’ve avoided Firefox because of UI changes it’s made that, to be honest, annoyed the crap out of me. The worst UI change, in my opinion, was from tabs to buttons across the top of the browser. Apple tried this design idea with a beta version of Safari, but got so much grief over that change that they put regular tabs back, and put a toggle in the browser settings page to select that “advanced” feature if that’s what you wanted.

I’m back to considering Firefox because I can no longer trust what will happen to Blink, and by its association, to Vivaldi in particular. I feel Vivaldi is excellent, but if they continue to use Blink (and honestly they couldn’t switch if they wanted to) then I really don’t want to use Vivaldi. That’s why I’m beginning to move back to Firefox on Linux Mint, starting with fixing the one UI feature I can’t stand — new-style button tabs.

There’s a link at the bottom to a question asked about how to fix the button tab issue, followed by a number of answers. I’m going to paraphrase that answer and show what solution I settled on. Here are the steps I took, and what it looked like along the way on my end.

  • Open about:config
  • Search for toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets
  • Double-click the value to set it to true

  • Open about:support
  • Search for Profile Directory
  • Click Open Directory

Opening the path shown will put you immediately into the profile directory. In that directory create a folder called chrome, and then navigate into chrome. Inside the chrome folder create a new file called userChrome.css

Open the empty file, and then copy and paste the following:

.tab-background {  border-radius: var(--tab-border-radius) var(--tab-border-radius) 0 0 !important;  margin-top: 1px !important;  margin-bottom: 0 !important;  padding-bottom: 31px !important;}.tabbrowser-tab[multiselected=true]:not([selected=true]) .tab-background {  border-radius: var(--tab-border-radius) !important;  margin-top: 2px !important;  margin-bottom: 1px !important;  padding-bottom: 29px !important;}.tabbrowser-tab[selected=true] .tab-background ,.tabbrowser-tab[multiselected=true] .tab-background {  background-color: var(--toolbar-bgcolor) !important;  background-image: var(--toolbar-bgimage) !important;}

Save what you just pasted into userChrome.css, then exit and restart Firefox. You’ll then have normal tabs back.

You might well ask yourself why must I go to this much trouble? I don’t have a definitive answer for you, but I can imagine that a singular developer decided to do it this way, and they were in their own little echo chamber/bubble that reinforced that decision. As I wrote earlier Apple tried this and got soundly beaten back, to the point that Safari was released with Plain Old Tabs. But at least you have an ability to actually fix the Firefox tabs issue.

It’s surprising how much better I like Firefox with this one change. Believe it or not I now feel comfortable leaving all other browsers and moving back into using Firefox.

Links