Now ChromeOS Can Reset Itself Without Erasing Your Laptop (theverge.com) 10
An anonymous reader shares a report: Google announced it's rolling out ChromeOS M131 to non-beta users, bringing with it a handy "Safety reset" feature that lets Chromebook users reset their laptops without totally wiping them. The update also introduced a new "Flash notifications" accessibility option to help those who might not otherwise easily hear or see them.
Like Powerwash in ChromeOS, Safety reset will wipe the slate clean if you're experiencing computer virus-like behavior such as unusual pop-ups. But where Powerwash is a full factory reset, Safety reset preserves local data and apps, as well as things like bookmarks and saved passwords, according to a help document about the feature.
Like Powerwash in ChromeOS, Safety reset will wipe the slate clean if you're experiencing computer virus-like behavior such as unusual pop-ups. But where Powerwash is a full factory reset, Safety reset preserves local data and apps, as well as things like bookmarks and saved passwords, according to a help document about the feature.
Reinventing /home ? (Score:2)
Re: Reinventing /home ? (Score:2)
Not every OS has a separate home.
I didn't even on Linux until I started using ZFS because it was too inconvenient using multiple partitions because what about when I wanted them to be different sizes? But now that I am using self-growing filesystems which get more blocks from the pool as needed there are no drawbacks.
Re: (Score:3)
Because in a lockdown OS the OS author gets to decide what and where someone can save data. In a normal OS the user can - permissions allowing - can save stuff wherever he wants in whatever format he wants so how is the OS tidyup system supposed to know whether its save to delete it or not?
Re: (Score:2)
Everything just goes somewhere in C:\windows\... what could go wrong.
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Everything just goes somewhere in C:\windows\... what could go wrong.
Well, even Windows puts user files under C:\Users\{username}.
But when you reformat, everything under C: is lost. You could set up things to have the OS in C: and user files in D: so user files can be saved in a reformat, but then you have to worry about the size of each partition and make sure it's appropriate.
That said, when installing apps Windows certainly does put stuff *everywhere*.
All that said, I'm a bit surprised that they care so much about ChromeOS being able to reset without losing data -- I mea
Re: (Score:3)
So how exactly is this stopping the OS from going back to a clean slate while keeping user data available? You generally only need to reset system folders to a known good state for a "system restore", for when something breaks and you don' t need a full factory reset to make the device exactly the way it was when you got it.
A "normal" user shouldn't be able to write to system folders or modify anything in them. That's what access control and root is for. This is why up through WinXP Windows was swiss cheese
Re: Reinventing /home ? (Score:3)
NT back to 3.51 at least (that was where I came in) would not allow a normal user to write to system locations.
Of course, back then and through NT4 as well at least many of not most people really did run as admin all the time so that their windows software written for Windows 3.x (non-NT) would work, as it often needed to be able to write ini files to those locations due to bad design. (They never should have done that to begin with.)
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ChromeOS is merging with Android.
Fuscia is Afuera! now.
Android has /data which this is getting closer towards.
There's probably room to improve Android too with lessons from ChromeOS.
Whichever fork of Linux survives, LF (now racist and DIE) or Global, it appears Google will continue to support it.
MacOS? (Score:1)
Huh? (Score:2)
I thought the whole point of ChromeOS was everything was backed up to your Google Drive and synced with your Google Account?