According to Google Chrome blog this is the group of selected apps which had been chosen to be made available for running on Chrome OS:
- Duolingo – a fun and free way to learn a new language before your next trip.
- Evernote – write, collect and find what matters to you, with a full-size keyboard and touchscreen.
- Sight Words – a delightful way for you to help improve your child’s reading skills.
- Vine – create short, beautiful, looping videos in a simple and fun way.
Both Chrome OS and other Linux distributions have a lot more than meets the eye in common, for instance, the kernel, and some distros have even more in common with Chrome OS e.g. Gentoo of which Chrome OS is using same package manager.
So, does that means that if Chrome OS can run one sort of app then so does the rest of Linux distributions can too? Well, the most honest and accurate answer would be – it depends.
This is something that needs to be examined in more detail since there are a lot of aspects to take into account when dealing with such matters.
For example, both Chrome OS and Android are also based on the same kernel too, yet still they cannot natively run the same apps as the other, unless some extra effort is being made.
More than that, sometimes even two kinds of Linux desktop distros which also run on the same machine are still not able to run the same apps as the other.
So as you can see the situation is a bit more complicated than it might initially seems and there isn’t a ‘one fits all’ answer here.
However what we can say about this issue is that since both Chrome OS and other Linux distros are sharing lots of their code base, as a result it would probably be a lot more easier to make an app that runs on chrome OS to also run on other Linuxs as well.
Hopefully that’s what we’ll see in the near future, and not only because Linux as an OS is so versatile that you might expect that from it, but also because it would be much beneficial for the Linux community has a whole to have just a little bit more apps at our disposal. wouldn’t you agree?
