It's all about security, especially for non-technical user.
The Chrome OS is running trusted boot and immutable partition, and completely closed host system, with no user-installable apt [0]. This means it's impossible to completely break the system - nothing that user does will escape browser sandbox. And, for defense-in-depth, even if browser sandbox got compromised, there is no sudo nor ~/.bashrc nor any other executable per-user configs, so malicious software will disappear after reboot. And if you compromise kernel and modify disk directly, there is verified boot...
And this is not just theoretical benefits, it's stops practical attacks. Are you sure that "bash | curl" command you typed was safe? Are you sure that "pip install" or "npm install" you did didn't actually install malware on your PC?
It is possible to build systems like this based on open-source Linux, but this will be quite a lot of work, and may even require separated trusted builder machine. Definitely out of reach of non-technical user.
The Chrome OS is running trusted boot and immutable partition, and completely closed host system, with no user-installable apt [0]. This means it's impossible to completely break the system - nothing that user does will escape browser sandbox. And, for defense-in-depth, even if browser sandbox got compromised, there is no sudo nor ~/.bashrc nor any other executable per-user configs, so malicious software will disappear after reboot. And if you compromise kernel and modify disk directly, there is verified boot...
And this is not just theoretical benefits, it's stops practical attacks. Are you sure that "bash | curl" command you typed was safe? Are you sure that "pip install" or "npm install" you did didn't actually install malware on your PC?
It is possible to build systems like this based on open-source Linux, but this will be quite a lot of work, and may even require separated trusted builder machine. Definitely out of reach of non-technical user.
[0] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/...