There is a single "desktop" user on chrome os - 'chronos'. Even when you login with different accounts, everything is still running as chronos (id 1000).
What happens is that there are separate loopback filesystems, 1 per each "google account", all stored under /mnt/stateful_partition. These filesystems are encrypted (ecryptfs). When you login, the relevant filesystem is decrypted and bind mounted over /home/chronos.
All of this is done locally, no network queries involved. I don't think that you lose your local files if your google account is somehow borked. You just lose the online aspects of that.
But as a general rule, your overall point about not being too reliant on googlopoly is one which should be well taken.
A true laptop-appliance with an immutable-ish OS, decent security and fast/easy updates is actually a quite compelling notion. I'd be pretty uncomfortable with it not being local-first for user data though.
BTW, chrome os is actually gentoo linux under the hood (with the portage pkg manager stripped out at the end). At one time, there was even a shell script doing the rounds which put portage back on it.
Your larger point re: Google reliance is still a valid one, but one which holds true even if you run chrome on another linux distro. If you really look at it, I'm not sure if a chromebook is less private than that.
Indeed, that was my point. Something like ChromeOS is a great idea.
> Your larger point re: Google reliance is still a valid one, but one which holds true even if you run chrome on another linux distro. If you really look at it, I'm not sure if a chromebook is less private than that.
Privacy's not my main emphasis. The world is in a state of gradual physical collapse. My (wealthy) region has had infrastructure destroyed by successive waves of fire and flood, and it will never recover (eg. we'll never again have year-round roads or always-on internet). We're the vanguard of what is coming to all. Entirely network-dependent devices aren't appropriate technology for our time. a fortiori for single-corporation-dependent devices.
Coincidentally, I've been doing a deep dive into offline-first, mesh & p2p related projects (nncp, yggdrasil, etc).
Would be interesting to see a linux distro with builtin plumbing for such things. Eg: constant snapshots, cached locally and then forwarded on to your other devices (once they are network reachable), all within a local mesh network that you define, which sits on top of the public internet (and bypasses NAT and firewalls)
Fedora Silverblue may suit your needs.
Aside from Linux distros per se though, I think there's a need for something like ChromeOS (preinstalled, appliance-like, as foolproof as possible), but without the deep single-corp dependence. Unfortunately I don't think the market in its current state is capable of filling this need.
I'm not making a 'Google is evil' argument (that would be a different conversation). I just couldn't bear to trust any corporation with that degree of arbitrary power over physical objects in my possession, regardless of whether or not I'd use their webapps. The power imbalance is just too great. Google (or Microsoft or Apple) is, in practise if not in theory, above any law that can be wielded by individuals.
On a more specific (read: paranoid) note, these security chips give me the heebie jeebies. How long until I need to register a program hash with the FAANG-that-be just to run my own software?