Developer mode basically unlocks the r/w firmware, so you can boot from USB and replace the firmware etc, but the Read-only Google Root of Trust stays there, however as far as I know the ChromeOS 'distro' exists only to support running the Chrome Web Browser, and also Android and Linux VMs, +audio/video/input/etc. So if you have root on a ChromeOS device in developer mode, and you are dropped into a shell and want to run firefox, how would you do that? There are no packages for running on 'ChromeOS'. You can't just apt-get. I don't know if ChromeOS is self-hosted, ie. it is compiled and generated on itself and not some other Linux distro.
which
I don't think adopting Wayland or using the 'Linux' Chrome makes it move towards being a 'general purpose' distro. This just lessens the amount of change between ChromeOS and Linux so no more Freon library. It also seems to greatly reduce the difference between the CHROME_BROWSER_FOR_CHROMEOS and THE_CHROME_BROWSER_FOR_LINUX builds.
"Linux for Chromebooks: Secure Development"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRlh8LX4kQI
https://chromium.googlesource.com/crosvm/crosvm/
https://chromeos.dev/en/posts/making-android-more-secure-wit...
WSL is like the Chromebook Official Linux Developer thing -(he last time I updated it), Debian, inside a container, inside a VM, running under ChromeOS. You can run what Debian can run. Inside the container.
I thought ChromeOS as a distro is more like a runtime - it has the stuff to let it boot a Chrome Browser and VMs. etc +hardware support. There wouldn't be much point (other than fun) for Running random software on ChromeOS. It would be like OpenWRT, but without the package manager.
Apparently this is via a VM, with limitations (no hardware acceleration, for example); presumably the original commenter wants to be able to run Linux binaries natively.
> ChromeOS isn't a general purpose Linux distro
But based on the article, it seems Google is taking steps towards making it one (switching to Wayland, using standard Chrome for Linux, etc.).