Google 表示 Googlebook 將支援 Linux 圖形介面應用程式

One of the many functional regressions I immediately noticed in my Googlebook is its half-assed Linux environment. Like the Linux environment you can install today in Chromebooks, it runs in a sandboxed virtual machine (VM) for security reasons. But unlike the Linux environment you can install today in Chromebooks, the Googlebook Linux environment is a preview and it does next to nothing useful. Google says that will change.

“Our preview of the terminal on Googlebook has been optimized for rapid prototyping, web development, scripting, and agentic workflows via CLI,” Google group product manager Cyrus Stoller explains. “There is automatic localhost port forwarding to the host browser, and support for modern runtimes (e.g., Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, Rust). Users can adjust the amount of memory made available to the VM to best suit their workloads. Our own engineers have been using Googlebooks to build a Linux kernel and use the terminal for platform engineering.”

What the Googlebook Linux environment can’t do is run Linux graphical apps that integrate into the OS launcher so that these apps can be used alongside the web and Android apps that Googlebook natively supports. But Google says that the Linux environment in Googlebook will “continue getting more capable over time,” and Linux graphical support is among the coming improvements.

Google also plans to add other functionality to the terminal, including USB passthrough and support for ADB over USB, which will let developers debug apps and test them on physical devices, dynamic memory and storage scaling support, GPU/NPU hardware acceleration, and VM persistence and separation from the app window to better support long-running tasks.

How Google shipped this platform in such an incomplete state is unclear given how long it had to mature Googlebook and its decade-plus long experiences with Chrome OS and Chromebooks. I’m pleased to see it starting to address Googlebook’s obvious regressions and other flaws. But I hope this process is a matter of months, not years.