14 DAY TRIAL // NayuOS is a new operating system built by Nexedi that aims to provide users with a Chrome OS free alternative.
There are a few Chrome OS alternatives out there, so NayuOS is not exactly arriving without any kind of candidates. The team doesn't change anything at the base of the system, meaning that it's a Gentoo and Chromium OS-based project, but the developers have made modifications to the default apps and to the settings.
There is always room for another Linux distribution, but making an operating system for Chromebooks is difficult because you need to cover each device, or at least this is what happens for NayuOS, which has images for numerous devices.
NayuOS is not stable just yet
The developers of NayuOS wanted to make their Chromebooks more customizable, secure and privacy-compliant. At the same time they also wanted a free alternative to ChromeOS.
"Chromebooks are relatively cheap specific machines sold by latop manufacturers in collaboration with Google. They run a specific OS called Chrome OS. In non-developer mode the OS provides a Chrome Browser and that's pretty much it! Developer mode is not bloated either. There is a shell with some useful software (python2, ssh, tcpdump, ...) preinstalled," developers wrote.
Here are the differences between ChromeOS and NayuOS, at least for now: the SSH daemon running by default in Chromium OS has been disabled, git support has been added, the Gooble login has been removed, re6st connectivity has been added, it's now possible to access and customize the writeable parts of the file system, and Zeroconf is used to configure the firewall.
The images that can be downloaded right now cover Acer C910 Chromebook 15, Lenovo Chromebook N20, Toshiba Chromebook, Dell Chromebook 13, Acer C720 Chromebook, ASUS Chromebooks C300, Toshiba Chromebook 2, and Chromebook Pixel 2015.