Google Propels Linux To The Top

Jack Wallen | TechRepublic | March 21, 2014

Find out why Jack Wallen believes that Google has single-handedly helped Linux become one of the most popular platforms on the planet.

...What Google has done for Linux, over the past few years, no other company has managed to pull off. By releasing two major platforms, both getting the most out of a Linux kernel, Google has put Linux in more hands than Canonical, Red Hat, SuSE, and any other company to have attempted to bring to life the Linux platform.

It’s taken a mobile platform and a completely new take on the “desktop OS” to pull it off. Not the server, not the standard desktop... nothing like anything the open source community would have expected.

Chrome OS is a particularly interesting facet to the gem that is Linux. This relatively new platform, based on Linux and created by Google, is gaining ground faster than any operating system ever has, thanks to dirt-cheap hardware and an amazingly simple interface. But it’s much more than that. Everyone has always assumed that Linux is one of the more secure operating systems on the planet. But what about Chrome OS? Recently, the Google-hosted Pwn2own competition shed light on three vulnerabilities within Chrome OS. All three were nearly impossible to find, but there they were.