Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

Summary

Dear Santa. For Windows-10-end-of-support-day in October, please may we have a dead simple bulletproof all-free OS that gets old PCs online without a Google account, and does nothing else? There are a lot of desktop Linux distros out there. It's the number one thing non-Linux users complain about: too much choice. One of them only comes bundled with hardware, and yet, it has more users than all the others. It's ChromeOS, and it could be facing the chop soon. How come there is no all-Free Software tool that even tries to do what ChromeOS does without needing an account with The Borg? Even if it may soon be replaced by a desktop flavor of Android, ChromeOS does just one thing and it does it well enough that vendors sold billions of the things last year. The idea of ChromeOS is simple: it's just enough Linux to get you online. It turns a PC into something akin to a tablet, with a full-screen icon-based app launcher. The desktop is very simple and vaguely Windows-like: there's a taskbar at the bottom, a file manager, drivers enough common hardware that most things just work out of the box, including a bunch of common GPUs, networking including Wi-Fi. In terms of apps, there's a built-in Google Drive client, and of course the Chrome web browser. And that is about it. Anything else that you want to do, you do in a browser window. Productivity apps? Use Google Apps. Messaging or video calling? Log in to your chat system of choice in a browser window. The file manager can show images, but not much more. Your bookmarks, passwords, and what few settings there are are stored in your Google account. All the components are there, including a potential revenue model. Strip out absolutely all the complexity that can possibly be removed, and leave something which can run on any old PC from the last 15 years and gets the user online – and nothing else. How hard can it be? There are no optional extra native apps, and no way to add any. If you have branded ChromeBook hardware, there's...