I got a offer today i consider taking. but i dont 100% know if i actually have any use for it. I do have a laptop, and i do have a desktop. what would the benefit be of a chromebook?
is there something im totally missing?
or is my already fully featured laptop the more reasonable route to go.
As basically a “backend dev”, I kind of went through phases wrt. what I used as my development environment:
ie. I use it as my primary work “terminal” device … which means browser + ssh client.
There’s some nice laptops out there, but my i7-1265u / 32G ram hp chromebook is a great workhorse – distraction free, and should something happen I can reprovision a different terminal device within minutes (I keep my previous chromebook charged as a fallback).
I don’t use android apps / android runtime nor do I use the local VMs - I don’t need them, nor do I want to rely on something I can’t respin to get back to work within minutes should random hardware die.
yeah i guess thats a usecase. All the online only tools would run perfect through a cromebook. Not using uneccesary power.
By the time you’ve got 32 gigs of ram, what’s the practicaldifference between that and a more traditional laptop? Is it significantly lighter? Battery life?
I’ve been doing phone and external monitor for a couple months, but it’s kind of a pain since I don’t have root access.
I’ve got a Pixelbook w/ 128GB SSD and 8GB of RAM. 3:2 aspect ratio and high resolution screen are great. Keyboard and touchpad are great (I love the three finger horizontal swipe to move between tabs).
You can easily do RDP and SSH if you’re good using alternative applications. That’s the only downside, you’re going to have to find alternative options that might not be as flexible.
Do you block all the google domains with a firewall or dns filter? Do you use the Google Chrome browser? Also, are you aware that with a few changes, you can enable a mode to allow you to install regular Linux on the device?
Depending on the Chromebook model “regular Linux” doesn’t run very well due to quirky hardware.
I love my Acer Chromebook, it is one of the upper midrange models you can get today. Has an 11th gen i3 processor, 8GB of RAM, an nvme, and a thunderbolt port. Honestly no need to spend way more on an i7 model or anything like that for its typical use case. I got mine on sale for $300, normally $500
The thing makes a great basic laptop for browsing, streaming, youtube, and is able to play most android games so that is a nice plus. Dont have such a tiny screen like a phone. I mean really for all basic tasks that 99% of the average user does it is a great device. It is also one of the few models with experimental Steam support that uses Proton like the Steamdeck does. I can play a few normal Steam games meant for x86 actually, which is pretty good for such an experimental state of the app. But it is cool being on one of the few supported Chromebook models they are developing Steam for.
The software stack is distraction free - it’s quicker to get going and do work on a new machine and you don’t need to care about bios settings or disk encryption or package managers or drivers/updates or window manager global shortcut keys. It forces you to go very spartan on local state and settings and a few things like some settings and extensions and their settings are synced across.
You’re missing “root” on a phone, to do what?
For personal and opensource development – if I had to ditch the servers where vs code and code building happens, if I needed to e.g. build something small once in a while or keep a copy of the sources checked out locally for some reason, or if I needed a local VM for GUI app development… I’d probably go with a 14" M1 Pro (because of multiple external display support and decent amount of relatively speedy and efficient cores).
Ahh, I see your point. Keep yourself focused on the task at hand.
As far as root access, the only critical thing that needs to change is how external keyboard keypresses are handled, depending on the phase of the moon it can make rdp inconvenient. I’ve got a few workarounds but it would be a simpler experience with more direct control.
I’ve used one of the newer MacBooks, though not so new as to have the custom silicone. They’re nice machines.
Ugh, luckily, I don’t need to RDP often (even less actually work over RDP).
I know some people work 100% over RDP, but to me - that just kind of feels like if you were handed a computer with a broken GPU driver and never bothered to fix it.
With Secure Shell and with VS Code (code-server) on ChromeOS, running them in “window mode” as opposed to in a “browser tab mode”, gets the window manager to pass most keyboard shortcuts into the actual web app.
Are you on samsung dex or some other android setup? What client app are you using to RDP?
Many of you who posted “say” you are developers. You don’t mention if you just allow all google spying whatsoever without a single care in the world (which I wouldn’t think ANY developer would ever allow–and I don’t know programming) and you don’t say if you stick with the default google chrome browser. None of you mentioned firewalls, noscript / EFF privacy addons etc, nothing. So you all just connect these google devices to your network and just let it run? I wouldn’t begin to do such a thing!
Should I share my google list of website blocks in my pi-hole? Maybe that would show you what’s happening? Maybe you just don’t care. I guess some devs are like that. Everyone’s different, that’s for sure.
Addition: One of you also mentioned that “regular linux” doesn’t run well on the device. I find this very difficult to believe, on any hardware. I highly, HIGHLY doubt, google did any severe optimization, more so than Clear Linux, (developed by Intel) to make chrome OS magically perform well on their devices. Google does do some Linux work, and they do deserve that respect, but the rest of what they do just needs to stop. Nobody wants tracking, nobody wants ads. Can we all just spend $400 on the internet a year and be done with this junk? Clarification: Donate to EVERY website you regularly visit more than once per month, and we would probably not need ads. In fact, if everyone was able to do this, or, if small portions of ISP bills could be directly donated to all websites visited, we wouldn’t even have to manually donate.
The ONLY thing Google does that I respect, is the Summer of Code, and the work on the Linux Kernel. And maybe Youtube. And possibly Android, but we have alternatives for that now. Everything else, can just stop. Gmail, Cloud, Google Play, all of it.
I’m using parsec for RDP, very happy with the apparent / reported decoding performance on android. Samsung DEX here.
As a workaround, I use an app called keymapper to map all (most) physical keystrokes to a virtual keyboard. The problem is that my phone will intermittently shut down keymapper’s accessability access and will require a restart. Keyboards have to be manually switched between the google keyboard (I use drag typing) and the keymapper virtual one, but that’s only once per session.
Many really don’t care much or at all.
Linux runs, but you run into weird issues with sleep/wake, audio, etc.
Battery life is the only justification I can think of for a chrome book over a laptop. I personally would go for a standard full laptop every time.
One exception, Tablets. But if you are after a keyboard to go with your Tablet, then you are better off going for a standard Laptop again… And most people’s uses for Tablets are entirely different than they are for Laptops.
But chrome books? They are just bad. I can’t suggest them for anything.
Edit - I should say that I have a personal bias here, I prefer having access to fully capable hardware instead of relying on remote machines. I.e. If I have a computer, it better be able to do everything I want it to do without an internet connection required. - as a result I invest fairly heavily in personal hardware, not quite up to Wendell levels - I don’t have my own server rack, but my personal computers and interior network is quite capable. So if the power goes out, and/or the internet goes down, I am unaffected.
This topic was automatically closed 273 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.