There are lots of new chromebooks on the market on the $150-300 pricepoint, (like the Acer Chromebook 15 Hardware Canucks reviewed recently).
However the OS is the weak point in the product, but I've read online that many people recommend to install a linux distro on these machines and remove the Google OS.
I'd love to see if the Teksyndicate crew can get their hands on one of these cheap chromebooks, install a preferred Linux Distro and see what are the true capabilities of such system, how it behaves on tasks you would do for work/school, or even some light gaming with the integrated graphics.
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Would certainly like to see this, esp on the acer 15 inch one with the nice speakers + 1080p IPS panel.
Looks like a good machine for the price, £230 here in the UK on amazon...
Only downside is it's white... because it'll get messy easy, I'm not racist.
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There is a black version also,he says it in the video.
Well then
Ah, not in the UK though... ;_;
You can always ask the retailer or wait a bit :) .
I'd like to see it on one of the cheaper ones, like the $150 ones. I wouldn't be able to justify paying $250+ for a fancy Chromebook only to make it just like any other laptop, but weirder and hacked up, but if I could get a $150 machine with enough speed to run Ubuntu off an SSD for casual office suite/web browsing type stuff then I might go for it.
Eh, maybe one of the smaller ones would be good, that one in particular is super nice hence why I suggested it.
+1 to this. It'd be interesting to see how another Linux distro would fare on one of those things and how well it would handle the higher resolution displays.
@wendell plz
I'd be interested in seeing some Linux steam streaming performance. Do any Chromebooks have reasonable storage yet?
Some of the older ones had 2.5 inch drives you could swap out, they don't do that any more to keep costs down and give you cloud storage instead.
The tiny Beebox did great and its a lowly 2ghz atom with igp What else you want to see?
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It could have just been the video, or what was happening on screen...but the performance appeared to be a little laggy. I noticed frame drops and more than a few stutters. How did it do in actual game play?
it was solid, 30fps though, so console experience. it was very, very good. its maybe a little better experience on Windows but it was very playable on linux and did not stutter during "real" gameplay.
Sounds like a decent performer then. I'm interested in the beebox for other reasons...but it would be worth playing around with using one as a steam streaming device if it can deliver 30fps with linux.
Thst video must have slipped past me, but that certainly sounds like a good test case