Any Chromebook more than $400 right now is just there to absorb even more disposable income from the market, because they ship with nicer finishes and faster processors, but they are anemic on memory and storage, making them subpar for intense multitasking, or getting certain types of work done. The situations in which they excel can be reliably hit by Chromebooks around a $400 price point, and even cheaper Chromebooks allow one to forego performance for the increased disposability of the machine.
I suspect one reason for $600 devices, other than Google itself trying to reposition Chromebooks as more upmarket, is because $600 Windows laptops are still are a mess of preloaded bullshit put there by the vendor. Microsoft has tried various ways to fix this but it only tends to protect high-end models. And build quality and the nature of hardware compromises at that price point have always been unpleasant, save for a few concentrated efforts like Lenovo's IdeaPad line. In other words, $600 laptops are second only to $200 laptops in making Windows look bad, making them an easy target for an OS that proved that $200 laptops can actually be quite good.
Still, there are few challenges. Chromebooks' filesystem paradigm deemphasises local storage to the point of cumbersome, relying on Google Drive or custom interfaces and implementations built for each app that know how to pull up past work. This is a smart idea when everything works, but makes import, export, and context switching harder, and makes sharing a feature of the product rather than a file-based affair.
On Chromebooks, Chrome's fantastic profile system is deliberately conflated with Chrome OS login sessions, which makes it harder for one user to maintain multiple independent browsing contexts than when using Chrome on other platforms. Power users on Windows can run multiple browsers, or use profile systems in browsers to keep separation, but on Chrome OS, you only get two de facto contexts (the white one and the black one with the cool spy icon), you blast the same cookies everywhere, and half your builtin applications are just hyperlinks to auto-log you into the corresponding Google product in your global white context. Applications like Hangouts (the app, not the extension) are rare, where the entire window inherits your OS login, but keeps your context entirely separate from what you're doing in the browser.
Nonetheless, with Service Workers and graphics APIs and auto-resuming applications and unintrusive updates, and people using Google products anyway, Microsoft should be worried, because they're being challenged for customers in a segment where their OS is least compelling, and was largely used by default.
> I suspect one reason for $600 devices, other than Google itself trying to reposition Chromebooks as more upmarket, is because $600 Windows laptops are still are a mess of preloaded bullshit put there by the vendor. Microsoft has tried various ways to fix this but it only tends to protect high-end models.
In the current version of Windows 10 there's a feature called "fresh start" that makes it trivial to reset to a clean OS install without vendor crap. It even automatically preserves your home directory. The only problem is that you need to know it exists, so it only benefits technical users and users with geeky friends to advise them.
As well as the bloatware added deliberately by Microsoft that's already mentioned, this method can't touch spyware and bloatware that's automatically reinstalled by the BIOS after reinstalling Windows.
Unsurprisingly, the only company I could find evidence of actually having done this is Lenovo:
It's even worse than that. There's 2 types of crap now: vendor crap and Windows crap.
You can avoid vendor crap by reinstalling a fresh version of Windows from Microsoft, but you'll still get Microsoft crap (i.e., various apps from the Microsoft store pre-installed with links prominently displayed on the Start menu).
A clean install of Windows 10 (not n versions) is shipped with stupid game installers for things like candy crush, Disney magic and march of empire which you can remove easily, but not just "hide" with disabling suggestions.[1]
Yes, I meant disabling "suggestions" stops them coming back again in the future. Although Windows has had update "bugs" whereby this setting is ignored. This is solved by delaying feature updates until at least a week or so after release.
ChromeOS is open-source. Last I looked, their build process was a horror beyond all reason. However, it would at least be possible to strip out any advertising built into the OS. Thing is though, Google controls the advertising on the top two pages on the Internet, and as long as that's true, they don't really need to do anything other than make sure you get there. Which is the strategy behind Google Fiber, Loon, and to some degree Android, more-or-less the reason for Chrome's existence, and why Chromebooks are designed around constant Internet access: all roads lead to Rome.
Yep while everyone was fighting yesterday's war with Microsoft another company took over the internet. Well done guys. Google has more power than MS did at any point in the 90s.
Since Chromebooks are very internet-forward, they get plenty of advertising opportunities without installing banner ads or something similar into the OS. Are you expecting them to start advertising on the Android home screen too?
They already do something better for their ad business moat. They just push their Google Apps bloatware collection on the Android ecosystem at every possible chance they get. I use none of it, yet it still comes with my Samsung phone whether I like it or not. I would expect them to continue that approach with any operating systems they control.
Seems counterintuitive that you take such a strong stance against bloatware and yet use a Samsung phone. The preinstalled (and non-removable) mountain of crap was the reason I gave up on them after my Galaxy S3.
Not that other vendors are much better, mind. But I'm quite happy with my OnePlus for now.
I just had to delete "Candy Crush Soda Saga". Was it there before I did that ridiculous registry hack to prevent it? Or did they add a new one at some point... Who knows. Its clear they don't actually want people disabling the installation of them.
Sometimes you can't even reinstall Windows easily, for example Dell has set SSD mode to Intel RAID by default (can be switched to AHCI) but Windows installation media doesn't come with Intel RAID driver by default. Installer doesn't see the disk at all (until switched to AHCI).
I was using my brothers machine, which is win10 - and I havent used windows in years - and I was disgusted by the crappy UI/UX I was given - with its inbuilt notifications which even pop-up to tell you that you went into full screen mode and told it not to pop-up....
Also, the start menu looks like a freaking spyware minefield they way it takes up 60% of the screen when it is activated.
Windows 10 start menu doesn't take up that much screen unless the user has configured it as such.
Start menu from store is pretty clean. Go to a microsoft store and mess around with devices from there - they are "signature devices" that are clean.
Windows isn't a mess these days in any sense of the word, It's just people who have a negative opinion of it speak about it with sympathy from others who have a negative opinion.
The Windows subsystem for Linux is awesome, the app store is a move in the right direction (damned if you do, damned if you don't) and they're closing out a lot of legacy design elements with their annual updates. (dark mode, better high res / high dpi support, consistency of legacy/new elements. yaddy yaddy yadda)
With a few minutes of trying you can all but customize the entire interface to your liking.
ChromeOS has the benefit of not having decades of legacy to preserve - and Android is suffering many of the negatives you speak of with regards to Windows and iOS has completely the opposite problem being a controlled absolute dictatorship err walled garden.
My "signature edition" Surface Book 2 running Windows 10 Professional came with a bunch of crap on the start menu such as Candy Crush Saga, Twitter, some travel app, Minecraft, and advert for Office 365 and some other crap I can't remember.
I had to right-click and uninstall them all manually but then a few days later a couple of them returned?! I ended up searching for a PowerShell script that actually removes them. Until a few months later when Microsoft rolled out the April 2018 update and they all magically reappeared again so I had to look up that fucking PowerShell script again.
I could kind of accept this on the Home version but on the PROFESSIONAL version?! No fucking way. Why on earth should my pro version come with Minecraft and Twitter?!
And this is a £2500 laptop made and sold by Microsoft! Not some £200 Acer from PC World.
Those aren't even installed and you can turn off app recommendations
Settings->personalization->start-> make sure "Show suggestions occasionally in start" is off.
Minecraft is awesome BTW :)
My android phone came with a ton of crap, my amazon tablet had a bunch of amazon crap.. i don't really think showcasing the marketplace of the hardware you have selected is that evil - especially since its easy to customize if it really bothers you.
> Those aren't even installed and you can turn off app recommendations
They installed the moment it saw a network connection which was before I even finished setup because it set that up during the OOBE.
> Settings->personalization->start-> make sure "Show suggestions occasionally in start" is off.
That setting does not seem to have any effect on Candy Crush, Twitter, etc. on a default install.
> Minecraft is awesome BTW :)
Yes it is but not on my £2500 business laptop. Unless I specifically install it to use.
>My android phone came with a ton of crap, my amazon tablet had a bunch of amazon crap.. i don't really think showcasing the marketplace of the hardware you have selected is that evil - especially since its easy to customize if it really bothers you.
I am not talking about Android or Amazon though am I?
But if you want to bring up Android - My Pixel 2 XL didn't come with a bunch of third party apps and/or adverts for their own, not free, software. Sure it came with some Google specific apps but that is why I didn't list OneNote, Edge, Groove Music or Photos in my list of Windows 10 apps as they are understandable to include even if I have no use for them.
And allow me to bring up my MacBook Pro which didn't come with any third party apps and/or adverts for their own, not free, software. In fact the only thing it comes with is macOS and the iWorks suite (free btw). And if you do a clean install of macOS yourself you don't even get iWorks pre-installed, you have to manually grab them again from the App Store.
The Windows experience is horrible out of the box even on a "signature edition" system. Yes you can go in and "fix" things with PowerShell scripts and changing a few options in Settings.appx but my point is that shouldn't be needed on a so called 'professional' operating system that comes on a £2000+ computer direct from Microsoft.
Couldn't agree more. I'm trying Windows 10 after many years on Linux, and I'm amazed at the hot mess I find. There isn't even a usable terminal. ConEmu looks like it could work with enough tweaking, still trying to get all characters to show up properly (many do, some don't).
Every mac owner quickly switches to iTerm from built in terminal nd lets be honest - there are a bazillion payware options for windows people could use too.
Every other OS I've used recently (MacOS, Ubuntu, Centos, RHEL, ChromeOS) doesn't require special knowledge or extra work to remove pre-installed spyware/bloatware. They may well have crap installed, but at least they're subtle about it.
If you are using Ubuntu, then you atleast have some knowledge about the OS and would be savvy enough to Google and run some commands on the terminal to fix it.
Compared to Windows, which has a huge user base with absolutely no understanding of how the OS works and what to do if you don't like it OOTB.
The current version of Ubuntu just has an affiliate link to Amazon. It may be overly difficult to remove and upsetting to some users, but it's nowhere near as egregious as the software many Windows machine are shipped with.
The geeks could already get this stuff on their system easily. 10+ years in UX design has taught me that little is more powerful than setting something to “default”.
> On Chromebooks, Chrome's fantastic profile system is deliberately conflated with Chrome OS login sessions, which makes it harder for one user to maintain multiple independent browsing contexts than when using Chrome on other platforms. Power users on Windows can run multiple browsers, or use profile systems in browsers to keep separation, but on Chrome OS, you only get two de facto contexts (the white one and the black one with the cool spy icon), you blast the same cookies everywhere, and half your builtin applications are just hyperlinks to auto-log you into the corresponding Google product in your global white context. Applications like Hangouts (the app, not the extension) are rare, where the entire window inherits your OS login, but keeps your context entirely separate from what you're doing in the browser.
ChromeOS actually has the ability to sign into multiple accounts at the same time and fast switch between them. It's not obvious in the UI though, so many don't know about it. https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/6088201?hl=en
But having to set up a whole Google account for multiple profiles on a Chromebook is a lot more ponderous that simply creating another profile as is possible with Chrome running on Windows/Linux/Mac OS.
That doesn't seem like a fair comparison to me. On all those other systems the built-in browser has to be replaced with Chrome as the first step to any utility while on chromeOS you can use a primary user and a guest user with a working browser having never done a single setup task.
Right, And this excellent little known Chromebook feature continues to get better.
One can now throw tabs from one account context to the second logged in account. Left click on the top to the left of the tabs, (while the Chromebook is signed into two accounts) and it offers moving the tab to the other account.
> Microsoft has tried various ways to fix this but it only tends to protect high-end models.
Try again. Microsoft is complicit in all of this. If you go buy an OEM version of Windows 10 today, even Pro, what you get is a ridiculous set of preloaded games and apps, like Candy Crush, Bubble Witch 3 Saga, Disney Magic Kingdoms, etc.
Its disgusting, and everyone who works at Microsoft should be ashamed of it.
My Ubuntu comes installed with Minesweeper and Mahjongg.
Windows historically came installed with Pinball, Minesweeper, Solitaire.
I would guess that a substantial base of Windows users plays games on their PC. It's rare to find a popular game that isn't enhanced by the internet.
I do tend to agree that maybe Professional versions should not come with these _links_, but even a large portion of professional users play games on their company issued laptop. I haven't installed Windows Server before but I would be surprised if that featured game links.
I think I draw a line when companies who aren't Microsoft are paying Microsoft to include this software. And its worse because I paid $150 for this OEM key. And its worse because its the professional version. And its worse because they're right on the Start menu from Day Zero.
Minesweeper, Mahjongg, and Chess are a little different because they were developed by Microsoft, with no motive beside adding value to the operating system, at least for users who find value in them.
Its disgusting, and everyone who works at Microsoft should be ashamed of it.
It is disgusting, but I fail to see how e.g. the team working on the C++ compiler should be ashamed for something another completely seperate team was forced to do by management (assuming something like that is responsible for this). In my opinion MS has gone too big for that, with a bunch of seperate departments almost acting as standalone entities (i.e. seperate companies) who can take a lot of decisions on their own without much interference between them, just all sharing the MS name. E.g. there's the research going on, there's VS/Office/Windows etc.
That's fair. But; employees at Google who weren't even remotely near the company's work on Drone AI programs were still disgusted and ashamed by it, enough to threaten quitting. Despite being separate firewalled departments, its about Identity and a compatibility of ethics with that identity.
Yes, Huawei shouldn't even be trusted anyways. but second a vendor shouldn't add a ton of crapware to my phone. There is absolutely no value added to the end user. It's garbage and does effect performance. It takes up space and data usage. I will never buy a phone that isn't 100 percent Android anymore. And again anything Huawei is entirely out of the question.
I'm interested in Chromebooks for a different reason, the same reason that brings me to Pixel phones.
I hate software that tracks me, but if I wipe out Android and I install a self compiled AOSP, it's a superb user experience for me.
Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro?
Right now, Xiaomi laptops are excellent cheap machines to run Linux on (thanks to having just Intel components). Same for Huawei if you are willing to spend a bit more, but on that price a Thinkpad is probably the way to go.
> Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro?
Yes, with the caveat that full BIOS/UEFI support sometimes lags hardware releases by 6-12 months - out of the box most Chromebooks can only boot ChromeOS. Pretty much all the Chromebook firmware work to support 3rd-party OS' is done by one guy, see his page here: https://mrchromebox.tech
I run Arch on a cheap Chromebook for some tasks at work, I've generally been satisfied, and will probably buy another one eventually. I think if I was spending $500+, I'd just buy a Windows laptop and reformat it though - way more choices, and they tend to be upgradable.
It's also worth keeping in mind most Chromebooks must be disassembled to remove a firmware write-protect screw in order to flash new firmware. The one I have requires removing the battery/keyboard/etc - more than just popping off a small panel on the bottom.
Which chromebook do you have and what are its specs? I'm interested in doing the same, and I don't want to spend $800+ for a laptop I'm not going to be super happy with.
Check out GalliumOS. One of the best, Chrome specific, distros around. The question on hardware comes down to what you want. Many of the newest releases of ChromeBooks do not have removable media (M.2 form factor). So, choose wisely up front: hardware that is supported by current releases and storage and RAM suitable to your needs. The latest CB I have is a Toshiba Chromebook 2 with an i3 processor and 4GB of RAM. That model has a removable M.2 and so mine has an upgraded 128GB of storage. It has received app support for ChromeOS and also runs Gallium with full support. You can dual boot these machines easily, which is how mine is setup.
Nick Janetakis had a nice write-up on setting it up from back when the machine was newer, but to give you an idea:
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad Chromebook and I would not recommend it mostly because you have to fully disassemble it to unlock the bios. I managed to do something wrong when I opened it and closed it so after a while one of the hinges just broke.
Look for a Chromebook that you can unlock by just removing the battery. Anything else is just torture.
I have the dell 7310. i3 with 8gb ram. Same as me chromebox last I heard(I think he had the i5 model but it’s not really much faster) it’s about the best experience. Flashing his full firmware is super easy
I think the highest level of widevine will not work, which is probably used for 4k and such, but regular widevine that works on linux distros will still work since it doesn't need anything special.
> Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro?
GalliumOS[1] is a Ubuntu-based Linux distribution optimized for Chromebooks with a huge list of supported devices[2].
> Right now, Xiaomi laptops are excellent cheap machines to run Linux on (thanks to having just Intel components). Same for Huawei if you are willing to spend a bit more, but on that price a Thinkpad is probably the way to go.
I find Lenovo Thinkpad E4*0 series to be the best low-cost, high build-quality Linux development machines, since they start from $569.99, allow a wide range of hardware customizations[3], and meet Mil-SPEC durability standards[4].
This is a budget ThinkPad model, design for small businesses, where 4k display would be an overkill. I actually find FHD to be a better option for a development machine, because of the lower energy consumption and extended battery life.
So I bought a cheap chromebook with an intel chip to run linux on and use as a dev machine.
The spacebar screen is a constant source of anxiety but it's even worse than that. The reason I am on chromeOS with sideloaded linux (crouton) is because when you flash custom bios (seabios) you need to authorize it, if your computer runs completely out of battery (like it did for me on a flight to Iran), then that authorization is revoked and you need to boot into chromeOS to fix it (something I couldn't do since I didn't have chromeOS) so the only thing you can do is press spacebar and wipe everything.
I think I'll never buy a chromebook again, I'll just get something from puri.sm or slimbook.es.
> Xiaomi laptops are excellent machines to run Linux on (thanks to having just Intel components)
Which ones exactly? Do you have resources?
The ones I've seen sport Nvidia GPUs [1] [2]. Which means no Wayland, and only proprietary drivers. Not "excellent" or "just Intel components" in my book.
Good bang for the buck but I want at least 8 GB DDR4 in a new laptop (bought in 2018), and preferably also TB3 and an AMD GPU.
Regardless of the other unnecessary or lacking features Macbook laptops have (butterfly keyboard, touchbar, magsafe, USB-A ports come to mind) if you want a decent amount of RAM and an AMD GPU you pay the jackpot price on MBPs.
DDR3. Does have 2.4 GHz + 5 GHz WLAN which is another minimum requirement. Anyway, though I haven't used it this seems like a nice machine with good bang for the buck. Except when it comes to warranty.
i5 has 8 GB of RAM and still an Intel HD card. Sadly, it's not fanless. Same as with MS Surface and virtually all fanless m3 setups, there's no 8 GB option.
It depends. For me this is about being future proof.
Its more secure than X, but you can compartmentalise as well via VMs (Qubes does this) or Docker (Jessie Frazelle runs everything in Docker).
Enlightenment [1] supports Wayland since E20.
If you use i3 right now, you can use Sway [2] as drop-in replacement. That's my plan (since I use i3) if I might some time.
SailfishOS [3] also already uses Wayland. Tizen apparently does as well. SailfishOS doesn't use profiling or ads, and has an Android compatibility layer.
KDE and Gnome might as well (according to [4] they do); I don't use those.
If it provides more security (I guess applications cannot draw over other applications, nor grab keyboard input unless they're in focus), then how can I have a wm? How can I have a screensaver?
Is there any reason to use it if most of my applications are running in xwayland?
Less code runs as root than with X, since the server is far more lean.
There should be zero tearing or artifacts in Wayland, and the latency should be lower as well. Both due to passive compositing.
Screensavers are a pointless waste of energy. I'm not sure why you mention them.
In Wayland, WM/DE use IPC to communicate with each other; not X.
In theory you can run multiple XWayland servers to separate from each other. If security is a concern, Qubes might also be an option. And you're still more secure and better performance with Wayland plus some XWayland than with X.
I still don't see how it is more secure. If the WM can use IPC and tell wayland 'hey, I want to send this keystroke' or 'what were the keyboard inputs?' then why can't some malicious application do the same?
Can I run multiple wayland servers separate from each other? If not, then I still don't see how wm can prevent a random application from pretending to be a wm but actually being a keylogger.
The Wayland compositor does that kind of task, not the DE/WM like with X. That's why porting to Wayland isn't trivial. The server has many less lines of code leading to a lower attack surface, and lower latency or less tearing, and better HiDPI functionality.
Wayland (with Gnome) is fine as a daily driver on Arch (I've been using it for months, since AMD drivers were mainlined). I guess Ubuntu's packages are just too old.
> Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro?
They aren't ideal. But they do have a good alternative that is in its late beta stages. Typically you could run a Linux distro in a chroot on the chromebook, after putting it into developer mode. Unfortunately the chroot does have limits - fox example it doesn't get another IP address so you can't coexist much with ChromeOS - such as using avahi.
The new approach (named Crostini) instead uses a lightweight kvm based virtual machine mechanism to run a Linux guest isolated from the host. They also (by default) use the hardened ChromeOS kernel inside the guest. Note that not all chromebooks are currently supported but a new x86 chromebook should be fine.
Maybe you know the answer to this question I have always wanted:
I want to be able to run multiple OSs/Installations-of-the-same-OS on a single machine such that I can swap between "running" OSs - meaning, I want to have one OS sleep while I use the other.
So, if I have windows and ubuntu on the same machine - I dont want to reboot, I want to just put one to sleep and wake the other one up...
OR Ideally - I want to be able to run them side-by-side in some manner that is greater than a VM running on top of the other... My System76 laptop has dual SSD drives in it, I'd like to have both machines running, with half the resources dedicated to each, and have my KVM switch between them.
The specific functionality you describe is available in mainframes, although they are designed to always run a hypervisor. You can't practically do it in the PC world because the operating systems either expect to use a virtualisation interface, or they expect direct control over the hardware. The latter will also give better performance.
Some virtualisation environments do have hardware passthrough. A good example would be having a high performance PCIE video card which is passed through to to a guest for gaming. You can also use real storage instead of files pretending to be storage, although this is less flexible (eg no snapshots).
My recommendation is to use Ubuntu as your host OS and run Windows as a VM guest.
The Xiaomi Air 12 is really good quality for ~$550 if you go for the m3 CPU. It's fanless (but only 4 GB of RAM), which is something I love.
It's a different price point than Lenovo. Much cheaper. They are good ultrabooks.
Regardless of the CPU you choose (e.g. i5 has 8 GB, but it's not fanless), all 12 inch models have Intel components only, including the wireless card. It's one of the few laptops that truly runs well on Linux out of the box with zero glitches.
Only a few classic Thinkpads are better, with even good ACPI support for battery discharge events. But that's really rare, and does not make much difference if you run a HAL like UPower to abstract your ACPI-battery.
There's a few ThinkPads where you can remove the BIOS and replace it with Coreboot, and remove Intel ME as well. For example the ThinkPad T60 and X200, available on second hand market. Replace the keyboard if you find it dirty to use those 2nd hand. The advantage these have is the hardware is serviceable by the user.
Thanks. I find $550 a bit expensive. Linux Mint runs flawlessly on a Lenovo S120 (11.6"/4GB RAM/32GB SSD) but I can't upgrade the SSD and that's a bummer. Can't complain, though, it was $170 new from Amazon...
Asus Zenbook UX305 also support Linux 100% out of the box. It’s essentially a MacBook clone with 13” 1080p screen, m3, 8 gb ram, and 256 ssd. I currently use one with Mint Linux and is happy with it.
Why not? I'm running vanilla AOSP with F-Droid apps only. No Google Apps framework.
Threats are limited then to regular baseband radio issues. I know I could be doing better if we had open hardware, but that's the most practical solution I can implement today I think.
Have you considered writing a guide on how you do this and what changes you make? I also own a Pixel, but kept running into problems when I tried to compile Android, eventually making me give up.
To my way of thinking, this is exactly the blind spot: ... they are anemic on memory and storage, making them subpar for intense multitasking, or getting certain types of work done.
Look at the iPad Pro, 2GB of memory, not a "laptop" class CPU. etc. It is eating into Microsoft's market for the same reason. The "big" part of the laptop wedge is people who aren't gamers, or intense multitaskers, or intense local storage users. They are people who have their stuff in the cloud, want an easy to carry package that can run the apps they need to run one, or perhaps two, at a time.
The Chromebook is anticipating the iOS based, ARM processor based Macbook air. This is also the Surface Go space.
The Surface Go is, on that note, a wonderful machine, though I feel one with too many compromises to hit mainstream right now. At 10" it hits the portability of a tablet, while the keyboard is good enough for real usage, not just in a pinch.
The Surface Go 2 will be a thing to watch. If they can get it running on ARM with flawless x86-64 translation, roll the price point down a hundred dollars (or just bundle the keyboard - come on, Microsoft, selling that separately makes _no_ sense here) and ship it with a dongle that turns one USB-c port into 2 usb ports, charging, and a displayport, and what you'll have is a 10" laptop that's fully functional, runs _everything_, trivially integrates into a desktop-like environment for home use, is a passable tablet, and gets all day battery life.
Right now it's _close_ to being able to achieve that, but the battery life is a bit too short and the price a bunch too high, and a switch to ARM could alleviate both of those issues.
Back in my day 2 GB was an unimaginably large amount of RAM, and our computers could still do many of the things they can do today.
I recall an article in Byte magazine which talked about when we'd have computers with a gigabyte of RAM (but it also noted that at the time you could have had a gigabyte, given in a mere cubic foot of hardware).
If I were at Apple building it, I wouldn't have it run any MacOS apps, just iOS apps. There are lots of articles about how that would happen, see[1] as an example.
> Any Chromebook more than $400 right now is [...] anemic on memory and storage
From the first link in the article:
> The Yoga Chromebook is an altogether more powerful system. It has a four-core/eight-thread 8th-generation Core i5 processor, with 8GB RAM and either 64 or 128GB of eMMC storage.
i5 CPU/8 GB RAM/128 GB eMMC puts it in MacBook/Surface territory.
> but on Chrome OS, you only get two de facto contexts (the white one and the black one with the cool spy icon)
I was wondering if you could somehow get Firefox on one, and apparently for ChromeOS instances where you have access to Android apps you can.[1] Not running ChromeOS, I'm not sure if that means you have to be running an ARM variant, or if the app developer needed to enable a specific set of features or compile a special version (e.g. for x86), or if this actually works, but it does seem promising.
From another article I just found[2], apparently if your ChromeOS supports linux apps, you can just apt install Firefox, or if you really need it and nothing else is working, you can use Crouton to use a linux instance within a dedicated Chrome tab and run Firefox there. I suspect many of these might have oddness when dealing with files and sharing between apps, as you noted that as a specific area of interaction that's somewhat odd within Chrome. I'm not sure whether the Android app works well with that either.
> $600 Windows laptops are still are a mess of preloaded bullshit put there by the vendor
Honestly this is one of the biggest things I liked about Apple computers since switching to them in 2007. They're so clean and pure compared to Windows which always comes with bloatware. Even the basic drivers you actually need for the computer to work usually come with some sort of bloatware awful UI programs that need to be installed for the hardware to work.
I suspect one reason for $600 devices, other than Google itself trying to reposition Chromebooks as more upmarket, is because $600 Windows laptops are still are a mess of preloaded bullshit put there by the vendor. Microsoft has tried various ways to fix this but it only tends to protect high-end models. And build quality and the nature of hardware compromises at that price point have always been unpleasant, save for a few concentrated efforts like Lenovo's IdeaPad line. In other words, $600 laptops are second only to $200 laptops in making Windows look bad, making them an easy target for an OS that proved that $200 laptops can actually be quite good.
Still, there are few challenges. Chromebooks' filesystem paradigm deemphasises local storage to the point of cumbersome, relying on Google Drive or custom interfaces and implementations built for each app that know how to pull up past work. This is a smart idea when everything works, but makes import, export, and context switching harder, and makes sharing a feature of the product rather than a file-based affair.
On Chromebooks, Chrome's fantastic profile system is deliberately conflated with Chrome OS login sessions, which makes it harder for one user to maintain multiple independent browsing contexts than when using Chrome on other platforms. Power users on Windows can run multiple browsers, or use profile systems in browsers to keep separation, but on Chrome OS, you only get two de facto contexts (the white one and the black one with the cool spy icon), you blast the same cookies everywhere, and half your builtin applications are just hyperlinks to auto-log you into the corresponding Google product in your global white context. Applications like Hangouts (the app, not the extension) are rare, where the entire window inherits your OS login, but keeps your context entirely separate from what you're doing in the browser.
Nonetheless, with Service Workers and graphics APIs and auto-resuming applications and unintrusive updates, and people using Google products anyway, Microsoft should be worried, because they're being challenged for customers in a segment where their OS is least compelling, and was largely used by default.