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Ask HN: Do you use a Chromebook or Pixelbook as your primary machine?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you use a Chromebook or Pixelbook as your primary machine?

#51
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, in my anecdotal experience, the most common failure mode of an USB stick seems to be going completely dead without any prior warning. So regular backups, definitely.

Yeah that sucks. I did read that the constant/read write does decrease life, maybe that was specific to SD cards but probably applies to USB as well. I don't know... one of those things where you think too much about it... like what about general consumers with a password on their Windows/Mac computer... is that "secure"? I don't know. You could potentially access that hard drive by taking it apart assuming it wasn't…

All flash-based memory devices have a limited number of write/erase cycles. Internal flash memories have more sophisticated strategies to extend memory life but they all rely on having spare memory available. Try not to go past 80% usage.

Re: Ask HN: Do you use a Chromebook or Pixelbook as your primary machine?

#52
I use a Samsung Chromebook 3 with Linux installed in a chroot via Crouton.

http://bryangrohman.com/ubuntu-i3wm-chromebook/

It's a bit underpowered, but it works just fine for my personal use which includes some light coding. It would be way underpowered to use for my day job in any capacity other than ssh-ing into other machines. Then again, it is one of the cheapest Chromebooks available at $169, so you get what you pay for :)

Re: Ask HN: Do you use a Chromebook or Pixelbook as your primary machine?

#53

Is anyone concerned about privacy using a Google laptop? I noticed recently that for years I've relied on Chrome's private browsing feature only to learn that it does not disable geolocation (unlike Safari) and websites always know where I am located even when browsing privately. And turning this off can change depending on the version of Chrome (in fact I cannot figure out how to turn it off in my current version).…

Of course that is a big problem. One of many reasons to replace ChromeOS with a full desktop Linux.

Chromebook hardware is great for the money. Replace the OS and you have the best of both worlds.

Re: Ask HN: Do you use a Chromebook or Pixelbook as your primary machine?

#54
I use an Acer C720P with GalliumOS installed on it as my secondary dev machine. My main rig is a Windows desktop.

I have no real complaints with Gallium or the C720P, it's a really solid little machine, and it's super fast. My only gripe is the keyboard - there's no delete key, there's a magnifying glass where the Caps Lock should go, and that gets mapped to Super, and the worst part, I only have F1-F10, missing F11 and F12.

I'm sure there's a good way to remap some keys to get F11 and F12, but I haven't figured out a good key combination that doesn't interfere with other keyboard shortcuts.

Re: Ask HN: Do you use a Chromebook or Pixelbook as your primary machine?

#55
Primary laptop, yes. I have a desktop with a vastly superior mechanical keyboard and multiple monitors, but for a primary laptop, sure.

The concept of "primary machine" is weird to me. Since the early 80s, things keep getting separated out. NFS home directories moved bulk file storage to a fileserver in the 80s or early 90s. I could run ALL the self tests and build for ALL possible outputs by hand like the old days on a local machine, but that's what the Jenkins vm is for. I could run git without any centralized server, but no one really does that, there's a host for that. I could keep track of bugs in email or in my head like the baddest of bad old days, but there's a host for that. Logging for debugging is on separate hosts now a days. I used to run my dev environment locally using lots of memory and CPU and battery power but I've had access to a vmware cluster that weighs several tons, I'm not carrying that kind of power around in a laptop. Since everything has abstracted out into cloudy hosts, there's really nothing I can do with local dev resources WRT the proverbial "what do I do in an internet outage?" question. The answer is "same thing I'd do with my desktop, nothing, because everything is online and cloudy today." In 1981 I could program productively on one machine air gap isolated from every other machine on the planet, but that was a very long time ago. There may also be inherent cultural issues, you can and we did program in Z80 assembler in '81 on completely isolated self hosted machines, but I'm not sure that even works culturally with modern languages, burned right into the tools are things like automatic dependency resolution that assume internet connectivity.

Having infinite cloud power laying around makes things weird talking with older generation devs. Yes the Scala compiler is not fast if you run it on a low speed battery friendly laptop cpu with 2 gigs of ram and slow spinning rust for storage, but the vmware image I compile on has specs better than anything you can buy today in as a laptop so I just don't care about speed.

You have to get used to some closed source weirdness, but can be worked around. You "right click" using alt and the touchpad on my weird keyboard. The keyboard feel is awful compared to an original model-M on my desk but it does work. The cheapest chromebooks have ridiculous low res low dpi screens and one with a good screen, is, as you'd expect, hundreds of dollars not $49 or whatever the school kids get today. The vnc client still complains about security every time I use it as if I'll respond on the 35194th complaint. The SSH client UI is like a weird re-interpretation of putty which is initially weird.

On the other hand, its never crashed or failed in any way not designed into it, OS security and maint patching isn't an issue, the boot time is a couple seconds so I don't bother with sleep mode, the battery really does last ten hours while it weighs practically nothing. It just works as an appliance which is very unusual for general purpose computer use.

Most chromebook solutions are multistep which makes it either impossible to use or trivial to use depending on your mindset and past experience. How to program an arduino on a chromebook? Well, that's impossible in one step there is no one click arduino IDE installer on the google play store, but absolutely trivial in multiple steps. Setting up a VNC client on a chromebook is trivial. Setting up VNC server on a dirt cheap pi and accessing it via the network is trivial. Setting up arduino ide on a pi is trivial. So its both impossible to program an arduino using a chromebook in one step, and its also four unimaginably trivial steps to accomplish. So using "windows monolithic thinking" many things are simply impossible on the chromebook and will forever be impossible as long as you demand one click solutions, while "unix small optimized tools thinking" means everything is possible, even trivial, on a chromebook. Chromebooks have acceptable individual tools that can be strung together unix-like to do anything, but there are very few swiss army multi-tool giant monolithic one click solutions. You can't one click install visual studio locally, but you can trivially VNC into a giant overpowered vmware image running emacs connected to cloudy fileserver and jenkins and gitlab and things...

Re: Ask HN: Do you use a Chromebook or Pixelbook as your primary machine?

#56
I had a 2015 Pixel for about 6 months; originally used it just using ChromeOS and it was great in every respect for everyday use (screen in particular was fantastic), but I couldn't find a suitable solution for using it for programming in Python - all the web-based solutions weren't as good as Pycharm which I've been using on my desktop at home, and while I'm not a professional programmer, I am spending a fair bit of time doing it as I learn/improve - particularly when I may not have constant internet (such as on a train), so I wanted another solution. That led me to put GalliumOS on it...

I've also got a cheap Acer chromebook (which got me started on the whole ChromeOS trip), which I'd already put GalliumOS on and found it pretty usable overall - indeed almost 'throwaway' because of the low cost secondhand (I paid £60 for it in the UK).

GalliumOS was generally pretty good on both machines - giving access to Linux software which was generally easy to install, but the issue on the Chromebook was the battery life/power consumption and management; it seemed to be running the fan a lot, and went from the usual 8-10 hours on ChromeOS for the Pixel down to maybe 2 or 3, which kind of defeated the object of having it.

During this time I got a MacBook Air at the right price secondhand, and that has taken over as my main 'browsing/mobile use/learning Python' machine, so I put the Pixel back to stock and sold it (amazingly for more than I paid for it).

If there had been a native Python IDE for the Pixel I would have kept it - it really was a high quality piece of equipment - but alas I didn't find a solution that I was happy with (and certainly not one that made use of the Pixel's true power and quality).

Re: Ask HN: Do you use a Chromebook or Pixelbook as your primary machine?

#57
I did this for a few months, sort of. I used the Secure Shell Chrome app[1] to connect to a server where I do my actual work. It worked about as well as a Macbook did for the same purpose - side-by-side Chrome and ssh windows.

It was fine for building and testing web app changes. I used Chrome Remote Desktop to test with Firefox and IE. It was fine for building and testing Android apps but only when I was physically next to the remote workstation to plug in a device for adb. I think there might be some weird hack to tunnel adb over ssh through your Chromebook, but I never got that to work.

It was a bit more cumbersome to get personal and work Chrome profiles running on the same monitor. You can sign in to multiple accounts at once, but they're separate desktops. However, you can right-click on a title bar for a "move to other session" option. A ChromeOS PM showed me that trick; no idea how a user is supposed to discover that.

The other things I missed on ChromeOS were 1Password (the Chrome extension relies on the desktop app being present) and BetterTouchTool (for programming additional trackpad gestures and remapping mouse buttons).

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec...

Re: Ask HN: Do you use a Chromebook or Pixelbook as your primary machine?

#58

I use an Acer C720P with GalliumOS installed on it as my secondary dev machine. My main rig is a Windows desktop. I have no real complaints with Gallium or the C720P, it's a really solid little machine, and it's super fast. My only gripe is the keyboard - there's no delete key, there's a magnifying glass where the Caps Lock should go, and that gets mapped to Super, and the worst part, I only have F1-F10, missing F11…

On my Acer c720, alt-backspace acts as delete. Not sure if that's ChromeOSes doing or the keyboard firmware.

I've gotten so used to it that I had to make my windows machine do the same thing!

Re: Ask HN: Do you use a Chromebook or Pixelbook as your primary machine?

#59
I had one of the 2012 Samsung ARM Chromebooks, then when its battery started to die I replaced it (earlier this year) with an Acer R13 (also ARM).

For development I mostly only need git, ssh, and emacs. So I use the cli-extra target from crouton for an Ubuntu command line.

Occasionally I need to run something graphical so I have a 2nd chroot for X windows.

The R13 is nearly perfect as far as the hardware goes - high-resolution touchscreen, 12+ hours of battery life, trackpad and keyboard are the best I've used (better in my opinion than Macbook Pro). The processor is 64-bit and it has 4GB of RAM, which is usually plenty.

Software is another issue. Most of the time if there isn't already an Arm64 binary, compiling from source works. I view claims of "cross platform" with total suspicion nowadays.

One thing I miss is hardware accelerated graphics in crouton. ChromeOS supports it but the driver isn't open as far as I know.

Re: Ask HN: Do you use a Chromebook or Pixelbook as your primary machine?

#60
post #53

Is anyone concerned about privacy using a Google laptop? I noticed recently that for years I've relied on Chrome's private browsing feature only to learn that it does not disable geolocation (unlike Safari) and websites always know where I am located even when browsing privately. And turning this off can change depending on the version of Chrome (in fact I cannot figure out how to turn it off in my current version).…

Of course that is a big problem. One of many reasons to replace ChromeOS with a full desktop Linux. Chromebook hardware is great for the money. Replace the OS and you have the best of both worlds.

> Chromebook hardware is great for the money.

Do you have a particular model that you recommend?

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