$600 chromebooks? REALLY? It's better invest that money in new/used laptop. They was competitive only with $200-300 prices.
They'll still have the $200 ones... Paying $600 is for people who want to have multiple tabs open at once.
$600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft
121–130 of 426 posts
Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft
#122A few years ago I picked up a $300 Chromebook, spent $50 to upgrade the SSD size (swapped the SSD card in it) and now I run GalliumOS on it (native xubuntu but optimized for Chromebooks). So for $350 you get a 1080p IPS panel laptop that weighs under 3 pounds and has an SD card, headphone jack and other goodies. It easily runs a bunch of Dockerized web apps without being slow. One of the best portable computing devic…
So for $350 you can buy much better laptop on ebay.
Example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-PROBOOK-650-G2-I7-6600U-8GB-256G...
Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope you consider funding the improvement of Libre Office instead of trying to write your own spreadsheet app. There has been an incredible amount of work poured into it, starting from scratch doesn't make much sense imho.
Not denying the amount of work gone into LibreOffice, however I'm not sure if I agree with you on the approach (this will probably be an unpopular opinion). I find the entire ecosystem of LibreOffice a bit clunky, and it wouldn't surprise me if there is a lot of technical debt that would need to be understood before we could make any sort of contribution. Don't know why, but my gut says starting afresh would allow us…
Well, if you fail at improving Libre Office to a state where you're satisfied with it, you still improved Libre Office. If you fail to write something better than Calc, all effort is lost.
Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read an old magazine article a few weeks ago where Bill Gates was talking about how the internet isn't necessary outside of businesses. That having a computer use a phone line to dial up to a central server once or twice a day is all anyone needs. This was back when 2400 baud was considered super fast. Steve Jobs may have had some bad qualities (many of them irrationally amplified in the "Jobs-bad-Woz-good" revisio…
What revisionist history?
A lot of people discredit Jobs' creative vision due to disliking his personality, and, if they're engineers, like to overemphasize Woz because he's an engineer.
Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft
#125In classic tech journalism fashion, no mention or even apparent knowledge of Microsoft's own efforts in this area: Polaris, Core OS, OneCore, and CShell [1] [2]
[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/understanding-windows-core-os...
Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
People often quote that, but I don't think he was necessarily wrong. What happened wasn't really so much between Apple and Microsoft, as Google giving away Android. That made all the other, arguably better, offerings redundant. Also letting Apple take a lot more market share because of quality and fragmentation issues. Almost no one makes any money from smart phones. Microsoft is probably fourth in terms of profit (f…
The iPhone was beating MS phones before Android was even a thing[0]. They were certainly way more than "2% or 3%" in the markets they operated in. I can't see how Ballmer's statement was even slightly correct. [0] https://www.macrumors.com/2008/02/05/iphone-with-28-of-u-s-s...
I don't think "2% or 3%" was very realistic, but you have to remember that when the iPhone first came out it wasn't very good. I didn't have 3G, GPS or App Store (nor a couple of other things). Apple was certainly ahead, but the market also wasn't ready nor big at that. When it actually matured there were a couple of solid offerings including from Microsoft, which among other things had arguably better design than Android. But at that point the market was moving on. The non-Apple market was no longer about selling the operating system or phones but apps, ads, components or accessories. If people want to go "Haha Microsoft" I guess that is fine, but they didn't lose to Apple.
Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 r…
Which Xiaomi laptop is good with Linux Mint? Are they better than Lenovo?
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.
Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft
#128No they are not. We are still not there yet. First, $600 is pretty expensive. Most Windows laptops that I see run on less than $500. Second, they don't have the ecosystem yet. Here are things you do on Windows: 1. Browse the Internet using Chrome. 2. Play a relatively demanding Video Game. 3. Run Office, Word and Excel. 4. Install your Canon Printer and print a few papers. 5. Plugin your Nikon Camera. 6. Run Adobe Ph…
Please tell me which of this things you cannot do on Linux right now.
With Gimp you can do a lot of what you can do with Photoshop.
TeX and any math package like R beat Microsoft Office and produce better documents.
WordPerfect was a much better alternative to Microsoft Word, but guess what happened: Microsoft invested on Corel and suddenly they stopped releasing on Linux.
There's a lot of money invested in making Office a monopoly. By supporting Office and spreading its use you are extending that monopoly further into another generation.
Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft
#129No they are not. We are still not there yet. First, $600 is pretty expensive. Most Windows laptops that I see run on less than $500. Second, they don't have the ecosystem yet. Here are things you do on Windows: 1. Browse the Internet using Chrome. 2. Play a relatively demanding Video Game. 3. Run Office, Word and Excel. 4. Install your Canon Printer and print a few papers. 5. Plugin your Nikon Camera. 6. Run Adobe Ph…
"Most" people definitely do not use photoshop, the most popular photo editing tool is probably the one that comes with your phone's photos application.
Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft
#130In classic tech journalism fashion, no mention or even apparent knowledge of Microsoft's own efforts in this area: Polaris, Core OS, OneCore, and CShell [1] [2] [1] https://www.windowscentral.com/understanding-windows-core-os... [2] https://youtu.be/F_bPcctTV_Y
all things so small no one has ever heard of them though