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The Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition

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Re: The Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition

#271

Post by refulgentis »

n0ric wrote: post #43

I'm having a hard time imagining the audience for this product. EDU most likely isn't going to go with this product due to cost (and can get easily complex, imagine trying to juggle all the expansion ports being lost by students), and typical audiences for ChromeOS devices don't always overlap with audiences who want easy repairability (and most likely are purchasing the device for the lack of nuances that other OSes…

People are sleeping on how awesome Chrome OS is. It really is awesome. The 2020 equivalent of 2005 OS X vs. Windows. From there, Linux container. It's mind-boggling to me because I switched _off_ Apple the last 5 years after realizing how powerful it is to be able to pick up a well-made powerful laptop for $600 instead of $2400. It's so much better to have something thats an iPad and a laptop. Ugh. Anyways. Underrated. Really really underrated. (disclaimer: I work on Android at Google)

Re: The Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition

#272

Post by IE6 »

dheera wrote: post #225
IE6 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chromebook ecosystem is completely saturated with low end / low cost devices so there is not a segment of the market there that is not being met. Even the "high end" devices are often computationally anemic (Pixelbook series with Y series CPUs and eMMC drives). As a Chromebook user I am glad there are at least 2 high end options now (Framework and HP Elite Dragonfly).

Why would people pay that much for a Chromebook, when you could just install Ubuntu and delete all the icons except for Chrome?

Because they want a Chromebook and they don't want Ubuntu with no desktop icons? I'm not sure what you're implying to be honest.

Re: The Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition

#273

Post by refulgentis »

IE6 wrote: post #220
dheera wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah exactly. $999 isn't exactly Chromebook territory.

Chromebook ecosystem is completely saturated with low end / low cost devices so there is not a segment of the market there that is not being met. Even the "high end" devices are often computationally anemic (Pixelbook series with Y series CPUs and eMMC drives). As a Chromebook user I am glad there are at least 2 high end options now (Framework and HP Elite Dragonfly).

Pixelbook is 5-ish years old, there's a half-dozen models with latest Intel like Framework and Elite Dragonfly

Re: The Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition

#274

Post by warent »

nrp wrote: post #258
warent wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using 12th gen processor, latest versions of Ubuntu and Linux Ubuntu: Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS Linux: 5.17.0-051700-generic The only problems I've had so far is the "brightness" fn keys don't work, and bluetooth isn't great with certain devices like Airpods. The brightness keys isn't a big deal, can still set brightness in the OS. It's probably fixable through some manual keymapping. Bluetooth is more annoying but I so…

I would be interested in understanding what issues you are seeing on Windows. We do quite a bit of validation on Windows. A sibling comment shared the fix for the brightness keys, but you can also grab that information from our setup guide for Ubuntu: https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Ubuntu+22.04+LTS+Installatio...

Thanks for the reply! Your own forums may be a great place to start. There are some open issues for this, some you have seen and some unanswered

https://community.frame.work/t/audio-issues-windows-11/11726

https://community.frame.work/t/windows-no-audio-output-devic...

https://community.frame.work/t/windows-11-audio-no-longer-wo...

Re: The Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition

#275

Post by dathinab »

lrvick wrote: post #256

ChromeOS is a privacy nightmare I cannot recommend to anyone which is a real shame because it is perhaps the most secure consumer focused workstation operating system out there. I wish any vendor would offer a privacy-by-default telemetry-disabled ChromiumOS option I could actually recommend.

But if we are honest:

1. is it really worse then windows

2. google does has privacy option, partially thanks to the EU forcing them and as far as I can tell they are not randomly "undone" with updates from time to time

3. a lot of more common users do also have instagram and similar, do most things through android/iOS apps and use google search and chrome, or some chrome derivate. How much additional information does using ChromeOs expose?

Don't get me wrong for most people on HN it probably is degrading privacy. But this is not targeting the common HN user.

This is targeting:

- existing ChromeOs users looking for an upgrade

  - this includes devs

  - this includes less tech affine people

  - this includes people which bought that premium Chromebook with a 3:2 Google sold years ago

    - this includes a bunch of google (ex-)employs which might have been the driving factor for bringing out a ChromeOs version

  - this includes junior devs which grew up with a edu focused chrome book
- people which care about the mission of framework, but are not highly tech affine, they might seem rare but they do exist

- presents, Chromebooks can be nice presents to less tech affine users and if they anyway use mainly Chrome and similar it's not necessary "reducing their privacy"

- people feed up by Linux desktop issues but disgusted with Apple Hypocrisy and totally feed up with windows since a while

  - especially if they are not supper sensitive wrt. privacy. And while such devs might sound like a myth on HN I have meet docents of them
Lastly it's the same hardware and probably more or less the same driver support issues, so the cost of shipping such a version is probably not too high while at the same time it can give you a bit more supply chain stability (by removing hardware choices outside of cards).

The main question is if the firmware is in a state where you could just install Linux or Windows if you want.

Re: The Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition

#276

Post by cco »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #68

This is awesome! I still use my Pixelbook, and I love it, and was always dismayed that it seemed to be yet another great product that Google lost interest in. For folks wondering "who's the market in this?", the Linux container support in ChromeOS is awesome - my Pixelbook was actually a great dev laptop (I ran postgres, VSCode, Node, etc on it), just with age it's lack of upgrades is starting to show. So for me, on…

I'm also going to add, and this is a spicy take, for every day browser tasks ChromeOS beats out both Windows and macOS.

It took them awhile to get there, but with virtual desktops, gesture support, the hardware back button, Chrome tab scrolling (actually OP), I found that ChromeOS is the day-to-day best operating system for browsing the web.

As you note, the Linux support is great but requires a pretty beefy processor, my Pixelbook was the i7 and it still chugged a bit. But overall, amazing OS today, really miss that laptop.

Re: The Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition

#277

Post by spicybright »

jorvi wrote: post #254
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your response, it's very helpful. I'll check out the HP Elite Dragonfly too. As the sibling commenter mentioned, though, Google did just shut down their Pixelbook division, which is what I was referring to. And as a corollary, if you can forward this to anyone that matters, Google's product marketing is the absolute worst . And I say this as a big fan of Google's developer-focused products. Case in point,…

> Google's product marketing is the absolute worst As long as ‘killed by Google’ continues to be a well-known meme, they could have the best marketing department in the universe and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference..

That's pretty silly. I know you're exaggerating a bit, but marketing is in the business of public perception. If google took steps to reverse the trend, and the marketing department could highlight that, that would kill the meme.

Re: The Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition

#278

Post by artificialLimbs »

refulgentis wrote: post #271
n0ric wrote: post #43

I'm having a hard time imagining the audience for this product. EDU most likely isn't going to go with this product due to cost (and can get easily complex, imagine trying to juggle all the expansion ports being lost by students), and typical audiences for ChromeOS devices don't always overlap with audiences who want easy repairability (and most likely are purchasing the device for the lack of nuances that other OSes…

People are sleeping on how awesome Chrome OS is. It really is awesome. The 2020 equivalent of 2005 OS X vs. Windows. From there, Linux container. It's mind-boggling to me because I switched _off_ Apple the last 5 years after realizing how powerful it is to be able to pick up a well-made powerful laptop for $600 instead of $2400. It's so much better to have something thats an iPad and a laptop. Ugh. Anyways. Underrate…

Curious if you've test driven an Mx Mac?

Re: The Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition

#279

Post by saltcured »

cbsmith wrote: post #245
r2binx wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why use another encrypted partition instead of putting a swap partition/file on the same with LVM/btrfs?

There's a lot of security models that rely on RAM being more difficult for an attacker to access than disk (as you can imagine it is much easier to ensure things stored to disk are resistant to compromise than to ensure that nothing in working memory is usable by an attacker). Swap is that in between case where storage is memory, so that creates a unique challenge. What you want is that if someone steals your hiberna…

I think you may have missed what was being asked? I think they assume that an LVM PV is encrypted and could contain the block filesystem and swap volumes as LVs. There is already a boot-time process to unlock such an LVM setup. Why should the swap require a separate encryption key?

As a Fedora user, this is how my disks have been setup for many years, and I don't understand why Fedora have disabled hibernation. During wake from hibernation, the kernel and boot ramdisk would need user input to unlock the PV and to decode the LVs. Then, the hibernation state would be visible at the same time as the other filesystem state, and the kernel could decide whether to load the hibernation image or continue a normal boot sequence.

This seems to provide the protection of content needed for theft of a hibernated machine. I don't know whether there is some unhappy sequencing flaw in the dracut-generated ramdisk (between when the wake-versus-boot decision has to be made and the LVM decryption is done), or, whether someone at Fedora has decided that the threat model is different than we discuss above?

Re: The Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition

#280

Post by mkozlows »

duped wrote: post #233
mkozlows wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there are tons of great use cases for Chromebooks (I've owned like eight of them, including the Chromebook Pixel, and love them), but I also think that once you start getting into Android or Linux-heavy use cases, native devices are better than Chromebooks. An Android tablet is a muuuuuch better experience for running Android apps than the Pixel Slate. A Framework running Fedora is a muuuuuch better expe…

> I've owned like eight of them This is something that jumps out to me - over how many years and why did you replace them?

9 years, and I'm exaggerating a bit for effect; it's actually five of them. (HP 11 G2 in 2013, bought because it was tiny and worked well. Replaced with a Toshiba something, because it had a better screen and was faster. Replaced with a Chromebook Pixel 2015 because it was the god tier amazing Chromebook of your dreams. Replaced with an HP X2 because it was a convertible tablet and I wanted a convertible tablet. Replaced with a Pixel Slate because it was a faster and better-screened convertible tablet and I like things that are better.)

None of them were replaced because I strictly speaking needed to replace them, and all got handed over to someone else who happily used them.

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