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The Chromebook Pixel

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Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#331

Post by Zak »

DigitalTurk wrote: post #71

The Verge has more pictures. http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/21/4013480/google-chromebook-... It looks an awful lot like a Macbook: Just witness the aluminum-like color and the black bevel around the screen. Where it looks different, it's uglier. The hinge looks particularly bad. And judging by the pictures it's an awful lot bulkier than a Macbook Air. Chrome OS strikes me as an underpowered OS. That is, there's a lot…

I love that it has a taller/squarer aspect ratio than the vast majority of laptops on the market. I find the current crop of ultra-short screens completely unacceptable for the text-heavy tasks I spend the vast majority of my computer time doing.

I'd rather have 4:3, and my current laptop is a semi-custom Thinkpad I built by shoehorning a newer motherboard in to a T60p just so I could have a decent 15" 4:3 screen and 8gb of memory in the same laptop.

Unfortunately, this particular machine is a little pricey for what it is and not a size I'd like. It should diminish the "these are the only screens we can get" excuse that PC makers keep trying to give us though.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#332

Post by [deleted] »

pax wrote: post #297
neverm0re wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already braindead easy to put Linux on the ARM Samsung Chromebook. One of the first things I did was to assemble my own personal Linux distro and besides having to copy some blob files out of the original ChromeOS image, it's all very straight-forward stuff and I pulled up about a hundred packages I wanted including an X.org stack without fuss. The compile speeds are adequate if you aren't cross-compiling, I've…

'brain-dead easy ... assemble my own personal distro' :))

[deleted]

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#333

Post by akandiah »

vibrunazo wrote: post #323
Einherji wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you are missing something. Processor performance is not simply a function of number of cores and clock speed. There are vast differences between arm's architecture and x86.

How could we compare then?

Benchmarks.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#334

Post by MatthewPhillips »

masklinn wrote: post #306
Teckla wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's absolutely no reason for Chromebooks to use x86 chips. What about people that prefer trading some battery life for some performance?

> What about people that prefer trading some battery life for some performance? Question being, performances for doing what? What are you going to do with a chromebook to need the extra oomph?

WebGL? Web Workers? It's astonishing how out of touch the cynics in this post are with modern web technologies.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#335

Post by MaysonL »

jbail wrote: post #14

So, it is real! It looks awesome, but at $1,299, I don't think it's priced well. That's $100 more than a 13" MacBook. I just don't see that much value in a Chromebook at this point in time.

Especially since for $1269, you can get a refurb MBP Retina with more RAM, more flash, more CPU, and almost as much screen.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#336

Post by Zak »

kunai wrote: post #326
dman wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To encourage a world where a) companies build desirable hardware b) companies realise having a good screen is a feature c) companies build screens with more code friendly aspect ratios

> companies build screens with more code friendly aspect ratios Let's hope Lenovo takes a look at this. I'd love a Thinkpad with a high-res screen, 3:2 display, and of course, the venerable TrackPoint and keyboard. Touchscreen is a nice novelty feature but really isn't required.

I'd rather have 4:3 or even 5:4, but I'll take any steps in the direction of square as positive.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#337

Post by neverm0re »

pax wrote: post #297
neverm0re wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already braindead easy to put Linux on the ARM Samsung Chromebook. One of the first things I did was to assemble my own personal Linux distro and besides having to copy some blob files out of the original ChromeOS image, it's all very straight-forward stuff and I pulled up about a hundred packages I wanted including an X.org stack without fuss. The compile speeds are adequate if you aren't cross-compiling, I've…

'brain-dead easy ... assemble my own personal distro' :))

* Enable developer mode.[1]

* Drop Crouton[2] onto Chromebook to get a full dev stack and unfortunate Ubuntu/XFCE environment.

* Set up chroot and start building other people's crap.

* Write to SD Card/internal storage and reboot.

Which step here is hard? Tedious to roll your own I'd give you, but you don't even need to as there's stuff like ArchLinuxARM[3] which skips the middle two steps.

[1]: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/deve...

[2]: https://github.com/keyboardsurfer/Crouton

[3]: http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/samsung-chromebook

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#339

Post by stanleydrew »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #324
javajosh wrote: post #58

There are only three meaningful things you can do with a computer with specs like this: development, design, or gaming. And yet ChromeOS can't do any of these things. Perhaps this is a vanity product for the wealthy. But wealthy people are going to just surf the web on an iPad. I really don't get this product.

It's got integrated Intel graphics. That's something I pay attention to because the open source support is great. But I was led to believe that no serious gamer would touch them. Note also that I could probably develop on it as I use Vim in a terminal, which I believe ChromeOS has.

Yes ChromeOS has a terminal. Just hit Ctrl+Alt+T. The SSH interface is a little non-standard as I recall but not enough to be a problem. It has dynamic proxying support so you can set up a SOCKS proxy through localhost and on to a host in [country] to get around content licensing restrictions. I've done this for Netflix, Hulu, MLB, Fox Soccer, and the London Olympics.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#340

Post by Orva »

vibrunazo wrote: post #323
Einherji wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you are missing something. Processor performance is not simply a function of number of cores and clock speed. There are vast differences between arm's architecture and x86.

How could we compare then?

Actually comparing Arm versus x86 is really like comparing apples to oranges. One is RISC, other is CISC. One is good with running multiple threads on single core with highly sophisticated branch prediction, other concentrates having many low powered cores each hoarding threads. And this is very, very crude simplification.

Benchmarks tend to be always favor other camp, depending which attributes you are testing.

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