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2015 Chromebook Pixel

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Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#161

Jesus, designing a usable ultrabook must be very difficult. We have one contender from California, but their ideology has them offer just a single USB-C port. Now we get the competitor from Mountain View, who have rightly recognized the need for more than one fucking port when that's how you charge the damn thing, and what do they decide? Oh yeah, we'll top out storage at 64GiB.

Well the goal of all the Google integration is that the majority of things are stored in the cloud.

Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#162
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fantastic. Everything works out of the box on ubuntu and fedora.

Is it still done through that chroot wonkery?

I am old school in the sense that I like to run my os as a native install directly on the machine without any chroot / vm / hypervisor trickery. This guide walks you through how to do a native linux install and blow chromeos away on the pixel. http://vger.kernel.org/~davem/chromebook_pixel_linux.txt

Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#163

Pretty neat. And caveat the port issue[1] pretty nice. I wonder what the battery life is like with Linux installed (probably not 12 hours :-) Now if they added a wireless charging option so that when I set it upon my desk it was powered/charging wirelessly that would be pretty neat. I'm amazed as how closely it tracks the macbook 13. They could be twins. [1] The whole one port to rule them all which is fine except th…

Doesn't this have 2 USB C ports?

Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#164

Jesus, designing a usable ultrabook must be very difficult. We have one contender from California, but their ideology has them offer just a single USB-C port. Now we get the competitor from Mountain View, who have rightly recognized the need for more than one fucking port when that's how you charge the damn thing, and what do they decide? Oh yeah, we'll top out storage at 64GiB.

if you use a hub as a charger i don't really see a problem. At home i have a usb hub and outside i don't even use usb. One cable ought to be enough for a portable device.

Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#165
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can install linux on it. I own the previous version of the Pixel and I run ubuntu on it and its close to perfect. Two things I would change are 1. Improve thermal cooling or move to a underpowered cpu. I have worked around it by rate limiting my CPU to not go over 800 MHz. With a few tweaks, it sips ~8.8W and gives me > 6 hrs of battery life. 2. Make the hinge a bit stiffer. My only other complaint is that it ref…

> My only other complaint is that it refuses to install FreeBSD. Did you try installing SeaBIOS on it?

I did not attempt to update the version of SeaBIOS installed on it. Do you think upgrading SeaBIOS will allow me to install FreeBSD?

Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#166

Jesus, designing a usable ultrabook must be very difficult. We have one contender from California, but their ideology has them offer just a single USB-C port. Now we get the competitor from Mountain View, who have rightly recognized the need for more than one fucking port when that's how you charge the damn thing, and what do they decide? Oh yeah, we'll top out storage at 64GiB.

It has an SD card reader. You can double the storage for super cheap.

Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#167

Jesus, designing a usable ultrabook must be very difficult. We have one contender from California, but their ideology has them offer just a single USB-C port. Now we get the competitor from Mountain View, who have rightly recognized the need for more than one fucking port when that's how you charge the damn thing, and what do they decide? Oh yeah, we'll top out storage at 64GiB.

Well, you just store all your data on the NSA cloud from your NSA terminal.

To your point about he MacBook one port. They do offer a rather smart "splitter" dongle at $60-$90 that allows you to charge while I/Oing other data when that uncommon scenario uncommonly arises.

I just don't get the whole Google approach. They think far higher of their "OS" than is warranted. They should have been selling this thing as a loss leader at around =<$800. I don't know too many people ... as in none ... who want to spend $1k on a Google "OS" machine.

Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#168
How is ChromeOS? Can you get a decent terminal or terminal app? Install and keep up to date the basic terminal utilities (ssh, tmux, vim, rsync, etc)?

What about other software? Is the browser like the regular Chrome? Can you play regular media files (flac, x264 mkv)?

Are there any unpleasant surprises?

Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#169
post #50

I really wish this didn't look like a bad imitation of an Apple product. Surely it's possible to build a nice looking laptop that doesn't look so similar to a MacBook. If you're going to do something different, just be different. I think these things are actually kind of sweet, but I can't stand the way they look.

Looks more like a Dell than anything.

Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#170
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole ChromeOS project seems to have gotten underway because someone at Google observed how much of the computing time was spent inside the web browser. the problem with ChromeOS, imo, is how limited it becomes once you pull out the net connection. Never mind the whole lockdown unless you flip that "developer" switch.

> "Never mind the whole lockdown unless you flip that "developer" switch." Speaking of which, it would be nice if that were a physical switch on Pixels. With the original Pixel at least, there is an issue that if your battery runs completely dead, the bit that tells the computer it should be in developer mode is unset. When that happens, if you have linux installed on it, you are hosed. Everything on the drive become…

https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-f...
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