“This is not the computer for you”

> A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of computing but the edges of a product category designed to save you from yourself.

I'm in the same boat as the author; I cut my teeth on a hand-me-down 2005 eMac, then a hand-me-down 2008 Macbook, before finally getting my own 2011 iMac. I think this is overly harsh on Chromebooks given they belong to the cheaper end of the market - you can still put linux on them and go for gold, you're just going to hit earlier resource limits.

I think when you're younger and building an aptitude for computers, it's the limitations of what you have that drive an off-the-shelf challenge: doing what you can with what you've got. That can vary from just trying to play the same video games as your friends (love what /r/lowendgaming does), usage restrictions (e.g locked down school issued laptops) or running professional tooling (very slowly) just like the author.

When IT caught my interest, I did all of the above - on Mac, Windows and Linux, on completely garbage machines. The Macbook Neo is an awesome machine for it's cost/value, but I don't think it's hugely special in the respect described beyond making more power available at a more accessible price point.

I didn't grow up in a 3rd world country but had the same experience, bar running games I don't own. Not everyone in the west had parents that wanted to just spend thousands on hardware that seemed to be obsolete next year, or any means of making that money. And I've never stopped using sub-par hardware, to this day I enjoy squeezing every drop of performance from cheap pre-owned stuff.

> And because that "someone" isn't a bigcorp (i.e. Microsoft) wanting to do a co-marketing push, but just FOSS people gradually building something but never quite "launching" a 1.0 of it — Apple just "acknowledged" it quietly, at developer conferences, exposing it only via developer-centric CLI tooling, rather than with the sort of polished UI experience they would need if Microsoft was trying to convince Joe Excel User to dual-boot Windows on their Apple Silicon MBP.

It's also important to remember that Microsoft was in the middle of their Qualcomm exclusivity deal at the time of the M1's release, and thus Windows for ARM wasn't available on anything other than a few select devices or unofficial use of Insider builds.

That deal didn't actually expire until 2024[1], at which point Windows for ARM finally started to be sold in an official capacity with stable builds widely available.

It's entirely possible, though unconfirmed, that Apple was intentionally leaving the door open for "Boot Camp 2", and Microsoft simply never took them up on the offer, either because they were stuck in a deal made prior to the M1's release that prevented it, or because they no longer saw a financial benefit to being able to sell Windows to Mac users (possibly since Windows license sales are effectively a rounding error to Microsoft at this point; they make way more off of subscription services and/or Office, all of which are already available on macOS without having to dual-boot Windows).

[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/windows-on-a...

> He is going to make a folder called “Projects” with nothing in it.

I'm still this person today :)

If we're talking about Ubuntu, ZRAM is still a thing.