201–210 of 256 posts
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Chromium OS is, though. https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os
yeah but how many of these K-12 educational chromebooks are going to get that installed on them? these just allow google to start tracking people even earlier in life than they may have otherwise been able to.
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> You'd be amazed how many people encounter a problem with their computer and give up because "it's mad at me." This isn't an educational problem Wow, you'd have to wonder how everyone here actually learned how to use computers back when there was no Internet and no help from your friends because you were the only one using them. It's NEVER been easier to use a computer nowadays, not just because they have become bet…
As someone who started using computers in 1982, I would have to disagree. Computers today are incredibly powerful, and because of that, operating systems and applications have become complex beasts themselves. My first computer only had 4K and a text based interface. As an end user, I only needed to know a handful of commands. Most navigation was done through multiple choice text menus. Even moving into the early 90s…
That's way back in time. I was referring to the good old 90s, where the web took off with home computers that were already running stuff like Win95 and people were not complaining about being clueless on how to use them. Even older people (>50s) has no big issue to start using computers then, and I'd argue Win95 was a way harder system to learn for a newbie than Windows 7 or Windows 10. And on top of that recent operating systems are fairly stable and don't crash anymore when you plug a USB device or things like that - they have automatic driver installs, a bunch of hardware already supported by default, and I could go on and on. The situation is MUCH better for the end user nowadays than 20 years ago.
As I've written earlier, ChromeOS doesn't interest me. It's a tightly locked down linux-y distro as a vector to peddle Google services. It's not complicated, it's very cheap and almost impossible to mess something up because it's so easy to wipe and all your data is on the cloud. That's the appeal and why they're booming in schools, but I find it dangerous for multiple reasons. I wrote at more length about it in yest…
> I don't think it's the year of the linux desktop anymore than Android is the year of the linux phone. Sure, there's a kernel somewhere deep, but the userspace is locked-down, weak and anti-consumer. Perhaps Stallman has a point when asking people to talk about Linux as GNU/Linux.
Especially Google’s actions have been quite literally towards unlawful-evil.
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How do you test your website in other browsers, on a Chromebook?
With a cloud based VM no doubt. Something like https://www.browserstack.com/ would fit the bill.
Still, it seems strange that a web developer would prefer to develop on an OS that only supports one web browser!
I think it's hilarious how little the HN community knows about Chromebooks. Every time it pops up, there's a wave of people saying "I don't know a single person who has one!" and "They seem useless without an internet connection!" and "I wonder how they compare to mac books." People forget that most of the world doesn't write code, and doesn't need native applications. They write email, take selfies, and write extrem…
> And then there's all of these amazing up-coming technologies like WebAssembly and WebRTC. If we can have the security and uniformity of a Chromebook and run Photoshop and Quake and BitTorrent directly in the browser with no overhead, then there's absolutely no point for users to deal with the muck and grime of whatever bad state they get their local filesystem into. I see a lot of excitement about WebAssembly. I al…
Second, Java GUI toolkits all sucked and produced ugly UIs. I know some developers liked Swing and people claim it can be made to look native, but I've used hundreds of Swing apps and they never lived up to that promise. For better or for worse, HTML+CSS works well enough and people understand it, so WebAssembly's ability to interact with the DOM is a massive improvement over what was available to Applets.
Third, Sun's ability to secure the JVM plugin was, to be kind, pathetic. WebAssembly should be better since it should inherit a lot of what we already have for JavaScript. For better or for worse, the JVM was just never designed to protect users from the people writing Java code whereas all JavaScript engines were built from the ground up with that in mind. WebAssembly will be built with that same mindset.
Fourth, an open specification vs a closed spec controlled by a single company.
There's probably more reasons, but that covers most of what I hated about Applets that I'm hoping won't be the case with WebAssembly.
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I love my Chromebook, with Crouton you can run Debian on it and for the most part don't have to worry about wonky drivers and the like. I currently work as a Sysadmin and I don't want to carry $800+ dollars of hardware with me while I'm up in ceilings running cable. It allows me to spend my downtime writing code so I can get into development one day. I get over a full day on a single charge. Great little machine. I'd…
Yeah well you are a "unique" case, I would be surprised if even 10% of Chromebook owners knows what Crouton or chroot is :) HN users don't see Chromebooks because HN users are a very special subset - highly educated and well paid which works in development and IT at large. If you look at children and low wage blue collar workers you'll see many more of them those are the people that buy what one would not even consid…
The major difference between a Ubuntu and a ChromeOS install is that one of them has a lot of marketing, the other doesn’t.
That’s the largest difference.
My sister works in a semi-developed area of Africa where electricity is unreliable in quality and presence at the best of times, and it's turned out the computer equipment she brought over years ago was pretty ill suited to the conditions and developed problems immediately. She went with all Apple because that was the craze at the time, and most of it was inoperable by the end of the third year. After listening to he…
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> Not to mention Chromebooks essentially are open products. The OS itself is pretty open. If I'm not mistaken though, if you put it into dev mode, you get a scary screen at every reboot, and an opportunity to hit space to re-enable OS verification, and apparently wipe out whatever modifications you've made to the system. In theory, actually rebooting the system should be a fairly rare event, but that's one of the rea…
At least some Chromebooks allow to install a custom bootloader that does not show the scary warning through simple hardware tinkering like [1]. I think this is a good compromise from security perspective. [1] - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1eGPMu03vCxIO0a3oNX8H...
If I was looking for a weekend project and a cheap machine at the moment, it might be fun to do. It also brings back memories of compiling new drivers to get some hardware working, haha. Likely, I could find similar hardware that doesn't take as much effort to get working the way I'd like.
Thank you for the link.
This might be due to the fact that a new Macbook Pro is coming. Everyone I know has held off upgrading until the new form factor comes out at WWDC.
I think it's hilarious how little the HN community knows about Chromebooks. Every time it pops up, there's a wave of people saying "I don't know a single person who has one!" and "They seem useless without an internet connection!" and "I wonder how they compare to mac books." People forget that most of the world doesn't write code, and doesn't need native applications. They write email, take selfies, and write extrem…
Professional software ( Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, CAD etc ) and a large majority of games only runs on Windows. There is a plethora of software already developed for Windows which will continue to only run on Windows. There is a large number of people who have bet their careers on Windows and Microsoft. Microsoft has billions of dollars of runway even now and they are a very diversified company in terms…
That's flat out incorrect.
I'll bet Adobe sell more Mac licenses.