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$600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

arstechnica.com

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Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#201

Post by j0hnml »

ac29 wrote: post #133
nextos wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in Chromebooks for a different reason, the same reason that brings me to Pixel phones. I hate software that tracks me, but if I wipe out Android and I install a self compiled AOSP, it's a superb user experience for me. Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro? Right now, Xiaomi laptops are excellent cheap machines to r…

> Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro? Yes, with the caveat that full BIOS/UEFI support sometimes lags hardware releases by 6-12 months - out of the box most Chromebooks can only boot ChromeOS. Pretty much all the Chromebook firmware work to support 3rd-party OS' is done by one guy, see his page here: https://mrchromebox.tech I…

Which chromebook do you have and what are its specs? I'm interested in doing the same, and I don't want to spend $800+ for a laptop I'm not going to be super happy with.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#202

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Nasrudith wrote: post #12
beerlord wrote: post #4

Chromebooks have one fatal flaw: Microsoft Office on them sucks. You're stuck with side-loading in the Android edition, which is an app with a simplified UI and requiring always-online connection. All of this might be OK for a schoolkid, but for anyone else you might as well stick with a Windows laptop for real work, or an iPad for real consumption.

I don't get the insistence upon Microsoft word as a killer app personally. It seems to be the suit and tie of software - more expensive than the alternatives and cumbersome but hidebound ones insist it is a prerequisite to be taken seriously.

Well kids [think they] need it often because schools demand it as the only option for homework submissions -- specifically Word document format.

Teachers will provide files in .doc[x] format too.

LibreOffice copes mainly but schools don't seem to know that; and teachers of course get deals to lock them in to MS.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#203

Post by slededit »

osrec wrote: post #190
slededit wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is maybe doable if you don't care about importing existing files. You'll spend years just getting that right. A grid of cells is the easy part. Compatibility is hard.

Compatibility is actually the least of my worries. I think it's a losing battle that's not worth fighting. Better to create an open ecosystem that people adopt for that very reason - that it is open. In the early days, Excel would actually obfuscate its output, making it extremely difficult to parse. Now things are a bit better, but you're still trying to hit a moving target. If we have an open format, and a correspo…

In the early days Excel focused heavily on compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3 which was dominant.

Excel never obfuscated their save code. I've seen it in person. They did just memcpy their data structures, which was the most efficient way to save on tiny machines of the day. Lotus did that too.

I've also seen and helped implement the Open Document spec. This is not a simple problem and you are doing yourself a disservice by blinding yourself to the scale of the task.

If you want to make an impact and don't have Google level budgets then leveraging OpenOffice is the only sane approach.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#206

Post by rogerbinns »

nextos wrote: post #84
sarcasmic wrote: post #24

Any Chromebook more than $400 right now is just there to absorb even more disposable income from the market, because they ship with nicer finishes and faster processors, but they are anemic on memory and storage, making them subpar for intense multitasking, or getting certain types of work done. The situations in which they excel can be reliably hit by Chromebooks around a $400 price point, and even cheaper Chromeboo…

I'm interested in Chromebooks for a different reason, the same reason that brings me to Pixel phones. I hate software that tracks me, but if I wipe out Android and I install a self compiled AOSP, it's a superb user experience for me. Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro? Right now, Xiaomi laptops are excellent cheap machines to r…

> Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro?

They aren't ideal. But they do have a good alternative that is in its late beta stages. Typically you could run a Linux distro in a chroot on the chromebook, after putting it into developer mode. Unfortunately the chroot does have limits - fox example it doesn't get another IP address so you can't coexist much with ChromeOS - such as using avahi.

The new approach (named Crostini) instead uses a lightweight kvm based virtual machine mechanism to run a Linux guest isolated from the host. They also (by default) use the hardened ChromeOS kernel inside the guest. Note that not all chromebooks are currently supported but a new x86 chromebook should be fine.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Crostini/ https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/c...

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#207

Post by osrec »

slededit wrote: post #203
osrec wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compatibility is actually the least of my worries. I think it's a losing battle that's not worth fighting. Better to create an open ecosystem that people adopt for that very reason - that it is open. In the early days, Excel would actually obfuscate its output, making it extremely difficult to parse. Now things are a bit better, but you're still trying to hit a moving target. If we have an open format, and a correspo…

In the early days Excel focused heavily on compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3 which was dominant. Excel never obfuscated their save code. I've seen it in person. They did just memcpy their data structures, which was the most efficient way to save on tiny machines of the day. Lotus did that too. I've also seen and helped implement the Open Document spec. This is not a simple problem and you are doing yourself a disservice…

I was under the impression they did attempt to obfuscate their files. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_POI

We don't have Google level budgets, but I think we can do something worthwhile with what we have. Might take a while, but I'm confident we will manage something good in the budget we are hoping to allocate to the task.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#208

Post by osrec »

icc97 wrote: post #91
osrec wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it wasn't for Office and the ecosystem around it, I don't think many firms would opt for Microsoft products. In my firm, we're purely Linux, but have Windows VMs, just for Excel. As an aside, we run a business management app called Bx ( https://usebx.com/app ) and have recently started making some money. We're putting aside some cash to fund the development of a feature-rich, cross-platform spreadsheet app (I wish…

Have you tried Wine? A lot of work has been done on it [0] with also help from the Steam devs [1] (that's mostly for games but it will have knock on benefits for Excel), and it was already reasonable back in 2010. [0]: https://www.winehq.org/announce/3.0 [1]: https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail...

I did try it once, but it played up on my machine (around 2014 was the last time I tried). Might give it another try at some point in the future.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#209

Post by osrec »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #171
adrianN wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you consider funding the improvement of Libre Office instead of trying to write your own spreadsheet app. There has been an incredible amount of work poured into it, starting from scratch doesn't make much sense imho.

Haven't used it for a while but there are other FOSS options, like Calligra or Gnumeric. It might make sense to start there?

Gnumeric is my go to spreadsheet app on Linux. Significantly faster than Calc, although not as feature rich.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#210

Post by slededit »

osrec wrote: post #207
slededit wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the early days Excel focused heavily on compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3 which was dominant. Excel never obfuscated their save code. I've seen it in person. They did just memcpy their data structures, which was the most efficient way to save on tiny machines of the day. Lotus did that too. I've also seen and helped implement the Open Document spec. This is not a simple problem and you are doing yourself a disservice…

I was under the impression they did attempt to obfuscate their files. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_POI We don't have Google level budgets, but I think we can do something worthwhile with what we have. Might take a while, but I'm confident we will manage something good in the budget we are hoping to allocate to the task.

FUD goes both ways and the OpenDocument battle was particularly vicious on both sides.

However the code is literally a memcpy of a struct that is used internally. Not being designed for others to easily read isn't obfuscation. FWIW the XML formats designed for that purpose still fail horribly on that front.

Anyways I've worked on spreadsheets for 10 years. File compatibility is the hard part and the rest is easy by comparison (but still pretty hard).

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