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“This is not the computer for you”

samhenri.gold

281–290 of 390 posts

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#281
post #19

> The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook doesn’t learn that his machine can’t handle it. He learns that Google decided he’s not allowed to. Or they learn to enable developer mode, unlock the bootloader, and install Linux, or use the officially supported Crostini, or so on. There's like 3 different ways to run Linux desktop apps on a modern Chromebook. The Macbooks don't let have an officially supported path…

Some kids undoubtedly get there, exactly as you say. That's not at all the same experience as opening a device that has a MUCH bigger sandbox to begin with and lets them start exploring with boundless applications from the beginning.

The bootloader kids get my deep respect. I think I'd rather give my kid a Neo to begin with.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#282
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man I got a computer engineering degree in 2015 with a $200 Chromebook chrooted into Debian. And I worked professionally for years on an 8gb MacBook Air. The Neo is definitely something younger me would be interested in.

> $200 Chromebook chrooted into Debian Are there even any x86 Chromebooks left at that price point? They are only one that are still capable of chrooting into Linux. ARM Chromebooks remain locked up.

ARM chromebooks run the Debian containers just fine. It's just at settings toggle to enable it and you don't even need dev mode.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Chromebooks originally came out, that was not an option. And almost all school-issued computers will not let you do this.

Author of the post here. You nailed it here; I used Chromebook as the example in my post since the one I used in high school was locked down to basically a kiosk. Couldn’t even open dev tools, much less root it. Such a wild departure from the eMacs I used in my elementary school’s library where I could set bonkers `defaults write` commands and customize every aspect of my account. If I got a Chromebook as a personal…

>the one I used in high school was locked down to basically a kiosk.

The Macbook Neo will be no different if the school is actually managing them properly.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#284
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man I got a computer engineering degree in 2015 with a $200 Chromebook chrooted into Debian. And I worked professionally for years on an 8gb MacBook Air. The Neo is definitely something younger me would be interested in.

> $200 Chromebook chrooted into Debian Are there even any x86 Chromebooks left at that price point? They are only one that are still capable of chrooting into Linux. ARM Chromebooks remain locked up.

Looking at BestBuy, category chromebook, the first one that comes up is $150, intel n4500.

I don't know if this is particularly current or what, or if it's easy to setup to run another OS or whatever, but it meets your price and architecture criteria.

https://www.bestbuy.com/product/hp-14-chromebook-intel-celer...

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#285

> 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 t…

> The Macbook Neo is an awesome machine for it's cost/value Uh... if you need to compile for iOS, sure. But outside of that, no its not. You are literally just paying the Apple tax that they deliberately choose.

Given the list of alternatives you provided I’m inclined to disagree with you.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#286
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think they're fewer and farther between? It's almost certainly at least partially because of Chromebooks and the save-the-user-from-themself design philosophy.

I would say it's primarily because their phone (android or iphone) does nearly everything they would ever want a "computer" to do, and so they never had a hook into real curiosity about computing. This will probably be exactly the same whether the school supplies a Macbook Neo or a Chromebook.

Hackers tinkered with other things (e.g. the telephone) before pervasive computing.

I imagine the young hackers of today just find other things with which to tinker.

I've seen kids build some amazing things in Minecraft. Is this really all that different from modifying the source to a game you copied-by-hand from BYTE magazine?

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#288
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned to code on my school's BBC Micro. [0] 8-bit. 16KiB of RAM. BASIC as the programming language. 640x256 resolution in 8 colours. I could make that thing sing in an hour. It was hard to get it to do much, but then the difficulty was the fun thing. By the time we got to the early 2000s and I could buy something with more RAM, CPU and storage than I could ever reasonably max out for the problems I was interested…

It was worse than you remember. You could have 640x256 in monochrome , or 320x256 with 4 colours, or 160x256 with 16 colours (which IIRC was actually 8 distinct colours plus 8 flashing versions of them). The game Elite did something extremely evil and clever: it was actually able to switch between modes partway through each frame, so that it could display higher-resolution wireframe graphics in the upper part of the…

AlexandertheOk's documentary on Elite and the BBC Micro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC4YLMLar5I

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Macbook Neo is an awesome machine for it's cost/value Uh... if you need to compile for iOS, sure. But outside of that, no its not. You are literally just paying the Apple tax that they deliberately choose.

Given the list of alternatives you provided I’m inclined to disagree with you.

I'm developing on a $270 refurbished Dell, which has an i7 and 16 gigs of RAM. The Apple processor might be competitive, but the rest of the machine is not. 600 dollars is fine and not unreasonable, but there is certainly an Apple tax.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#290
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think they're fewer and farther between? It's almost certainly at least partially because of Chromebooks and the save-the-user-from-themself design philosophy.

I would say it's primarily because their phone (android or iphone) does nearly everything they would ever want a "computer" to do, and so they never had a hook into real curiosity about computing. This will probably be exactly the same whether the school supplies a Macbook Neo or a Chromebook.

I'm a computer nerd who started on DOS on IIRC a 286, all the Windowses (OK not quite all, though my first job did expose me to a couple NT versions and 2K in addition to nearly-all the home versions I upgraded through on my own) and various Linuces (Gentoo as my primary OS, even, for like... five years, LOL)

These days there are two things I use my "real" non-server computers for in my personal life:

1) Media piracy, only because I've been too lazy to set up a headless torrent system on my media server w/ VPN connection (why does the media server exist? Again, purely for piracy, remove that use case and it'd be gone as a waste of electricity and space the very next day). I could fix this in a Saturday and remove this entire use case, improving my process significantly at the same time, just haven't yet.

2) Video games. Really hoping that new Steam console doesn't end up being sky-high expensive, because I'm excited about "consolizing" this use case and ditching my last "real" PC tower (other than one server that I go months and months without directly messing-with; and that "real" PC tower is already running Bazzite to make it Steamdeck-like, it's just janky as fuck because it's Linux on frankensteined hardware so of course it's janky as fuck, so I'm still eager to swap it for something designed and with support for that actual use case).

Everything actually-important happens on iOS, and usually on a phone.

In my personal life, I've concluded that I just have no idea what more-useful-than-the-time-it-takes stuff I'd even do with a "real" computer, despite spending absolute fuckloads of my time screwing around with them from ages like 7-30. What I learned in that time was "how to computer" to a pretty advanced level, and luckily that per se has paid the bills and then some, but in all that time the actually-directly-useful-to-me stuff I've done with it has amounted to very little.

To me, personally, I've realized PCs are a solution looking for a problem, and that so rarely does my trying to bridge that gap result in an actual net-benefit (usually, not even close) that I've mostly stopped trying. That impulse got me where I am, can't complain, that "wasted" time over literal decades gained me a bunch of skills that are (it turns out) almost entirely useless to me personally but that others are willing to pay for, great, but I find myself a computer nerd who doesn't actually know WTF to do with a "real" computer. I just use my damn phone.

I suppose I'd still find them a lot more useful if iPads and iPhones didn't exist and so I needed to do banking and reading and such on some other computery device, but those do exist, so... yeah, not a lot of motivation to even own a "real" PC anymore, to include a MacBook—I doubt I'll replace my M1 Air when it finally dies.

To sum up, as a lifelong computer dork, I don't even know why I need a "real" computer any more, let alone why anyone else does.

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