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Chrome OS has stalled out

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61–70 of 205 posts

Re: Chrome OS has stalled out

#61
post #31

I personally like the Chromebook, but it's relegated to fun, not work. It worked well to help me establish a boundary b/t work and home life, as I'd have to pull out my MacBook to do any actual work. I played around with Crostini Linux, but I've had it die on me twice and been forced to do a clean install of Crostini, which would be awful had I used it for anything important. The Chromebook is also a great way to get…

You must be doing something wrong if reinstalling your OS causes you to lose anything important. For starters it helps making your /home directory a separate partition.

Re: Chrome OS has stalled out

#62
post #43

I bought a pixelbook last year as I was excited to play with the early native Linux integration. The technology that has been built is an amazing amount of work (crosvm, Wayland support, etc) but at the end of the day it's really only useful for simple use cases. This is a common theme for everything in ChromeOS. I've given up on ChromeOS for the time being as been capable of any serious work I do. The more frustrati…

Slightly OT, but is getting your kids a traditional Linux laptop an option?

Re: Chrome OS has stalled out

#63

Meh. Nah. Chromebook growth has been phenomenal, full stop. There is still plenty of headroom, because the price point continues to beat phones and laptop competitors. Note also the growing success of premium Chromebooks. Classic bottom-up innovation/disruption story. In terms of making use of the hardware, Android is a necessary stopgap strategy, but webassembly is coming to bring native app performance and security…

>> Chromebook growth has been phenomenal, full stop. There is still plenty of headroom, because the price point continues to beat phones and laptop competitors. Note also the growing success of premium Chromebooks. Classic bottom-up innovation/disruption story.

I completely agree. Both my mother-in-law and cousins (that are college age) have switched to chromebooks because of the price point to accomplish what are basic needs for most laptop users.

Re: Chrome OS has stalled out

#64
The counterpoint to this argument is that there are many users who want a super-lightweight OS that is not bloated, but very high performance with long batter life. I use my Samsung Chromebook 3 for gsuite, gcloud management through the web console, linux (beta) shell based development, gcloud cloud shell, putty type chrome terminal and fairly hardcore web app testing (webgl 2.0 compute, magenta, tensorflowjs). It works phenomenally well. And I've definitely noticed a lot of Google employees using the Pixelbook as their work laptop.

Looking ahead and making predictions for ChomreOS in the 2020s. I could even see a Stadia style pipeline for more processor intensive apps. Run Creative Cloud / Maya type tools on dedicated cloud gpus. And just send the video frames to the client browser tab. I've been thinking a lot about how 5G adoption really can be leveraged to offload computation from the device and will introduce whole new classes of interactive media.

Re: Chrome OS has stalled out

#65

The new Pixelbook Go only comes with a low resolution display, except for the most expensive model (see [1]). This is significant change for Google, since their previous Chromebooks had 4K-ish displays. This move from high end to low end reminds me of the Pixel 3a phone [2]. I loved the idea of Chromebooks, and hoped ChromeOS was a way that Linux would finally be "mainstream" on laptops. I've bought at least 10 Chrom…

What's interesting, especially with the Pixels, is that Google used to lead with the Nexus phones, which were notable in part because they were excellent phones at a very good price. My guess would be that the difference is that at some point Google decided that instead of making good developer phones (I don't think they ever really viewed the Nexus line as targeting the general public), they wanted to make their own premium consumer line.

Re: Chrome OS has stalled out

#66
post #61
post #31

I personally like the Chromebook, but it's relegated to fun, not work. It worked well to help me establish a boundary b/t work and home life, as I'd have to pull out my MacBook to do any actual work. I played around with Crostini Linux, but I've had it die on me twice and been forced to do a clean install of Crostini, which would be awful had I used it for anything important. The Chromebook is also a great way to get…

You must be doing something wrong if reinstalling your OS causes you to lose anything important. For starters it helps making your /home directory a separate partition.

Does Crostini play nice with a separate /home ?

Re: Chrome OS has stalled out

#67
post #43

I bought a pixelbook last year as I was excited to play with the early native Linux integration. The technology that has been built is an amazing amount of work (crosvm, Wayland support, etc) but at the end of the day it's really only useful for simple use cases. This is a common theme for everything in ChromeOS. I've given up on ChromeOS for the time being as been capable of any serious work I do. The more frustrati…

[deleted]

Re: Chrome OS has stalled out

#68
post #64

The counterpoint to this argument is that there are many users who want a super-lightweight OS that is not bloated, but very high performance with long batter life. I use my Samsung Chromebook 3 for gsuite, gcloud management through the web console, linux (beta) shell based development, gcloud cloud shell, putty type chrome terminal and fairly hardcore web app testing (webgl 2.0 compute, magenta, tensorflowjs). It wo…

I've been using a pixelbook as my mobile dev platform (mostly web and server dev) ever since my 2015 macbook (15 inch) died. Overall, the experience as a developer has been quite good. The hardware is second to none. The trackpad is (IMHO) better than the one on my macbook, the keyboard is way better than Apple's recent keyboards, and having a touchscreen has been very nice for mobile testing. Passive cooling is a mixed bag. I like being completely silent and solid-state, but running a complete test suite takes a really long time because it must downclock (running the tests for my current files isn't bad though). The 3:2 aspect ratio also gives a ton of extra height over a lot of other systems.

The ChromeOS UI has been 2 steps forward and 1 step back. In preparation for their tablet launch, they re-worked the launcher. This was mostly fine, but they made the poor choice to merge settings and notifications to be like Android. They used to sit side-by-side and viewing lots of notifications was much easier. It used to be really buggy too, but now it's mostly just a worse experience for no good reason.

On the other hand, they finally added workspaces that are pretty similar to macOS. They work great and my only complaint is that they haven't made a gesture to switch between them yet (just a keyboard shortcut or expose then select).

When I switched, you had to put the machine into dev mode and run Crouton. This made everything work more-or-less like a normal Linux machine, but made for annoying startups (make a mistake and your machine will wipe and reset) while also getting rid of the security the OS provides.

Crostini has been an amazing advancement and they're making very fast progress. Support for VPNs was my primary issue, but that's been fixed for months. Sharing between the main OS and Crostini used to be a bit painful, but that's easy now too. GPU acceleration can now be enabled and works decently most of the time opening the way for most Debian apps. Tabs for the terminal would be nice, but I usually use tmux anyway. My only particularly annoying issue is UI scaling of Linux apps, but that's not entirely their fault. On the high-dpi screen, things can look really small because most apps aren't optimized. The really annoying issue for me at the moment is third-party APKs in Android. They simply do not allow them unless you want to go back into dev mode. If that isn't something you do, I guess that's not an issue at all.

I'm currently hoping for a pixelbook 2 which simply adds another inch of screen and shrinks the bezels a bit. Other than that and maybe adding thunderbolt, there's not much I'd want to change.

Re: Chrome OS has stalled out

#70
post #11

Technically Chrome OS has some interesting bits, like its use of virtualization, containers, based on Rust and Go. As general purpose OS, I never got the point of it. Any OS other OS is able to offer browser juggling support alongside the benefits of having a proper OS, better hardware that a Web browser is capable of (does not matter how good is the GPU, Web GL 2.0 can only do so much). And the security story is kin…

> And the security story is kind of meaningless when everything that matters is stored in someone else's computer, with the traffic going through Google's servers.

It all depends on your threat model. Some people don't mind Google knowing everything about them, and are happy to reap the benefits of making that tradeoff.

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