I suspect one reason for $600 devices, other than Google itself trying to reposition Chromebooks as more upmarket, is because $600 Windows laptops are still are a mess of preloaded bullshit put there by the vendor. Microsoft has tried various ways to fix this but it only tends to protect high-end models. And build quality and the nature of hardware compromises at that price point have always been unpleasant, save for a few concentrated efforts like Lenovo's IdeaPad line. In other words, $600 laptops are second only to $200 laptops in making Windows look bad, making them an easy target for an OS that proved that $200 laptops can actually be quite good.
Still, there are few challenges. Chromebooks' filesystem paradigm deemphasises local storage to the point of cumbersome, relying on Google Drive or custom interfaces and implementations built for each app that know how to pull up past work. This is a smart idea when everything works, but makes import, export, and context switching harder, and makes sharing a feature of the product rather than a file-based affair.
On Chromebooks, Chrome's fantastic profile system is deliberately conflated with Chrome OS login sessions, which makes it harder for one user to maintain multiple independent browsing contexts than when using Chrome on other platforms. Power users on Windows can run multiple browsers, or use profile systems in browsers to keep separation, but on Chrome OS, you only get two de facto contexts (the white one and the black one with the cool spy icon), you blast the same cookies everywhere, and half your builtin applications are just hyperlinks to auto-log you into the corresponding Google product in your global white context. Applications like Hangouts (the app, not the extension) are rare, where the entire window inherits your OS login, but keeps your context entirely separate from what you're doing in the browser.
Nonetheless, with Service Workers and graphics APIs and auto-resuming applications and unintrusive updates, and people using Google products anyway, Microsoft should be worried, because they're being challenged for customers in a segment where their OS is least compelling, and was largely used by default.
In the current version of Windows 10 there's a feature called "fresh start" that makes it trivial to reset to a clean OS install without vendor crap. It even automatically preserves your home directory. The only problem is that you need to know it exists, so it only benefits technical users and users with geeky friends to advise them.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-use-the-fresh-st...
Unsurprisingly, the only company I could find evidence of actually having done this is Lenovo:
https://betanews.com/2015/08/13/lenovo-bios-tool-prevents-cl...
ChromeOS actually has the ability to sign into multiple accounts at the same time and fast switch between them. It's not obvious in the UI though, so many don't know about it. https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/6088201?hl=en
One can now throw tabs from one account context to the second logged in account. Left click on the top to the left of the tabs, (while the Chromebook is signed into two accounts) and it offers moving the tab to the other account.
Wow. Did not know this. Thanks.
Try again. Microsoft is complicit in all of this. If you go buy an OEM version of Windows 10 today, even Pro, what you get is a ridiculous set of preloaded games and apps, like Candy Crush, Bubble Witch 3 Saga, Disney Magic Kingdoms, etc.
Its disgusting, and everyone who works at Microsoft should be ashamed of it.
Windows historically came installed with Pinball, Minesweeper, Solitaire.
I would guess that a substantial base of Windows users plays games on their PC. It's rare to find a popular game that isn't enhanced by the internet.
I do tend to agree that maybe Professional versions should not come with these _links_, but even a large portion of professional users play games on their company issued laptop. I haven't installed Windows Server before but I would be surprised if that featured game links.
It is disgusting, but I fail to see how e.g. the team working on the C++ compiler should be ashamed for something another completely seperate team was forced to do by management (assuming something like that is responsible for this). In my opinion MS has gone too big for that, with a bunch of seperate departments almost acting as standalone entities (i.e. seperate companies) who can take a lot of decisions on their own without much interference between them, just all sharing the MS name. E.g. there's the research going on, there's VS/Office/Windows etc.
I mean, they take up some space but don't affect system behaviour, like some old windows OEM bloatware did.
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 run Linux on (thanks to having just Intel components). Same for Huawei if you are willing to spend a bit more, but on that price a Thinkpad is probably the way to go.
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 run Arch on a cheap Chromebook for some tasks at work, I've generally been satisfied, and will probably buy another one eventually. I think if I was spending $500+, I'd just buy a Windows laptop and reformat it though - way more choices, and they tend to be upgradable.
It's also worth keeping in mind most Chromebooks must be disassembled to remove a firmware write-protect screw in order to flash new firmware. The one I have requires removing the battery/keyboard/etc - more than just popping off a small panel on the bottom.
GalliumOS[1] is a Ubuntu-based Linux distribution optimized for Chromebooks with a huge list of supported devices[2].
> Right now, Xiaomi laptops are excellent cheap machines to run Linux on (thanks to having just Intel components). Same for Huawei if you are willing to spend a bit more, but on that price a Thinkpad is probably the way to go.
I find Lenovo Thinkpad E4*0 series to be the best low-cost, high build-quality Linux development machines, since they start from $569.99, allow a wide range of hardware customizations[3], and meet Mil-SPEC durability standards[4].
[2] https://wiki.galliumos.org/Hardware_Compatibility
[3] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-e-ser...
[4] https://www.lenovo.com/hk/en/thisisthinkpad/innovation/think...
The spacebar screen is a constant source of anxiety but it's even worse than that. The reason I am on chromeOS with sideloaded linux (crouton) is because when you flash custom bios (seabios) you need to authorize it, if your computer runs completely out of battery (like it did for me on a flight to Iran), then that authorization is revoked and you need to boot into chromeOS to fix it (something I couldn't do since I didn't have chromeOS) so the only thing you can do is press spacebar and wipe everything.
I think I'll never buy a chromebook again, I'll just get something from puri.sm or slimbook.es.
Which ones exactly? Do you have resources?
The ones I've seen sport Nvidia GPUs [1] [2]. Which means no Wayland, and only proprietary drivers. Not "excellent" or "just Intel components" in my book.
[1] https://www.banggood.com/XiaoMi-Gaming-Laptop-Intel-Core-I7-...
[2] https://www.banggood.com/Xiaomi-Pro-Notebook-15_6-Inch-Intel...
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...
It's doesn't resolve the tracking issues.
Look at the iPad Pro, 2GB of memory, not a "laptop" class CPU. etc. It is eating into Microsoft's market for the same reason. The "big" part of the laptop wedge is people who aren't gamers, or intense multitaskers, or intense local storage users. They are people who have their stuff in the cloud, want an easy to carry package that can run the apps they need to run one, or perhaps two, at a time.
The Chromebook is anticipating the iOS based, ARM processor based Macbook air. This is also the Surface Go space.
The Surface Go 2 will be a thing to watch. If they can get it running on ARM with flawless x86-64 translation, roll the price point down a hundred dollars (or just bundle the keyboard - come on, Microsoft, selling that separately makes _no_ sense here) and ship it with a dongle that turns one USB-c port into 2 usb ports, charging, and a displayport, and what you'll have is a 10" laptop that's fully functional, runs _everything_, trivially integrates into a desktop-like environment for home use, is a passable tablet, and gets all day battery life.
Right now it's _close_ to being able to achieve that, but the battery life is a bit too short and the price a bunch too high, and a switch to ARM could alleviate both of those issues.
I recall an article in Byte magazine which talked about when we'd have computers with a gigabyte of RAM (but it also noted that at the time you could have had a gigabyte, given in a mere cubic foot of hardware).
How will it run MacOS apps - x86 emulation like Qualcomm for Windows 10?
From the first link in the article:
> The Yoga Chromebook is an altogether more powerful system. It has a four-core/eight-thread 8th-generation Core i5 processor, with 8GB RAM and either 64 or 128GB of eMMC storage.
i5 CPU/8 GB RAM/128 GB eMMC puts it in MacBook/Surface territory.
I was wondering if you could somehow get Firefox on one, and apparently for ChromeOS instances where you have access to Android apps you can.[1] Not running ChromeOS, I'm not sure if that means you have to be running an ARM variant, or if the app developer needed to enable a specific set of features or compile a special version (e.g. for x86), or if this actually works, but it does seem promising.
From another article I just found[2], apparently if your ChromeOS supports linux apps, you can just apt install Firefox, or if you really need it and nothing else is working, you can use Crouton to use a linux instance within a dedicated Chrome tab and run Firefox there. I suspect many of these might have oddness when dealing with files and sharing between apps, as you noted that as a specific area of interaction that's somewhat odd within Chrome. I'm not sure whether the Android app works well with that either.
1: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chromebook-ce...
2: https://www.howtogeek.com/357693/how-to-install-firefox-in-c...
Honestly this is one of the biggest things I liked about Apple computers since switching to them in 2007. They're so clean and pure compared to Windows which always comes with bloatware. Even the basic drivers you actually need for the computer to work usually come with some sort of bloatware awful UI programs that need to be installed for the hardware to work.
He laughed. He said it was a joke. He made it very clear that he didn't understand what Google was even thinking. And that stuck such a sour chord on me. Here's a company well known to be hiring the brightest people in the world, and they've announced a direct competitor to what you're doing... and you're laughing? It was like seeing an experienced chess player playing against a rumored-to-be-brilliant child prodigy and laughing at the stupid move the child was making.
I spent the next summer working on the ChromeOS team.
Blindness: I was in a Microsoft VP’s office when he said he was downsizing the IE effort because “the browser is done”, enterprise users were satisfied, and consumers don’t generate significant Windows revenue. I think that was IE6.
Paranoia: I was present for many early-00s decisions where a Microsoft exec weakened the ability to write rich applications in the browser to avoid devaluing Win32. So they were at least scared of the idea of a “browser OS” in the abstract.
Although...at the same time, Office was pushing for browser application capabilities, which is where we got XHR, which is a big reason browser applications became practical. Sometimes you’d never guess Office and Windows were the same company.
Office does a lot of things their own way and without a lot of the cross-compatibility that's a feature of most Microsoft products.
That's why you'll find you'll be able to do something in Office, but other Microsoft programs won't. Or vice versa.
Like Notepad and Internet Explorer are pretty much just containers for certain Windows controls. Controls Office don't use. They roll their own. Or at least, used to. Wouldn't surprise me to find out that Office had their own browser rendering engine that didn't rely on anything in IE.
Well you literally had Mozilla telling everyone they could that the browser is going to be the OS in that era. Microsoft was certainly paying attention.
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 wished OpenOffice Calc would suffice, but it simply doesn't, and is unstable at times), so that we can finally ditch the Windows VMs we run!
Something about Microsoft's historical ethos makes me abhor development on their platform, and targeting their browser is a nightmare in its own right (with Safari a close second).
[0]: https://www.winehq.org/announce/3.0 [1]: https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail...
Many firms and people need Windows software, MS Office is just one example.
You want to edit pictures, Photoshop only runs on Windows and OSX. You want to build things, AutoCAD only runs on Windows. You want to produce music, Cubase only runs on Windows and OSX.
> There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-steve-ballmer-tho...
[0] https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2...
I wonder what the maximum penetration was for Windows OSes on phones.
"...my 85-year-old uncle probably will never own an iPod, and I hope we'll get him to own a Zune."
What's a Zune? /s
Addition: Which part, if any, are the downvoters objecting to? From the people I have talked to in the industry that is exactly what happened and why a lot of companies got out of it.
Bill Gates and patent troll Nathan Myrvhold wrote a while book unironically displaying their utter lack of vision about the industry. Their while business is a mix of making bland weak copies of more popular software to run on their decades old Windows entrenchment, Xbox, and a few nice keyboard and mice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_b...
He was in a meeting where they were talking about Amazon Web Services, which had just launched. He said an IBM executive called it "stupid" and asked, "Who would ever pay for a server with a credit card?"
This blew my mind, because now that AWS is crushing IBM's cloud offerings, the answer to his question is tons of people.
Both are extremely bad reactions at face value but also show how clueless the company can be (at least if you believe it is indicative of the company's mindset)
https://www.cnet.com/pictures/microsofts-funeral-for-the-iph...
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
- Microsoft should have known this but they had made too much money for too long.
Lets not forget Google said the surface line was a disaster too.. They all poke at each other
The 399 go is a step in the right direction.
BUT, i do wish we had a legit 7" that wasn't a Chinese malware knockoff or a really outdated Samsung or Android 5.0 devie. The 7-8" formfacter is such huge utility for pilots, GPS navigation and ebook reading. Shame even apple doesn't update the ipad mini anymore :(
So for $350 you get a 1080p IPS panel laptop that weighs under 3 pounds and has an SD card, headphone jack and other goodies. It easily runs a bunch of Dockerized web apps without being slow.
One of the best portable computing devices I ever spent $ on. I still use it almost every day 2.5 years later.
Details can be found at: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromeboo...
Example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-PROBOOK-650-G2-I7-6600U-8GB-256G...
Google says your ebay laptop costs somewhere between $900 and $1,400 in new condition depending on what model it is. Yours is also "smashed and cracked" with no AC adapter based on the description.
I don't really mind if there's something faster because I spend time developing 10,000+ line Dockerized Rails apps with the Chromebook along with having a bunch of browser tabs open and streaming music, etc.. and it all runs great.
That Chromebook I mentioned is just a perfect storm of high quality components at a good price. I hope it lasts another 5+ years.
I assume parent spoke about a new Chromebook, not a used (broken) one
For the server, I recently had to write a process that takes messages from a queue in AWS and store it to a database. It ran well as a .Net Core based lambda running on a 256MB RAM Linux VM.
I did the same with a .Net Framesork app that inherited and the smallest EC2 instance we could use was one with 4GB RAM. It was barely usable. We had to upgrade to 8GB. Microsoft has been successful because of Moore’s law hid the increasing bloat of Windows. But once smartphones and low resource required operating systems became popular, they can’t compete.
It makes sense business wise. Getting new features is sexy/sell-able. Refactoring existing/working code to be smaller/faster/secure/etc isn't.
‘As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could spend six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.’
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/09/18/strategy-letter-vi...
[1] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...
That's the current conventional wisdom. But it's more like an excuse.
Windows got bloated because Microsoft relied(s) on cheap masses of mediocre programmers, backed by equally mediocre managers. A pattern that Windows application developers copied.
Yes, Microsoft has some really talented people. I knew a good number of them from the Bing and Xbox group when I lived in Bellevue. They would talk about amazing things. But then they would always follow those tales with internal Microsoft horror stories.
Wine better at windows than windows itself.
This hasn't been true for years.
They have realized that it doesn't matter whether you use Windows, Chrome OS, Android or Linux, or anything else: everything is in the cloud now, so the OS is pretty much irrelevant.
Azure, Office 365 and heck, even Linkedin are doing great:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/19/microsoft_huge_2018...
So I very much doubt that Microsoft is sweating it about Chromebooks.
Azure has a huge and every-growing service offering, which includes things like Postgres, so it's not like you are bound to Microsoft tech if you use Azure.
I've been working with Azure for a few years now, and am very happy with it - in the main, I've found there support to be excellent too.
IMO the only area AWS really kicks Azure's arse is for compute - you get a lot more VM for your money with AWS. I really wish Azure would do better here.
They aren’t crazy enough to support lambda or Fargate for Windows.
So yes, they do care about owning a successful platform.
Their IAAS revenue is a lot smaller.
The Office 365 iOS apps are nice enough and the web version runs anywhere. Mostly because of the cloud storage space, but also the applications, I will probably be a lifetime customer for $100/year. I wonder how $100/year compares to Facebook’s and Google’s revenue per user. I pay Google $500/year for music, books, movies, tv dhows, and GCP but I am not a typical user.
You're simply saying people want affordable technology. In that case, what is Chromebook's advantage over the competition? The market is flooded with cheap hardware, targeting those exact types of consumers.
But that being said, Chromebooks don't scale with better hardware very well. You can spend $250-350 and get 90% of the experience, and a very good experience at that. If you spend three times more you'll get more memory for Chrome and slightly more responsive tabs but hardly blows your socks off.
Microsoft likely aren't shaking in their boots because of a $600-900 Chromebook. If anything Android emulation is the real "killer app" since it massively expands a Chromebook's capabilities, including running Microsoft's own Android-Office apps.
Should I pay 3X's as much to get only 10% more experience, is a great question. But if I frame the choice as, I could pay less than $0.50 / hour for better experience on something important to me, my calculus is different.Even OS X has the feel that cloud services are kind of bolted on, whereas a new OS written in this era could feel more like ChromeOS in terms of reliability but still include features for advanced users like developers and business analytics.
Definitely feels like a missed opportunity, especially with growing discontent among developers with the Mac hardware line.
Microsoft rewriting the operating system from scratch wouldn’t help. The only compelling advantage that Windows had was backwards compatibility. Once you take that away they have nothing left - evidenced by thier complete failure on mobile.
and games, and popular software, and domain administration, and office, and tons of users and books and training and repair people available everywhere, and hardware compatibility, and ubiquity from home to work to places like library computers, and a tidy enough GUI, and thorough accessibility options, and ..
I'm at a point now where i lost trust in almost all software when it comes to respecting privacy. So even if windows has the biggest share of useful third party apps, most of them are old and not written against UWP/Store so they are not sandboxed, which means i'd rather not install them in the first place. So instead i open my android tablet and see if i can find an equivalent there.
Having to pay the huge markup for Professional edition to get disk encryption is also ridiculous when this is standard on Andrdoid and iOS. If my laptop gets stolen i want my data secure. This should be considered standard feature in this age.
Windows is 30 years old. Rewriting it would throw away a lot of builtin value.
Translation: It's good enough. Why innovate? We still make money on it.
It's like having a company van that breaks down all the time, but that's O.K. because, "It's paid for!" Meanwhile, your customers are getting increasingly impatient with your inability to meet their needs.
I know you can run Crouton but it just doesn't feel the same.
Requires a bit of googling to ensure there's no driver issues but this is what I've done for nearly a couple decades now.
I read about other people installing Arch Linux directly on a Chromebook. (I've tried only GalliumOS.)
We've seen Microsoft criticised, quite rightly, for introducing tracking of users in Windows 10 (euphemistically labelled as telemetry), yet Google gets no criticism. In fact we get the opposite, people rush to Google's defence. The double-standard is hard to understand.
Presumably, if you think it's fine for ChromeOS to record everything you do in the OS, you equally think it's fine for Windows/Mac OS/Ubuntu to record everything you do too (non-anonymously of course).
Windows didn't used to do this, so it feels like they're changing the rules after you've agreed and bought into the platform. If Microsoft had instead called "Windows 10" something completely different, and similarly was up front about what it was doing, I suspect there wouldn't be the same backlash. Some people would still disagree with it, and would be unhappy they were moving to replace Windows with this other thing, but it wouldn't have the same impact that acting like it's just another major version upgrade does.
Everyone at some point has had a Windows machine, including the privacy-conscious and the paranoid -- simply because, at the time, there was no realistic alternative. Once you reach 90% penetration, any special-interest group with a pet complaint will be sizeable.
That's not happened with Chromebooks and it's unlikely to ever happen. Privacy-conscious users now have NSA-hardened Linux and "won't-let-FBI-in" iPhones, they will never have to deal with Google if they don't want to. They are not forced to use any of their services, since there are alternatives for pretty much everything -- even superior ones, in most cases. The only service that used to be unmatched was Search, and sure enough, plenty of people still complain about tracking searches.
What can't you do without a Google account? There's a "browse as guest" option.
ChromeOS is for people who are not technically inclined and don't care much for privacy. The majority of users I am sure.
nit: It's reasonable to not fret about one additional way that proprietary OSs can abuse their users, but still not want to see surveillance culture normalized on a Free software distribution.
Question: can you install your own OS on this machine without hacking?
I had a collegue who got Arch linux for Arm working on a Chromebook with some caveats.
Of course, the average user isn't going to swap the operating system.
Firstly you can lie.
Second: turn off sync, turn on Do Not Track, turn off Manage Passwords, autocomplete, prediction, malware protection, spellcheck, diagnostic data and drm id.
Or stop caring about such minor problems unless you're a spy
Lubuntu is really like "teaching a man to fish". If you give them instructions on how to install it, then suddenly nobody will ever need a shiny new $1700 macbook to get started with basic programming and content rich web browsing.
Though personally I prefer text :)
Chromebooks are targeted towards college students and websurfers are they not? Lubuntu is perfect for them, especially, if they don't have $600 to shell out on a Chromebook.
[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/understanding-windows-core-os...
Andromeda is the codename for their revitalized smartphone effort. Polaris is the codename for their "windows minus the legacy" experience on desktop; no Win32, just UWP, capable of running on significantly less powerful hardware.
That's really the takeaway here. GSuite has gotten its hooks deep into elementary/secondary education and now that's starting to sweep into the college market.
Families also shop for new laptops around the holidays, and they'll want something that dovetails with the work kids are doing at school. If the choice is an iOS or Chrome device, the choice becomes a lot easier when they're nearly the same price.
Or just a used thinkpad.
But I guess I’m not part of the normal demographic anyway, so....
I don't know anything about desktop application development, but for example in college I would use PowerPoint a lot. Was there some specific limitation that made for PowerPoint to be a Windows only thing? Was it that Microsoft just refused to make it for different operating systems? Or was there no point because everyone had windows installed anyway?
I'm kinda just chewing the fat here but in 2018 with iOS, osx, Android, windows, and Ubuntu being the main operating systems of machines, why'd it take the second level of abstraction of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Edge working together to make sharing apps across machines a thing? Like, why didn't, I dunno, some cross platform python library (I know nothing about desktop apps sorry) instead be The Universalizer?
In a sense, most programs today are really portable. I think in the past, there was a far greater variety of machines, and people used to make programs for them specifically, in assembly, that absolutely wouldn't run on even a different generation of the same familly of machines.
The problem is, though, that every platform is actually different -- look and feel, UI conventions, feature-set, integration, etc. And Java solved this problem by introducing their own look and feel, UI conventions, etc that were completely different from the underlying platform. Sun wanted you to know that you were using a Java application. Users, on the other hand, were not too thrilled with this -- they wanted consistency across applications. Microsoft and Apple weren't too happy with another company trying to paper-over their entire platform so they didn't offer any help either.
The other problem was performance. Especially in those days, abstracting over the entire platform was pretty computationally expensive. Furthermore, since Java didn't render anything with the native UI it also didn't get much rendering help from the OS either.
> the different browsers regarding working together to identically implement JavaScript
They didn't work together; they simply copied features from each other in order to maintain compatibility with "the web". Netscape invented JavaScript. Microsoft copied it and added some features. Netscape copied those features and added some more. Microsoft repeated that. All the browser makers have written some code or API that never copied by everyone else.
It was really not that long ago that the standard process was formed and browser makers actually started working together.
Instead, it's two big recent changes:
1. The relative ease at which application developers can build globally scalable infrastructure via Cloud PaaS.
2. More computers can depend on always-connected internet access.
Also worth mentioning:
Users also had a strong preference for apps that performed like native apps, which made using cross-platform toolkits less appealing (still exists when building mobile apps).
Apple Mac's didn't switch over from power pc to x86 until ~2006, which meant only large companies could support code bases for both, Windows and OSX.
Linux had a number of competing distributions, and expertise on how to deliver linux software to customers wasn't common knowledge.
Google was crap at hardware, are they good now? They're hiring like mad right now for hardware PMs from other orgs, and that'll grab some younger talent, but they need pretty seasoned people to rebuild a whole hardware org. They have good hardware design teams but they're fractured from eng, biz, strat and more.
You can be good at a network of your ODMs but that doesn't mean the product comes out to target. Chromebooks were positioned as this cheap school thing for a bit, but then the pixel kinda overshot this by a lot.. they need clear segmentation and targeting goals.
A consequence of this is that MS has always focused on making their OS and applications useful for businesses, at a great sacrifice in ease of use and security for consumers. Apple jumped in to focus on ease of use and security, but their computers have always been too expensive for mass adoption.
Now Google is going for the mass market with a secure and easy to use OS. Microsoft can't really fight back because to do would mean abandoning the business market. And it understandably doesn't want to do that because that's where the big bucks are. So we should expect to see ChromeOS steadily gaining in popularity, though it is an open question as to how far it will also go in the enterprise.
If not, I would avoid it. My experience with C++ and macbooks has been pretty bad.
Availability of Chromebooks in Australia is still very spotty (can’t get the Pixel easily for example) so the Microsoft hegemony isn’t being threatened Down Under!
Windows laptops are a joke because low end laptops uses slow CPUs and Intel graphics. Mid end laptops for $600 have faster CPUs and Nvidia graphics but suffer preloaded bloat and virus issues a Chromebook can avoid.
I got a 10 year old laptop with Linux Mint on it that runs great. Windows 7 and above run too slow on it.
Here are things you do on Windows:
1. Browse the Internet using Chrome.
2. Play a relatively demanding Video Game.
3. Run Office, Word and Excel.
4. Install your Canon Printer and print a few papers.
5. Plugin your Nikon Camera.
6. Run Adobe Photoshop to do some tweaking.
Most people do that on their laptops. We are still far from being 100% cloud. Also ChromeOS is not an improvement over Windows. It is a change of environments. OSX is an improvement. The only deal is that it is prohibitively expensive.
Only one that might be relevant is gaming but even then most people who are serious about it buy a gaming machine or game console.
I got my parents - technically capable folks a Chromebook and it works beautifully.
With Gimp you can do a lot of what you can do with Photoshop.
TeX and any math package like R beat Microsoft Office and produce better documents.
WordPerfect was a much better alternative to Microsoft Word, but guess what happened: Microsoft invested on Corel and suddenly they stopped releasing on Linux.
There's a lot of money invested in making Office a monopoly. By supporting Office and spreading its use you are extending that monopoly further into another generation.
TeX/LaTeX may make some pretty documents, but the learning curve is pretty heavy-duty, and compiling a typeset document isn't exactly dash-it-off quick for normal typist/secretary activities. It doesn't matter much what you can do with technical or book-length documents; that's not what the world runs on.
And Gimp ain't Photoshop. It's not even a close thing.
they're all in you're user folder on Windows so wouldn't that be pretty much the same as the root gdrive folder and whatever subfolders you have things organised into?
Sadly Remote Desktop is lacking in a lot of ways mainly the refresh rate makes it very difficult to resolve the rendered scene I’m working on.
Any suggestions?
Of course you could carry around an external drive but do you want to have to plug in a drive every time you wake up your computer.
I want more powerful ARM ones… RK3399 is a great step in the right direction, but I'd love to see a chromebook with, say, the new Kirin
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.
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.
There's even an Office support page: https://support.office.com/article/how-to-install-and-run-mi...
Also, the Office apps do work offline.
It's odd, because even features from the 90's like mail merge are missing. Mail merge as a feature is something most coders could automate in a few hours. Why isn't it in the product so the rest of the world can use it?
How about footnotes? References? Multi-column layouts? A mixture of portrait and landscape pages? Captions on tables? Flow text around a circular image?
The list of lacking or hobbled features is really long. The unmatched live collaboration features are really the only place it shines.
GSuite is not comparable because it is not a standalone, 'desktop' application. I don't want to have to use a version stuffed into a browser.
Windows' duck taped UI makes absolutely no sense.
On top of that, you get ads, nagware and your activity data is exfiltrated to their servers... and this is on a product that you have to pay for.
I don't mind paying for a product, but Windows does not offer any added value.
It's better invest that money in new/used laptop.
They was competitive only with $200-300 prices.