It is a good idea IMO, especially with GalliumOS (a Chromebook optimized variant of xubuntu) so you can run Linux natively.
Back in 2016 I picked up a Toshiba CB35 Chromebook with a 13" 1080p IPS display, 4gb of memory, 1.7ghz Celeron and a 256GB SSD for $350. It weighs under 3 pounds and has a backlight keyboard too.
It still runs great today and despite the low end specs it can deal with some programming work loads (Dockerized web apps, a bunch of browser tabs, mp3 player, editor with 40+ plugins, multiple workspaces, etc.). It's not slow either. Even decently sized Rails apps with Webpacker reload nearly instantly while developing and there's no type delay.
It's been a really nice outdoors / travel laptop for someone like me who normally uses a desktop workstation.
I wrote up a whole review of it here: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromeboo...
If you can still find this exact model at that price point I'd consider it today. It's one of those rare combos of hardware that's really good at a fair price. I wouldn't insta buy it, but I'd at least keep it in the runnings vs a 2021 model, especially at that price point. With lower end machines, newness isn't always a deciding factor for goodness.
And why wouldn’t it? CS education is rarely taxing in terms of processor/memory requirements. I doubt the curriculum is all that different than 10 years ago or more with far less specs. It’s about theory and writing algorithms. And if this is a program specializing in ML, the models are still likely to be toy, and anything more can use cloud computing like Google’s Collab.
Agreed. While doing my undergrad in CS a decade ago (wow - I can't believe it's been that long) a lot of coursework was relatively light-weight to execute, and when it wasn't it could be done by SSH-ing or VNC-ing into a university-managed RHEL environment.
We could even RDP into well-equipped Windows machines that had licenses for all the software you could ever want if you happened to need Windows.
This was at a large Midwestern research university. From talking with friends and colleagues over the years, it sounds like it was a pretty standard set-up.
I did try to do local development on an ARM Chromebook I got as a curiosity back then, but it was just too constrained. Cruton wasn't perfect and only the XFCE desktop environment had acceptable performance. Plus, not a lot of software was ARM compatible out of the box back then and compiling from source was a pain on the low-power processor I had.
These days, especially with the crazy fast ARM cores we're seeing and Android Apps working on ChromeOS, things look way more usable for a CS student's general computing needs. It's always cool to see stories like OP's to confirm what I hoped was the state of computing outside the Mac/Windows norm.
Disclosure since this is about ChromeOS: I work at Google, but this is all my personal experience and opinion.
I went to a community college and we had the ability to SSH into ridiculously powerful servers on campus + were given Azure credits, etc. I think it’s pretty standard
I think this is mostly right. I'm currently enrolled in same the GaTech CS Masters that the author will be starting.
I have had just two courses that strained my machine out of the 7 I've completed. Reinforcement learning in particular had one project that really tested my machine. (I trained my agents on CPU, so that was definitely a factor). Even then, my agents were training in fairly reasonable times (5-6 hours max for a grid search). If I'd taken the time to vectorize every computation, I could have probably gotten the time down at least 10x.
This is on AMD Ryzen 1700x - a pretty speedy chip but not top of the line - and 16 gb ram.
Powerful hardware is a convenience more than anything in this program. It allows you to focus less on optimizing your solution.
A 1700X is quite a bit more powerful than the i5-8250U in the author's Chromebook.
Probably around 2–3x the overall speed.
Do a HPC course, the whole point is to tax your system.
I've heard it described as the best course in the program. I won't have room to take it unfortunately. I went full ML spec and my last two courses will be Video Game Design (Been dying to take that) and Graduate Algorithms (Required)
I must politely disagree with that. It may be that we have been to distinct types of CS programs.
Some of my work as an under grad was taxing on my computer and much more so as a grad.
Even simple things like compiling a system can quickly get taxing and slow.
Some classes require models, algorithms that takes a lot of power to process or to prove.
My master thesis was system would run for 48 hours on the desktop I had then, after some optimization got it down from 65 hours.
Ideally though you have access to a lab / server that you can offload your hard work on.
In my experience those resources were already under maximum load during most of the day and parts of the night.
Being able to just run them locally was convenient.
> Ideally though you have access to a lab / server that you can offload your hard work on.
And I think this is the key point here. Most CS things you can easily handle with the horse power of a Chromebook. And when you hit the 10% of the coursework that you can’t use a Chromebook for, you probably wouldn’t use a “normal” laptop for it either. You’re always going to have jobs that will take a bit more horsepower. Those should be farmed out to a cluster or server anyway.
Where I think the OP will have issues is what resources they will need for their research, which again will probably need a server or cluster. Likely, the most taxing thing they will likely need to work on locally is their thesis. This is where I’d think they might run into issues, especially with figures. But even here, Overleaf should be up for the job.
Not to mention being on video calls with classmates / actual classes and also having a few other windows running (lets say Slack / Discord), and maybe driving a decent-resolution monitor.. these relatively basic sounding things can push the CPU/gfx memory/RAM of even higher-end hardware to their limits! Especially if you choose to / need to run all these together and multi-task. That might partially be an indictment of software performance, though.
All my main CS coursework was done while SSH'ed into a class cluster, but I took a bunch of electives where you're like working w/ docker, doing android development, etc. where its nice to have a fast machine.
During my B.CS, most power I needed was whilst doing Android and iOS development, and even then that's just for the VMs. Otherwise did it all on a beat-up 2014 MacBook Air. Specific programs we used like SPIM, the pan/spin verification thingo, gcc/g++/etc, you can run wherever you like.
EDIT: Uni provided computers with VM stuff installed, and let us remote into them during COVID.
For my computer graphics class, being able to break out my overclocked and watercooled 20-thread behemoth in an era where most processors had far fewer, definitely helped me procrastinate a bit longer, because my renders took a fraction of the expected time :)
The same machine’s GPUs helped me be the first to solve a password brute-force challenge in my computer security class (designed to teach us how to use password cracking tools), though that wasn’t for any credit, of course!
For my machine learning class, I was able to train models much more quickly than other students.
Generally speaking, being able to brute force certain things was just fun.
But yeah, I would agree that there is no practical benefit to a powerful machine in a CS education. These few instances are not worth the cost - buy or build a powerful rig because you want to, not because you think it’ll help. I felt immense pride at watching my system whir to life.
Yeah, I used my machine to do a ton of NLP on relatively big datasets, and I had cool realtime 3D visualizations to show off. I lugged my full tower to class for that one.
It's really nice to have something powerful to play with.
I once bought an Eee PC for note taking, it was great execpt for two things:
* The low end graphics chip was already 12 years old on release, the advertised OpenGL 2.0 was emulated in software while everything else that came out supported OpenGL 3.
* Intel didn't do virtualization on low and mid range variants of its CPUs, while an Eee PC barely had any resources to it was the second time I got burned by that.
Basically 10 year old requirements meet technology that was outdated 12 years ago. Even toy samples will fail if the hardware doesn't implement the features required.
> CS education is rarely taxing in terms of processor/memory requirements
Not sure I'd enjoy doing something like compiling LLVM on a Chromebook for a compiler class.
Not sure what compiling LLVM has to do with a compiler class though. Yes it's a compiler, but compiling it won't give lots of insights on how a compiler works or how to write one?
> Not sure what compiling LLVM has to do with a compiler class though.
Not normal to work on a compiler during a compiler class?
> Reading the code, why not, but compiling it?
Compiling it with changes you made to learn about how compilers work. Such as adding a new optimisation phase.
> I can't see what you could learn about compilation in a CS sense by compiling LLVM.
You don't learn by compiling it obviously. You learn by extending it and running it, and to do that you need to compile it.
Compiling and training ML models can be pretty taxing. Hopefully OP can just ssh into Gtech's cluster or else I could see it being annoying.
Had a friend who needed to borrow my beast machine to run “word2vec”.
Took a couple weeks on his machine, took 30 minutes on mine (mostly because of memory).
Though he was studying AI and not compsci
I don't understand why people buy expensive Chromebooks - the author's Samsung device seems to cost $699 refurbished (16 GB RAM/128 GB SSD). To compare, a basic configuration Macbook Air M1 (8 GB RAM/256 GB SSD) can be bought for $899 new with education discount; if you're lucky, you can also buy a Thinkpad X13 at similar prices.
It depends on the Chromebook, but having owned a personal Chromebook Pixel of the first two generations, it's because, the Pixel at least, represented something that I couldn't find anywhere else. In no particular order:
* We MUST MAKE MORE 3:2 screens. Content is not wide, except video which I don't watch. Content is vertical. A 3:2 screen makes for an amazing laptop shape that is very well suited to the way humans view content, especially on the web.
* I've done computer security stuff for a while. Chromebooks are, by far, the best computer security model I've seen. Trusted boot, hashed root filesystems, fast updates that are as painless as possible (they even keep entered text in textareas on pages). They are, by default, secure enough that I would log into my core accounts on someone else's Chromebook (given a fresh reboot to ensure it wasn't in developer mode - physical firmware attacks aren't in the scope of things I worry about from people I know). Yet, I can twiddle a few keys and get one to be a properly nice Linux laptop with all sorts of great features, that also manages to "just work."
* OS resolution scaling is amazing. Eyes tired at the end of a day? A keystroke or two and you've rescaled the entire UI to match. Throw in the super high res, high def modes on the high DPI screens, and it's good for just about anything.
* Almost everything can be done on the web today, even if one probably shouldn't. I've used them as primary computers for many years, and I only rarely ran into something that I couldn't do (or couldn't do with Crouton and a Linux chroot environment). Those things included "a handful of Windows applications" (wine covers a lot) and "some kernel interfaces for Linux Internals classes" (the kernel simply lacks things that the OS doesn't need).
I know it's popular to hate Chromebooks, but if you're willing to toss them in developer mode for a few things, the value you get for your money, even at the high end, is legitimately impressive.
Hopefully more Laptop manufacturers make screens at least in 16:10 which is a compromise to having 16:9 on all consumer laptops due to the movie industry (the new Dell XPS comes to mind). The only way right now strangely enough to get something resembling that would be supported by a large manufacturer would be to buy an iPad and use it as a secondary display. You could try to use the iPad with a keyboard as a productivity oriented laptop but it would only really work out right now if you were a web developer and only needing ssh access.
I haven't given up the hope that an iOS hacker manages to jailbreak the new M1 iPads so that you can boot macOS or Linux (https://asahilinux.org).
The 4:3 screens of the iPads are really nice and Thunderbolt on the new devices allows for a large number of peripherals (if you buy a hub :)). Only Apple's "Magic" keyboards are far too expensive, but regular Bluetooth keyboards and mice should also work.
Booting Linux or macOS is unlikely to happen anytime soon, but we might get them running in a VM if a jailbreak shows up.
Microsoft's Surface Book line have 3:2 screens and are absolutely wonderful (though the price premium might be even worse than Apple).
I fully agree on the 3:2 displays and I'm happy to see more of them being used in regular laptops (Apple, do you listen?).
While I certainly don't hate Chromebooks, it seems that one can either buy inexpensive but underpowered devices (with slow ARM cores or low-end x86 Celerons) or devices on par with other notebooks - the Chromebook Pixel was certainly nice - but then you are not saving money compared to a regular notebook, even though the Windows (or macOS) tax doesn't apply.
The Chromebook security concept seems to be well implemented and can protect the user from a lot of typical problems. I'm still curious how much data Google collects from Chromebook users, though.
Resolution scaling is one of the most underappreciated technologies. My eyesight isn't really great and I'm using the macOS zoom feature often when I struggle to read text in a small font. It's great to see that ChromeOS implements something similar.
The trend of having to do everything on the web today (or using Electron apps) is still irritating. Contrary to expectations, this seems to result in more proprietary protocols (Slack, zoom, Teams, ...) instead of using open source or proprietary clients for open protocols. Well, this is probably yet another approach of solving a problem in CS by adding another level of abstraction ;-).
I'm using a Lenovo Duet ($170 on amazon right now) which is a mediatek powered arm tablet. it came with a keyboard and a stand that pair with it perfectly and it works like a surface go. I do all of my work on it for over a year now where most things are either run inside of the linux vm or pinning PWA's to the homescreen. since most desktop apps are made cross platform through having a web version and having full chrome extensions makes me easily leave behind any "native apps"
the concept of saving a lot of money, having 20hr+ battery life and no way to brick the computer (unless I really try) is kind of incredible, especially since this came out way before my patience ran out for the m1 macbooks.
I can still imagine someone wanting a premium chromeos experience since just having a logged in session of chrome is super powerful in being able to store your internet knowledge through bookmarks and history. While the trend of ignoring native apps accelerates it seems foolish to use something like windows these days and running it in chromeOS mode where accessing information or connected chat apps like slack might as well not be electron apps and be PWA's not running their own browser instance :/
One of the pitfalls with the security model of Chromebooks is the end-of-life of their products. In one respect, it is great that Google is up-front about the duration of support. On the other hand, the only way to get security updates after that point in time is to replace the operating system.
Give me an SSD and an OS distro on a thumb drive with USB3.0 support, and you get the same guarantees computer security-wise on literally any UEFI secure boot enabled system.
Fast updates are enabled by heavily locking in what user's are able to do with them. No exotic checks to be done.
I am not impressed by Chromebooks in those regards at all. Different strokes I suppose.
I might give you the screen, but to be honest, most of the time Chromebooks find their way to me it's because they're broken, and I'm everybody's computer guy of last resort due to high tolerance for frustration. All of them have had their screens or MOBO's rendered inoperable. Further, I philosophically reject anything that cannot be side loaded or is so locked down you can't load software onto it from external media.
Yes, security people may love that, but in reality, the entire point of processors is to run code. If I can't get my code to the processor that needs to run it without hostage negotiations, then that is not a useful machine to me. That is a niche PoS. Which all power to those who need it as such. Just isn't high on my list of things to actively purchase.
> Further, I philosophically reject anything that cannot be side loaded or is so locked down you can't load software onto it from external media.
But they're not. You can, with the proper incantations of "fiddling keys you can't do remotely," boot anything you want on them. Just disable the secure boot stuff, which is a designed in, required feature for a Chromebook, and run whatever.
> Yes, security people may love that, but in reality, the entire point of processors is to run code.
If you let a computer, connected to the internet, run any code that is sent its way, it will eventually run mostly malware. Probably foreign, and while well behaved, still quite unwelcome.
Which is rendered moot by understanding your user's needs, robust traffic monitoring, and paying attention to network logs.
What's fun is when you shut down that sketchy looking outbound traffic, and it turns out to be a new Windows telemetry service thing.
I also find, driving with kiddos through sketchy places on the internet and getting deliberately infected, so they learn what to look for, and letting your user's educate you on software they need/want also cuts down on the necessity for cargo cult infosec practices.
User's are not stupid, nor Lusers. Developers, programmer's, and the companies that pay them are not fond of repetition, expect you to only use their thing and bend over backwards for their convenience, and are often in it not for producing Quality software, but for the paycheck.
Admittedly, my practices don't scale to the point of being taught as general infosec practice, as I'm in it for the long haul for the hope that one day computer literacy will be as widely spread as regular literacy. We'll see if I live long enough. (Probably won't).
> Chromebooks are, by far, the best computer security model I've seen.
Did you hear about Qubes OS and Heads software?
There is a major trade-off between convenience and security. Qubes is likely significantly more secure, but it is far, and I mean FAR less convenient.
Not a bad thing at all, I feel both have their place but they aren't comparable. Also you pretty much can't (shouldn't is more correct but when you do, you will feel it is closer to can't) run Qubes on the kind of low-end hardware many chromebooks ship with.
> except video which I don't watch. Content is vertical. A 3:2 screen makes for an amazing laptop shape that is very well suited to the way humans view content, especially on the web.
You say humans, but you mean you and the other 3 people that “don’t watch video”.
> I've done computer security stuff for a while. Chromebooks are, by far, the best computer security model I've seen.
How can you talk about security if there is spyware on every Chromebook? I mean Google Chrome. Everything you do is recorded on Google servers, not only that but Chrome doesn't integrate any anti tracking protections like other browsers do (even Chromium based ones like Microsoft Edge), because it's the interest of Google to track the users. Not only that, but Google Chrome has a lot more security vulnerabilities than the competitors. I wouldn't say it's secure, and I would never do something on a Chromebook or in general in a Chrome browser, since it's like giving the access to Google itself.
Regarding the operating system, how can you trust more a system from Google than a system you build yourself? If you are paranoid you can buy a machine that supports Coreboot and even run your own trusted BIOS. If you don't want to take this seriously, you can setup your secure boot by creating your own keys, installing them in the firmware, and signing the kernel that you compile yourself. I don't know why you would have to be that paranoid but whatever, to me when I have an encrypted hard drive and my computer stays in my bag is more than enough.
> Almost everything can be done on the web today
You can't do programming in the browser, you can't do graphics, video editing, 3d modelling, you can't connect to a remote computer with RDP from a browser, you can't even have a full office suite in the browser (Office 365 in the browser, Google Docs, etc are limited), you can't play big games in the browser, you can't connect to a VPN from a browser, a webmail it's worse than using a desktop email client, you cannot have an advanced video/audio player in the browser (like VLC), etc.
Also, if internet doesn't work you are basically screwed, what do you do? Stare at the screen and play with the dinosaur game?
> How can you talk about security if there is spyware on every Chromebook? I mean Google Chrome.
I have the option, in Chrome, to decide what is synced up to "the Google cloud." Are you asserting that this doesn't work - that if I turn off history/bookmark/etc sync, that this is still pushed up? I've not SSL intercepted a Chromebook to determine it, but I believe if you tell it not to do something, it won't.
You've got a bit of a solid anti-Google screed here, but you've not bothered to actually provide any evidence in favor of it.
> * Regarding the operating system, how can you trust more a system from Google than a system you build yourself?*
Because they hire an awful lot more security conscious people than I am, who I believe know their stuff pretty darn well.
As for your list of "You can't XYZ in a browser," you can put Linux in a chroot on a Chromebook in developer mode, so most of what you claim is either false through extensions, or false through Linux dev environments.
> Also, if internet doesn't work you are basically screwed, what do you do?
Well, I keep a local Ubuntu repo at home, so...
> I have the option, in Chrome, to decide what is synced up to "the Google cloud." Are you asserting that this doesn't work - that if I turn off history/bookmark/etc sync, that this is still pushed up? I've not SSL intercepted a Chromebook to determine it, but I believe if you tell it not to do something, it won't.
How can you be sure? Chrome is a proprietary software. Even if you don't sync up with your Google account, Google collects some usage statistics and similar things. Of course you can use Chromium (and Chromium OS) that is open source and thus doesn't contain that kind of trackers, but we were talking about Chrome OS.
> Because they hire an awful lot more security conscious people than I am, who I believe know their stuff pretty darn well.
They hire them to make Google interest, not yours. Google interest is to track you and make profit with your personal data. Your interest is having a system that preserves your privacy rights.
> you can put Linux in a chroot on a Chromebook in developer mode
Yes, you can, with some limitations. But at that point, why not installing Linux as the main OS on the Chromebook with Firefox as the default browser and throw away all the Google crap?
> Well, I keep a local Ubuntu repo at home, so...
Because you reinstall your software everyday? I install all the software I need when I install the operating system and I'm done. I can work without internet fine, of course I cannot do anything that requires a connection (emails, for example), but I can do everything else.
With browser based software if you don't have a connection you can't do anything. We evolved from the idea of mainframes to the personal computer, and then we are going back to mainframes with all the disadvantages that they have.
> how can you trust more a system from Google than a system you build yourself?
You have never built a system yourself. Neither has Google, for that matter, but they've gotten closer than you. The amount of code that runs on the average modern computer is probably too much to be read in a lifetime.
> You can't do programming in the browser
But you can on a Chromebook because you can use the Linux underneath.
> Also, if internet doesn't work you are basically screwed, what do you do? Stare at the screen and play with the dinosaur game?
You use the apps you have installed. I don't actually have a chromebook, but try to argue in good faith
> You have never built a system yourself. Neither has Google, for that matter, but they've gotten closer than you. The amount of code that runs on the average modern computer is probably too much to be read in a lifetime.
When I say built a system obviously I don't mean writing the code. But deciding what programs install and how to configure them to build a system customized for your needs, secure and optimized. In fact Chrome OS is based on Gentoo Linux if I recall correctly, I installed Gentoo Linux a lot of times in the past.
> But you can on a Chromebook because you can use the Linux underneath.
But you aren't doing it in the browser. Running Linux inside Chrome OS has some limitations anyway.
> You use the apps you have installed.
On Chromebooks you cannot install applications locally. Unless you use a Linux Chroot, that is something advanced that most user don't do (and I would argue what is the point, just install Linux as the main operating system at this point). You are supposed to use only web applications, like Google Docs, that will not work without a connection available.
Also typically Chromebooks have little SSD space, because you are supposed to keep all your stuff in the cloud. Of course if you don't have internet the cloud doesn't work. I prefer having all my data locally on my computer, so I can access my files without needing a constant connection (and internet connections seems to know when you need them and decides to stop working exactly at that moment).
It’s an Acer spin 13 and not a Samsung, but the 16G price seems to be in the same 700$ range.
For the Macbook Air, the 16G version starts at 1079$ with education discount so roughly 1.5 more expensive (they explicitely choose the 16G version of the ACER, so the RAM shouldn’t be ignored IMO)
The thinkpad X13 at 16G of RAM is around 1380$ on amazon [0], so twice as much.
I don’t know the Acer spin 13, but if the screen is as good as Samsung’s one, it is well worth the price, especially as you usually get more battery life, and the chrome OS + android + linux mix is actually good. There are still rough edges, but the good parts largely outweigh those.
[0](https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-20T2003YUS-13-3-Noteb...)
Oops, Acer, correct (that was also the price I looked up), thanks for the correction.
The 16 GB version of the Macbook Air is more expensive, but I wonder how much more RAM a Chromebook needs for similar tasks since most of the software runs in Chrome instead of native?
I don't know US Thinkpad prices in detail, but you can buy the 16 GB RAM/512 GB SSD Thinkpad X13 AMD (no OS) for 1025 Eur (edu discount) including 19% VAT in Germany (https://www.lapstars.de/thinkpad-campus/x-serie-campus/x13-a...). This makes 861 Eur before tax (US$1042 at current conversion rates).
Of course, in the end it's all a matter of taste and use case and I'm happy to see more variety in the personal computing market.
For the RAM use, I also think a 8Gb M1 MBA would be fine for most people, including the OP if they stay within the confine of the OS.
Now, in CS we're one of the edge cases where booting VMs and parallel systems is part of the deal. In the Chromebook configuration it's actually 3 systems running at the same time so more RAM has a direct impact on performance.
(point taken on the Thinkpad price, I also think if we settle on a refurbished Chromebook, we could so the same for the Thinkpad and perhaps get it a bit lower)
The increased complexity and possibly missing familiarity with the system running inside the VM has led me to abandon VMs for the OS and compiler construction courses I teach. Instead, we make sure that all programming exercises work on Linux, MacOS and WSL.
My OS course covers operating systems from a system call perspective (POSIX, processes, synchronization and the usual things), but doesn't include kernel/device driver development, so we only had to cope with small differences in syscall behavior here.
Supporting Linux/WSL and macOS was a bit more problematic for the compiler backend exercise due to subtle differences in the supported assembler syntax and linker behavior between Linux and macOS as well as some students who might already own an M1 Mac.
Luckily, Rosetta happily executes the x86 binaries my students created using the macOS x86 crossassembler and -linker, so that turned out to be not a problem (I was hoping that a student would build an Aarch64 backend, but that didn't happen). None of my students seems to own a Pinebook or MNT Reform, so Linux/Arm was not a problem this year.
As a web application engineer, I've been very happy with my Acer Spin 13 8GB version.
I hit the RAM ceiling too frequently to regularly use the Linux VM on this device for work. But then I discovered I could run code-server (https://github.com/cdr/code-server) on my Manjaro desktop gaming PC and it's become a perfect match. I get VSCode in-browser of ChromeOS on a cheap light thin client with a great touchpad and 3:2 screen. The battery lasts forever since I'm not running anything intensive directly on it. And I get more compute resources than any laptop could offer. A bit surprised I don't read more people taking this path.
3:2 aspect ratio screens are amazing for productivity, and sadly very rare outside top end chromebooks
Chromebooks are just polished Gentoo linux machines too that don't have nightmare headaches of driver incompatiblity issues. A M1 macbook would have to run linux in a VM (even docker containers) and deal with the overhead/tax of that issue. A chromebook will just run chroot/container stuff against the native kernel with very little overhead and maximum access to the machine's available memory.
For a lot of use cases there's no need to boot a Linux VM, since you have a perfectly fine Unix already (though you have to fiddle with the security settings so macOS Big Sur becomes less annoying). Of course, it's a matter of taste and use case if you prefer one of the Linux package managers to homebrew or MacPorts. I use Macports, which still has some problems with more exotic packages on the M1, but in general seems to be running fairly well. But then, I'm used to compile my own software (such as exotic cross-compilers) and fix compilation problems when I need it.
Docker containers are problematic, of course, and I often wondered why macOS never implemented functionality similar to FreeBSD Jails or Solaris Zones. I see both as superior approaches compared to Docker, especially if you can combine them with ZFS.
The overhead for running VMs on a M1 Mac seems to be pretty reasonable, though, at least when you buy the 16 GB RAM version (though I also think it's overkill for something like Docker). Apple's hypervisor framework seems to work well and provides standard VirtIO devices to the guest OS, so many popular guest OSes that run on other virtualization solutions should be easy to adapt. The limited RAM expansion capabilities of the M1 Macs is probably the most problematic thing for these use cases.
I bought the original Chromebook Pixel when it was new for something like $1.3k. At the time, I believed this the best way to get a slim laptop with a high resolution screen and good linux support. Debian did run well on it, as I expected, but I soon came to regret the purchase and will never buy hardware from Google again.
EDIT:
It lost audio about 3 or 4 months after it was out of warranty, both out of the speakers and headphone jack. Left speaker failed first, then the right, then the headphone jack. I can only assume it was some sort of hardware fault, since sound no longer worked in ChromeOS either (and HDMI audio continued working in both). But good fucking luck getting such a thing fixed on a product like that from a company like that. Now I have a Dell XPS with a 1080p screen, which is good enough, particularly considering Dell has a much better reputation for support/repairs.
My chromebook pixel from 2013 stopped receiving OS updates a few years ago.
My MacBook Pro from 2012 still receives updates and works a charm.
Why did you regret the purchase?
My edit includes some details. Basically, the warranty was too short and when audio (except HDMI out) broke, I couldn't get it fixed.
There was also the matter of the secure boot nonsense, where if you press the wrong key on boot, secure mode would be re-enabled. With secure boot re-enabled, the only image that would boot would be a ChromeOS installation image, which would wipe your linux install. So you couldn't re-flip that secure boot bit without losing your linux installation. This bit me once, before I got better about regular backups..
As long as I can run Linux easily, edit/compile smallish code projects and watch Youtube smoothly CPU/GPU/RAM specs don't matter a whole lot for me when it comes to a laptop - I've got a beefy desktop at home for that (and I could remote into it from the laptop too).
However battery life, ruggedness, 3:2 display, small size etc (note: not thickness, I don't actually care about that, just the other dimensions so it easily fits in a backpack) are all features I do look for in a laptop, and Chromebooks usually have that in spades (stuff that's intended to be handed out to high school kids is probably pretty indestructible).
If Apple releases an 11" MacBook Air for a reasonable price that would be pretty compelling for me too though, knowing I do have the processing power should want it (and the very high dpi display).
So with an education discount, you can spent $200 more for half the RAM? Maybe if you need the disk space (although if it's replaceable, $200 will buy a lot of aftermarket SSD), but that's certainly not an obvious tradeoff to me.
I agree. In fact if I chose a chromebook, I'd automatically restrict the budget to $250 max even for a brand new one. For $950 or more, I wouldn't accept anything less than a performance laptop with a discrete GPU.
So the question is, can you get through the Master's program with a brand new $250 chromeook? I'd say yes- you basically need to set it up as a remote coding machine. Georgia Tech (and most other universities with decent graduate programs) provide access to educational and research computing clusters these days. Also, Google Collab is your friend, especially during the assignment deadlines when those clusters will be occupied by other students.
>I agree. In fact if I chose a chromebook, I'd automatically restrict the budget to $250 max even for a brand new one. For $950 or more, I wouldn't accept anything less than a performance laptop with a discrete GPU.
A laptop with a DGPU within that price range is mostly a NVIDIA MX-series GPU.
But you can get a good NVIDIA GPU with the Acer Nitro 5 (from 2020 and upwards) series and maybe an Ideapad gaming.
> $699 refurbished (16 GB RAM/128 GB SSD). To compare, a basic configuration Macbook Air M1 (8 GB RAM/256 GB SSD) can be bought for $899 new with education discount
This is an odd comment.
Imagine I walked up to you, asked if you were happy with your computer, you said yes, and then I proceeded to try to "sell" you on an "upgrade" to half the RAM for the same price. Now consider if we weren't talking about the same price; I'm suggesting that you spend an extra $200+ on this.
Why would anyone take that deal?
Well, my experience is that in practice, older refurb high-end Chromebooks can be had song.
Chromebooks expire, losing security updates, and buying an older model is almost always a bad deal. Figuring out expiration dates is a PITA. In practice, COVID19 shortages aside, they typically carry very low resale value.
If you're running Linux, you don't care.
A rather premium model can be had for under $200 easily. That's cheap enough that you can do things with it that you'd never do with a real laptop.
This. For a while I did the Chromebook thing and it was actually pretty nice running android apps on it along with chrome OS but just kept slamming into chrome limitations. Looked at all the hoops necessary to sideload or try linux stuff and noped out to a regular X1 carbon thinkpad. Common Linux distros on a regular laptop is so much easier.
Battery life on linux laptops are always bad. Unless you want to try a bunch of custom hacks that could break things in the future for you (when you update) in the name of saving battery...
It's the last thing that's stopped me from using linux on a laptop day to day. A macbook is far superior for mobile needs (though more pricey) and I can justify a linux desktop for my day-to-day development activities because it's plugged into the power.
Battery life depends a lot on which laptop you buy. With an old Elitebook Revolve with an Intel 5200U and a new Envy X360 with an AMD 4700U the battery life on Linux is about the same when compared to reviews on Windows. Especially the Envy has some issues with running Linux, but battery life isn't one of them.
Interesting - i haven't heard about the battery life performance of the new AMD chips and linux. I might have a go after all!
Chromebooks frequently go on crazy sales - bought my 8Gb/i5 Acer Spin 713 for less than $500. As work machine it’s perfect for me and is also disposable if something were to happen to it.
Linux support rounds out what I need, though it’s not perfect for GUI tools.
I have a hefty budget for personal computing. My current laptop cost me almost 2400USD equivalent. The only reason that's not a Pixelbook is that Chrome doesn't run real Lightroom.
Didn't Apple make it extremely difficult to boot Linux on modern Macbooks?
Whether or not a chromebook is adequate for cash-strapped students in my painful experience depends on whether or not your model has soldered RAM.
Doing research in school will likely have you opening a lot of browser tabs. Running Firefox on a non-ChromeOS Linux install is going to eat up more than the measly amount of soldered RAM that cheap Chromebooks offer.[0]
I used Acer Chromebooks in college and very much came to regret this aspect whenever my machine slowed to a crawl the moment I opened an important PDF in Firefox. In hindsight, I probably should have set up zRAM on my machine, which expands the amount of RAM available by compressing it, just like ChromeOS does. However, as soon as I had money I chucked the Chromebook and bought standard a standard Acer notebook with upgradable RAM at a lower price than the fancy Chromebooks.
[0] Don't underestimate this: at the moment I have hundreds of tabs open in a saved browser session, with htop pegging Firefox at 16GB RAM utilization! It goes down when I restart the browser maybe to 5GB or so, but it also doesn't matter much when you have 32GB or more available.
I dont mean to offend, but it sounds as if the problem is your workflow rather than the device. There's no reason to keep 100+ tabs open unless you don't know how to use bookmarks/citation software/save pages offline effectively. I also find myself with many tabs open once in a while, but if I see FF above 8GB of RAM I'm not going to think the issue is the hardware.
Opening PDF in FF also always is a pain but there are plenty of lightweight readers.
Yeah. The workflow I use for serious work actually ends up using less tabs because I tend to take care of stuff. I also bookmark/tag/close the important stuff. I talked a bit about my setup a few months ago in an HN post. [0]
But just for casual browsing? I prefer to leave stuff open as a reminder to pick it back up again. My home office is also pretty messy in terms of books scattered about though, so this probably boils down to a personal preference.
Come to think of it, maybe there's an analogy between people who keep their desk neat and tidy / those who program in languages requiring manual memory allocation versus those who like to leave books open and scattered / prefer the decreased mental overhead of working in garbage collected languages. :-P
> at the moment I have hundreds of tabs open in a saved browser session
May I introduce you to the concept of bookmarking things, so you can find them later?
I don't understand why anyone should have those many tabs open. That is not practical at all, I don't believe anybody who says something different, sorry.
I'm not necessarily saying it's a good idea! Just that I would caution anyone considering running Firefox on vanilla Linux with less than 8GB of RAM. As for the 'hundreds of browser tabs' I mentioned, most of those aren't loaded anyway, and yet Firefox still eats up RAM, especially on sites like Facebook and Discord. I also whitelist Javascript using uBlock Origin, which helps some but really it's a losing battle--leaving hundreds of tabs open or not, there's no reason today to have less than 16GB of RAM on a modern PC.
It's been a while since I've looked, but last I checked, pretty much every model that was price competitive with regular notebook PCs had no more than 4GB soldered RAM, which really is unacceptable. Looking on Acer's website, the only 8GB model is $929, which is about twice as expensive as what I can get by buying one of their non-Chromebook notebooks.
> at the moment I have hundreds of tabs open in a saved browser session, with htop pegging Firefox at 16GB RAM utilization!
This must vary by available RAM or something; I can get Firefox with 2000+ tabs (lazy-loaded) to run on a machine that only has 8GB of RAM.
(Aside because someone always mentions: Yes, I know that many tabs is insane. It does work, though.)
You know what, you're right: I was looking at the VIRTual memory allocated instead of the RESident memory column in htop. RES says only 8.8GB.
Of course it's well known that linux pretty aggressively allocates virtual memory to processes so it's not surprising that the other one is so high (I have 32GB RAM and just as much swap).
I remember many many years ago taking an intro CS class and learning that the Java compiler was available on The newly released Mac OS X. I thought “Thank goodness I won’t need to use Windows” unfortunately, I never really got it to work. Some obscure errors prevented me from making progress and I wasn’t proactive enough to follow it any further.
The hardest thing about going against the grain in structured learning is that you’re giving yourself extra work - translating the instructions into whatever your toolset is, solving errors that don’t exist on the approved platforms. I wish the author the best of luck.
There's also a social aspect, where any problem that you encounter is immediately pinned on your choice of a peculiar setup, and becomes a story that gets told and repeated. You may have a professor who is suspicious that you are wasting time on what seems like a quixotic pursuit.
So you actually have to go way overboard to ensure that your stuff always works perfectly, and that nobody ever sees you trying to troubleshoot something.
Tried to upgrade to a Dell XPS 13 (9310) on sale at Costco.
Webcam wasn't connected from the factory. In a post-2020 world, this doesn't fly, and for a $1500+ device, I shouldn't need to spend hours doing firmware updates, driver updates, only to find it's a hardware fault.
Back to my Google Pixelbook, but the final software update date is a terrifying prospect [1], as is it's woefully inefficient Intel 7th generation processor (I've been spoiled by Ryzen for years).
Oh how I wish I could just build my own laptop with COTS components, like my desktops for the last 16 years.
Or, if I'm just not looking in the right place, I'd love to find something with a great display, lightweight, great typing experience, and something that won't hit 45*C+ on the keyboard deck after boot.
In another life, I might have bought into the Apple ecosystem, but I have been Android since 2009 and have already traded my soul to Google for it's scrambled attempts at a cohesive ecosystem.
[1] https://support.google.com/pixelbook/answer/9413900?hl=en
I've chosen XPS-13 because Dell supports Linux on it. I am no longer using it (Switched beack to Thinkpads because of keyboard) but I had all hardware working on it with Linux just fine: wifi, camera, sounds.
Dell is notoriously funny about QC. Weird when you’re branding yourself as high quality, huh.
Design and serviceability are nice, but coil whine and a rattly touchpad are pretty common. r/dell has some more horror stories.
My experience is that there is a major difference between their consumer and business lines. The business lines are generally pretty solid; the consumer gear is made of whatever parts were in the bins today. (Most manufacturers have the same distinction.)
AFAIK they are marketing the XPS line as business devices. That’s the line I tend to hear the stories about (and just replaced a device from with a fruit branded one).
I have always wanted a laptop I could easily work on. I remember working on my Toshiba, and it was petty straight forward, even though the internet was in its infancy. Hell--I had a Panasonic I kept running for a decade, and loved that machine.
I don't mind a heavy big laptop either. I've never understood people whom complain about the weight of their laptop, but I know most customers want light weight devices.
That said, I've been told here repairability, upgrading an existing laptops is the last thing on their mind when forking out money for a computer.
I don't get it, but they are right.
Similar experience with dell xps except touchpad froze intermittently. Had 2 engineer visits and two motherboards and no fix. Hilarious to think they want to throw hands with apple.
I didn’t know about these dates - is google just done making pixel books at some point before then? I’ve had mine for years and I can’t imagine going back to anything else.
I think the framework laptop company May interest you if you want a more customizable laptop. Still not full desktop component choice though
You may find Framework interesting: https://frame.work/
I posted this for several different reasons. I was one of the beta testers for Chrome OS and have used it exclusively for the past decade. I am always interested in how it continues to improve. Secondly, the terminal Debian is a dream come true for me. It is the best CLI I have ever enjoyed. It is also well integrated with the OS. Lastly, while I know that Chrome OS has made many inroads into public education, I had no idea it might be applicable for something like an MA in a technical degree...
The performance of running Linux in a container on a VM is noticeably bad, even on a Google Pixel with Core i7 and 16 GB of RAM.
It works okay for most tasks, but is laggy when running JetBrains IDEs compared to bare metal Linux distros.
Edit: Chromebooks are nice in terms of laptop hardware support compared to some hardware / Linux distros I have used over the years. No issues with suspend / resume, printers and scanners work, great touchscreen and Android tablet functionality.
Some tasks that require more direct access to the hardware (e.g. device drivers used to read lab instrument hardware, debugging devices over USB, etc.) might not work as well (or work at all) due to the Linux VM and container sandboxing.
That dude doesn't have a real chromebook.
Try 32GB HDD, 4 GB RAM, 1.6 GHz CPU.
Been using it for light web dev. It's a disaster.
Yeah, that's what a chromebook is. The machine in the article was $1000 MSRP. An M1 Macbook Air is the same price, and $900 with education pricing.
This. I did not even realize OP was talking about a $1000 chromebook.
It wasn't even that long ago that you could get a computer science degree without even owning a computer.
I graduated in 2017 in Computer Science using a Thinkpad x210 that cost me £50 (~70$). And never had a issue. I haven't used a chromebook in a while but back then they where less powerful than a x210. Nowadays, if I have to recommend a laptop for coding or CS course I would recommend whichever Thinkpad X-series you can afford.
if ram is required DDR2 or DDR3 sodimm ram is cheap. And any SSD for storage works (I used the HDD that came with it until the 3rd year where I got a Samsung Evo SSD).
> without splurging on a new computer costing $1,500, $2,000, or more.
Well, just buy a used ThinkPad (or whatever business machine) then. My T460 cost me 200 Euro and will probably be good for two or three more years.
Then I'll buy the next used one for the same price and will be happy for four more years...
200 Euros buys you a very old and low end Thinkpad right now, at least in Europe, that's a slouch when dealing with modern web apps.
Sure, it's probably fine for running linux and coding in vim but on the modern web and electron apps it shows its age.
Unless you're cash strapped, I'd much rather spend 500-800 Euros and get a machine with a modern Ryzen or Tiger-Lake chip that makes a much more usable experience for a variety of tasks.
You're right, maybe I made a good deal, also by buying from a private seller. But for 100 or 200 Euro more, you should be fine, according to this list: https://www.thinkpad-gebrauchtpreisliste.de/
And is performance really better with that Chromebook?
Was helping a friend look for a sub $300 PC for their sibling abroad and could not find anything reputable that wasn't like a 2c/2t 4th or even 3rd gen Intel part. And those listed with an SSD did not have one, based on reviews.
I tried using a chromebook for general development and it was not a pleasant or efficient experience.
My goal was to compile and write something using Python and OpenCV, a computer vision library. While one can indeed run Linux apps, the vast majority of what I needed was not pre-compiled. Compiling led to issues with having to compile parts of the toolchain, which went up a couple levels of recursion. Compile some library so you can compile some other library so you can compile a program to compile some thing that she used to compile some package. Then library conflicts, and so forth. I haven’t needed to do this since about 2004. Plus, then waiting for a Chromebook to compile large packages can take all day.
There’s no way I’d try this again versus just getting a normal laptop and installing Linux.
Why not install Linux on your Chromebook?
The chromebook I had was not intel based, which complicates things along similar lines. From what I recall I wasn't able to install actual linux for some reason. Most likely compilation would be required at some point (and starting the JVM) and this machine was rather slow for such tasks, regardless of OS.
I have a MSc in computer science and used the university workstations and saved my work on a 128MB USB stick for a very long time before my parents helped me buy a laptop.
I'm toying with the idea of getting a chromebook for my day job (software development). I already use the vscode ssh [1] plugin, so that my IDE runs on a remote server which has been a great experience. For Jupyter notebook type tasks, Google's collab sheets [2] run on a remote server (there's a bit to be desired of course). I even use Genymotion in the cloud [3] such that my android APKs are run on the cloud and rendered through a browser emulator. At this point I'm 85% of the way there, and can't wait for the day where no serious computation needs to be done locally.
[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh [2] https://colab.research.google.com/?utm_source=scs-index [3] https://cloud.geny.io/
I don't get the appeal of taking local task metadata, executing on a remote machine and then consuming results locally.
I can imagine this for a collaborative task, but not much else.
Local computation has always led teams I've worked in to a superior (personalized, decentralized, fault tolerant, highly parallel) mode of operation.
My tryst with working with remote computation ended when the 5 VMs we were using as a team for development were locked out and decommissioned without a notice due to a devops error. Thankfully, I did have local equivalents, which I habitually worked on and copied over to the VM for execution, not so much for my team members.
To each his own. In my work, standardizing environments is a point of frustration to the extent that it's better for us to figure out the environment once remotely than for every OS locally.
I've really wanted to move into this direction too. What's the remaining 15%?
I haven't really figured out MacOS specific stuff, especially Xcode related (though apparently AWS has OSX EC2 instances). Also with Genymotion, you don't get the same live-reload experience as you do locally so it's better to suck it up and listen to your fans sometimes
What a waste of time. Just get a refurbished Thinkpad for less than the price of a Chromebook and focus on the actual course content instead.
I actually learned web development on a Chromebook running Linux, originally with Chrouton, later with GalliumOS. The Chromebook is around 7 years old and still runs pretty well. There's a lot you can't do, but it has no problem spinning up a Rails or Node server.
Now I mainly use it for GCompris for my kids.
Some OMSCS classes require certain proctoring software that may not work on Linux or ChromeOS. Please make sure you have an alternative ready to go as course staff do not make accomodations for this.
(source OMSCS grad, seen this happen to others)
You're absolutely right. My main driver is a Linux machine which isn't compatible with Honorlock. I'm very lucky to have inherited another laptop that is compatible.
How long did it take you to go through the program? Any advice / regrets?
Maybe. It depends on the classes you choose. Some OMSCS classes require VMs, and at least one uses Windows.
Chrome OS is built around VMs, so depending on the reason for that requirement, it might be fine.
You don't get to run your own VMs on ChromeOS.
Nested virtualization is supported, and you can just use KVM directly in developer mode.
It does seem a rather unnecessarily complicated task given much cheaper second hand/refurbished units could be picked up on eBay and happily run a Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu Linux.
as an alumni of OMSCS here are a few things I want to say:
1. exams can be taken on a chromebook now (you couldn’t until a year ago) so that part should be covered.
2. more ram is good because classes will give you a VM so you can buils it locally and test it in a VM (what almost everyone in class would do)
3. unfortunately some VMs only work well in a windows virtual box environment . and that’s where I think you might run into problems. the thing is the TA will automate his tests for grading. So if the testing on your end was not done correctly (like let’s say locally instead of the VM provided or the environment suggested) then you will fail the grading tests. So be very careful there.
4. You might want to automate things yourself to get things done faster. In that case you may want to run multiple instances of the VMs provided.
My MBP was broken so i ended up using a desktop for completing the whole thing which was a mistake because it was too inconvenient especially during tests. however many students were able to finish the course with a 200$ thinkpad so it’s doable. But then there were those who also had a powerful ryzen desktop for classwork with dual monitors and a laptop for test. So i guess it all depends on your comfort level with your setup.
I can only remember two courses in my CS Master's program that had any actual programming whatsoever, mostly it was manual algorithms, proofs, and theory.
If you are spending more that 50% of your time in Linux emulation mode under ChromeOS you'd better off running Linux natively.
Pretty soon you could get through it with an unmodified iPad...
https://www.andreafortuna.org/2021/03/13/coding-on-ipad-pro-...
Not sure when it's going to be out of beta.
Remote development machines aren't for everyone and availability will always be an issue.
I remember as a student trying to debug an issue on a train. I would have been so frustrated if the internet connection to my remote machine was impeding my ability to think through a debugging scenario.
I've been waiting on the beta list for almost a year I think and haven't heard anything.
One solution I've seen is to carry a Raspberry Pi, especially a Zero, and connect to that from the iPad via WiFi or USB-C. Can even VNC to it for a full desktop experience. Pretty portable and low-power.
Linux on Chromebooks is Debian buster running in an LXD container. Being LXD there's no reason why you're limited to just one container either. I don't like to mess around with the default "penguin" container too much so I've added more. I've currently added centos7, centos8, ubuntu and another debian container. Plus you can take LXD snapshots, rollback, publish images etc.
Hint: Add a Ubuntu container and install LXD, then copy the lxc binary to your "penguin" container and setup a trust between it at the Chrome OS "termina" hypervisor. Then you can manage all your containers from the default linux install.
I have a Pixelbook Go with 8GB of ram and a 128GB drive.
OpenCV takes a few megabyte of storage. Opening a few images for pixel access, meaning you have an uncompressed copy in memory, can quickly bring any system down. Same problem with Matlab.
Not really sure, but there are probably precompiled modules of OpenCV for popular distros.
I think a Chromebook would work if you are indeed able to install Linux. But I don't really get why people studying computer science don't have a dedicated machine for that.
> on a new computer costing $1,500, $2,000, or more
I don't know current prices, but you get an Intel Nuc for < 150$. Add a monitor to that... Even on a cost basis, I don't think Chromebooks can compete and I would not recommend them for learning overall.
Do CS students not ssh into the computer lab these days? A Chromebook is more than enough. I was able to get Android Studio running on mine. I'm pretty sure most of the JetBrains suite would run as well if you need an IDE.
I don't understand what the issue is here. OP is using a Linux laptop to get a CS degree? I did that 10 years ago with less compute resources. At this point I would assume that a majority of CS students are using laptops (with a significant amount on a tighter budget). In my experience at 2 Universities, compute resources are supplied to complete the required course work (cloud or lab).
I wrote my master thesis some time ago on a Samsung Chromebook equipped with an ARM CPU. Back then it was the perfect machine for me: fanless / silent, cheap and it ran Linux and i3wm after 10 minutes of setup. Even the keyboard was ok. Had no problems with Latex, just some minor hiccups with software not compiled for ARM that should be resolved by now.
As for GPU (ML/DL) intensive classes or projects, using google colab worked just fine - at least if you're going to write in Python. Also, schools tend to have their own dedicated machines with good GPU power - you could always just SSH into these and let them do the heavy lifting.
I got through my BS in CS without more than crouton. It was good that it forced me to
* be judicious and focussed with my lab time when I needed to use an IDE for Java or such, and
* get real comfortable with SSHing to the school's server and operating remotely on the command line real early
Fun story, though: Up until internship money allowed me to replace it (with another chromebook!) for my senior year, the chromebook I was using would crash if I had more than ~5 tabs open. Good times!
>Use the Chromebook for the 90% that I think I can use it for and use virtual machines in the Georgia Tech Computing Center.
Most universities also have some sort of high performance computing cluster available, so you're not limited to just a simple VM.
I got my CS master's degree from a university that came from a math tradition (rather than from an engineering one). There was only one class in all of my studies where a computer was needed at all, the rest was all theorems and proofs.
I did a degree in computer science from one of the top universities in the world. When I started, it was recommended that we not bring a computer at all.
I'm not sure why this is a big deal. Why would you need a powerful computer to study computer science? If any of the courses involve huge computations then I expect the university would have a supercomputer of sorts they can use.
What is the exact point? Is Chromebooks a pretty good choice, or not bad as expected?
I wrote my master thesis on Acer C720 (2013) running xfce. I used some octave but I mostly needed it for latex. These days I don't use it anymore because the screen is not that great but it aged incredibly well.
Has anyone had success running Arch Linux on Chromebook?
You might not even need an egpu if you are using google collab which provides much faster gpus for free.
Does anyone know the knowledge graph visualization tool that they're using?
Looks like the Graph View in RoamResearch.
System 76 engineers: for your upcoming ultralight, please make a 3:2 screen!
any computer should do, no?
I started my degree in 1997 using a PC with a 66MHz CPU and a dial up modem. Why should a Chromebook not be sufficient?
+1 to Chromebooks, though I was never much interested in Gallium
I picked up one of the original Acer C720's back in 2013. Anemic 2c1t (dual core) Celeron at 1.2 Ghz and 2GB of memory. But Gentoo on it with XFCE was incredibly nippy. Add a processor optimized Firefox at the time and it was an extremely good tiny laptop
A year or so later I upgraded to its "big brother" the core i3 variant (2c2t, quad core) with 4GB of RAM. Same experience. Extremely happy with both machines
Eventually as the Chrome browser started to eclipse things though I moved to Dell's Chromebook 13 "Lulu" with a beastly Broadwell i5 quad core and 8GB (soldered) RAM
The biggest draw for me is these were the first Linux machines I'd used where everything didn't "just work" or "it works okay but you can tweak XYZ" it worked in the sense it was explicitly designed __to run Linux__
For all the flak Google deservedly gets, the decision to enforce a "no binary blobs, everything must be upstreamed to mainline Linux" kernel and Coreboot (BIOS) as well as making "jailbreaking" the thing with a permanent firmware flash as simple as removing a hardware screw was commendable
These days I'm stuck using an MSI Modern 14, which while "okay" is nowhere near as delightful as the Chromebooks were previously
Chromebooks generally run Linux well, no need for a specialized distro post 2016 or so. De-chrome by installing mr. chromebox firmware and xubuntu (or distro of your choice) and you're set. I still use my acer c720 as a daily driver today.
It’s started to change unfortunately, for example audio doesn’t really work on skylake or kabylake chromebooks yet. They are moving to more custom hardware.
The design of the Intel audio stuff in the Skylake systems is pretty horrid. Previously things had HD Audio hardware which was at least sufficiently self describing to be able to attach a general driver. The new stuff depends on this topology file which you have to pull out of your hat -- there's no reason it can't be open source as far as I can tell, but it's maddeningly not something the hardware itself can provide to you. It's not an improvement.
Last time I looked (a long time ago) there were some issues with running Linux on Chromebooks, like having to press some combination of keys at each boot and/or risking to erase everything if the wrong combination of keys was pressed (if I remember correctly). Does this mrchomebook firmware fix this kind of problems?
Perhaps the situation has changed recently, but a few years ago I had an acer c720 and remember this being mitigated by flashing seabios. This completely removed chromeos rather than dual booting, but it worked excellently for taking to lectures early in my undergrad.
I have massive respect for Google's work in this area as well. They released awesome laptops with open firmware and Linux support. I wish they could use their power to improve the mobile Linux drivers situation. Just straight up require that hardware companies upstream their drivers to the Linux kernel.
I have one that's been running Gallium since ~2018.. Asus C202SA. It works like a charm.
I update coreboot every once in a while, as it gets regular updates.
Just a note for anyone that's going to try it: you will have to open up your chromebook and search for the write-protection screw in order to flash your bios (most models are like this). It is a google search away to find where your motherboard's screw is located, as not all boards are labelled. Another thing to to note is that, as long as you don't brick your device somehow, everything is reversible. You can reinstalled the original bios/bootloader, reinstall ChromeOS and put the write protection screw back in and all is well again. Other than that, just follow all instructions for Gallium & coreboot exactly and it will work fine.
Gallium is basically Ubuntu + xfce + mods for keyboard & performance tweaks.
> Just a note for anyone that's going to try it: you will have to open up your Chromebook and search for the write-protection screw in order to flash your bios (most models are like this)
This is an optional step btw. I haven't done this on mine.
If you do the screw modification it allows a specific setting to be persisted so you don't lose it when the battery drains. If you don't do the screw modification then you'll need to set a specific setting every time your battery fully drains to 0% (technically beyond 0% where it's 100% tapped out and not just reporting 0%).
Out of the ~5 years I've had this I only had to do the process a few times.
It's not a big deal if it drains. The blog post I linked covers the process. It only requires logging into the terminal and running `sudo crossystem dev_boot_legacy=1` on the boot screen. End to end it takes about a minute each time where most of that time is Googling my own blog post to find the exact command, the command itself finishes immediately.
IIRC, if you don't remove the write protection screw you'll need to press a key combination at each boot or the hardware will factory reset.
There's a few things going on with that screw AFAIK.
Before you go down the GalliumOS route you can choose between dual booting with a menu or booting straight into it. I went with the dual boot approach because I still wanted the ability to boot into ChromeOS in case something crazy happened with GalliumOS. In most cases this translates to turning on the Chromebook and hitting CTRL+L which boots you into GalliumOS, as opposed to hitting CTRL+D to boot into ChromeOS. It's a 2 second process to pick the OS to boot from and that's all you have to do.
But going back to the screw, it controls at least these 2 things:
1. sudo crossystem dev_boot_legacy=1 is a command that lets you boot something other than ChromeOS. This setting needs to be persisted somewhere. The screw lets it get written to your BIOS so it never gets lost. If you don't modify the screw it gets lost when your battery is 100% tapped out, but if that's the case all you have to do is drop into a terminal when you turn your Chromebook on and run the command again and you're good to go, nothing gets wiped. This only happens if the battery is fully fully drained.
2. If you decided not to dual boot you need to modify the screw to directly boot into GalliumOS.
There's also a loud sound that plays on boot up. I removed write protection on mine just so I could boot it up after my partner fell asleep without having to leave the room.
Is that worth the hassle when PC-compatible hardware with similar specs is widely available and just as cheap?
Nope.
In hindsight, I wouldn't do it again. Reasons:
Storage is a problem for most chromebooks and the memory chip is soldered onto the board, so cannot upgrade it.
I bought an expensive MicroSD card at the time that is 128GB and can do 100/60 read/write... but the memory card reader seems to be soldered to a Usb 2 header.. thus it tops out at 30mb/s.
The updates to the OS and packages delivered via apt is basically very far behind, and many packages get held back. Kernel stays old too. I'm used to Fedora so it is really itching me that it is so far behind.
Keyboard is not standard: No delete button, no windows key, no function keys. This is a big problem for me and I didn't check the keyboard before I bought it.
A better machine to run linux on in the same manner, is the Lenovo Ideapad (S130-11IGM), it is also a celeron, a 11" screen and supports windows/linux out of the box with a normal bootloader and drivers.
Other than that, a 2017 13" Macbook Air with Fedora also works great.
What I really want is an 11" laptop with a Ryzen 3 without an active cooler (silent machine) + nvme slot + 2 ram slots + backlit keyboard. I don't want anything soldered except the cpu. Display can be 720p or 1080p.
I primarily did it to scratch an itch. At the time I was distro hopping a lot and tried to make linux work everywhere I could. I've since settled on Fedora and stopped trying to hack things together which weren't made for each other as it is time consuming and doesn't really serve a purpose. Fedora gives me a good balance between new versions of software while also being very stable and simple. Everything just works.
Yup, agree. Cannot stand the Ubuntu Desktop variant at all. It always manages to break itself after updates and when you install it, it come preloaded with a ton of stuff I don't want. If I want to spend 2 hours uninstalling things I'd go install Windows 10.
On Fedora I just uninstall a handful of things after a clean install: gnome-software, cups, libre office, maps/calendar, webcam app.
Other than that I agree that Fedora is the hidden gem of all the distro's in my mind. I don't have to babysit it, it gets regular updates (1 to 4 weeks behind any release, where arch is a week or less), I can make it pretty and configure it how I want it and basically everything I use to work and be productive works on it. Once you use it for about 6 months and get used to it, everything else feels crappy and over complicated (incl macos, windows, xfce, kde). The only OS that I've managed to get cleaner and simpler than Fedora is a debloated android that uses only google software (bare minimum of them, phone, messages, gmail, clock, calendar, calc) but the problem is I cannot install arbitrary packages on it nor have official root, so the nature of that ecosystem/walled garden makes me resent that "distro" in a way.
This is the exact machine setup I used for my first job as a professional developer. It was a contracting position and the unemployment from my barista gig had run out some months prior, so I was running on fumes. For $350, the amount of value I got out of it is staggering. While I unfortunately spilled water on it and broke the keyboard some years ago, it will always hold a dear place in my heart.
I'm a currently-on-unemployment former barista with years of hobby and freelance coding experience, I've spent much of my time on unemployment getting professional certifications and doing some bigger learning projects. I'm interviewing non-stop these days trying to land that entry level junior engineer role now, and it gives me heart to see other food service refugees have made it. I've passed every coding challenge I've been given but seem to get ghosted when employers learn my most recent gig was hustling my ass off pulling espresso shots just to survive. Back on topic, I didn't go the Chromebook route, instead I got a ten year old HP Elitebook at a second hand shop, added an SSD and maxed out its memory, and I couldn't be happier! I spent less than $300 and it's easily my favorite laptop I've ever owned.
Re the interviews, do you have any side projects you can show? An app you built for fun, a local business/groups website you built? Focus on that if you can - show how you can complete projects.
This. As an employer, scouting for talent, a well-rounded web project I can play with is miles ahead en terms of engagemnt with your profile
I highly suggest going the consultancy route. You will get exposed to a large breadth of technology and projects very quickly. In my first year, I wrote JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Golang and a little Python.
Just stay thirsty and keep going. Once you get a foot in the door, you are going to be a rising star. The work ethic and discipline of the service industry is like a super power in the tech world.
Hello,
I went to your website, and noticed you don't list those certifications and bigger projects there. You should also tell there what kind job you are looking for, otherwise I doubt anyone is going to click on "wants to hire me", since it's pretty hard to guess what you want to do.
Anyway, good luck for the job hunting!
It's not because it exists that is visible. Guide me!
Heh heh, I came to say the same - my first professional development job was on an Acer C720 for which I had barely enough money to buy from my restaurant job.
I feel like with new ARM laptops like the Samsung Galaxy Book Go ($349) the advantages of running Linux on a Chromebook (mainly insanely good battery life) are quickly disappearing.
I don't actually have the Galaxy Book Go but I'm considering it, pending reports of people actually installing Ubuntu on it.
Unfortunately, GalliumOS / Generic Linux doesn't work on many newer Chromebooks due to not supporting the CR50 EC. My Apollo Lake (circa 2017) Chromebook, for example, doesnt work.
i have one of these with gallium as well -- cannot recommend it highly enough, though i wish the memory weren't soldered in. daily driver for normal web stuff for six or seven years now.
I bought Toshiba Chromebooks (the 2014 variant, which lacks the backlit keyboard but is pretty much otherwise identical to the 2015) for my kids. Two of them have moved onto MacBooks but the youngest chugs along with his Chromebook. I was able to find them online for $85 - $135 over the years. The screens were fairly easy to replace and cost about $45.
I also recommended one to my brother-in-law and he totes it on trips. The trackpad stopped working so he uses an external mouse. They're terrific as a travel laptop: plug the SD card into the slot, upload your photos to Google Photos, and don't worry about what happens to your photos if your camera is stolen or whatever. And at that price it's much less painful than if your MacBook Pro is stolen. Plus the 1080P resolution on 13" screen is better than most options for a lot more money.
+1 to the Toshiba CB-35 Chromebook. It is an excellent laptop fr running Linux, although a bit outdated at this point. If I hadn't shattered mine's screen in a bike crash, I probably would still be using it today.
Not sure what the best Chromebook is for running Linux, but appreciate the OP's suggestions.
Every HN thread has to have a comment like this... Look at me, my ancient machine can (barely) get stuff done. But I can't wrap my head around this... why torment yourself like this. Who pays for the lost productivity with these shenanigans? Do you value your time so little? If freelance, do you pass it on to your customers? If job, does nobody notice that you're taking ages getting stuff done? My hourly rate is nearly minimum wage but I have a $5K PC build and the latest MBP. I can't imagine even using a web browser with 4GB RAM. Virtual machines? Android Emulator?? Compiling a Java application?? How...
What makes you assume there is a lost productivity? I couldn't find any reference from the post. Besides, it is also stated that it serves as mobile option as the main computer is a desktop.
I am also amused that you feel that $5k build is more productive. Productivity is not mostly a function of the system but the user
Often depends on the workload. My work requires compiling the kernel regularly (among other things) and 5 minutes saved over 12 compilations in one day is an entire hour saved. Made up numbers, and in the case of a lot of other code I touch it makes even more of a difference. On the other hand, I ssh into a work desktop from a work laptop, so a Chromebook with an SSD would probably still be useful if I could get over the lost screen real estate and low quality keyboards
I primarily have a desktop where I do most of my work (that was mentioned in the post you're replying to), but I'll bite just so folks who might be on the fence about the Chromebook have something to reference.
I primarily work with Flask, Rails and Phoenix and most apps I build use Webpack too. I don't have to run an Android simulator or Java apps because I don't use those technologies.
With this Chromebook, any multi-service Docker app (web + worker + db + cache + Webpack) can go from not running to accepting web requests in about 5-7 seconds after running a docker-compose up. Every time I make a code change, the code base reloads in 100ms or less so the dev loop is extremely fast. With Tailwind's JIT and Webpack caching to disk even asset changes are fast (100-300ms in most projects).
The machine is great for certain types of programming and browsing the internet.
My main workstation is an i5 3.2ghz with 16GB of memory and an SSD with a 2560x1440 monitor. It's approaching 7 years old and I paid around $850 for it at the time of building it (+$350 for the monitor at a later time). I still use it today and while it has more resources available it's not that much faster than the Chromebook, I can just run more things at once. Starting up my web apps with Docker happen in 3-5 seconds but I still get the same < 100ms reloads for code changes.
I also happen to run WSL 2 within Windows which is where I spend 99% of my time. I also do video recording and editing on this machine and there's no skipping or slowdowns for editing 1080p video. I can also run OBS to record everything while developing normally and it's a non-issue.
The reality of the situation is nowadays unless you're doing something very CPU bound, a mid-grade machine with an SSD can be quite efficient for lots of types of web development. I choose not to upgrade because there's no practical incentive. With 16GB of memory I can run my usual dev workload with a 2 node Kubernetes cluster and a separate VM and not feel any slowdowns while developing.
This is all while having a bunch of tabs open, image editors, mp3 player and everything else you'd expect while working -- even while screen recording my desktop to make tech videos. I made a video about this once around the topic of "is 16GB of memory enough for web development?" at: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/for-the-time-being-16gb-of-ra...
Personally I've ordered a new thinkpad but it's slated to come in 3 months, with the delivery date extended once already. I went to Target and bought some lowend (slightly higher than chromebook) laptop and ubuntu is running fine on it. Of course I can't do anything too memory intensive, but regular dev work is decent for a <500 dollar machine.
If your hourly rate is nearly minimum wage but you have a $5K PC build and the latest MBP, something tells me you have put the cart before the horse.