Wouldn't this be useless as a primary machine with their <64GB hard disks and no Google Drive support ? Anyone care to share their experience with this as their primary laptop ?
-It only has 4GB of RAM, but that's been enough up to now. Most builds are I/O bound anyway, and the SSD is fast.
-I don't use an external monitor, as the high pixel density of the screen more than makes up for the small size.
-The 64GB can be limiting, but in some ways its been beneficial, as its forced me to actually pay attention to backups.
-These days, if I have a long-running/high-resource process, I just spin up a VPS and run it there.
I think Google was pretty prescient with the Pixel laptops. When this one isn't enough, I'll be upgrading to the 2015 model.
What's your experience?
If you're on the fence about going native, you should do what I do: install arch on an SD card and boot from that. Good SD cards these days are plenty fast too, and if you like the native system, you can keep using it from the SD card, or use it to install Arch on the SSD. Just make sure you get an SD card with TRIM, and it'll work fine for long-term use.
I have a acer c720 with arch installed alongside chromeos on a $50 128GB ssd: http://www.amazon.com/MyDigitalSSD-Super-Cache-Solid-State/d...
All together I spent $150 for a surprisingly performant on the go machine. The battery life is pretty great as well.
http://www.amazon.com/PNY-Elite-Performance-256GB-Speed/dp/B...)
There are still a few hiccups with hibernation. Using a tiling WM meant I needed to remap all of the chrome keys to get stuff like brightness and volume working.
I got it refurbished for £120 (~$170) before I set off backpacking in Asia and it's been the perfect laptop. Lightweight and decent battery life.
I do a lot of vector drawing and the trackpad fidelity isn't great, but that's hardly something you can ask for on such a cheap little machine.
Resources were pretty limited (dual core Celeron, 2Gb RAM, 32Gb SSD) but it ran fine for most of the things (like normal browsing, js and Python development).
Things you CAN'T do on it:
- Java. Just don't even think about it.
- the former point implies all the Java IDEs (Eclipse, Intellij)
- Android, because of disk space and everything else.
- Games.
- really small and light
- AMAZING battery life
- having so little disk space made me pay attention to my usage of it, make backups, and move on a server things I didn't really need.
However, since it's based on Ubuntu 14.04 the kernel and the software versions are a bit old.
In the next months I will switch to Arch or Nix or Void (to have more recent versions) and I may try to port Pantheon on them.