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Comment by jzymbaluk | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking at getting a new laptop this summer, and I've been leaning towards a Dell XPS 13, but this chromebook is intriguing to me. I had a an Acer c720 chromebook for a while and I had a really good experience running Chromeos and Ubuntu through Crouton. Having 16 gb of RAM is an important feature to me, and I'm disappointed the non-touch XPS 13 doesn't offer it. I'm probably also all right with having limited on-device storage because usb 3 is fast and external storage is cheap.

How capable is the Core m7? Is it hefty enough to drive a KDE desktop smoothly? What about playing light linux games like Civ 5 or Crusader Kings?

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The thing that kind of annoys me about the XPS is the location of the camera. It's in the bottom bezel of the monitor. They should have simply not put a camera in the machine because all you will ever get are upshots of your nostrils, closeups of your hands while typing, or the bottom half of the image being a close up panoramic shot of your keyboard if you try to bring the camera up to eye level.

I don't know what Dell was thinking, but clearly they weren't thinking much. It's horrible.

> What about playing light linux games like Civ 5 or Crusader Kings?

It appears to use the HD Graphics 515 processor, which seems to have performance in the same ballpark as Intel's HD4000/HD4400 graphics processors. I've played Civilization V on both those (HD4000 OSX & HD4400 Windows), and it runs fine on the lower end settings. I don't see why the HD515 would be significantly different.

The new ThinkPad 13 might be worth a consideration if you're not set on a top screen or aluminum case.

Thanks, I was definitely looking at Thinkpads also, but I hadn't taken a good look at the thinkpad 13 yet.

> What about playing light linux games like Civ 5 or Crusader Kings?

It uses an integrated Intel graphics chip -- it won't be able to do any decent gaming.

At the 16GB price point of this thing ($1k), you could get a more conventional laptop instead of Google Chrome/Pixel OS systems and get a lot more power and flexibility out of it.

> > What about playing light linux games like Civ 5 or Crusader Kings?

> It uses an integrated Intel graphics chip -- it won't be able to do any decent gaming.

Depending what you mean by decent gaming. I've played Civilization V on Intel Graphics (HD4000 OSX & HD4400 Windows), and it runs fine on the lower end settings. Not ideal by any means, but the newer Intel Graphics chips are OK for some games.

I think you missed that they used Ubuntu on their previous Chromebook (I do too) and so would probably do the same with this one

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