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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

That's hard to believe (I believe it, but it struck me as incredible at first). I don't know anyone with a Chromebook, and it's such a different way of computing that it's hard to believe it's taken off so much in such a short time.

I think it is reflective of a new generation whose first computing experience was with phones and tablets. The idea that nothing of importance lives on the device is a huge paradigm shift, and I don't know that old folks are comfortable making the shift yet (I'm not entirely there, and, despite being middle aged, I like to think I'm way out front on the technology curve). The mention of Chromebooks in schools lends some credence to this notion.

Anyway, I think it's great. A Chromebook is so much more empowering than an iPad or tablet (which is what I think this is actually mostly replacing for folks, rather than high end laptops). A keyboard opens up the door to really building and creating, USB ports allow expansion, and Chrome OS is hackable in ways tablets are not.

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The idea that nothing of importance lives on the device is a huge paradigm shift ...

Rich vs. thin client is a pendulum that seems to swing about every 10-20 years.

In the mid-'70s, a computer was a big box by IBM or DEC with a number of thin terminals attached. These had enough power to display a screenful of interactive information without having to talk to the server constantly (sort of like an early version of HTML forms).

Then PCs happened, and suddenly you could have your very own device with a slice of the power of that DEC. The client was suddenly so rich but widely available connectivity so slow -- 300-1200 bps modems -- that most people never connected to a server (except for special national networks like France's Minitel).

By the mid-'90s, thin was in again. Sun and Oracle defined a "Network Computer" spec. Apple was planning to build devices for it, but then Jobs had better ideas and the NC never really took off.

So we got ever richer clients in even more personal form factors. The iPhone became the ultimate rich client: in the App Store model, each online service provider is expected to build a native binary and deliver it through Apple. Microsoft has been plotting along similar lines with the Universal Windows platform.

At the same time Google has been trying to push the pendulum back to the thin end. With the new "Instant Apps" model [1], even Android is being turned into a web-like platform of app fragments delivered on the fly. Will be interesting to see how far they can take this -- will the Android runtime be part of Chrome eventually?

[1] http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2016/05/android-insta...

I don't think it ever actually swung into popular usage, until now, even though a lot of smart nerds wanted it to. So, I don't think a pendulum is the right term for what's happening (or what happened with the NC spec).

I think it's a hill that a lot of people and companies have been pushing computing tech up for many years...now we've reached the top, and we're rolling down the other side. Getting to the top required getting mobile networks "fast enough", systems small enough (because what's the point of being mobile if your system is big and heavy...might as well leave it plugged in at home or at the office), and the web (or something like it) advanced enough to be the platform on which these network apps are built.

If it were a pendulum, we'd see it swing back in 10-20 years. I can't think of any scenario in which that'll happen, even as small/personal devices get more powerful.

Note: I don't know if our destination is a good one. But, momentum and gravity (and hundred billion dollar companies) are definitely pushing us in a pretty clear direction.

The momentum comes from the massive overinvestment in network capacity made as a result of the dot-com bubble. Bandwidth doesn't scale like storage or processing capacity do, though, so I predict the current balance in favor of centralization will eventually reverse as the cost of shuttling data back and forth to the center once again comes to outweigh the cost of doing all the heavy lifting at the edges.

Network capacity, at least in most regards, currently dwarfs the expansion that happened back in the late 90s (unless you're talking about some later "dot-com bubble"). I'm not sure how you can argue that we're still trying to fill up bandwidth built in 1999. Sure, there was some build out during the bubble...but, I don't see any reason to think network infrastructure is going to shrink or that costs will increase remarkably.

Makes sense that my specifics would be out of date. I'm not arguing that network infrastructure will shrink; I'm observing that the scaling factors for network infrastructure investment are not nearly so favorable as the scaling factors involved in CPU or storage capacity. We can already build hardware with capabilities greatly in excess of our actual needs. When network capacity becomes a bottleneck, it will be much cheaper to take advantage of all that latent capacity at the edge than to invest many billions increasing network capacity, and we'll see yet another pendulum swing away from thin clients toward fat independent hardware devices. Then the market will change and lots of money will flood into network infrastructure, and for a few years the pendulum will swing back again. It's been going back and forth like this for decades.

Network capacity is a continual bottleneck, and many billions are spent to upgrade the transport network yearly.

Transport signals have gone from 2.5G to 10G to 40G to 100G to 200G per wave, and from 8 waves to 16 waves to 40 waves to 96 waves to 100+ waves per fiber.

The bottleneck has existed for a decade at least, and is invested in to keep pushing it out at the same time all this other stuff is happening.

Hmmm. Interesting that speeds at the edge don't appear to have changed much at all, in years. I didn't think there was much ongoing coverage expansion going on. What's driving the capacity investment? Greater utilization of existing connections? What's using up this capacity?

There's a pendulum, but there's also a long term trend. Each swing towards thin clients seems to go a bit further and the local swing a bit less far.

I came of age during the thin client craze of the 90s and I remember the grey beards then telling all of us whippersnappers that it was just the latest swing of the pendulum. Cut 20 years later and now I'm one of those grey beards.

Chromebooks are very popular as a first laptop for children and teens these days, they are cheap many can be had under 200$ and they provide basic office and apps/games especially now with the play store.

Effectively Chromebooks are the new "EEE PC"/netbook which were also very popular with children and teens as they were chip as dirt which meant that they were often bought as a gift or when a child needed a 2nd computer to take with them.

So when you have devices that cost 199 it's not that surprising that they outsell devices that cost 899 and upwards.

If the "premium" chromebooks outsold MBP's/MB's it would be as much as a surprise to me as why would anyone want to put a Core i7/i5 CPU and upto 16GB's of RAM in a chromebook in the first place.

I love my Chromebook, with Crouton you can run Debian on it and for the most part don't have to worry about wonky drivers and the like. I currently work as a Sysadmin and I don't want to carry $800+ dollars of hardware with me while I'm up in ceilings running cable. It allows me to spend my downtime writing code so I can get into development one day. I get over a full day on a single charge. Great little machine. I'd consider one of the premium ones for my next laptop.

Yeah well you are a "unique" case, I would be surprised if even 10% of Chromebook owners knows what Crouton or chroot is :)

HN users don't see Chromebooks because HN users are a very special subset - highly educated and well paid which works in development and IT at large.

If you look at children and low wage blue collar workers you'll see many more of them those are the people that buy what one would not even consider a budget laptop but an entry one.

Those are also the people for whom Google and Facebook are defacto the internet, I've recently met people that didn't knew "Office" even existed outside of Google Docs.

If you are high school student that only wants to get access to Facebook and maybe be able to write a small paper you don't need more than a Chromebook. If you are a truck driver or a security guard that wants to be able to read email or watch YouTube you don't need more than a Chromebook. And for those people a 150-250$ device makes all the sense in the world.

College students would probably still be able to use a Chromebook for 99% of their tasks, but since Apple has a student discount it's chic Apple most likely will still continue to rule the College class.

There are a few people in my office (web dev shop) that have Chromebooks. With a little tinkering to open them up, they're perfect.

I mean really, 99% of the time all you need is a web browser and a connection to remote into the machine that's doing the real lifting for you.

My favourite part is the disposability. If it gets trashed or stolen, all I have to do is sign in to a new chromebook and generate new keys to be back up and running.

My little sister is now 14, and Kubuntu is for her easier to use than ChromeOS ("why can’t I put this there? Why doesn’t that software run? What? I can’t have other programs?" – I installed ChromeOS for her on her laptop for a while).

The major difference between a Ubuntu and a ChromeOS install is that one of them has a lot of marketing, the other doesn’t.

That’s the largest difference.

> I don't know anyone with a Chromebook

Here in New Hampshire I've seen many, especially among older people who are way too overwhelmed by PCs and Macs. Things like viruses, installing programs, updating the OS, "my hard drive is full? How do I fix that?", etc, there's just so much they have to learn that technical people and younger people take for granted as simple. The Chromebook reduces the bar to maintaining your own machine among low-digital-literacy people.

Many just want a "laptop" to get and send email, look at their grandkids on Facebook, complain on the local facebook page group about xyz, look up weather and news, and buy things online.

This group also does not understand why some laptops are $600 and others are $1,400 and yet they appear to run the same programs and visually look the same. I don't blame them. A few of my friends have said, "My mom/dad (aged 40-60) needed a new computer and I convinced them to get a Chromebook, now I don't have to answer all their technical questions anymore."

They are fantastic machines for the technically less-literate and frugal-minded.

> I don't know anyone with a Chromebook

That may be because of who is buying them. They are making huge inroads to public schools (a former apple stronghold). The "Cloud Everything" bit solves a large "where's my data" problem that used to plague our kids WRT school work. No more taking the wrong thumbdrive to school problem.

Yeah, if I had kids, and they weren't using Chromebooks, I'd advise them to do everything on Google Docs anyway.

well I am glad an inexpensive but useful item is making inroads. I remember the day when it seemed nearly every damn local politician was lining up to congratulate themselves on putting for the idea to give every student iPads before making sure the roof wasn't falling in.

Technology is very important to learning but there are so many useful and inexpensive ways to do this but this requires those in charge to look past the marketing power some companies wield

I use a Chromebook. But I also put it in devmode, put on Crouton, and run a full-blown Ubuntu on it as well. Everyone I know with a Chromebook does the same thing. Then it becomes an inexpensive Linux Laptop that handles some things automatically.

Same here. Anybody who repeats the "Chromebooks are for kids who don't do anything sophisticated with their computers" schtick is just showing off their ignorance. A decent Chromebook (e.g. a Pixel or soon one of the HP/Acer models) plus Crouton is a more real development machine than anything Apple ever made, because it's more like the server where you'll eventually deploy. Then, unlike any of the other dozen Linux laptops I've had, it works and continues to work without requiring constant technically-proficient care just to keep things like wifi or suspend/resume from breaking. Mine replaced both an MBA and a Zenbook running Fedora. Haven't looked back since I got it.

> Crouton is a more real development machine than anything Apple ever made, because it's more like the server where you'll eventually deploy

Well, this assumes one particular type of development! I would not choose a Chromebook to develop, say, Chrome!

I tried Crouton a few years ago, wanting to run xbmc. Audio didn't work, because it required a newer version of the Linux kernel. It turns out you can't just install a stock Linux kernel: you have to use a patched device-specific kernel that Google provides, and for my device, the Google-provided kernel was too old. Perhaps I could have built some frankenkernel, but instead I gave up and got a real Linux box.

I would not try to use Crouton again for a general Linux box, because you become dependent on Google for updating core software.

Yes, and it would be fantastic to use a Mac or Windows box to debug something involving Linux kernel drivers, right? There will always be special cases. Sometimes there's only one solution, and you take what you can get within those parameters. I've worked on "one of this exists in the world" kinds of hardware a few times myself. Nonetheless, the "Chromebooks are for n00bs" meme is still BS. For the majority of people who are in love with their Macbooks, a high-end Chromebook is a more than adequate alternative. The fact that it didn't suit your special needs doesn't change that.

Developing software for something other than a Linux server is not some bizarre edge case. I was reacting to your unqualified claim that a Chromebook is "a more real development machine."

My "special needs" was running popular and well known Linux software. Many people in this thread have said that running Crouton on a Chromebook is just like having Ubuntu or Debian. But this is not so:

1. Google does not reliably update core software

2. It's harder to get help when things go wrong, because the system is sufficiently different from an ordinary Linux box

For those reasons, if you want to run Linux software, it's better to use a familiar Linux distribution, and not ChromeOS.

If you want/need to run a very particular version of Linux software, then maybe a Chromebook's not for you. But many thousands of people successfully run all kinds of Linux software that works just fine inside the Crouton environment. I didn't and wouldn't say you're a bizarre edge case, but xbmc is being far more picky about versions than it needs to be and that's not ChromeOS's or Crouton's fault. It's unreasonable to criticize the platform because it didn't satisfy your one use case, and it certainly does nothing to refute my original point that ChromeOS isn't just for newbies.

To develop things like Chrome, a mac won't be enough as well. Chances are you will need a powerful desktop beast anyway, in this case, a Chromebook can be a super handy addition for checking emails, browsing the Internet, not to mention you can also ssh to your desktop and work off the Chromebook.

> you have to use a patched device-specific kernel that Google provides

Only because upstreaming is so slow. Those patches end up on the relevant mailing lists and eventually get merged.

Do you replace Chrome OS with Ubuntu, dual boot, or run it in a VM? Do you spend most of your time in Chrome OS or in Ubuntu?

So with Crouton, you don't actually dual boot. It's more like a VM, but it uses the same kernel that Chrome OS uses, so it's more like Docker than Virtualbox.

I have a cheap 11" Acer C720 and I probably use it more than my Macbook Pro. I have command line only Ubuntu installed, and the result is a tab I can open to have a full linux shell, much like how you would use a macbook. For all intents and purposes, it's the same OS, but it's not.

A few things I particularly like are battery like (maybe 8 hours?), no fans, matte screen, and macbook like keyboard and trackpad. Also Chrome OS maps the F1/F2 keys to forward/backward keys in Chrome, which I use all the time surprisingly.

All in all, I would highly recommend a Chromebook. For development it's great. If you don't want to use Crouton, a linode server you can SSH into is just as good as a macbook really. Now that they will be able to run all Android apps, it's even more tempting.

> It's more like a VM, but it uses the same kernel that Chrome OS uses, so it's more like Docker than Virtualbox.

I'm amused by this explanation, because I grew up doing chroot before virtualization took off and obviously before Docker.

Feeling old.

I don't know if it's age really. I've explained, to developers well older than me things like "well, this practice is bad because <reasons> here's an article from <before I was born>" or having to translate old fundamental concepts into their latest hip implementations. "this use calls less for virtualization and more for something like a Chroot..." "what?" "Sorry I mean like a Jail... cgroups...? LXC...? sigh Docker." "Oh! Yeah, that makes sense. nods as if they understand"

The funny thing is, I'm not old. I'm under 30. I just started young, on my own, and fell in with some more experienced sysadmin crowds.

>No fans

I think you must be mistaken on this. I own a C720, and there is a fan in it.

You can see it in the upper left of this picture:

https://www.chromium.org/_/rsrc/1381990807648/chromium-os/de...

I don't actually do any of those three. Underneath ChromeOS is a *nix variant. So Crouton actually allows one to change the root directory to something else [like away from the meaningless root that ChromeOS puts you in, essentially in a Downloads directory, and to the actual root of the machine].

In practice, this means that if I hit a three key chord, then I flip over to a regular xfce, and if I hit another three key chord I go back to ChromeOS.

I do all web-browsing in ChromeOS. I do all programming and textediting in xfce. Or rather in vim, using my standard vim setup. [I'm a mathematician, so I do somewhat minor programming and lots and lots of LaTeX writing].

Do you find the anemic storage limiting?

I have a similar setup, and ran into storage problems pretty quickly. Eventually I reflashed it and installed Linux natively, and got a fast 64GB SD card for my home partition.

A 128gb usb drive costs very little now.

I have the Samsung Chromebook 2 (Exynos CPU, 4GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage).

I tried using a Class 10 MicroSD card to hold an Ember-CLI project, and running commands on it was intolerably slow.

A drive 4-8x that size would be nice (and not hanging off the side of the computer).

Out of an abundance of concern for security, I use a Chromebook running without any browser extensions for all my banking and investing activities.

I take it as a given that my Chromebook will always be more secure than my Macs and Windows machines. Less likely to have invasive malware of all types.

I currently have a Toshiba Chromebook with a gorgeous screen and good battery life. It just works.

I'm in my mid-20s, and I'm not comfortable with nothing living on the device :-P

You're not the new generation though

I think it's more that, as a software engineer, I'm not at all representative of my age cohort. Non-techie college friends my age seem split on the Chromebook question, but because the working world has not embraced them I suspect that even the young kids who use them every day now will be forced back into a more fat-client computing system if they enter the workforce in the next few years.

How about 19? That young enough?

I have a question for any under 20 year olds. What are likes/dislikes in current tech? I know it's a general question, but I'm honestly interested.

For instance, is a physical keyboard even necessary? Do you use FB? Apple, or Android phone? Contracts, or prepaid? Do you buy stuff from small websites? Or, is it just not worth the security risk? Does it bother you if a website demands a profile picture? Does the repairability of a electronic device matter? I'd appreciate any feedback.

I'm just curious. I'm not one of these rich guys trying to corner the next big trend. I'm pretty poor, but interested in tech., and would like to get a gauge on where it might be heading.

I do know someone who has a Chromebook. He's a professional writer [1] and if he loses his computer, all he has to do is get a new one and he's back up and running. He does quite a bit of travel as part of his job so it really works out for him.

And he's not a first time user of computers either. He grew up with an Atari 400 (yup, he was a teenager during the Golden Age of home computers).

[1] That is, he makes all his income from his writing. https://seanhoade.wordpress.com/

Edit: added a bit of history. And a link in case anyone is interested in his books.

How is it a different way of computing? You can use it offline and frankly any laptop nowadays without internet is pretty crippled.

It's actually really easy to believe and frankly not particularly interesting. The cost of a chromebook is like 1/3 or something of that of a mac. I'd sure hope that unit volume was higher..

Most of my friends (ages 20-ish on up to 50s), when told to write a resume, build a spreadsheet, make a drawing, etc. will reach for Word, Excel, Illustrator/Photoshop, whatever. Local computing, while fading in importance, is still the dominant mode for most people for some tasks.

Other tasks have completely made the transition for many people. Listening to music; everybody under 30 streams it, and looks at me funny when I talk about "owning" an album. Email and messaging; no such thing as local email clients anymore, except for us stubborn old-timers, or people who have to use Outlook for work. Nobody I know, other than nerds with their own websites and servers, has an email address that isn't @gmail.com (a few @hotmail.com and maybe one or two Yahoos). I work on mail admin tools, and a webmail client and still use GMail exclusively for my personal mail. Photos are on their way off the local machine, but I think it's about 50/50 among my friends, as to whether they keep local copies or not.

Anyway, I've already said how I think it's different. It sounds like you disagree with me, though I'm not sure what the basis of your disagreement is; it seems to be that a regular laptop can do everything online like a Chromebook. Which I haven't said anything about; I'm speaking of who I think will be immediately comfortable with the Chromebook way of doing things, and I think it's people who've not been trained to think of a computer as a permanent storage device.

> Most of my friends (ages 20-ish on up to 50s), when told to write a resume, build a spreadsheet, make a drawing, etc. will reach for Word,

Personal anecdote - I like updating my resume at least once a year. A few years back I struggled to find the latest local copy of my Word resume. Frustrated, I found one that was a few years old, updated it with details for the intermediate years and proceeded to import it into Google docs. Now I don't have to look too hard to find it.

> and frankly any laptop nowadays without internet is pretty crippled.

Depends on what you keep locally on the machine =) I've generally got a bunch of DVD rips, a few dozen games, my dev environments, documentation for whatever I'm working on (API references and such), a bunch of ebooks...

My important data is on my local machine, and my irreplaceable data is backed up to the cloud. It's a very different paradigm of computing, compared to the people whose laptops are "crippled" without Internet.

>> A Chromebook is so much more empowering than an iPad or tablet

>> A keyboard opens up the door to really building and creating, USB ports allow expansion

>> and Chrome OS is hackable in ways tablets are not.

And a PC or Mac laptop is all of things, and so much more.

Yes, and I said I believe that Chromebooks are replacing tablets rather than laptops. If a kid is getting a "not-quite-a-computer", I'd much rather it be a Chromebook than an iPad.

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