Comment by sunnyps | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sunnyps | Hacker News Reader

I recently decided not to purchase expensive laptops any more. It's cheaper to buy a good cheap laptop and a workstation than it is to buy a top of the line laptop.

I bought a Dell Chromebook 13 after trying one out for a few days. I'll be upgrading the SSD and installing Crouton (with Ubuntu/Debian) to run along side ChromeOS. The benefit of this over installing a Linux distro by itself is that ChromeOS has the right drivers for the hardware. As a result it can do certain things like hardware video decoding which are poorly supported on Linux.

Pros:

- Cheap (~550 USD with promotions)

- Core i3 + 8GB RAM (powerful enough for me)

- Upgradable SSD

- Excellent glass touchpad and keyboard

- Matte 13.3 inch 1080p IPS display

- 12+ hours battery life

- Good build quality / materials (carbon fiber + magnesium alloy)

- ChromeOS :-)

Cons:

- Max display brightness is under 300 nits (somewhat countered by matte display)

- Default resolution of 1080p is too high for such a small screen, a smaller scaled resolution (~720p) works better

- Lower spec integrated graphics (HD 5500 not Iris Pro)

- Lack of HiDPI screen

- Proprietary charger

- No USB-C, no display port (HDMI only), single USB 3.0 port (other port is USB 2.0 only)

If only they sold those outside the US and Canada. In Germany the only Chromebooks you can buy are from Acer. I dislike Acer as a brand so I won't be buying one. I would buy a Dell one in a heartbeat :/

Out of curiosity, what would you use a stronger graphics card for on a Chromebook? I thought all the video codec acceleration was on the CPU. Do you use a lot of WebGL?

Gaming on Linux, maybe? A lot of games in my Steam library are Linux compatible.

Re: video decode acceleration, ChromeOS on Broadwell should support GPU accelerated h264/VP8 decode and hardware assisted h265/VP9 decode. (I might be completely misinformed about this though.) I'm not really concerned about the GPU performance with regard to video decode.

Can you actually use the gpu properly through curton?

There are two modes for X11 under Crouton: GPU accelerated output (called "xorg" mode) and unaccelerated output to a chrome window (called "xiwi" mode). Both seem to work fine based on my limited testing with Gnome on Debian Sid.

ChromeOS is getting android compatibility, so you can run android games.

It's not particularly hard to get ubuntu working on most chromebooks.

Not to mention even random web games (like slither.io) do better with a decent gpu, especially if your driving a monitor with more than 1080P.

If you think 1080p is too much for 13 inches try 4K at 13 inches, nothing works right.

I think something like 3200 x 1800 (HP Chromebook 13) or 2560 x 1700 (Pixel) at 2x scale works better.

2x scale is perfect but only OS X gets it right. Windows breaks dragging Windows between average DPI screens and HiDpi screens, Gnome does too except if you use Xrandr to halve your resolution (and patch it to disable the bicubic filter), but then text is rendered at half resolution and it shows. OSX renders almost everything at half resolution, but renders text and GUI elements at full resolution at 2x scale giving the best of both worlds

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