Hacker News Reader

Comment by monkmartinez | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, you can get a Windows laptop with a bigger SSD, more RAM and ports for the same price as a decent Chromebook. Instead of jumping through hoops to run linux on chromeos, you can just install the distro of your choice as a windows replacement. My opinion: Developing on a chromebook is like typing with a hand behind your back; You can do it... but it doesn't make a lot of objective sense unless you have bizarre constraints that force you to make such concessions.

View on HN

"Okay" Chromebooks seem to cost less than the equivalent Windows laptop. The CPU and memory is often fine but I agree, they are all too often limited by the size of eMMMC storage. I managed to get a HP Chromebook 13 G1 for 250$, 3200*1800 IPS display, 4GB RAM, Core m3 CPU but 32GB eMMC. Even playing around with a compressed filesystem it's limited, especially since 4GB RAM basically mandates I have some swap space. Ultimately I'm left with about 16GB free. There is a micro SD slot but that isn't very fast.

That's an amazing price given it's retailing for more than twice that. One option to expand storage is have an always-inserted, low-profile USB 3 flash drive like SanDisk Ultra Fit, providing read speeds upto 150 MB/s.

HardKernel makes ODroid boards which offer board-mounted eMMC as an alternative storage medium; you can choose between a normal microSD card, or a small custom eMMC PCB with a mezzanine connector:

http://www.vesalia.de/pic/odroidc1emmc.jpg

It'd be cool to see flash memory slots put on ARM laptop boards like you see DRAM slots today. "16GB expandable to 2x 128GB!"

M.2 SSDs are the solution. Many low end laptops support them without listing it on the spec sheet. Look around for service manuals with mobo pictures to determine what one supports before making a purchase.

Yeah, good point. There's no way a custom flash chip could beat the combination of cost, density, speed, endurance, and industry-standard footprint.

>unless you have bizarre constraints that force you to make such concessions

Like true software freedom? An ARM chromebook with Coreboot and Linux puts me squarely in Richard Stallman approved territory. Living the dream; No binary blobs on modern hardware. Freedom software for everything. I'm watching industry slowly boil the rest of you with firmware blobs, locked bootloaders, and curated app stores.

I'll take my 5GHz i7 and Intel Management Engine over software freedom and an ARM processor any day.

I don't think it's living the dream unless your dream fits in the constraints of its limitations

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom — go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen! — Samuel Adams

I've never got why people bring up these 1700s quotes which have such drastically different meanings when you consider context. Like the context of this one being US independence, not a better but less open mousetrap.

Just because a certain algorithm was created to handle a very difficult problem doesn't mean it can't be used to handle much smaller problems.

Plenty of algorithms go from practical to impractical based on the size of the dataset they're applied to.

Not that I think bringing algorithms into this makes for any more of a straightforward discussion than the 1700s quote from Samuel Adams with no additional context or rationale does.

Just because you can't see a connection between the two ideas does not mean it does not actually follow from that. (It's only a non-sequitur if you lack the imagination.)

I don't think it's non-sequitur, I think it's dramatization for the sake of making using an underpowered laptop, which after jumping through hoops and funding a corporation that's the anti-thesis of what Stallman would want to support is now running free software, seem a lot more romantic than it is.

I'm actually fine with someone doing that but I especially don't get then implying everyone who needs more computing power than that is a "boiling frog" because their vastly more powerful machines aren't open. Buying products from heartless multinationals licensing from Google (which is literally as "the man" as you get) then jailbreaki... sorry, rebuilding... them is not some great stand against "the man" "boiling the clueless masses in closed software"

Well said!

It's worth noting though that there is Chromium OS, too, although I will be honest I've only ever used Chrome boxes that were machines with real (closed) ChromeOS on them. I didn't "jailbreak" any of them, I just put them into developer mode and turned off the image signature verifications.

I too am not really sure that one can say legitimately an ARM box is more open than one of those AMT i7 Intel machines, regardless of what OS you put on it. You can't build your own ARM like you can build your own MIPS. (None of us plebes can legitimately build our own processors anyway, maybe you can, not me anyway.)

I learned "how" in a Computer Architecture class 'I' and 'II', but only just enough to give me the sense that if I was on a large desert island with lots of natural resources and the only person left in the world, I might manage to have a rudimentary computer again before whenever the time I die... although I might have to reinvent a transistor and a semiconductor and some other things I didn't think of, first.

That being said, ARM has patents, Intel has AMT, MIPS has the chinese government, I'm just glad there's still some kind of diversity because when we're running all the same identical Intel chips (or any of the competitors for that matter), we're all doomed.

I admit this rather pithy, but I'd kinda like the functional equivalent of both. I'd like high-end and open.

For now, I compromise.

Chromebooks are usually very handy, portable and have decent battery life. What exactly Windows models are competitive in this area and still in the same price range?

The idea with ChromeOS is that you should use web apps, web IDE's ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com