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Comment by dchuk | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that there is no reference to targeting developers/coding at all for this device. Seems targeted at creatives with the Pen and Lightroom/etc on it. Other than that, none of the example apps it can support seem to me to really require "high performance" at all.

Which is too bad, because it's a pretty device. Just seems like it's in a weird uncanny valley where it's probably way too much horsepower for most of those apps (documents, instagram, etc) and way too inflexible for true high performance stuff (coding, 3d modeling, video/photoshop stuff, etc) because you can't install anything.

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I really agree with the "uncanny valley" judgement. I would absolutely love to ditch my Windows 10 laptop for a smooth, efficient, and secure ChromeOS device. However, it simply doesn't have the software support, unfortunately.

What I see a lot of "power users" doing is simply using their Chromebook to remote into their desktop for their application work. However, what then is the point of putting such powerful hardware in the Chromebook? Either you make a "thin" portable client that is used to remote into your "real" PC, or you make a powerful portable device that is self sufficient.

An overwhelmingly powerful device that can only be used to remote into another system to do the "real" work is simply a waste.

Most of the time if I'm using a chromebook for anything other than web browsing, it's in a chroot environment--so I have all of the same functionality as my desktop at home.

Then again, my workflows are pretty all light weight, so I probably wouldn't notice the extra horsepower anyway.

> What I see a lot of "power users" doing is simply using their Chromebook to remote into their desktop for their application work.

Naive question - how would one set up a desktop at home to make it securely remotely accessible?

I just tunnel VNC over SSH. SSH is locked to a GPG key stored on a Yubikey, and I use gpg-agent as my SSH agent. VNC only listens to localhost.

This is one option:

https://guacamole.incubator.apache.org/

Wow, that's really neat. Surprised I've never heard of it.

Recent discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15389727

Most folks I know use Windows Pro and Remote Desktop. VNC and the like are options as well. Then there are the closed source paid commercial options.

Can confirm, am using Remote Desktop with Windows 10 Pro. Very happy so far.

My cursory search indicates that Android Studio doesn't run natively on Chromebooks yet (well, not without faffing around with crouton, anyway).

Seems like a huge missed opportunity for Google. They could pitch these as the standard Android/ChromeOS development platforms. Heck, they even run Android apps themselves, so you already get "emulation" for free.

I believe that lots of people would pay not to have to faff around with drivers on Windows, or udev on Linux, or the maintenance overhead of either to be able to develop apps. That is a lot of devices sold right there.

Same. I tried doing development on the Chromebook I'd bought for my wife because a client needed a ChromeOS-specific extension. The process was painful; you had to boot into a separate mode to use things like a text editor to write js and it booted out of that mode every time it woke back up (or maybe my wife just kept resetting it so she could actually get her work done). I'd be happy to have one for development, but based on the apps listed under Productivity, it feels like it's still the same set up.

I've done a lot of development on my Chromebook and I absolutely loved it, but it was with a ssh connection to a machine in the cloud and a browser based editor. But yeah for that, you don't need insane specs like the Pixelbook.

Personally I'd love to have a dev Chromebook.

The software stack running on it is second to none.

Even the BIOS is light-years ahead any Windows/Linux box. As for OSX I'm not familiar with the boot process.

> The software stack running on it is second to none.

Can you elaborate on that? I thought ChromeOS was just a stripped down Linux with just enough to run Chrome and whatever other Google stuff they have on it.

There's the dm-verify path. In a locked down configuration, the os is updated as binary deltas. Your system partition is read only. You lose the flexibility of a general os though.

The BIOS of a system has not once ever factored into my decision making about a tech purchase. Please elaborate...?

1) If you can't disable Secure Boot you might not be able to boot an alternative non-Windows operating system.

2) Some tablets use a 32-bit UEFI while supporting a 64-bit operating system. Nobody supports that. You're stuck with Windows again.

3) Can you turn on Wake On Lan features on the desktop? I played with geoproximity on my phone to send wake up packets when I got within 200m of home.

4) Can you disable Intel's Trusted Platform on your computer? Many people don't trust having an undocumented system in total control of their computer.

Look up coreboot and libreboot.

> As for OSX I'm not familiar with the boot process.

Basically a mix of UEFI and their proprietary SMC controller on the system board.

The SMC is actually kind of nice to have since it means that the actual boot sector is more sandboxed.

>"The SMC is actually kind of nice to have since it means that the actual boot sector is more sandboxed."

Can you elaborate on this? How does the boot sector sandboxing work exactly?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Controller

It's primary purpose is largely DRM, but I'm guessing it has to store a large portion of boot information on the chip as to prevent a Mac drive from booting in a standard x86 tower.

Thanks, yeah I'm familiar with the SMC but this is the first I've heard of it in the context of boot sectors.

There wasn't much in the wikipedia link about that.

Also the primary purpose of an SMC is not DRM, but battery, fans, power management etc.

I'm willing to bet crouton runs on it out of the box so you can get a dev environment up fast.

But the developer mode notification on bootup kills the laptop :(

It warns you that you're in developer mode, makes a beep, and prompts you to push spacebar if you want to turn off dev mode, deleting everything on your computer.

Maybe you know to never make this mistake. Maybe you almost never turn off your computer. All that needs to happen is for you to reboot the computer once (say, it ran out of batteries while you were gone on vacation). Maybe it's you pressing spacebar on autopilot or a family member who mis-read the warning. The spacebar is pushed and now all your data is deleted.

I love crouton, but the dev mode warning is the most unfortunate user interaction design I've experienced in a product :(

Totally agree. I had this thing's immediate predecessor, the second-gen Pixel. I used crouton and the integration was fantastic. Alt-tab between ChromeOS and a real Linux desktop. Clipboard integration. ChromeOS driver stability plus all of my familiar Linux tools. Fantastic battery life too.

However, that developer-mode "hit Crtl-D or lose everything" misfeature always made me super-nervous too. Whoever implemented that must have never read any one security-UX book, because they all mention the evils of taking irrevocable action in response to a password failure. Or maybe they were just brain damaged. Either way, what a horrible mistake.

Agreed, I bought a used $100 chromebook and installed linux to set up some emulators for my ~6 year old at the time son..

I explained to him how to get around it, but forgot to give his mom the same instructions

It is funny how the "press spacebar" part jumps out at you, but the "to wipe this machine" isn't as obvious to the novice user.

>But the developer mode notification on bootup kills the laptop :(

Yeah, you can turn this off via boot flags, and even replace the bitmaps for the warning so its a little less garish. Requires removing the write protect screw, though. See: https://mrchromebox.tech/#fwscript

I don't understand why it's not possible to run a Docker image that has the whole development environment, without turning on developer mode.

ChromeOS doesn't want to expose these syscalls to ChromeOS apps? I can understand wanting to sandbox the actual OS environment, but a Docker container should be totally isolated from that?

Docker is not designed for security, and shouldn't be mistaken for a secure border. It can, with painstaking effort, be made semi-secure for particular audited recipes, but this isn't a FreeBSD jail we're talking about.

If believe if you run GalliumOS vs Crouton it doesnt do that.

This may have changed, but when I used GalliumOS a year ago I still dealt with the white screen

What version? Ive been using 2.1 it for about a year on my Acer C910 (i5) and has been flawless. It maxes at 4GB of ram which is the only bummer, but that makes the pixelbook appealing.

I was still on 1.0 I believe I loved the OS, it was as good as you can get on a chromebook, I was just commenting about the white dev-mode screen at bootup. Did they get around that now?

No, Ive never gotten that. After the firmware flash and OS install, it boots right up, sleeps and resumes perfectly, just like a normal OS. Ive actually never seen the white dev-mode screen on this on, but I started with 2.0

Crouton experience is very bad. so many bugs.

I've been running the Android App called "Termux," which lets me do C++, Python, Node.JS, git, Subversion, Emacs, Vi... Quite happy with it. I mean, it's not AWESOME, but for tinkering it works very well.

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