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Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

I'm using the Chromebook Pixelbook as my primary development device. I love it ergonomically: great keyboard, love the ability to flip the keyboard behind and use as a touchscreen.

ChromeOS could be really big, and it makes sense as a brand to switch again from Android for the reason.

But, the fact that I lose access to the sound services almost every single time I use the machine is crazy.

The response from Google is not encouraging.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/?noredirect=true#!top...

Basically:

Reboot

Or, just wipe all your data!

If they really expect people to use these as their primary machines or even as just a browsing device, you MUST have sound working 100% of the time.

Mine is setup as a developer machine so it could be that I'm bleeding edge. But I'm loathe to switch back, lose all my data, just to see if that fixes things.

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It could be worse.

I had a low-end Chromebook that I bought to put Linux on it. Part of the reason for this was that I needed a wi-fi repeater and extra screen for my dev machine.

A long time later my needs changed and I switched back to running ChromeOS. This install was because I wanted to gift the Chromebook to a friend. So we tested YouTube and the Chromebook was mute. It turned out that installing Linux fried something inside and only a new motherboard would fix that.

Luckily I was still on the right side of the warranty expiring, therefore, with no love for the shop I bought it from, I decided to try my luck at getting it repaired. The machine came back box fresh with superb sound. So I was able to gift a 'brand new' machine (which happens to still be on sale) rather than some hand-me down.

I am still on Chromebook Pixel 2013 vintage and very happy with it, the Pixelbook was 'meh' to me even though I think I really need one. I was disappointed that they did not go 8th generation Intel with the CPU during this year's product launches for the Pixelbook. So I am now viewing my Pixel (2013) as a future classic, not that computers have this status (Apple 1, Altair excepted). I think Pixelbooks will also have this status but I don't see an 'investment opportunity' in getting one in the hope it will be worth $$$ in decades to come.

lol. something fried because google hardware is notoriously bad, not "because you installed linux". Hardware is not supposed to fry because the software told it to.

I wasn't clear there as I didn't want to namedrop the brand of the $300 machine, it began with the first letter of the alphabet and was a four letter name.

It is not the hardware that is a problem with Google products, there is no 'you must be holding it wrong' nonsense. The problem Google have is in the support. Utterly awful. They have absolutely no idea, as if they are not able to empathise with the customer in any way whatsoever. A budgerigar is as much help.

Fortunately my five year old Pixel is as good as new, not a scratch. Despite its age it still impresses people whether they know what it is or not. Few computers do that these days. The wow factor isn't quite up to 'SGI' standards but I always say it is just 'a cheap really old Chromebook'.

The room filling sound from the speakers under the keyboard is something I can't believe the newer Pixelbook has to quite the same level of 'high fidelity', I would be gutted if that died due to some upgrade. This won't happen though as updates no longer happen (as of a week ago) due to the age of it.

The 2560x1700 'retina plus' native screen mode is also a true delight, particularly with dev tools open. People struggle to read the text and, with them not used to having pinch-to-zoom on their Applebooks, they are amazed that the zoom works just like on a phone.

edit: mistake but too late to delete.

I think they meant Pixelbook.

Sometimes it's a little of hardware and software's fault: https://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/sln186332/dist...

That is 100% the hardware's fault. I'm including firmware and drivers for the audio card in "hardware".

"not supposed to" is pretty idealistic, the goal. Anyone working on firmware, drivers, or other low level SW will assure you that SW can fry, shorten the lifespan of, or otherwise brick HW.

Many of us were very careful to avoid frying our monitors while configuring X Windows on BSD/Linux back in the old days.

I'm in the same boat. My original pixel is awesome and never had an issue with it. Of course, can't run containers in it but otherwise it's perfect.

> So we tested YouTube and the Chromebook was mute. It turned out that installing Linux fried something inside and only a new motherboard would fix that.

I have a $3K Dell XPS 9550 on which I run Debian. One of the things many reviewers noted was "wow those inbuilt speakers are loud". And indeed they are loud, it turned out too loud as they burn out. The fix from Dell was new Windows drivers.

As a consequence I've had my speakers replaced under warranty twice now. The second time I swear it was only seconds before I frantically turned the sound down. Alas it was too late. I can't imagine Dell replacing them for free more many few times, so now I'm paranoid about what is really a hardware bug.

Are you saying that you are in beta or Canary channel? I'm on Canary Channel to get access to crostini, but there are definitely some bugs I've hit over the last few months because of being on Canary.

Crostini is now in stable and works well there.

Switching back to stable (I was on dev) has made audio work reliably for the last 48 hours. And, I can still use crostini/containers now that it is in stable. Crossing fingers!

I think the issue is that if you set your device up for Android Studio and want to connect an external device via USB (https://developer.android.com/topic/arc/development-environm...) this command will break your sound:

sudo crossystem dev_enable_udc=1

It's a PITA, but you can always enable USB, set your device to TCPIP, connect via network, and then turn off dev_enable_udc=0, and reboot...

I'm in the market for a new development machine, and wholly afraid of the new Macbooks. What do develop on the Pixelbook? Are you using Linux or Cloud IDEs?

I have a the i7 pixelbook for dev work and I love it. I use both a cloud ide (CoCalc) and Crostini for local Linux and Docker dev work. This is an awesome machine. Very ergonomic, fast, etc. and 2.4 pounds weight. I use the stable channel also and do not use crouton. I don't have trouble with sound.

Wait wait wait wait wait wait. ChromeOS is Linux now? Is it as good as using a full blown Linux distro for development?

What languages can you program in?

Bash?

Is Docker running natively?

My head is spinning. I don't want to buy a MacBook, but I'm unhappy with the polish of the Linux world. Is ChromeOS a legitimate alternative?

Yes, you can run any Linux program on it. It has Wayland which converts x11 to the Chromeos windowing metaphor. You can install things using apt-get on your local instance of Linux or use -X with ssh and it just works. It's amazing.

But the sound issues, sigh.

Is it regular x11 apps with ChromeOS' own window manager / skin theme or some weird hack?

x11 apps talk to XWayland, which then talks to Sommelier (a Wayland forwarding agent), which then talks to the Wayland server running on Chrome OS. Other communications between Chrome OS and the Crostini system happens using the gRPC protocol. There is a program called Concierge on the Chrome OS side, that talks to Maitred inside the VM, to get it to do things. And apps inside the container use Garcon to talk to a service called Cicerone on the Chrome OS side (again, both these are over the gRPC protocol). All this is layed out here: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/c...

That sounds a little saner though still convoluted. I hope they eventually don't have to run through so many hoops to run Linux apps.

Hey, it's still less of a hack than using crouton was!

I don't fully understand it all but I don't think it is a hack. It's the "new way" to do x11 type applications. I'm not at liberty to read the article on Wayland right now (alone with the three kids tonight and bedtime looms...). But I remember reading and thinking it wasn't complicated to understand and that this way of doing things is the future.

It makes ChromeOS into a really powerful terminal. You can run stuff locally that's best to be run locally. Then you can run applications that don't run locally (like that need access to special hardware like a gpu) on the machine itself via x11 forwarding. It's very flexible and works.

As a separate issue from mine (faulty ChromeOS sound), currently you can't use the sound hardware inside the container. But that'll get fixed soon. Just means there is no way to run Linux music making apps yet.

ChromeOS has always been based off Gentoo. It's still a slapped on browser, but if I remember correctly there are things you can do to toggle regular Linux apps on, or you know, you could also just install another distro over it.

This is not really accurate, especially nowadays...

* Based on Gentoo- it was actually based on Ubuntu during development, and I believe it switched to a Debian base (from Gentoo) a year or two ago.

* A slapped on browser - it's a lot more than that. It has its own window manager and many other things. It's closer to normal Linux than Android is, but there's quite a lot of differences.

* Toggling Linux apps on - you have been able to install a chroot unofficially and can run Linux apps that way, but integration with the GUI is pretty janky. Official support for Linux apps is very new and not supported on a lot of hardware.

* Install another distro - not always an option. A lot of the machines have spotty driver and/or firmware support, e.g. my Acer Chromebook is a big headache to get working. Some are supported pretty well though.

Project Crostini. "Native" Linux is Debian, run inside of a container, which is in turn run inside of a restricted VM. You don't get root in the VM, but you get access to commands for manipulating containers. Inside the container you have full access, but no devices.

Current limitations: you don't get accelerated graphics, no sound, and can't access USB or SD storage from the Linux container (yet). Things that look really good, you can install .apt packages from the Chrome file manager, and anything with a .desktop file shows up in the Chrome launcher. Looks like there are a bunch of patches with accelerated graphics coming in, and audio should be coming sometime too. Better storage should be available once they re-baseline on kernel version 4.18+, as that has non-root fuse mounts.

BTW, the reason for a lot of limitations of for security, so that a Linux app can't possibly negatively affect the rest of the system. For that reason, they don't have a mechanism to run Linux programs on system startup -- you have to purposely launch any apps.

Ah, sounds like a way to go before it's a serious contender as a daily development machine

Emacs. ;)

But I've used Android Studio successfully as well as vscode and atom. They are pretty heavy and it does show on these machines.

i recommend you get the xps 13 or 15. once you swap out the killer wifi card for an intel solution, you have a solid machine that's ready to run your favorite distro out of the box. or you can get the developer addition that actually has dell support for ubuntu. idk why you would prefer the pixelbook to this unless you really like chromeOS.

This is the annoying thing - I've got the 9350 and I had to swap the Broadcom card for an Intel card to get any kind of stability in Windows.

Well known error: https://www.dell.com/community/Laptops-General-Read-Only/bcm...

At one point, the crashes even managed to corrupt my filesystem. What I will say is that it's super easy to swap out the wifi and M.2 SSD - took 2 screwdrivers and about 10 minutes. I may have lost Miracast but does anyone actually use that?

YMMV but a former coworker had a 2016 XPS 13" and swapped out the wifi card for some Intel one and Miracast still worked for him.

My only word of caution with the xps is to mind the keyboard layout. I returned an xps 15 because I was constantly needing to use the Fn key to get what I wanted. Stopped back in the store and the xps 13 key layout solved all those problems. Just not sure I can handle that small a screen all day.

Well that's interesting, I did the opposite. I bought the xps 13 9350, and the Intel 8260 in there was terribly unstable. I opened it up and put in a killer 1525, which also was unstable. Then I replaced it with a killer 1535 and it's worked perfectly ever since. Perhaps the 8260 was just a bad model?

I just use Thinkpads or Asus laptops.

So, sound sub-system f-ckery. Google is indeed become the new Microsoft.

I wouldn't be surprised if these problems intersect continuing DRM clampdown efforts. (I've no actual knowledge of what is going on -- just suspicions based upon product designs and behaviors.)

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