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Comment by dirkg | Hacker News Reader

Some counterpoints -

- Crostini is only for a limited set of Chromebooks. I have an Acer 15 with Intel Broadwell, which is extremely powerful and not that old, but Google won't support it for whatever insane reason they might have

- Chromebook keyboard is lacking. You cannot program without a del key

- They aren't cheap. Only the low end low powered 2GB models are and they are unusable, as well as not supported by Crostini. For this kind of money I can get a Windows laptop with almost equiv battery life

- or even better, a used Thinnkpad + Linux which would be better than almost anything for 1/2 the cost.

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> You cannot program without a del key

As a programmer who switched to a mac (without a delete key), I also used to think the delete was crucial. I'm curious, what are you using the delete key for? I've only ever used it as a backspace-but-reverse when typing, and to delete things like files in GUIs. The workarounds for these issues are trivial (change your cursor's position for the typing issue, and GUIs respond to backspace with a modifier key), so I'm wondering what other (not-as-easily-emulatable) functionality the delete key gives

By the way, Fn+backspace on a Mac does a delete. Not just in GUIs, either.

> - or even better, a used Thinnkpad + Linux which would be better than almost anything for 1/2 the cost.

I do have a Thinkpad (running NixOS), however the battery life sucks. 2 hours for P71 (or 4 hours for X1C6). And hardware support is not perfect (I simply cannot figure out yet how to connect my Bose QC headphones via bluetooth).

So I have high hopes for chromebooks (like Pixel Slate) because then you can have best of the both worlds.

The year of Linux desktop is arriving, but not as directly as we have all thought it would.

> I do have a Thinkpad (running NixOS), however the battery life sucks.

Do you have tlp set up?

https://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-linux-advanced-power-ma...

Yup.

It's one-line config in NixOS (`services.tlp.enable = true;`).

Alt + Backspace should work for the delete key.

I agree with you on the pricing and Crostini support though.

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