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Comment by elipsey | Hacker News Reader

A guy I was hanging out with a hackathon this weekend was using a chromebook with crouton. An update broke his crouton intsallation and he had to find another editor and another way to spin up services, containers, etc.

If you're running a linux container on a machine with a bootloader you don't control, the manufacturer can pull your card at any time for no reason. I refuse to live that way if I have a choice, even if it means crappy hardware. :p

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Note you can get (very) old ThinkPads for a pittance which will be a much better platform for running Linux. Many actually prefer the T420/X220 for its keyboard and the performance is not as bad as one would think from the eight years passed since its release. As https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_v... attests from Sandy Bridge (2011 ThinkPad) to Kaby Lake (2017 ThinkPad) IPC only grew by 20%, the big changes were in efficiency allowing the move from 35W CPUs to 15W CPUs. Also, if you are just slightly handy, you could use the T430/X230 with the old keyboard hacked onto them. If you are even more handy, you could install a converter board and a full HD screen. If you are doing this to a T430s with an i7 CPU without an nVidia GPU you even get Thunderbolt, Thunderbolt 1 for sure but still, a converter allows you to attach TB3 devices. A T430s hacked so is basically the poor man's ThinkPad 25 which is the pinnacle of laptops. (Not counting the T480-ThinkPad 25 Frankenpad which is nuts.)

I am typing this on $150 refurbished x230, I also have a t440s with a retrofitted IPS screen, and t450 touchpad.

shhhhh..... stop telling the other hackers, they will buy them all! XD

So the t450 touchpad is compatible with the t440s? Tell me it has real buttons and doesn't tilt the pad to click!

Most indeededly!

My t440s screen just died :(

/hugs. don't despair, you can get a new one for 40 bucks. that's what's so great about these things!

https://www.ebay.com/itm/OEM-Lenovo-ThinkPad-T440s-14-Laptop...

Heh, I just bought an x200 for the same reason. I was able to retrofit Bluetooth, Wifi, the Hard drive to a new SSD, flash libreboot, and put in 8 GB or RAM. Debian + XFCE is amazingly fast on it

Oddly enough, I am having an issue with the keyboard though. I unplugged it and when I replugged it in, keys stopped working. Repeating that process made a lot more keys stop working as well. I have a feeling that's just because the ribbon cable was old though, so I am replacing the whole thing.

The 520/420 is also easily upgradeable - in my T520 running Fedora, I have:

- switched the i5 CPU for i7-2860QM, doupling thread count while mostly keeping per thread performance

- maxed RAM to 16 GB

- put in SATA3 SSD to the 3.5 inch position

- put in a high capacity 3.5 inch spinning hard drive to ultrabay instead of DVD drive

- put in a small m2 SSD to the SATA2 m2 slot because why not

This is still my main computer, driving two full HD monitors from its docking station.

- you mean a SATA3 SSD to the 2.5 position - a high capacity 2.5 inch spinning hard drive in the ultrabay - an mSATA SSD in the mPCIe slot it's not m.2

I had a similar setup in my T420/T420s (I moved to the T420s when the first full HD boards didn't work well for the T420 and then came the sudden thaw in the keyboard winter, the ThinkPad 25).

W520 was the best old ThinkPad - still old-school keyboard, Full HD, 32GB RAM, 2x HDD/SSD.

I find T480 quite decent, compared to alternatives at least (Dell XPS, MacBook Pro)

I posted https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/dd2i3y/can_we_tal... a few weeks ago:

> You can get still in warranty, good spec machines below 600 USD on eBay from reputable sellers, returns accepted. Extending the warranty for 1-2 more years is 50-100 USD. So, for all intents and purposes it's new. This machine is not worse than the T490, in fact it's better in some aspects like two memory slots and two batteries. It costs like half the T490 and just as good!

Discussion mentioned Europe but eBay has a nice global shipping program so you can just buy from ebay.com but also ebay.co.uk has similar prices...

I love my x220 i7, 16GB RAM, 500GB Samgung EVO Pro... The thing flys..

Fuck chromebooks, I once had to make a jumper out of aluminum foil to replace the bootloader on one (not all are that bad, I know). If the aluminum jumper gets dislodged during the process, you brick the machine. I still recommend chromebooks for people who just need a web-browser and are okay with Google seeing all, but I'm never again buying one for myself without finding model-specific bootloader replacement instructions and making sure that they don't require a McGuyvered jumper cable.

yep, I also put coreboot on my acer c710, becuase crouton pissed me off. I don't think mine had to rely on the jumper not falling out though -- yikes.

I have an HP x2 Chromebook. The chromeos-imposed limitations are infuriating: no on-screen keyboard access for Linux apps, no side-loaded Android apps without a wipe+dev mode, etc. However, the form factor (tablet, magnetically attached keyboard, excellent battery life, stylus, etc.) make this an acceptable trade-off for me.

Check out the Galaxy Tab S6 - it has a very nice magnetically attached keyboard acting as a decent cover.

And while this is one of the devices affected by the Linux on DeX depreciation, it still has regular DeX (basically a desktop shell for Android apps) and quite a few community maintained open source Linux chroots (such as Termux or UserLand) provide decent development environments.

Though there are some worrying developments recently kinda mirroring your worries due to Googles draconian security policy changes possibly making projects like this harder: https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/1072

Chromebooks now support a Linux installation officially in the form of Crostini. It runs securely in a VM and work is done to make your linux apps and sharing as first party options in Chrome OS. Crouton was never an officially released and supported product by Chrome OS. Crostini is.

Some flagship Chromebooks do, not all of them.

So if one is paying flagship prices, then why not just buy a regular laptop from a Linux vendor?

First of all it's not just flagship devices, here you go - https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/c...

Also all Chromebooks produced 2019 and onwards will support Crostini. Flagship or not flagship. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/291185-all-chromebooks...

Chromebooks' update model, speed and security are way ahead of any Linux vendor. Security is the pride of this product. And the hardware quality is great too. What you buy is your prerogative but the ability to run both Android apps and also a Linux install makes Chromebooks a good value.

That just sounds like Google marketing.

First of all, speed is hardly a feature when compared with laptops on the same price range.

Specially when taking into consideration the VMs being executed, namely browser instances, gVisor and the Crostini hypervisor.

Then just like on Android devices, Chromebooks have a limited duration of updates, namely 6 years since device market release.

Hardware quality is debatable when I need to pay MacBook class prices for getting such quality.

There are “wall into a store” devices at far less than MacBook/XPS/X1 prices that have good performance, stellar battery life, good displays, and run the web’s default browser alongside Android apps and almost all Linux apps (direct USB access and audio is tricky, but the Android development kit is directly supported).

It’s true that after some number of years, you switch the hardware to a different OS, including a 3rd party supported ChromeOS system or a variety of Linux distributions.

I’m not saying it’s for everyone, but I will say that it’s at least in the same class of consideration as “you could buy an old Thinkpad, and replace at least the hard drive, keyboard, display, and battery to get something similarly usable”.

You can get a Crostini supported device for around 400 Dollars. These are not MacBook class prices.

Chromebook's security story is far ahead. You can do your own research and you'll find ample links proving the same.

Yes I can, but that is hardly the quality and speed you are advocating versus what regular Linux laptops offer on that price range.

My Windows and Linux laptops are kept up to date since ever, with hardware encryption turned on.

Disk encryption protects you from somebody who steals your switched-off laptop.

This discussion is about the permissions that applications get. Desktop Linuxes don't have such an permission system in place - "just run as root" with ultimate trust in the application is quite common. Sandboxing isn't a thing either.

Sandboxing is surely a thing, you just have to configure it.

And that is where things fail. Expect all users to setup sandboxing on their own ? Don't make a mistake ? And "disk encryption" is not a catch all solution to security. Otherwise every OS would be secure.

Just like Chromebooks are a market failure outside the US school system, because a large target of the world population requires more than a browser manager OS on their laptops.

Amount of Chromebooks on sale across European electronic consumer stores, less than 1%.

The 1% is left for when they occasionally pop up under "deal of the day", when the shop decides to test waters and is more than happy when it finally goes away after a couple of weeks on display.

Nice, don't reply to the point on security and shift goal posts. So you admit that "disk encryption" doesn't work ? Year of the Linux Desktop wohoooo. Also did you see Windows announcement about a cloud based OS :) sounds familiar ? But sure hate a Google product. It's the fad these days.

I did answer, but you weren't paying attention.

GNU/Linux security is better than ChromeOS because the updates are guaranteed for longer than six years, if one buys a laptop from someone like System76, or plenty of small Linux shops, it can be properly configured with encryption, LinuxSE, Flatpak/Snap/whatever.

Windows is a proper OS and its cloud offerings are not new.

Have a look at all the ancient Linux routers everywhere. They have all kinds of nasty security issues up to RCE. Linux and open source doesn't solve anything by itself. It must be brought to the customer -- without interaction.

Security must be the default. Automatic updates, sane default configuration. And a user interface that supports security.

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