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If I'm thinking about this correctly, isn't this essentially what a Chromebook does? Google Sheets, for example, shows me a picture of a spreadsheet that's being generated on a Google server, not my machine. A Chromebook is just a display with a keyboard - and the Chrome browser is just the software that passes the images from the server to my display.

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Chromebooks are full laptops, with a full OS, running a full browser, windowing system, notification system, device drivers, network stack, etc.

You can even run Android apps, or linux native apps under chrome://settings.

You can edit that spreadsheet locally, just click on offline editing.

Sure when you click save it saves to the cloud, but that's about the largest difference between Chrome OS and Linux, they are running the same kernel after all.

Yeah, I think chromebooks are halfway there -- but like chromebooks still have CPU's and an OS. I guess I was thinking that the network connection could be, for instance, to a windows 10 client VM, so you could run games and other things you couldn't do in a chromebook.

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