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Comment by Kaiyou | Hacker News Reader

You say that, but you got a Chromebook despite everything Google did in the past. If people had gotten any message they'd have abandoned Google back in 2008.

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Speaking just for one, I haven't adopted a new Google consumer product in 7 years. I don't even click the links.

Pretty sure Reader had that effect on a large chunk of the technical base they previously relied heavily on.

Indeed... I don't even consider using their development tools now.

Just the other day I met a guy who told me he wouldn't consider learning and using Go because Google will cancel it eventually

What a reputation issue they're developing. Even if their tech is pretty good, there's a growing number of people who won't even consider it (myself included)

That doesn't really make sense, though. Go is entirely open source. If Google dropped it tomorrow there are more than enough non-Google people invested in it to continue development.

Maybe, but how many of them are compiler engineers? Go does not strike me as a language, that a compiler engineer would love.

Eh, if google cancelled go, there's a good chance a bunch of go compiler engineers would move to other companies using go...

It would continue development, but how popular would it remain without Google blessing?

Very reasonable concern. I like Go, but it's not sufficiently better than its competitors (Java/C#) to be professionally maintained or adopted. Then there's the huge chunk of people who use it just because of the Google halo effect. My guess, Go and its ecosystem would end up floundering like other ex-corporate languages like Object Pascal or Objective-C. Even more so if Google abandons Go because they made a brand new replacement.

Shutting down Reader really did an oversized amount of damage to Google's reputation. I always found it surprising that Google wouldn't devote the engineering resources just to maintain Reader and not upset the influential people who relied upon it.

No one is more influential than Google.

- Google

There used to be cheap linux notebooks, that what I used to buy, then Chromebooks appeared and replaced entirely cheap linux laptops. I stupidly hoped that it would be good enough, or easily convertible to straight Linux; it isn't. In fact the main problem is that Google Docs doesn't properly support OpenDocument format, making it crippled for me even as a basic desktop (it's only useful as a browser and nothing else).

Many of the Chromebooks are pretty simple to convert to a standard OS. I've got two chrome devices flashed with 3rd party firmware and running FreeBSD. It seems more likely if you get devices running Intel Core series chips (cpu model numbers like xxxxU or maybe xxxxY, but not Nxxxx), but it's good to confirm it's supported by your 3rd party firmware of choice before you buy.

I use firmware from https://mrchromebox.tech/ these days.

+1, I'm on the Chromebook Pixel 2 (2015) and have been running Arch Linux for years now. I can't recommend it enough.

Unfortunately, since 2017, Google has been using a new security chip (CR50) that isnt supported in the upstream Linux kernel. So while you can flash 3rd party firmware and install your own OS, the security chip will throw the device into recovery mode if you ever suspend the computer.

AFAIK, there is no workaround for this - if anyone knows otherwise, please share details. I've got a chromebook that I'd very much like to be able to use something besides ChromeOS on.

Was Google anywhere near as bad in 2008? I don't recall anything particularly awful back then.

No, I think that was around the launch of the first android, right? There was some serious interest in a Linux (!!!) based phone. They were seen as a savior of sorts, as I remember it. Now they’re a place where novel ideas go to die.

That's how I remember it - they were starting down their current path in privacy terms but hadn't hit the moral event horizon yet, and they were still in that unbridled optimism phase where they were launching moonshot projects rather than churning through web service offerings. I didn't get seriously concerned about them until later (around 2014-2015 iirc) and it took until the start of 2018 for me to completely de-google myself.

I don't remember all the little details, but it was the year I started to actively avoid anything they touch, starting with their search engine. I think the main concern was the privacy nightmare.

Chromebok was originally marketed as a simple, no-nonsense laptop and that's what it is. All iterations since have been useful but did anyone really believe it was going to be a ThinkPad killer?

Once they started selling $2k+ versions, yeh I kind of do think expect that actually.

Fair point.

Precisely. Though all the Google devs I've met weren't using them for development --> devs aren't the target market.

TBH I dont understand the developers preference for laptops, generally.

The laptops are good when you need to be mobile - but you can pry my multi-large-monitors desktop out of my dead hands, because I'm not giving that up for serious be-in-the-zone development.

I can only speak for myself, but my development environment being mobile is precisely the point. I can work from home, I can commit changes while on business trips... it's valuable. I also have a large monitor at the office that I plug my laptop into, so I get the best of both worlds.

Uh, my work device is a laptop and I use multi-large-monitors. With external keyboard and mouse.

I can unplug it (single cable) and take to a conference room if the need arises. I can take off early and plug it at home. It has a built-in UPS by the virtue of having a battery. Why would a desktop be better, unless you need crazy hardware?

I do have a desktop at home, but that's for my personal uses.

Yeah, I have no idea who those are for, but the cheaper ones are great for family members who only really need to browse the Web anyway. My tech support burden is way down, and so I love Chromebooks for other people.

Those high-end are amazing business machines for people who work with cloud/web software.

They're very easy to manage from a central location, easy to replace and very hard to break.

I've been recommending cheap Linux laptops like the Pinebook (as well as the Pro) for family members who just use their computers for email and Facebook. Turns out if they spend 99% of their time using Firefox, Linux is a good platform that can suit their needs just fine. Haven't had a tech support call in ages.

The ThinkPad Chromebook 13 is actually pretty nice: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/lenovo/student-chromebo...

Of course, Lenovo doesn't make those anymore, but you can find them used.

First they came for the Grand Central users, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Grand Central user.

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