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I'm not sure - what makes a Chromebook cheaper than similarly specced regular laptop? I've looked at price/perf/quality and they seem to be fairly comparable.

Why not just buy a regular laptop and put Chrome OS on it?

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You can't just put Chrome OS on any laptop. It's cheaper by far, and there's not dealing with cruft building up, updates mangling your install, patch Tuesday nonsense, slowing down over time, drive-by downloads, you name it. I admit that I do most of my work on remote machines, so I don't have to have a machine with heaps of horsepower to crunch code, compile, etc. I also don't use an IDE. I write code in a terminal window. I'm not a pure programmer, more dev/ops. I do work with a fair amount of code, but it's all Linux (Bash, Python) or PowerShell based, meaning the majority of my work is done in terminal windows. This approach doesn't work for everyone. My work-issued laptop runs Fedora 35 and it's a lower-end machine (i5 processor, 8GB RAM, run-of-the-mill Dell workstation laptop). I can use Remmina for RDP stuff, and the rest I can do with a terminal window.

As a frequent Chromebook user, Google does a lot of work on the touchpad drivers to make it a pleasant experience that you don't usually see outside Apple.

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