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Comment by malkia | Hacker News Reader

I only wish for more powerful Chromebook - like 32GB or even 64GB of RAM, 3-4TB of SSD - maybe proper accelerated GPU, maybe discrete one.

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I'm curious, why? I can completely understand an "iPad Pro" version of a Chromebook. Something that is an incredible version of a limited device.

But I'm struggling to think what a 64gb of RAM with a GPU Chromebook could do that the current ones can't do? If it's run Linux, why not just get a Linux laptop?

Chromebook means hardware + software are packaged, which means someone is making sure they work properly together. That's the biggest differentiator.

You can maybe get this with some Linux laptops, idk. The Thinkpads we have at work that "support" Linux have known Bluetooth issues; if I ever have trouble hearing someone in a remote meeting, it's someone with a Thinkpad.

Lenovo Thinkpads have traditionally been a pretty safe choice for Linux, probably because they're popular with Linux devs. Pretty sure what's what Google buys for their corporate Linux laptops too.

If you buy something like a Dell, you might encounter more rough edges, although it's generally not as bad as it used to be 1-2 decades ago.

I thought about Thinkpads just before you replied and edited to mention the issues I've seen with them. Yes you're right, Google buys them, and they have minor problems, but I've never owned one personally.

Yeah absolutely. But at that point, why not get a Macbook or a Surface?

Because I want Linux.

MacBook is what I've got, but if you specifically need lots of RAM and/or a dedicated GPU, that disqualifies it. 64GB RAM isn't even an option in the $3000 model. Also, maybe you want to run Linux for whatever reason, without experimenting with Asahi. Apple Silicon chips are awesome, but this is the downside.

And Surface runs Windows. Gonna plead the fifth on that.

ChromeOS is more secure than any Linux distro for web browsing and other "user-facing" roles.

(Qubes is close, but does not verify the whole stack against hashes stored in a secure enclave on every boot. Also, Qubes has a much lower bus factor.)

I don't want to deal with maintaining a pure Linux laptop, and I don't want to be limited by OSX/Windows (for different reasons). Chromebook, by far, is the easiest to get good amount of linux for development without much issues ... with some limitations. It also works with docker/podman for the cases I care, so was simply looking for upgrade of my great (and still used to this day) Chromebook Eve (16GB RAM, 512GB SSD) - I really only wish it was bit faster, bit more memory, and I can still live really with 512GB SSD if I have to.

Maybe Vulkan support through Linux (only HW accelerated OpenGL GLES works right now for me)

Fedora Atomic?

You'll need to check for compatibility, but ChromeOS Flex should work on many laptops that would otherwise come with Windows. It runs terribly inside a VM, though, so it's hard to try out before installing, but if you have a leftover SSD laying around you could try swapping the storage and installing it on whatever laptop you use now.

Framework has a Chromebook that can be stuffed with RAM and storage.

They can have up to 64 gigs of RAM, but internally apparently they only support up to 1TB hard drive [0], and while you can have "external" hard drives in the expansion modules, you are giving up IO to have it (half the IO slots if you wanted to get all the way to 3 TB)

I don't quite understand why it couldn't accept a larger internal hard drive, but if it could I don't know why "up to 1 TB of NVME storage" would be their marketing copy.

[0]https://frame.work/blog/introducing-the-framework-laptop-chr...

Here is the paasage. My interpretation of it is different from yours.

>Memory and storage are socketed, enabling you to load up whenever you’d like. The pre-built configuration comes with 8GB of DDR4 and 256GB NVMe storage and can be upgraded to up to 64GB of DDR4 and 1TB of NVMe storage.

I suppose the "up to" might only refer to the ram, and not the NVME storage, which would admittedly make more sense.

Hard to say but the "up to" may be only the limit the framework company wants to stock and sell.

With regards to the memory I went looking and the framework has 2 ddr5 laptop dimm slots. The largest I was able to find were 48 gb modules so the physical limit may be 96gb.

And as a closing note, this was the first time I really looked at the framework laptop page. And while I am still not sure about the build quality or the usefulness of the "ports". the number of guides and photos of laptops under surgery sold me, I think I found my next machine.

> Hard to say but the "up to" may be only the limit the framework company wants to stock and sell.

It has to be something like that. That's a standard length M.2 slot...

> https://community.frame.work/t/will-framework-chromebook-wor... Installed WD Black SN850X 4 TB (WDS400T2X0E) on my Framework Chromebook. I’ve been using it for a month and a half now. Everything is fine. The only point, probably due to which the use of such disks is not officially recommended, is the excessive reserved space for the OS. Apparently this is a legacy of the times when disks in Chromebooks were of small sizes. If you are happy with the situation where a quarter of the disk will be idle for technical reasons, then you can take it.

your google fu is stronger than mine. I specifically tried to find such a thread and failed. Well done! The stocking argument makes sense to me, and makes more physical sense as well, since, as actual hardware limitations, both the RAM and storage limits would have been highly unusual and would have almost certainly needed to be purposefully implemented for some reason.

The HP Elite Dragonfly Chromebook Enterprise was configurable up to 32GB.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/335423020537

Hard to believe it was only a little over ten years ago that the first Chromebook Pixel came out with its generous 4GB of RAM. It's a shame the battery life on it was only about 4 hours on anything other than ChromeOS (which got maybe closer to 6), because I absolutely loved the form-factor of that first model.

It was utterly useless though. It significantly predates all the valuable features that came to chromeOS later, like running any android app. I bought one used and it was impossible to troubleshoot any of it's problems because "just a normal linux distro" has always been a lie. Linux is as much the stuff built on top of the Kernel as it is just the kernel. All that stuff was basically impenetrable unless you were a Google ChromeOS dev. By the time ChromeOS was actually useful, that machine could barely run a single YouTube tab.

Screen was super nice though. It was never worth $1000

I paid $800 for a barley-used one off Craigslist. True, it lacked the Android features (which even the 2015 model might have had? Certainly the successor Pixelbook did), but it was perfectly serviceable for my uses with crouton on it. And when it eventually went out of support, I removed the write-protect screw and loaded a standard BIOS onto it so that I could then install Linux Mint. It was a capable machine for several more years, marred primarily by that poor battery life.

I got one in 2018 for $200 and it was okay as a netflix and Youtube machine, and nothing more. The Linux features were harder to activate and use than just buying a used Thinkpad for also $200, with a way better processor and twice as much memory, so I eventually did that to replace it and should have done that first. It aged like raw meat for being a "premium" product.

Mine in particular died a slow and painful death. The thermal paste had aged out, and the fan died, though was cheap and easy to replace, but even after, it still was nonfunctional, as it would die after being on for just a few minutes. Because it was running Linux with weird userland stuff like Crouton, it was devilishly hard to debug. I also just do not know how to debug Linux nearly as well as I understand Windows "internals".

It's too bad because it was a pretty laptop with a very nice screen.

A bunch of the models still only ship with 4GB RAM today! 8GB is just recently more common I'd say, but still plenty of 4GB ones out there you can buy brand new.

We have a few in the office and they are surprisingly OK. Let down more by the weaker processor (i3 instead of i5) but workable for a lot of things.

Why not use a beefy, Linux compatible laptop at this point? I'm unfamiliar with ChromeOS, so apologies for a potentially stupid question.

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