Chromebook can make a surprisingly sweet machine for a developer

    you are guaranteed nothing important is only stored locally.

And I can run a real operating system on that hardware with no problems. My laptop boots in less than 10 seconds and I trust Ubuntu just as much as a Chromebook for security. If you are worried about the security of local files you can encrypt your drive, very simply in the last few versions of Ubuntu but I don't bother, if needs be.

None of the points you make in favour of the Chromebook are exclusive to it, what's exclusive to it though is you can't get access to the vast flexibility of a local system and have to go through NX.

That's all fine for people who only do back-end stuff, or Google if they want their employees to "dog food" living in the cloud, but for someone who wants to be able to do normal everyday things like edit images, test locally or any of the many other advantages of a flexible system it doesn't really cut it. If there were locally running JavaScript equivalents for image editing and everything else we'd be a bit closer to feature parity but I still wouldn't see the major attraction.

Toshiba - Satellite 15.6" Laptop - 4GB Memory - 320GB Hard Drive - Satin Black Model: C855D/S5103 • SKU: 8119044 62 Ratings $279.99

That's 2x the ram and I get 320 HD which even if you don't want to use it for storage it's pretty awesome when running any OS that supports virtual memory. Have you looked at how much virtual memory your average Linux distro ends up using?

That was just the first hit. There's plenty of machines in the same price range as a chromebook that have better specs, more power and therefore more freedom.

If price/value is the main concern a used 4-5 year old x86 laptop is a way better deal. I have an old HP nc8430 for this purpose. Sells on eBay for about $100-$150 these days. Blows away a low end ARM ChromeBook on performance, price and flexibility.

That was more so a Verizon issue that Google's choice. Also remember that Verizon had disabled Google Wallet on that model in favor of the still not launched ISIS.

It's a moot point now because the Nexus 4 is GSM-only.

And while I theoretically could I am not going to install a "cracked" version of Android from a l33td00d7 user on a php forum just to get a fundamentally basic and useful networking feature which is present in other installs of Android and which there was no reason to turn off. The whole point of buying a Nexus device was to get away from the crap modifications (like the constant nagging, with a loud beep, to update the "Facebook integration" stuff from my phone's manufacturer which can't be turned off) and lack of basic updates on non-pure Android devices. I wanted a pure Android experience, one of my strong desires was to use it for tethering, Google promised a pure experience and it was a deception (can't remember if it was actually stated somewhere in the fine print, but I certainly read loads about the specifications before purchase and didn't see any mention of it).

It's a disgrace and, along with a series of other pointless Apple-like restrictions worming their way into Android, it confirms Google is fully prepared to cripple things in the name of profits. And it's not even their own profits in this case, it was likely done at the behest of carriers and hugely damages what Nexus was supposed to be about and their brand, so it's even crazier.

So while Canonical might try to put Amazon integration into the Unity bar, they know that you have to be able to turn it off or they will lose their users. The people at Google on the other hand know they can get away with it, although they might lose a few power users (post hoc, after taking their cash and disappointing them) they'd get a few more tie-ins with carriers, so they did it. What bugs me is that lots of people here work for Google and like to think of themselves as hackers fighting the good fight at the "do no evil" company. No, hackers don't ship devices with basic networking features crippled whilst pretending it's a restriction free device.

I can't wait to wipe Android off my Nexus 7 once there is a robust Ubuntu release for it, and my next phone almost certainly won't be Android.

For people who live remotely, Chrome OS is perfectly serviceable. I think you have to already be in that remote mindset for it to be a comfortable switch, though.

The objections I usually see (including those in this thread) relate to what the laptop can't do locally, and a lot of those objections are perfectly legitimate. There's a lot these little boxes can't do easily with the tools available today (which again, isn't to say these things aren't possible, just that they're not there yet), and for people who need those things making such a switch isn't going to be possible.

It's not like I don't have ssh here on my Ubuntu machine (similar model Thinkpad to yours), I don't see why you are trying to sell that as an upside. Indeed I have iPython in shell mode and a local copy of vim customized to my needs, and I have that as well as a server I can connect to at any time with all my sessions. Sometimes I might want to do an experiment locally rather than on a server though.

I can not only edit video (is anyone going to upload HD over the network to edit it on YouTube's editor?) , I can edit images, use my Wacom tablet, program things locally, I can record audio into Audacity and edit and change it. I can run LaTeX and actually work on academic documents. I can apt-get programs to resize many images, encode music or do just about anything. I can use R or python to generate graphs and save them locally rather than copy them from a server save or some crazy cloud save. On smaller data problems I can have a spreadsheet open for GUI editing in Libre Office and be saving to csv for a program to ingest after quick edits. Peripherals work without having to program an entirely new driver. It's a full desktop and it's fully featured, you can use it in a cloud-oriented way if you so choose as well so there doesn't seem to be any advantage to the Chromebooks other than this supposedly easier updating and nice sounding hardware.

The problem here is people are trying to sell an unfinished consumer OS as being good for developers or power users who already have powerfully polished desktop operating systems that are consumer oriented AND developer oriented as soon as you lift up the hood. In comparison the Chromebook simply doesn't stack up. The article was trying to push boot time as a feature for example, it just leads me to believe he hasn't installed Ubuntu in two years (or more actually).

I'm a power user so I need to work on images, video and audio, I need to be able to generate academic papers. I need to have OpenCV running locally on webcam feeds for testing things. I need advanced networking features from command line tools on localhost. It's all fine and dandy for them to come up with cut down device like a tablet with a keyboard, but after my experience of them turning off tethering on a Nexus device I am just not going to jump on board with anything until it's actually got more features and those features are actually not going to disappear at the whim of some advertising dollar driven decision. I don't think they'll ever be able to guarantee that properly. That OS sounds like it's years away from being remotely usable for a power user who's across a number of domains.

Have you tried Dropbox as a way to keep your config sync'd?

Seen as it's an actual computer and all not a locked down Google product that needs to be rooted to install an OS in the first place.

Seems a bit of a hacky mess if not TBH

I keep the cloud at an arm's distance, those computing resources are not owned or controlled by me. The cloud, given full control like a ChromeBook, takes all of the control away from me.

The author is referring to launching normal ssh instead of the version included in cros shell which has a weird runtime configuration menu (much like ftp) and some limitations.

You do need dev mode to start bash even as a non-privileged user unfortunately.