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Comment by jkldotio | Hacker News Reader

I don't see the point in using a crippled operating system when it will prevent you from quickly editing a low res screen cast or editing an image in the GIMP. Machines in that price range have enough performance to do some of these tasks even if they're not optimal for them. If I'm on the move away from a bigger system I might still need to do it though, so not having that capacity just because of someone's "in the cloud" dream is silly.

It's already bad enough that Google maims some of the Nexus line by disabling tethering. Android is also inflexible in many ways regarding having a local easy to use file system etc. I personally can't wait to get off Android and onto Ubuntu mobile or Firefox OS.

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As stated in the article, the "point" is to have the same functionality for a fraction of the cost. You can still run image editing software or whatever you'd run on your workstation using NX. That's somewhat inconvenient, but then it boots faster with no malware, and you are guaranteed nothing important is only stored locally. So it's a trade-off, not a "crippling" as you've put it. Some folks, like the author, barely notice a difference in quality yet save $1000, and that feels good.

    you are guaranteed nothing important is only stored locally.

That's what scares me the most. Unless I have the option of not using Google's infrastructure, and can run my own "ChromeOS Storage/Auth Server" on a computer of my choice, then I'd never trust the OS. Google is expecting a surreal amount of trust that no single corporation should be given.

I can get the same functionality in terms of hardware at the more or less same cost, certainly not $1000 more as you claim. A 1.7gighz ARM or the other versions aren't more powerful than a 1.6gighz or higher Atom processor at the same price point.

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.

>> 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.

Adding to that working with remote GUI apps simply sucks compared to running them locally, for all kinds of reasons. It's less responsive, applications don't always integrate well with the rest of the OS (think keyboard/language settings, terminal capabilities, reliable copy/paste), you lose things like local search, some applications you rarely use will not be available on the remote, and if your network connection goes down you lose your session. And who's going to set up and maintain the NX service? If having your work in the cloud matters a lot, I would much rather just mount some remote filesystem for storing it, and run all my dev tools locally.

I tend to agree I don't see the point here, since when is a cheap machine to SSH to some other box anything special, let alone a viable replacement for a dev system? I did stuff like this (SSH-ing to a remote host, editing webpages there, viewing the result locally) literally 10 years ago on a Pentium-233 laptop you couldn't even give away for free today because no-one would want to have it. For $250 there's a lot of decent notebooks that would do everything a Chromebook does, and adequately run a modern linux distro to boot.

$1000 is an exaggeration, but chromebooks really are significantly cheaper than netbooks/laptops: $250 ARM and $199 Celeron.

But you know, just now considering the restrictions that Apple, Google and Microsoft put on their mobile machines, because they can, creates a real opportunity for Firefox OS (and yes ubuntu). Though niche, as most consumers won't care... unless the restrictions go too far.

Can you link to this notebook you're talking about? I'd love a $200 notebook that's better than a Chromebook.

It's called a Chromebook with Ubuntu on it.

Went to Best Buy, typed "laptop", first result

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.

To be fair, that one is more than twice the weight of a chromebook (5.5 lbs vs 2.5).

and a much worse battery life and significantly larger.

That's not a laptop that's a luggable

And arguably more than twice as powerful. You can run nearly every Windows app including games like Call of Duty, Portal, Farcry etc. You can run Photoshop, Lightroom, Office etc.. You can run VC++, gcc and even have room to store your project. All things you can't do on the same priced Chromebook.

Only 1 year ago before the Retina MBP every MBP being carried by the majority of geeks around Silicon Valley weighed 5.6lbs yet that did not stopped them from carrying them as laptops

Why would you want to use virtual memory? I bet that laptop has a 5400 rpm hard drive - there is no way I want it to be swapping on and off of it at every opportunity. The OS would grind to a halt.

For most developers' usage, you'd be better off with a 32gb SSD than with the 320gb slow-as-hell spinner drive.

Not to mention a cheap 15.6" laptop gets terrible battery life. My $250 Chromebook gets 6.5-7hours, even when running Ubuntu via crouton.

just a quick question.

With crouton you still get the large developer mode warning right?

and it requires either a keystroke or a 30 second to pass correct?

and do you have the arm one or another?

Yeah you have to have your chromebook in dev mode, so you'll see the warning. You can press ctrl+d to skip it.

I have the original Series 5 which has a dual core Atom.

All the standard macbooks that have HDs come with 5400rpm HDs. Apparently the majority of Silicon Valley has no problems getting work done on a 5400rpm HD.

As for battery life I'd personally rather have a machine I can get real work done with shitty battery life than one with great battery life on which I can't get real work done. There's a huge list of things I can do on the machine with an HD, virtual memory, and a real OS that I can't do on the Chromebook. In fact Chrome will even run better on the machine with the HD as it won't kill off tabs when it gets low on memory. It also won't get low on memory as quick as it has twice the memory.

save $1000, and that feels good

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.

But not on weight/battery life. It all depends on your priorities.

Maybe not battery life/weight… but on being an actual computer with storage you can rely on and a properly supported operating system.

Actual computer as compared to what? A modern Atom processor with an SSD and a few gigs of RAM isn't a powerhouse, but it's plenty for dev work on the go unless you're a graphics programmer or you need a local copy of a large database etc.

The file storage is the one that made me leery. I solved the issue by using owncloud, which so far seems to be working pretty well. The performance could be better but I'm pretty sure that's due to my slow upload connection.

I don't get your last point though. Chrome OS has a pretty rapid pace of development and is getting new features every day. They also have tech support for those who need it.

Chromebooks are not that much cheaper. They don't give you that much extra battery life. They are extremely limited in functionality and I feel a proper "developer machine" should have more than just ssh.

Genuinely curious, since I've used every nexus device to date: which ones disable tethering? I can't recall one that does.

All of the GSM ones tether fine. The Verizon Galaxy Nexus needed rooting or a workaround to tether.

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.

Nexus 7 3G bought outright entirely separately to any plan or network carrier. Tethering is entirely disabled and many forums confirm this.

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.

>Nexus 7 3G bought outright entirely separately to any plan or network carrier. Tethering is entirely disabled and many forums confirm this.

That's pretty obnoxious. I can't believe I can't find any info about this except small little anecdotal cases. I'm surprised it wasn't worthy of more hubbub or maybe I missed it.

>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.

That's not really how that went down when the Amazon integration was first rolled out. See: 12.10.

I switched to a (non-developer-mode) Chromebook recently for work. It's a great development machine for what I use it for. My main workstation basically runs Chrome, Emacs, and some xterms. On my Pixel, I can just use Secure Shell to ssh to my tmux session and be working on exactly what I was using on my desktop. (Port forwarding works too, if you're developing a web app or something.) It's like being at my desktop except the keyboard and ergonomics aren't as good.

If I need to edit a screencast or image, two things I've never done for work ever in my life, I can just use Chrome Remote Desktop to log into my workstation. (I have a friend who logs in to his Windows machine at home using Chrome Remote Desktop and plays Final Fantasy. It's that usable!)

For what it's worth, I never really used a laptop until I got my Chromebook Pixel, because it was so painful to keep it up to date and my configuration sync'd. My Thinkpad X220 has been sitting dead on my windowsill for about a year. With ChromeOS, I don't have to deal with that anymore; I can just open up my computer and use it. And it's that usability that makes it worthwhile to me. (I also love the touchscreen and high resolution display!)

I'm also pretty excited about the flexibility of the Chrome APIs for writing packaged apps. One thing that made me apprehensive about switching from a Linux laptop to a Chromebook was that I wouldn't be able to use all the features of my portable HF SDR ham radio (an Elecraft KX3) while traveling with only my laptop. But, fixing this is just a simple matter of programming -- you can write a Chrome app that controls a USB device, and you can read incoming audio. (Meaning that you can tune the radio and read the I/Q signal via the soundcard. The only snag is that the Chromebook Pixel has only one channel of input, and you need two to reassemble the nearby radio signals. But a USB dongle can fix that problem.) Anyway, I'm looking forward to the era where complex cross-platform software is just a click away, and right now the tools exist. It's time to start using them!

I've recently done the same thing, although coming from the perspective of "you can have my MacBook Air when you pry it from my cold dead hands". It turns out that when all of your development has to happen on your Linux desktop anyway, which laptop you use matters a whole lot less.

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.

The only upside you seem to have there is the hardware itself, and that updating whichever OS (you don't specify) was harder before.

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.

That is a damn nice radio. Unfortunately it'd be well over $1000AUD once I got it here - is there another product you know of that's a step above the Realtek TV card hack? I'm starting to get beyond its' capabilities (decoding P25 broadcasts)

>I never really used a laptop until I got my Chromebook Pixel, because it was so painful to keep it up to date and my configuration sync'd. My Thinkpad X220 has been sitting dead on my windowsill for about a year.

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

"crippled operating system" is far from reality. It is proper Linux on x86 with GUI layer. It is very easy to install proper desktop environment (such as KDE or Gnome) and use it as normal laptop. Intellij Idea runs just fine on Chromebook. Only problem is small disk space (16GB).

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