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Comment by kunai | Hacker News Reader

I used that same excuse to switch to Mac, but found that OS X really didn't "just work" and that there were tons of things that needed extensive configuration to get to work properly.

Now, I'm on a Chromebook Pixel, and I can say safely that it's the only computer I've EVER used that really lives up to the "just works" mantra. To top it off, it actually is Linux inside, so for someone like me who uses a Linux VM on OS X most of the time, all I have to do is install crouton, do startx and go with Gnome 3 (which is quite polished now).

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That's been my experience. I use OSX, but am regretting it after a few years of it seeming interesting. I think it really was superior years ago when Linux had bad wifi support, but nowadays it seems like it's not going to be my next machine. The experience is so bad that I spend much of my time inside a Debian VM inside Virtualbox inside OSX! The package management sucks: the OSX app store has a fairly narrow range of things, and then brew/Macports/fink have a different range of things, which don't install or work nearly as reliably as the stuff I apt-get inside a virtual machine. Setting environment variables requires a weirdly extensive intervention (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/135688/setting-environmen...). And the difference between the base-install python/perl/ruby and recent versions installed via non-Apple means is an unnecessary hassle. Etc.

Have you tried MacPorts? I use Linux extensively in the server side but really don't like using it as a development machine. I'm using a rMBP right now.

I've just been setting up MacPorts and pkgsrc side-by-side and though certainly have not plumbed the depths of either, I'm finding MacPorts to work better and have more packages.

Huh, everyone I know switched to `brew` as an OSX package manager and never looked back. I've been quite happy with `brew`.

Never really understood the appeal of brew. I tried it several times, ended up wasting a lot of time looking for the recipes. I might be using it incorrectly.

I do enjoy using MacPorts because I can quickly search the packages from their website.

Brew's got you covered, to find mysql for instance it's just

    $ brew search mysql

That is weird; I like brew better than macports so far. It hasn't failed me, as long as you keep everything updated.

brew just seems like a less mature macports. most of the differentiating features have disappeared as brew gradually discovered the same problems that macports/fink had already learned over the past decade.

Similar experience here as well, but it's eons better than linux on laptops. Just getting linux to support your laptop's video card for multi-monitor displays is a complicated beast already. I would rather deal with crappy package management than deal with driver level problems.

With what laptop is this currently true?

I've never personally had this experience, and I haven't heard a sincere account of something as basic as multihead graphics being broken for years.

It's hard to get it to work with optimus-like systems, where the external video ports are not wired to the integrated gpu, and you want to use it by default (which is something you want if you care about battery life at all). Otherwise, yeah it should work out of the box.

There are vendors that create dedicated Linux hardware (I got my laptop from System76) and it does work out of the box very well.

I used to feel this way as well (except I'm a Windows user), until I read the `man` page for `xrandr`. Wrote a little script to automate everything, and I don't even remember the frustration I had before.

Except that's the very anti-definition of "just works".

It's also totally unnecessary in a DE, where XRandR will be wrapped in a GUI.

It really depends on the laptop. If you are fine with mass market (i.e. likely supported) hardware rather than 2 month old bleeding edge cards you will likely be supported. I'm happily running ubuntu on an Asus VE248H - everything worked out of the box (after the install), including multi monitor support. I'd give up my OSX desktop (powermac) at work for ubuntu in a heartbeat (in fact I have a virtualbox install on it for when I really hit the limits of OSX.)

if you're bypassing the ChromeOS by installing a full Linux stack then aren't you undoing the "just works" part and you're back to the same issue of "maintaining" an OS. And its a very expensive machine for what you're getting. The Air is less expensive for more hardware, and you get a real operating system.

Not quite. Around 70% of the time, I'm in pure Chrome OS. The 30% I start a GNOME 3 session is to edit in Sublime and do some light image editing, and since GNOME 3 is pretty much full-GUI now without many config files, it's one setup and done.

Can you switch without a full reboot?

I would also like to know this.

I used to use a dirty hack for that (https://github.com/agravier/chromarch), but it was developed for the first generation of Samsung chromebooks, I don't know if it would work on the latest ones.

Yes: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

Can I ask you the remaining 70% of the time what you do in pure Chrome OS? Web browsing, using Google docs etc..?

Browse HN and edit in Vim most of the time.

This is the ridiculous opposite of "just works".

No, actually it isn't. A chroot environment to run Sublime and a few other GNOME applications is not the opposite of "just works." You're going to have to do a hell of a lot more configuration in OS X than in Chrome OS if you want to run X applications.

First of all, why would I want to run X applications?

That said, let's say I do -- so I download and double-click the MacPorts installer, and then run 'port install' to install an X11 app from a binary package.

Not that I'd want to.

Because of using the Samsung Chromebook for a while with ChromeOS, I started getting very used to that way of working. I write code 70% of the time, which is not very nice on a Chromebook indeed, but because Crouton is a chroot, I ended up with a rsync/git chroot which takes a few minutes to install and is almost always synced with my server both at home and at the colo. For most of the work that $249 thing is just definitely good enough. And if it breaks / gets totally destroyed / whatever, I have everything back in no time and ready to work.

The Pixel seems great, I think I would need a more powerful processor and more storage & RAM for it to work for me though.

The Pixel with the 3.9 kernel is really incredible - it just works with linux. Every single thing works flawlessly - suspend / resume, kernel mode setting, wireless, sound, touchscreen, display backlight. The weight, screen and battery life make the package even more compelling. I liked the macbook pro I had from work quite a bit, but this is the first laptop I have that I love using.

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