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Comment by marccuban | Hacker News Reader

A Chromebook is a pretty impressive piece of hardware for $99.

Piece of hardware yes. Terminal yes.

Computer: no.

I'm typing this in chromium on ubuntu/xfce, alongside an Eclipse window open working on some Go code, inside of a crouton chroot, on a $250 Samsung Chromebook that has better battery life than any of my previous laptops. I disagree.

In context to education do you really think they're going to use anything other than the OOB configuration?

Oh and the Lenovo T400 I bought last week (Core 2, 2.4, 8Gb RAM, Radeon HD, 128Gb Samsung 840 pro) lasts 8 hours only cost $25 more and doesn't break if you cough near it.

I don't get the value proposition.

Where can you get a bunch of outdated Thinkpads with custom hardware installed (in my experience, the T400 released four years ago doesn't come with a 128GB Samsung SSD) for that price? How would a school district go about buying a thousand of these off-market, custom-modified laptops?

UK IT brokers have hundreds of them if not thousands floating around. Mine wasn't even used. SSD costs more than the unit. It doesn't take a genius to source that quantity.

HOwever, the school district should buy a pile of shit dell desktops and bolt them to the desks like they probably did before rather than succumb to a low priced promotional Trojan.

Someone probably gets a promotion for saving the cash but do they realise how inflexible the machine is and how tied onto the vendors' platform it is.

Selling out is the only description.

It's also a machine the kids can't screw up and takes next to no IT resources to administer. Unlike a shit Dell bolted to a desk.

I'm a system admin for a large school district. My daily device for day to day work is a pixel.

Before that I functioned just fine on a Samsung chromebook ($199) for 6 months.

I can assure you, Chromebooks are most definitely a computers. (They cover far more than the needs of the average user)

Do you use ChromeOS or have you installed something else?

If it is a ChromeOS device, I don't believe you. You cannot be an effective sysadmin administrator on a ChromeOS machine unless you're propping up Google Apps and nothing else.

If you have installed something else, the value proposition of a pixel is flawed and your education district shouldn't have paid for it.

You can get an SSH terminal on ChromeOS (either dev-mode or via a Chrome app). You can also get a remote desktop client. That's all you need for the vast majority of system administration tasks. Typically you use your primary desktop to connect to a server to do any other tasks.

And, I would think that for most school work, having a computer that the kids can't break would be an admin's dream.

So, the ChromeOS notebook should work as good as anything for that job.

What happens when you have no network connection?

About 50% of my administrative tasks (documentation and architecture) are entirely offline tasks?

My kids can't break their windows machine, because I know what I'm doing and have set up a strong security policy.

> What happens when you have no network connection?

I wait until the end of my commute, and then use the network there. All places I work form have internet access.

Unless the connection is broken and you need to fix it and your technical contacts are on Google contacts of course...

Then use the offline mode built into ChromeOS: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375012?hl=en

I'm not sure what kind of system and network admin you can do with no network, but presumably that'd be a problem with any other computer.

For offline tasks, use offline apps, like Google Docs.

> My kids can't break their windows machine, because I know what I'm doing and have set up a strong security policy.

In my experience, I find that regardless of policy, windows computers are more likely to break down at one point or another. Curious though, what do you do different to mitigate that inevitability?

Well two mitigations:

1. Secure by default. The default windows configuration is not secure by default - it's a compromise that is used to make it usable for people. You can (with Group Policy) lock the machine down heavily then allow things as they are required. I do this.

2. Good hardware. They have a Dell Precision T3500 rather than some shitty disposable piece of crap. I expect this will last around 8-10 years.

Windows is perfectly fine if you understand it. We have 377 Windows machines and 205 Linux machines in total. Reliability statistics are approximately the same. The only issues we get is with hardware packing in occasionally (usually the HP mid-range stuff and their laptops).

My Pixel runs pure ChromeOS (I have Crouton installed as well, but that was when I was still transitioning into a full time Chrome environment)

As others have mentioned: -I can ssh into any linux box I need.

As others haven't mentioned: -I can RDP via chrome app to any Windows server I need (Or more commonly I RDP to a "command" server and do all my other work from there.) This gives the added benefit of keeping my device outside the general workflow of things. I still have a windows laptop loaded with the same image as the average user, but there's really only for dogfooding.

We are a Google Apps heavy shop - so there's that.

I'm missing the logical connection you make between what my school district should and shouldn't pay for... Should your employers not buy Macbooks?

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