Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

At least the MacBook is a real computer, not a browser on steroids.

You can install linux on it. I own the previous version of the Pixel and I run ubuntu on it and its close to perfect.

Two things I would change are

1. Improve thermal cooling or move to a underpowered cpu. I have worked around it by rate limiting my CPU to not go over 800 MHz. With a few tweaks, it sips ~8.8W and gives me > 6 hrs of battery life.

2. Make the hinge a bit stiffer.

My only other complaint is that it refuses to install FreeBSD.

Did you get touch features working on your older Pixel? I'm very curious about whether the Pixel series would be a good machine for Ubuntu .. care to share your experiences?

Touch sorta works on my Pixel running Debian. By which I mean I can tap on the screen to click, but all of the multi-touch gestures don't work.

I have put absolutely no effort into getting it to work though (honestly I'd disable it entirely if I wasn't too lazy to bother), and a desktop environment like GNOME might be able to configure it to work. I'm not sure there.

Edit: (Multi-touch on the touchpad works fine for me.)

It should be possible to get working. All the drivers are in the chromiumos source repository. Until very recently X was used, so the X server should have the touch support. (Haven't tested on the new Pixel because I don't have one, but the old one, definitely.)

The kernel drivers are in src/third_party/kernel/v3.10 for first-gen pixel, and v3.14 for this one. If you're going to run your own Linux, I'd use that kernel rather than the one the distro provides. Or figure out what patches are different between the two, and cherry-pick those onto your distro's kernel.

I meant 3.8 for the old pixel, btw. Doh.

Multitouch on the touchpad works out of the box on ubuntu including gestures. Touch on the screen works too, but I dont use it since I dont like smudging my screen. If there is interest.

Is the touchpad as nice as a Macbook? I have a work provided Macbook Pro but I dread having to buy one myself.

Yes it is as good.

Is there enough storage?

I write C/C++ code on the machine, so my storage needs are minimal. If I was to guess my total storage footprint on the device would be less than 1 Gig over the base ubuntu desktop install. The machine has 64 Gigs of storage, which is more than enough for my needs.

> My only other complaint is that it refuses to install FreeBSD.

Did you try installing SeaBIOS on it?

I did not attempt to update the version of SeaBIOS installed on it. Do you think upgrading SeaBIOS will allow me to install FreeBSD?

was FreeBSD your first choice, then after abortive attempts you installed Linux?

I have been a Linux user for sometime, so when I got the laptop I first installed linux on it. Subsequently I have grown rather fond of dtrace, so I like to use FreeBSD when the environment permits. So I tried installing FreeBSD on the machine in November last year.

thanks

> You can install linux on it. I own the previous version of the Pixel and I run ubuntu on it and its close to perfect.

Yeah, just like buying a Windows laptop to install Linux, meaning using the laptop for another purpose than it is being sold for.

Laptops are sold to be general purpose computing devices, not to "run Windows".

The reasoning you gave seems to be some sort of fully general counterargument to ever installing GNU/Linux, as there are hardly any devices that are "sold to run GNU/Linux".

In general installing GNU/Linux on devices not meant for it is, indeed, a bad idea. Bad drivers will usually make your computing experience a hell filled with non-REISUB-able freezes and other goodies. If you're like me and you can handle all the crap then it's fine. Otherwise stick to Windows. Or, better yet, just buy a Mac. A Dell developer's edition or a Thinkpad might be problem-free. Might. I wouldn't put money on it, though, especially with future regressions likely to fuck something up.

I get what you're saying, but I feel like the example you're providing is off. When people buy a laptop, the major selling point isn't that it runs Windows, it's typically the hardware in it. It just happens to come with Windows because that's what most people use. A major selling point of the Chromebook is that it runs Chrome OS, so in this case yeah installing Linux on it kind of defeats the purpose of buying a Chromebook.

The reason people like to buy Chromebooks to run Linux is that chromeos uses the Linux kernel, so all the hardware has to have Linux drivers available. Most laptops have at least some issues with Linux. Even my thinkpad, a line known for Linux comparability, can't use the discrete graphics card under linux.

The major selling point is that it runs Windows which runs the software and games they want, and their old data. Try offering one with BeOS or even Linux and see how many you sell.

Out of curiosity what laptop do you use? What do you do on your laptop? How does the vendor that you bought the laptop from enable your intended use (out of the box)?

A Asus laptop with Windows 8.1.

Yet many people use their MacBooks as a browser on steroids. Those people are the target audience of the Chromebook.

The whole ChromeOS project seems to have gotten underway because someone at Google observed how much of the computing time was spent inside the web browser.

the problem with ChromeOS, imo, is how limited it becomes once you pull out the net connection. Never mind the whole lockdown unless you flip that "developer" switch.

"the problem with ChromeOS, imo, is how limited it becomes once you pull out the net connection"

The other problem with ChromesOS is that it's a gigantic privacy sinkhole.

Everything you do in the OS is tracked and recorded by Google. Even printing to your desktop printer. None of this tracking is anonymous either since you must sign in with your Google account to properly use ChromeOS. (Just a reminder that a Google account equals your name, gender, email, date-of-birth, location and mobile phone number).

Google fail to state in their lengthy privacy policy how long they keep your data (presumably forever) or whether your activity is disassociated from your identity when viewed by Google. In my view, this is simply unacceptable when you consider the gargantuan volumes of private date collected and the unprecedented degree of tracking.

The reaction on this site to an entire OS that tracks you by default has mostly been: "Yeah, you're being tracked. So what? Get over it." Presumably everyone happy to recommend ChromeOS would be equally happy to switch on their Mac/Windows/Ubuntu machine and have it track everything they do, have that information sent back to the OS manufacturer, and for none of that data to be anonymous?

You can create a fake account.

In order to purchase the Pixel, I had to create a Google Wallet account. This needed all my contact info.

Once I get the device I will use a different fake google account, but they can suspect there's a link between the purchasing account and the account that uses the machine.

Besides the terms of service violation, if you provide an invalid phone number you're likely to get locked out of something and not able to verify your identity to get back in.

Which someone at Google can likely tie to your real one with zero effort, especially if you've got an Android phone or a Nest.

But again, that doesn't really matter to people who are using their laptops as a browser on steroids. Whether you're using a Macbook or a Chromebook, you're SOL in either case if you mostly do your work in a browser.

True, but i was not thinking just about work. I keep seeing them pitched as simple devices for home "computing".

The thing is, home computing is, for the vast majority of people, accessing email, Facebook, and various web information sources 90% of the time. If the Internet's not working, for the most part, they wouldn't be able to do whatever they were doing in the first place, ChromeOS or not.

Using office-type apps at home is not something that's done every day any more - my family do it incredibly rarely on their Windows desktop.

> "Never mind the whole lockdown unless you flip that "developer" switch."

Speaking of which, it would be nice if that were a physical switch on Pixels. With the original Pixel at least, there is an issue that if your battery runs completely dead, the bit that tells the computer it should be in developer mode is unset. When that happens, if you have linux installed on it, you are hosed. Everything on the drive becomes inaccessible, and the only thing you can do is reflash ChromeOS.

If I am wrong about that, somebody please tell me. It is making me paranoid as hell about leaving it unplugged.

The issue is fixed on Pixel 2: "And yes the issue with dev/legacy enable state being lost when the battery drains has been fixed as the state is now saved in the TPM instead of CMOS" (comment to https://plus.google.com/+OlofJohansson/posts/1yopVMjEhjK)

A TPM? Not sure i like the sound of that. Who holds the final keys?

Also, what happened to giving the CMOS a backup battery?

The backup battery is gone because Intel datasheets advised against it for years, and they got more insistent over time. It's surprising enough that they still didn't manage to kill of that part of the PC80 architecture (RTC clock and associated memory). They certainly try for years by now.

As for the TPM, Chromebooks come with them for a long time now. They're cleared when entering or leaving developer mode. The main difference is that after clearing, the devmode mechanism also records the state there (instead of in CMOS).

If you're concerned about "final keys", read the spec (eg. http://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/resources/tpm_main_spec..., Part 1, Section 9.5). The only key that is never deleted is the "Endorsement Key". That one is similarly annoying as the Pentium III serial number (ie. it allows secure identification of the TPM if you let software send requests to the TPM).

https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-f...

Well snap. No Chromebook for me any time soon...

Thank you! Hopefully I never have to do this, but I feel much better knowing that it is possible.

> The whole ChromeOS project seems to have gotten underway because someone at Google observed how much of the computing time was spent inside the web browser.

Well, I think there is something in that direction, but quite a lot in the direction of "the whole Chrome project at Google -- including ChromeOS -- was started because someone at Google realized that Google would have more reach if people spent more time in the browser and had less reason to use non-web software, so they set out to address the issues that make out-of-browser software necessary for what users want to do with computers."

First I saw mention of it, it seemed that they wanted to make a minimal OS that was very quick to boot - minimal in part because it was only the browser, or whatever.

Then soon after that SSDs happened and I stopped caring about boot times.

The "audience" or market for the Pixel are Googlers - hardly folks looking for a browser on steroids. Although that being said, I'm not sure "browser on steroids" is exactly a knock given what you can accomplish these days.

Plot twist, even CR48s can run Arch and other light variants of Linux, with an i7 and 16GB of RAM, I have no doubt these will be capable as well.

Now, about that price point...

Heck I ran straight Ubuntu on mine, and Firefox was less janky than Chrome on ChromeOS at the time.

I use the Asus Chromebox (small "desktop" ChromeOS machine) as an OpenELEC media center. It runs absolutely flawlessly, mostly because it's just a basic Intel Pentium system. From what I've heard, the ARM Chromebooks like the Samsung ones can be a bit trickier, but it can be done.

It's a real computer, it's just that people haven't written a lot of software for it. What kind of software can't you write for Chrome OS?

Photoshop.

What's that Frenchy open source photoshop called again?

You're thinking KRITA probably. Germany though I believe, because of the GMBH thing on its group. Krita really bogs on my system when using painting tools so ready for primetime, I think not. But hey I've been wrong before. The best photoshop / Illustrator replacements underway right now are coming from Serif Software under the name Affinity. Not opens source BUT definitely going to make a dent in Adobe's fat head.

Untrue: http://edex.adobe.com/projectphotoshopstreaming

> Untrue: http://edex.adobe.com/projectphotoshopstreaming

Please don't take people for idiots, photoshop won't be running on your ChromeOS.

It is possible to write software like photoshop for ChromeOS, thus it is a real computer. It's just that no one has. Nobody has written this kind of software for Plan 9, and a computer with Plan 9 is still a real computer.

Spending a grand on a piece of machine that people rarely write software for is a bit of a pickle.

I agree with you, but this is a different argument.

You might as well just link to a Chrome-compatible VNC client and say it can run anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com