My favorite device is a Chromebook

My favorite device used to be a Chromebook. I got a maxed out Pixelbook in 2018 and I loved it, especially as Crostini got better and better over the years. It was my primary dev laptop and I loved using it.

I think we know where this is going... Like many other things Google over the past decade, it died on the vine - IIRC Google killed their Chromebook devices group a couple years ago. I would have loved a Pixelbook 2. I'm back on a Macbook because I was just never able to find a Chromebook that had sufficient processing power and memory after the Pixelbook.

My favorite device is an android phone these days.

With termux, I can get most of my work done right away. This is especially true since I switched from VS Code to yazi+helix in the command line as an IDE.

The rest of what I need works in a proot ubuntu instance[1]

Also, since Android 13, the overall OS is pretty good with floating windows.

Some brands (Samsung, Honor, etc.) have full on desktop experiences now with kb+m. Google is slow rolling this into core android since 2017, though, to protect their Chromebook market.

1. https://ivonblog.com/en-us/posts/termux-proot-distro-ubuntu

I'm big on digital minimalism and have relied on Chromebooks for everything for well over a decade now. I have Gimp, Inkscape, and the other flagship Linux apps I need. I have ssh and my tmux/shell/vim development environment I prefer.

It would be nice if there were an open source alternative, but all that the open source community wants to deliver is rip-offs of the Windows XP experience. Chromebook is what desktop Linux was supposed to be, but nobody understood that the browser was the Linux desktop the whole time.

A long time ago, I bought an Acer Chromebook off of Groupon for $100. It was surprisingly performant despite being woefully underpowered. The screen wasn’t big but was bright and had a nice resolution. I too was able to get Crostini up and running but hit the limit with certain windowed apps.

I’ve been on the hunt for a Chromebook these days but they feel like poor value to me these days. They tend to have bad speakers, resolution, and frequently processors that run hot and much worse battery life than the Acer.

They seem like a worse value today because I expected them to be cheap and run all day while letting me browse the internet quickly. They can do that but at a much higher price and at that point you’re looking at a used MacBook Air or a Windows device.

For that price (300 EUR) I'll take a used classic ThinkPad with a shiny new SSD anyday.

I used a chromebook for a long time for travel while I was using a linux desktop at home. I've now switched to a macbook as the only device I use due to apple silicon and the macbook being the only laptop I could order with a QWERTY keyboard in germany. Still there are many things I miss from the chromebook:

- touchscreen

- alt+tab

- proper fullscreen mode

- linux VM

- no annoyances like apple music or "look this up" popping up randomly

An entire category of things I miss are things that make tabbed browsing more pleasant. ChromeOS is the only OS that seems designed for that:

- swipe to cycle through tabs

- triple tap to open in a new tab

- move pointer to the top to select other tabs, in effect giving you an infinitely tall tab bar, like MacOS has an infinitely tall menu bar[1]

I hope there will be chromebooks with snapdragon x elite chips and Google will figure out distribution like Apple (order and choose keyboard layout online and pick up at a store).

[1]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/fitts-law-and-infinite-width/

I think what is always lacking in these reviews is: compared to what?

I’m always curious to see what other devices authors have used prior to this “best device”.

For example, I started with a 2010 MacBook Pro, then a T430 Thinkpad, then a dell, then a desktop computer, then Apple finally fixed the butterfly keyboard so now I use a 2021 MacBook Pro.

In my experience nothing comes close to the trackpad of the MacBook. But I haven’t tried something like a Framework or a Chromebook. So maybe those are better.

I really wish there was a “rent a laptop” service where you could check out a different laptop every month and see if you really like it.

The demise of Lacros indicates to me that CrOS is dead as an independent project. Inertia will keep it going for a while but in the long run it is doomed to be subsumed by Android in an unsatisfying way. Which is what a lot of people have predicted for a long time. I think they will eventually be right.

https://9to5google.com/2024/07/12/chromeos-lacros-ending/

I have one, but I never use it. It sits in a corner. I want to love it, for it’s simplicity if nothing else, but it’s slow and then I’ll want to run something it doesn’t support.

Interestingly, I’ve fallen for a Kindle Fire lately. An even more limited device. I also have the pen. My Chromebook has a pen too, but the keyboard folds around and is awkward when in tablet mode.

If you have a stylus though, I highly recommend the Squid app. It’s a pretty great app for handwritten notes and drawings. I might have loved the Chromebook more if I had discovered this app on it.

The coordination between the containerized Debian terminal and ChromeOS is really quite good. I pop back and forth all day long effortlessly.

[disclaimer] I was one of the pre-release beta testers for ChromeOS...

I just got a duet 3 two weeks ago and I am surprised by how much I like it. Got it mostly for reading/annotating pdfs but I am finding that I use it for all general computer stuff. The small keyboard took abit to get used too and the chromebook's lack of many common keys with the caps lock being more a function shift still throws me off but is growing on me.

I find them criminally underrated. Mine is also my favorite device, and I've worked months at a time on it as a programmer as my only device.

I liked it so much I wanted to install it on my own desktop machine, but unfortunately ChromeOS Flex at least runs an older kernel that doesn't work on newer hardware. In my case it doesn't even try to boot.

The newer Chromebook plus devices are pretty good and they sell for around the same price. They get the basic right, 8GB Ram, 1080p IPS screen, 256Gig UFS or eMMC 5.1, good speakers and not bad trackpads. I got a ASUS CX34 at the starting of this year. It's been pretty good so far. No complaints with battery life or performance.

I have the same Chromebook since a few weeks now (got it in sales at 299 euros in France) and... it is my favorite device too.

First, the build quality is very nice for 299 euros. It does not feel weak or "plastic" at all. It comes with an ok keyboard and, imoo, a "meh" touchpad. The keyboard offers a nice protection to the chromebook.

Most of Android apps work well on this device, on both smartphone & tablet settings.

I can open a shell on a Debian distribution using LXC, do my light coding on it without any issue, and then go back to native web apps like YouTube in tablet mode once I finish coding...

2-in-1 chromebooks are really what iPad failed to do for me: both media consumption and light coding when I need to, with a very good battery life (6 to 8h depending of my needs). Also, I can plug in via USB-C on my external screen and work on external screen without any issue.

Imoo ChromeOS is really the best "it-just-works" Linux machine since a while, and I really hope Google will continue to maintain this great system (and ecosystem, plugged with my Android phone) for a while!

The CPU is a bit weak for heavy coding, and the audio is just "ok" for media consumption, but otherwise I really love this device!

Eternal yes to this

I've been Chromebooking since 2015 as soon as I found out about Crouton, which crashed more often than I'd like so I was happy to see the Linux 'Beta' become a thing.

I still have a Mac mini and will probably always but no more towers for me. I have several CBs for biz vs. personal use and haven't spent more than US$180 on any of them. They're not the fastest machines as my OSX machine often reminds me but this is the way forward for me and I try to apply the same decisioning in as many purchases as possible

Mine's a first gen 8GB Surface Go; very light, decent life, pretty good note-taking functionality with a pen, absurdly cheap used and just about powerful to do the job for situations where I'm travelling and _may_ need to do some minor dev work

I use a macbook for dev work generally but the Surface Go has been a godsend for separation of concerns.

> And what I think makes ChromeOS really powerful is Crostini, a full Linux VM that you can run inside ChromeOS. It runs Debian (it seems you can run other distros though) with a deep integration with ChromeOS, so you can run even graphical programs without issues (including OpenGL!)

Agreed. WSL2 makes Windows really powerful too.

Hey, author of the post here. Didn't expect someone else to submit it to HN. Happy to answer any questions.

"And what I think makes ChromeOS really powerful is Crostini, a full Linux VM that you can run inside ChromeOS"....

This is akin to the person that uses their left hand to touch their right ear....

Both MacOS and Windows offer that without all constraints and privacy negligent services from Google/Alphabet.

Yep, totally feel the same about computers these days: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2024/07/03/2000

Pretty happy with chromebook duet, but faster mobile cpus = bloatier android apps. Can't even run youtube app without stuttering anymore. OS itself still pretty servicable.

Some chromebooks are decent machines. Unfortunately some strange decisions like the circumcised keyboard layout makes it a no-go.

if you re-arrange the letters in 'chromebook' you get 'e-waste'.