
$600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft - mockindignant
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/600-chromebooks-are-a-dangerous-development-for-microsoft/
======
syntaxing
Bought a relatively highend Chromebook for a family member and I have to say,
these things are honestly really nice and perfect for the average user. I just
wish there was something similar for standalone linux. The same sleek profile
and price point as the Acer 14/15 series but runs some generic distro like
Ubuntu natively.

I know you can run Crouton but it just doesn't feel the same.

~~~
UncleEntity
Just buy some cheap windows box with roughly the same specs and install linux
on it. Unfortunately requires paying the "microsoft tax" but _c 'est la vie_.

Requires a bit of googling to ensure there's no driver issues but this is what
I've done for nearly a couple decades now.

------
Someone1234
Let me just say right off the bat that I like Chromebooks and think they're
fantastic for education in particular (combined with GSuite).

But that being said, Chromebooks don't scale with better hardware very well.
You can spend $250-350 and get 90% of the experience, and a very good
experience at that. If you spend three times more you'll get more memory for
Chrome and slightly more responsive tabs but hardly blows your socks off.

Microsoft likely aren't shaking in their boots because of a $600-900
Chromebook. If anything Android emulation is the real "killer app" since it
massively expands a Chromebook's capabilities, including running Microsoft's
own Android-Office apps.

~~~
jasonvorhe
Isn't that basically the same on a Windows Laptop or an iPad? Are there any
premium features that are hardware bound on any platform?

------
beezle
Unlike Google and Apple, Microsoft really doesn't care what you run on their
OS or do with their hardware. Though it is not quite 'freedom' in the OSS
evangelical sense, I'll still take it any day over the other two,
Chrome/Google in particular. YMMV.

------
torgian
Shit at this point I’d rather get a used iPad and keyboard if I wanted
something like a Chromebook.

Or just a used thinkpad.

But I guess I’m not part of the normal demographic anyway, so....

------
013a
In classic tech journalism fashion, no mention or even apparent knowledge of
Microsoft's own efforts in this area: Polaris, Core OS, OneCore, and CShell
[1] [2]

[1] [https://www.windowscentral.com/understanding-windows-core-
os...](https://www.windowscentral.com/understanding-windows-core-os-and-
polaris)

[2] [https://youtu.be/F_bPcctTV_Y](https://youtu.be/F_bPcctTV_Y)

~~~
make3
all things so small no one has ever heard of them though

~~~
013a
Windows Core OS is literally the next major OS from Windows (though who knows
if they'll just silently upgrade Win10 without a name change or what). Its not
small. The point is to create a modularized operating system, built on
OneCore, where they can add or remove major features depending on the platform
it is deployed to (even features as big as Win32 support).

Andromeda is the codename for their revitalized smartphone effort. Polaris is
the codename for their "windows minus the legacy" experience on desktop; no
Win32, just UWP, capable of running on significantly less powerful hardware.

~~~
make3
I agree with you, but it's not because it's big that anyone has ever heard of
it (consumers, not Microsoft employees)

------
notananthem
I don't see it a threat, its entirely different segmentation. Microsoft eats
up lower pricepoints through its OEM/ODM partners that it can direct by
issuing best practice guidances in fit, finish, features, etc and captures
what it likes. It does ultra-premium but occasionally dabbles in lower
segments- the thing I'm most curious to see is what it considered in the
Surface 3 and other slightly more budget conscious releases.

Google was crap at hardware, are they good now? They're hiring like mad right
now for hardware PMs from other orgs, and that'll grab some younger talent,
but they need pretty seasoned people to rebuild a whole hardware org. They
have good hardware design teams but they're fractured from eng, biz, strat and
more.

You can be good at a network of your ODMs but that doesn't mean the product
comes out to target. Chromebooks were positioned as this cheap school thing
for a bit, but then the pixel kinda overshot this by a lot.. they need clear
segmentation and targeting goals.

------
Crontab
I like the idea of ChromeOS but I don't understand why anyone would want to
own a computer that you can't even create a user account on without the
manufacturer's permission. I am also unsure, from a privacy prospective, if it
is wise to use an OS created by an advertising company.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Because after a day of work, most people just want to see funny pictures and
check their email and login to a bank account to pay some bills. They're
consumers, not producers.

~~~
xtrapolate
> "Because after a day of work, most people just want to see funny pictures
> and check their email and login to a bank account to pay some bills. They're
> consumers, not producers."

You're simply saying people want affordable technology. In that case, what is
Chromebook's advantage over the competition? The market is flooded with cheap
hardware, targeting those exact types of consumers.

~~~
krn
> In that case, what is Chromebook's advantage over the competition?

Chromebooks are not about the price. There are plenty of affordable
alternatives. They are about having to do zero maintenance.

------
woodandsteel
This development is not surprising. From the beginning, Microsoft's brilliance
been in figuring out how pc's could be used in the enterprise. It was only a
lucky side-effect that it also became the king of consumer computing.

A consequence of this is that MS has always focused on making their OS and
applications useful for businesses, at a great sacrifice in ease of use and
security for consumers. Apple jumped in to focus on ease of use and security,
but their computers have always been too expensive for mass adoption.

Now Google is going for the mass market with a secure and easy to use OS.
Microsoft can't really fight back because to do would mean abandoning the
business market. And it understandably doesn't want to do that because that's
where the big bucks are. So we should expect to see ChromeOS steadily gaining
in popularity, though it is an open question as to how far it will also go in
the enterprise.

------
jokoon
It seems there is a terminal in chromeos. Is there some kind of package
manager? I'm just curious is a chromebook is fit for software development, and
if g++/clang is running on it.

If not, I would avoid it. My experience with C++ and macbooks has been pretty
bad.

------
open-source-ux
Don't forget that ChromeOS is an operating system (OS) that tracks everything
you do. To use the OS to the full requires a Google account, so you aren't
even anonymous while you use it. (As a reminder, your Google account = your
name, your date of birth, your location, your gender and mobile phone number
i.e. some of your most private and personal details.)

We've seen Microsoft criticised, quite rightly, for introducing tracking of
users in Windows 10 (euphemistically labelled as telemetry), yet Google gets
no criticism. In fact we get the opposite, people rush to Google's defence.
The double-standard is hard to understand.

Presumably, if you think it's fine for ChromeOS to record everything you do in
the OS, you equally think it's fine for Windows/Mac OS/Ubuntu to record
everything you do too (non-anonymously of course).

~~~
wilsonnb3
> To use the OS to the full requires a Google account, so you aren't even
> anonymous while you use it

What can't you do without a Google account? There's a "browse as guest"
option.

~~~
phobosdeimos
And win10 has a local account option, no MS account needed to access all the
features.

ChromeOS is for people who are not technically inclined and don't care much
for privacy. The majority of users I am sure.

------
jimmcslim
> For now, Chrome OS's success seems limited and fairly US-centric.

Availability of Chromebooks in Australia is still very spotty (can’t get the
Pixel easily for example) so the Microsoft hegemony isn’t being threatened
Down Under!

~~~
thiagocsf
Australia has less than 10% of the US population. We get the scraps if and
when our capitalist overlords are feeling generous.

------
orionblastar
High school my niece goes to gives students free Chromebooks to take home and
work on. My son went to a high school that made us buy iPads. So there is an
academic issue here and the new Chromebooks might eat iPad sales or cause
Apple to make cheaper iPads.

Windows laptops are a joke because low end laptops uses slow CPUs and Intel
graphics. Mid end laptops for $600 have faster CPUs and Nvidia graphics but
suffer preloaded bloat and virus issues a Chromebook can avoid.

I got a 10 year old laptop with Linux Mint on it that runs great. Windows 7
and above run too slow on it.

------
nickjj
A few years ago I picked up a $300 Chromebook, spent $50 to upgrade the SSD
size (swapped the SSD card in it) and now I run GalliumOS on it (native
xubuntu but optimized for Chromebooks).

So for $350 you get a 1080p IPS panel laptop that weighs under 3 pounds and
has an SD card, headphone jack and other goodies. It easily runs a bunch of
Dockerized web apps without being slow.

One of the best portable computing devices I ever spent $ on. I still use it
almost every day 2.5 years later.

Details can be found at: [https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-
chromeboo...](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromebook-
cb35-into-a-linux-development-environment-with-galliumos)

~~~
paulcarroty
So for $350 you can buy much better laptop on ebay.

Example: [https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-
PROBOOK-650-G2-I7-6600U-8GB-256G...](https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-
PROBOOK-650-G2-I7-6600U-8GB-256GB-NO-
OS/273407193643?epid=6019183665&hash=item3fa856b22b%3Ag%3Aaz0AAOSwxrNbcv6l&LH_BIN=1)

~~~
benplumley
This is a listing for a second-hand laptop, if the Chromebook had been bought
second-hand too it would have probably cost significantly less than this.

~~~
paulcarroty
This "second-hand laptop" is much more powerful than chromebook and can be
found for less money. I just use the same price range.

~~~
Theodores
But you don't get the minimalist Chromebook keyboard.

Plus laptop CPU thermal management has a lot of problems. I would prefer a
modern and fanless Chromebook to an old laptop where the fans are whirring
away the whole time for no evidence of performance gain.

I am hoping that there will soon be an eight generation Pentium inside a high
end Chromebook with that Chromebook running linux things like a web server
natively. No idea how the IDE is going to work running that way but that is
where I would like my dev environment to be going.

You can still get refurbished Chromebooks, I bought a Dell one and I think
that come the apocalypse there will be cockroaches and my Dell Chromebook
running, if nothing else, as it is that indestructible. Plus charging seems
optional. It goes for days.

~~~
paulcarroty
> Plus laptop CPU thermal management has a lot of problems.

The business class machine means no thermal problems and keyboard problems by
default - probably many people who use Pentium on Acer just don't know.

------
joezydeco
_For example, new college students that had used Chrome OS at high school and
families who wanted the robustness Chrome OS offers are looking for machines
that are more attractive, use better materials, and are a bit faster and more
powerful. The $600 machines fit that role_

That's really the takeaway here. GSuite has gotten its hooks deep into
elementary/secondary education and now that's starting to sweep into the
college market.

Families also shop for new laptops around the holidays, and they'll want
something that dovetails with the work kids are doing at school. If the choice
is an iOS or Chrome device, the choice becomes a lot easier when they're
nearly the same price.

~~~
justadudeama
I am sure a non-trivial reason for this is every Middle School, High School,
and College I have ever heard of in my area the emails are g-suite, and they
all have unlimited google storage. Almost everyone I know uses Google Docs
when it comes to sharing papers, and many it is their primary editor. I see
why chomebooks are popular if everything else in your school is g-suite.

~~~
joezydeco
A lot of schools also have legacy PCs that are _not_ Chromebooks, and GSuite
runs on these as well.

------
sebringj
I recommended my son and father to get a chromebook. They got the $600 Samsung
model that flips back and has a touchscreen with stylist. I think these are
great devices and do what most people need to do sans annoyances. My parents
bug me much less now on how to do this or that and my son can still learn how
to program javascript games not needing to crack into the core but that's
still a possibility if you put it in dev mode at some point.

------
anoncoward111
$100 Pre-2010 laptops running Lubuntu are an even more dangerous threat that
more and more people are learning about

~~~
lioeters
The first time I tried Lubuntu, was on an old, no-name brand laptop with
Windows XP, that a friend gave me. Installed in a few minutes, and was
pleasantly surprised how performant and usable it is, considering the limited
hardware resources. I mostly just use it as a browser and book reader, but for
giving new life to old laptops, I think Lubuntu works great. Not sure how much
of a threat to the market it is though.. Hopefully it provides an open-source
option for educational purposes and the "next billion" in the developing
world.

~~~
anoncoward111
I highly, highly, highly, highly agree!!!! So glad someone else out there
likes it. It's like ubuntu with snapiness, of course.

Lubuntu is really like "teaching a man to fish". If you give them instructions
on how to install it, then suddenly nobody will ever need a shiny new $1700
macbook to get started with basic programming and content rich web browsing.

Though personally I prefer text :)

------
sunstone
I'm not sure how this article managed to overlook the Asus C302 Chromebook
flip which has been out for well over a year now and sells at the $500 price
point. Very happy with mine.

------
fredley
I want Chromebooks to dominate the consumer market, to be honest. Hopefully
that will push Windows towards dropping bloated consumer-focussed features in
lieu of a leaner OS aimed more squarely at the professional market. Currently
installing Windows 10 Pro fresh installs an unimaginable quantity of crap. Why
is Minecraft on a 'pro' install, and pinned to the Start Menu?

------
komali2
I'm pretty new to tech, and young in general, but I'm curious why what's
happening between the different browsers regarding working together to
identically implement JavaScript, thus allowing tons of modern applications to
be universal across machines as long as you can install a modern browser, not
happen before with other programming languages? Or did they?

I don't know anything about desktop application development, but for example
in college I would use PowerPoint a lot. Was there some specific limitation
that made for PowerPoint to be a Windows only thing? Was it that Microsoft
just refused to make it for different operating systems? Or was there no point
because everyone had windows installed anyway?

I'm kinda just chewing the fat here but in 2018 with iOS, osx, Android,
windows, and Ubuntu being the main operating systems of machines, why'd it
take the second level of abstraction of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Edge
working together to make sharing apps across machines a thing? Like, why
didn't, I dunno, some cross platform python library (I know nothing about
desktop apps sorry) instead be The Universalizer?

~~~
pasabagi
I think that was basically C, and POSIX. Except Microsoft wasn't particularly
interested in it, and they thought they'd be better off if they didn't make
their software work for competing OS's.

In a sense, most programs today are really portable. I think in the past,
there was a far greater variety of machines, and people used to make programs
for them specifically, in assembly, that absolutely wouldn't run on even a
different generation of the same familly of machines.

------
phobosdeimos
Look up how much win7 used to cost and how much you have to pay for win10.
Microsoft knows that Google is the competition.

------
xacky
There's still no official 17 inch Chromebooks out. Why is Google ignoring
people who prefer larger devices. Also ChromeOS is absent from high end
desktops and workstations. If Google really want to put the pressure on
Microsoft then they need to aim there.

------
soniman
One thing that's good about Chromebook is that if I save something, it's in
one of two places - Downloads folder or Gdrive. On Windows it could be in
Downloads, Desktop, My Docs, some random file, Onedrive, Gdrive, etc etc. I
realize this is not a big deal but given so many choices, ultimately files
will multiply and spread everywhere.

~~~
pymai
> On Windows it could be in Downloads, Desktop, My Docs

they're all in you're user folder on Windows so wouldn't that be pretty much
the same as the root gdrive folder and whatever subfolders you have things
organised into?

------
mentos
My dream is to get a light weight laptop with just enough power to
send/receive input to/from my more powerful desktop where I do Gpu intensive
game development on Windows.

Sadly Remote Desktop is lacking in a lot of ways mainly the refresh rate makes
it very difficult to resolve the rendered scene I’m working on.

Any suggestions?

~~~
ThatPlayer
Steam In-Home Streaming ? It's even got a mobile Steam Link app now if you
want to use your phone with a Bluetooth controller.

------
yeukhon
No it is not. You can easily find a $600 or even less equally powerful Windows
laptop.

------
michaelmrose
Soldered in emmc storage seems kind of unattractive to me. 128GB is enough to
get by but it really hurts that you can't spend $100 and have 4x as much
later.

Of course you could carry around an external drive but do you want to have to
plug in a drive every time you wake up your computer.

------
sg47
I'm looking for a good Chromebook/cheap laptop to take notes and do some
lightweight programming. Criteria is good display, decent chrome performance
(20 tabs open) and decent battery life (8 hours would be nice). Any
recommendations?

------
floatboth
> inexpensive ARM processors rather than more powerful and pricier Intel ones

I want more powerful ARM ones… RK3399 is a great step in the right direction,
but I'd love to see a chromebook with, say, the new Kirin

------
disconnected
This article misses the mark completely by assuming that Microsoft still needs
Windows to stay afloat.

This hasn't been true for years.

They have realized that it doesn't matter whether you use Windows, Chrome OS,
Android or Linux, or anything else: everything is in the cloud now, so the OS
is pretty much irrelevant.

Azure, Office 365 and heck, even Linkedin are doing great:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/19/microsoft_huge_2018...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/19/microsoft_huge_2018_q4/)

So I very much doubt that Microsoft is sweating it about Chromebooks.

~~~
shrumm
One major differentiator for Azure is its 1st class support for Windows /
Microsoft centric tech. Besides that, I find it hard to see why someone would
pick them over AWS. So if consumer Windows becomes irrelevant, so does Windows
server. If you’re no longer needing Windows server, why get SQL server and so
on. I think consumer Windows demand fuels demand for Azure and Office 365.

~~~
GordonS
For one thing, the Azure portal is more consistent and _so_ much better to
work with than the clunky, rather antiquated AWS portal.

Azure has a _huge_ and every-growing service offering, which includes things
like Postgres, so it's not like you are bound to Microsoft tech if you use
Azure.

I've been working with Azure for a few years now, and am very happy with it -
in the main, I've found there support to be excellent too.

IMO the only area AWS really kicks Azure's arse is for compute - you get a lot
more VM for your money with AWS. I really wish Azure would do better here.

------
booleandilemma
Are they really? Recently I had to choose between a chromebook and a cheap
lenovo laptop and I went with the lenovo.32GB just isn’t enough space.

------
hi41
Do Chromebooks have applications to edit videos? For applications like that
don't we need PCs?

------
partycoder
There is no excuse to use Windows anymore.

Windows' duck taped UI makes absolutely no sense.

On top of that, you get ads, nagware and your activity data is exfiltrated to
their servers... and this is on a product that you have to pay for.

I don't mind paying for a product, but Windows does not offer any added value.

------
gd2
Wow, 360 Hacker News comments on a Chromebook article

------
paulcarroty
$600 chromebooks? REALLY?

It's better invest that money in new/used laptop.

They was competitive only with $200-300 prices.

~~~
londons_explore
They'll still have the $200 ones... Paying $600 is for people who want to have
multiple tabs open at once.

------
matt2000
I never really understood why MSFT didn't start a clean slate rewrite of
Windows about a decade ago. Imagine how much simpler and more reliable it
could be, and you could run Windows 7 in an emulation layer if you had older
apps you depended on.

Even OS X has the feel that cloud services are kind of bolted on, whereas a
new OS written in this era could feel more like ChromeOS in terms of
reliability but still include features for advanced users like developers and
business analytics.

Definitely feels like a missed opportunity, especially with growing discontent
among developers with the Mac hardware line.

~~~
mavhc
They did, Windows RT

~~~
Hydraulix989
I thought RT was just an ARM port, not a rewrite?

~~~
gruez
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Runtime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Runtime)

~~~
Hydraulix989
Close, but not quite. The first sentence on the linked article says:

"'WinRT' redirects here. It is not to be confused with Windows RT."

So "Windows RT" is an ARM port of the Windows 8 OS, while "Windows Runtime"
aka "WinRT" is an API for "modern" Windows applications.

To be clear, I was responding to OP's literal "Windows RT" mention in my
parent post.

------
csomar
No they are not. We are still not there yet. First, $600 is pretty expensive.
Most Windows laptops that I see run on less than $500. Second, they don't have
the ecosystem yet.

Here are things you do on Windows:

1\. Browse the Internet using Chrome.

2\. Play a relatively demanding Video Game.

3\. Run Office, Word and Excel.

4\. Install your Canon Printer and print a few papers.

5\. Plugin your Nikon Camera.

6\. Run Adobe Photoshop to do some tweaking.

Most people do that on their laptops. We are still far from being 100% cloud.
Also ChromeOS is not an improvement over Windows. It is a change of
environments. OSX is an improvement. The only deal is that it is prohibitively
expensive.

~~~
partycoder
Please tell me which of this things you cannot do on Linux right now.

With Gimp you can do a lot of what you can do with Photoshop.

TeX and any math package like R beat Microsoft Office and produce better
documents.

WordPerfect was a much better alternative to Microsoft Word, but guess what
happened: Microsoft invested on Corel and suddenly they stopped releasing on
Linux.

There's a lot of money invested in making Office a monopoly. By supporting
Office and spreading its use you are extending that monopoly further into
another generation.

~~~
stan_rogers
WordPerfect died for two reasons: the transition to Windows (and WP6 for DOS,
which was the worst of both worlds); and its lack of a real office suite
integration. Lotus 1-2-3, the other application that owned to office, lost out
for much the same reason. SmartSuite was a whole lot closer to an integrated
solution than bundling WP with Quattro Pro and friends was, but Ami Pro was a
less-than-competent word processor for business purposes.

TeX/LaTeX may make some pretty documents, but the learning curve is pretty
heavy-duty, and compiling a typeset document isn't exactly dash-it-off quick
for normal typist/secretary activities. It doesn't matter much what you can do
with technical or book-length documents; that's not what the world runs on.

And Gimp ain't Photoshop. It's not even a close thing.

~~~
partycoder
Gimp may not have full feature parity with Photoshop but unless you are a
professional graphics designer or creative worker, Gimp will provide most of
the features you need.

~~~
bitL
Not at all. Its image processing algorithms are often subpar, missing the
final touch that is present in Adobe products, admitting it as much as I hate
their subscription model.

------
scarface74
Dependence on Windows is the most dangerous development for Microsoft. An 8GB
RAM Windows Surface Go is less performant than an iPad with 2GB of RAM for
consumers.

For the server, I recently had to write a process that takes messages from a
queue in AWS and store it to a database. It ran well as a .Net Core based
lambda running on a 256MB RAM Linux VM.

I did the same with a .Net Framesork app that inherited and the smallest EC2
instance we could use was one with 4GB RAM. It was barely usable. We had to
upgrade to 8GB. Microsoft has been successful because of Moore’s law hid the
increasing bloat of Windows. But once smartphones and low resource required
operating systems became popular, they can’t compete.

~~~
ericcholis
I _think_ this is entirely due to backwards compatibility.

~~~
reaperducer
_I think this is entirely due to backwards compatibility._

That's the current conventional wisdom. But it's more like an excuse.

Windows got bloated because Microsoft relied(s) on cheap masses of mediocre
programmers, backed by equally mediocre managers. A pattern that Windows
application developers copied.

Yes, Microsoft has some really talented people. I knew a good number of them
from the Bing and Xbox group when I lived in Bellevue. They would talk about
amazing things. But then they would always follow those tales with internal
Microsoft horror stories.

~~~
supernovae
This isn't true at all. The ENTIRE industry had to re-invent itself MANY times
- and MANY companies failed and have long since shutdown. Microsoft on the
other hand has survived - and not only maintained backwards compatibility but
embraced new technologies - and is doing so at a breakneck pace today.

Microsoft research is a top notch research company. Microsoft is also a large,
if not the largest, contributor to Linux & Open source.

Horror stories aren't unique to Microsoft... The industry of the 80s/90s and
early 2000s was something i'd never want to go back to - but its also
something i suffered through and that suffering didn't matter what OS you ran.
If you chose Irix it sucked paying 600 bucks for MEDIA to update your OS, if
you ran HPUX it sucked having to buy a support contract to update your OS, if
you ran Solaris, you were proud of solaris - but it wasn't until sun embraced
open source that it really took off because we didn't have to buy a compiler
that cost hundreds of dollars if not thousands to license.

Meanwhile, Windows has TurboC, TurboPascal and tons of stuff - and open source
gnu started taking off and linux came around and the world started getting
better for everyone- opportunity opened up - we crossed the chasim from 8 bit
to 16 bit to 32 bit and 64bit and Windows has maintained a level of
compatibility second to none to support all that legacy.

They're working hard to compete - Windows "S" mode is windows without the
ability to stall win32 - its "Store mode" \- it could go a LONG way into
making it "suck less" from legacy cruft but by and large the market and
developers are refusing to support it - which is odd considering they NEED to
support the store model for official chromebooks, android apps or ios
marketplaces.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
> Microsoft is also a large, if not the largest, contributor to Linux & Open
> source.

I always hear things like this. What exactly are they contributing though?

> Windows has maintained a level of compatibility second to none to support
> all that legacy

As far as I can tell, if you want to run a legacy Windows app, you're more
likely to be successful running it in Wine on Linux.

~~~
supernovae
>I always hear things like this. What exactly are they contributing though?

Their employees contribute tons of code to the kernel and they're a premium
partner in the Linux foundation paying Linus's salary. They contribute to the
kernel, hadoop, mesos, k8s, they contribute to gcc, heck they let you run
linux on windows now with Linux subsystem and have official partnerships with
redhat, suse, ubuntu. They also open sourced C#, they contribute to jenkins,
so much mroe.

>As far as I can tell, if you want to run a legacy Windows app, you're more
likely to be successful running it in Wine on Linux.

no sane person would do that. Just run it in compatibility mode on Windows 10.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
> Their employees contribute tons of code to the kernel and they're a premium
> partner in the Linux foundation paying Linus's salary....

Linus wasn't starving before MS became a platinum member of the Linux
Foundation.

> They contribute to the kernel, hadoop, mesos, k8s, they contribute to gcc,
> heck they let you run linux on windows now with Linux subsystem...

Right, so as far as I can tell most of their contribution are likely to be
things to make their linux subsystem work better. Which has very little effect
on me.

> >As far as I can tell, if you want to run a legacy Windows app, you're more
> likely to be successful running it in Wine on Linux.

> no sane person would do that. Just run it in compatibility mode on Windows
> 10.

Mentioning sanity and running Windows 10 in the same breath?

~~~
supernovae
Where do people like you come from? 20-year grudges, personal biases and so
much hate/spite for something you know literally nothing about and would never
use... Why?

Chromebooks are great. Windows 10 is great. My Macbook is great. We have TONS
Of great computing devices and choices today. Use an iphone, use an android,
use a stick phone, i don't give a crap.

What i do get appalled at is all this hate, misinformation and projection of
personal biases and preference as "matter of fact".. its bull crap and ya know
it.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
What do I literally know nothing about? I spent way too many years using
Windows (not knowing any better), so I know more about it than I care to. I'm
not sure how mentioning Wine's capabilities is hate in any case. But I'm happy
to learn about whatever I may be mistaken about.

Edit: Ah, I realise what the 'hate' remark is about, my comment about Windows
10 and sanity. Here's my Windows 10 story - I was installing it on a 'game
box' (since repurposed as a Linux workstation) off of a usb stick. In the
middle of the installation, it complained about some sort of missing drivers
(in a very opaque fashion). I wrote down the information and went off to the
Internet for help, figuring, it's easy to help for Linux issues, so Windows
issues like _must_ be even easier, given its wide-use. But nothing I found
made any difference. Until I came across a suggestion somewhere to unplug the
usb at that point in time and plug it into another usb slot. I thought "that's
silly and will never work". Of course, that was the solution. Note: it didn't
matter which usb port it was plugged into initially, so it wasn't a 'usb3
drivers missing' issue or anything like that. For whatever reason, at that
point in the installation, unplugging the usb and replugging it in made
Windows 10 'see' the drivers. I spent _way_ too many hours on such a silly
(and still to me opaque) problem. Thus I don't really associate Windows 10
with sanity. (And I won't mention my experience with the official Microsoft
Store and malware.)

------
sarcasmic
Any Chromebook more than $400 right now is just there to absorb even more
disposable income from the market, because they ship with nicer finishes and
faster processors, but they are anemic on memory and storage, making them
subpar for intense multitasking, or getting certain types of work done. The
situations in which they excel can be reliably hit by Chromebooks around a
$400 price point, and even cheaper Chromebooks allow one to forego performance
for the increased disposability of the machine.

I suspect one reason for $600 devices, other than Google itself trying to
reposition Chromebooks as more upmarket, is because $600 Windows laptops are
still are a mess of preloaded bullshit put there by the vendor. Microsoft has
tried various ways to fix this but it only tends to protect high-end models.
And build quality and the nature of hardware compromises at that price point
have always been unpleasant, save for a few concentrated efforts like Lenovo's
IdeaPad line. In other words, $600 laptops are second only to $200 laptops in
making Windows look bad, making them an easy target for an OS that proved that
$200 laptops can actually be quite good.

Still, there are few challenges. Chromebooks' filesystem paradigm deemphasises
local storage to the point of cumbersome, relying on Google Drive or custom
interfaces and implementations built for each app that know how to pull up
past work. This is a smart idea when everything works, but makes import,
export, and context switching harder, and makes sharing a feature of the
product rather than a file-based affair.

On Chromebooks, Chrome's fantastic profile system is deliberately conflated
with Chrome OS login sessions, which makes it harder for one user to maintain
multiple independent browsing contexts than when using Chrome on other
platforms. Power users on Windows can run multiple browsers, or use profile
systems in browsers to keep separation, but on Chrome OS, you only get two de
facto contexts (the white one and the black one with the cool spy icon), you
blast the same cookies everywhere, and half your builtin applications are just
hyperlinks to auto-log you into the corresponding Google product in your
global white context. Applications like Hangouts (the app, not the extension)
are rare, where the entire window inherits your OS login, but keeps your
context entirely separate from what you're doing in the browser.

Nonetheless, with Service Workers and graphics APIs and auto-resuming
applications and unintrusive updates, and people using Google products anyway,
Microsoft should be worried, because they're being challenged for customers in
a segment where their OS is least compelling, and was largely used by default.

~~~
nextos
I'm interested in Chromebooks for a different reason, the same reason that
brings me to Pixel phones.

I hate software that tracks me, but if I wipe out Android and I install a self
compiled AOSP, it's a superb user experience for me.

Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM &
storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro?

Right now, Xiaomi laptops are excellent cheap machines to run Linux on (thanks
to having just Intel components). Same for Huawei if you are willing to spend
a bit more, but on that price a Thinkpad is probably the way to go.

~~~
ac29
> Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM
> & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro?

Yes, with the caveat that full BIOS/UEFI support sometimes lags hardware
releases by 6-12 months - out of the box most Chromebooks can only boot
ChromeOS. Pretty much all the Chromebook firmware work to support 3rd-party
OS' is done by one guy, see his page here:
[https://mrchromebox.tech](https://mrchromebox.tech)

I run Arch on a cheap Chromebook for some tasks at work, I've generally been
satisfied, and will probably buy another one eventually. I think if I was
spending $500+, I'd just buy a Windows laptop and reformat it though - way
more choices, and they tend to be upgradable.

It's also worth keeping in mind most Chromebooks must be disassembled to
remove a firmware write-protect screw in order to flash new firmware. The one
I have requires removing the battery/keyboard/etc - more than just popping off
a small panel on the bottom.

~~~
j0hnml
Which chromebook do you have and what are its specs? I'm interested in doing
the same, and I don't want to spend $800+ for a laptop I'm not going to be
super happy with.

~~~
windexh8er
Check out GalliumOS. One of the best, Chrome specific, distros around. The
question on hardware comes down to what you want. Many of the newest releases
of ChromeBooks do not have removable media (M.2 form factor). So, choose
wisely up front: hardware that is supported by current releases and storage
and RAM suitable to your needs. The latest CB I have is a Toshiba Chromebook 2
with an i3 processor and 4GB of RAM. That model has a removable M.2 and so
mine has an upgraded 128GB of storage. It has received app support for
ChromeOS and also runs Gallium with full support. You can dual boot these
machines easily, which is how mine is setup.

Nick Janetakis had a nice write-up on setting it up from back when the machine
was newer, but to give you an idea:

[https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-
chromeboo...](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromebook-
cb35-into-a-linux-development-environment-with-galliumos)

------
beerlord
Chromebooks have one fatal flaw: Microsoft Office on them sucks. You're stuck
with side-loading in the Android edition, which is an app with a simplified UI
and requiring always-online connection.

All of this might be OK for a schoolkid, but for anyone else you might as well
stick with a Windows laptop for real work, or an iPad for real consumption.

~~~
Nasrudith
I don't get the insistence upon Microsoft word as a killer app personally. It
seems to be the suit and tie of software - more expensive than the
alternatives and cumbersome but hidebound ones insist it is a prerequisite to
be taken seriously.

~~~
antoineMoPa
I can't believe entire businesses I worked for rely on Microsoft Word for
documentation. Heavy, slow, expensive, closed source, not searchable, with
ugly output.

------
mabbo
I was an intern at Microsoft the day that ChromeOS was announced.
Conveniently, a few days later the head of Windows was giving a talk to all
the interns. Overall, spoke well, but during Q&A someone asked him what he
thought about ChromeOS.

He laughed. He said it was a joke. He made it very clear that he didn't
understand what Google was even thinking. And that stuck such a sour chord on
me. Here's a company well known to be hiring the brightest people in the
world, and they've announced a direct competitor to what you're doing... and
you're laughing? It was like seeing an experienced chess player playing
against a rumored-to-be-brilliant child prodigy and laughing at the stupid
move the child was making.

I spent the next summer working on the ChromeOS team.

~~~
ChrisSD
It's not like they haven't got a history of doing this. Remember when the
iPhone had "no chance" of "any significant market share"?[0]

[0]
[https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2...](https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2007-04-29-ballmer-
ceo-forum-usat_N.htm)

~~~
reaperducer
FTA: _" There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant
market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of
money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get
sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I
would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get."_

I wonder what the maximum penetration was for Windows OSes on phones.

 _"...my 85-year-old uncle probably will never own an iPod, and I hope we'll
get him to own a Zune."_

What's a Zune? /s

~~~
londons_explore
To be fair, after over a decade of trying, Apple still only has 15% market
share.

If Microsoft had the other 85%, they'd be in a good position.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Why should Apple care about the other 85% of the market if all the profit
margin is in the 15% they have?

~~~
DennisAleynikov
I guess apple is totally okay with being a minority of the market then since
they're doubling down on proprietary sensors and apps that only work in their
own ecosystem.

they can ignore the 85% if they want. The 85% of the market will ignore them
back in turn.

~~~
debaserab2
They "double-downed" on that decision ten years ago, and now they are the most
profitable company in the world. I think it's safe to say whatever bet they
made paid off handsomely.

~~~
DennisAleynikov
it's paid off handsomely and cut off apples prospects of expanding beyond the
15% market share they currently enjoy. sure owning 15% of the global
smartphone market makes them money but androids 85% share ensures googles
dominance in the sector unless apple lowers some of its hardware walls and
turns them into bridges.

#buildbridgesnotwalls

~~~
debaserab2
What does market share matter when you've captured the part of the market
where all the significant margins are?

~~~
DennisAleynikov
A company that trades like a railroad company shouldn't be gloating about how
little of the market share they want. there is no room for apple to expand
with their rich people first strategy. Eventually you run out of new rich
people to sell your products to.

Apples investors do not expect them to grow much more unlike Google or
Facebook which both act as monopolies in both the smartphone and online
markets. I'm sure apple knows what it wants but it sure doesn't show any
abition to take over the world with their products.

