

What everyone is forgetting about the Pixel - d3nial

Despite Google's medium/long plan on expanding its ChromeOS userbase, I think we have forgotten something about this uber cool (albeit underadopted) device.<p>Does the Pixel not bring beautiful design, and awesome hardware to linux users? I for one, prior to its release, had been browsing everywhere for a 'mac killer' laptop (hardware-wise) that I could load Linux Mint / Ubuntu onto without luck.<p>TL;DR - Could the Pixel + Linux be the device we'll use?
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d3nial
I am a rare convert, I went from PC to MBP and back again. And deeply regret
moving back to the MBP. Currently on an Asus UX31e (Zenbook), and whilst it
looks quite cool and industrial, the keyboard sucks, the LCD is defective (and
I'm currently arguing with Asus about warranty claims, but that's another
story). So, excuse my cynicism surrounding the real 'quality' of other high
end devices.

The hard drive is a pretty good point, the LTE/3G data connection + 1TB cloud
storage could overcome this, but I live in Australia, so the data costs would
be enormous. Also, I did run Ubuntu for a while on my MBP and it was ok, but
there were some hardware issues (power management mostly).

I wasn't aware of the kernel issues, this could be a problem. Damn. :P

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shrughes
You're suffering quality problems because you went with a bad laptop. Zenbook
Primes are good but other Zenbooks are not.

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mooism2
I'm wary about getting a Chrome laptop to run Ubuntu on, because (aiui) there
is no way to run a kernel on it other than the ChromeOS kernel. I worry that
an update to the Ubuntu userspace could cause it to rely on features present
in the Ubuntu kernel but not in the ChromeOS kernel (perhaps if Ubuntu was
using a more recent version of Linux than ChromeOS was) and thus crash or
otherwise be unstable.

~~~
mooism2
Having said that, I've just seen
[https://plus.google.com/100479847213284361344/posts/QhmBpn5G...](https://plus.google.com/100479847213284361344/posts/QhmBpn5GNE9)
and learnt that yes, it is possible to run Ubuntu/etc including kernel on the
newest Chromebook.

Although “there's no way to set the legacy boot as the default option” so it
still sounds a bit of a pain.

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pedalpete
But there are many manufacturers that make nice hardware. I love my Lenovo,
Sony and Samsung make some pretty nice stuff too.

What makes the Pixel any better than the high-end devices from these
companies? And though many will say that you can't get the Pixel screen on any
of the available devices, don't forget that you also can't get a Pixel with a
hard-drive of reasonable size.

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cjbprime
Not with a 32GB (or 64GB) SSD, unfortunately. It looks like it uses a USB SD
card reader rather than a PCI one -- which I expect to be slow -- so that's
not a good way to expand storage either.

But other than storage, it seems to be almost everything I'd want in a dev
laptop.

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ricardobeat
SD cards top off at ~45mb/s (the expensive ones), just a little over USB2
speeds, and if that's USB3 it's faster than any SD card you'll ever get.

~~~
cjbprime
> SD cards top off at ~45mb/s (the expensive ones), just a little over USB2
> speeds

No they don't. [http://www.sandisk.com/products/memory-
cards/sd/extremepro-s...](http://www.sandisk.com/products/memory-
cards/sd/extremepro-sdxc-sdhc-uhs-1-95mbs/) \-- "Delivers up to 90MB/s write
and 95MB/s read rate for extreme speed."

> and if that's USB3 it's faster than any SD card you'll ever get.

It's not, it's USB2.

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d3nial
To add to this, I just saw this post this morning too, which strengthens this
argument
[https://plus.google.com/112449749826562830126/posts/ZS9Waegr...](https://plus.google.com/112449749826562830126/posts/ZS9WaegrZYH)

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maxpospischil
Why not just load Mint or Ubuntu onto a mbp?

