I've done that with mine. Worked great, and now I get around 30 hours of battery life with a lean linux distro, as long as I'm only like reading websites or writing on it.
>Which windows program are you looking for, specifically?
All of them, specifically.
I don't want to think about which windows program can or can't run with Wine.
This includes:
* Microsoft software, from MSTeams to Windows itself
* Audio production software (DAWs and VST plug-ins)
* Games
* Device-specific software (like drivers/software for portable thermal printers)
* CAD (nTop, only supports Windows, for example, and don't tell me I don't need it; same for many Autodesk products. NX and Rhino don't have Linux support)
The last one is the most fun, as I'm a CAD developer who worked on nTop in particular.
tbh audio might be the hardest fit here - low-channel sound cards on low-end devices is pretty common, last I looked, and it tends to be CPU-heavy (and these tend to use very weak CPUs). you'd probably be fine rendering it out and checking the result (slow but afaik not usually memory heavy), but it may struggle with scrubbing around.
hard to say without actually trying it tho. and depends on the device, of course - mine was like $250 when new, it's a very different beast than a $1,000+ chromebook. the higher-end ones are much closer to normal laptops.
Aside from Microsoft Office, the rest is workstation stuff, and Microsoft Office is pushing "web first" (at least if their pricing is to be believed, the lowest O365 subscriptions do not offer access to the native apps).
We'll have to see how the AI softwarepocalypse goes. If I only need 10% of the features of Photoshop, I really don't need to be spending money on the full software suite.
Back when Chromebooks and Netbooks were contemporaries, yours was a much harder proposition. I had an awful time getting Linux on my first gen Chromebook
I've heard that on the new ones they've illegally made it not possible anymore, but haven't experienced direct evidence of that yet. For mine I had to remove a screw from the motherboard but it wasn't that difficult. Not much worse than jumper for boot order in ye olde days
My suggestion? If you want a Chromebook to run Linux, look for surplus school laptops instead. My throwaround workshop laptop is an Asus that to me looks like it was clearly sold in an educational Chromebook format as well--partially ruggedized, partially waterproof, 12", N100, plastic blank where the camera should be, still only $120
Basically, if you're lucky, you can find Chromebook-class PCs with less restrictions. Admittedly I'm in a lucky locale for such things, but the one in question i bought from a normal retailer
That sounds like an opinion baked in 2013 and never revisited. A modern chromebook with Crostini can run basically any Linux desktop stack you want. Like, what exactly are the tasks you need from a "computer that you could use like a normal computer" that you aren't getting today?
As a data point: I'm 100% converted personally. A Chromebook is what goes into my backpack and the device I use for all my general day-to-day UI clickery, and it's a better fit for my needs than Windows (not nearly as bad as it used to be but still sort of a PITA to make work as a Linux-focused dev environment) or Linux (not nearly as much of a PITA for a connected consumer network device but still has the occasional wart trying to get something weird to run).
Crostini is a mixed bag; e.g. IIRC something in their stack breaks ptrace. I prefer to wipe and install a normal Linux distro. But, when it works it works, and I do use one Chromebook with Crostini.
ptrace works fine on crostini. The guest kernel has Yama enabled, which restricts it to root for boring security reasons. You can do your debugging at a root shell or turn the setting (yama/ptrace_scope) off via sysctl.
> A modern chromebook with Crostini can run basically any Linux desktop stack you want. Like, what exactly are the tasks you need from a "computer that you could use like a normal computer" that you aren't getting today?
Well... yeah. Likewise your post is clearly about your needs, which are different. But that's not what you said, you said it "wasn't a computer" and you couldn't use it "like a normal computer". Which is obviously wrong. But I guess "normal computer" means "windows" to you, which (especially given the forum you posted on!) is a little surprising.
So what you wrote (but apparently not meant) seemed mistaken to me, thus the correction. But if you want windows then just buy windows. Your market is well served.
> Normal computer means a choice of OS to run on it without having to hack it to do that job.
That's too high a standard. When we consider MacOS along with Windows and Linux, there are basically no computers that let you freely choose between all three without hacks.
And even just considering Windows and Linux, a big chunk of the laptop market only supports Windows properly.
A laptop that runs any normal desktop OS is a normal computer.
You're losing me. Your first reply says "A computer that meets my needs must provide a choice of OSes", your second says "A computer that meets my needs must run one specific OS". To be blunt: your reasoning here is simply bunk and I don't understand it.
If you must use windows, then you must use windows and you don't have a choice. None of that has anything to do with the nonsense about Chromebooks not being "real computers" or whatever, that's just the rationalization you've decided on. Obviously they are real computers.
That works great until you inevitably need to launch some streaming service that doesn't work on Linux Chrome or whatever. The needs of "general consumer junk we all deal with" are real. I spent decades on the "I don't actually need that stuff" hamster wheel too, and... yeah, it sucks and I'm too old for that.
A Chromebook is a first class consumer device backed by a Big Threatening Tech Giant that works on all sites everywhere because no one wants to piss off Google. And it's still Linux and runs great. I'll take it.
I was too, and then AI came out, and now Codex just makes my Linux work how I want it, no needing to fiddle with .config/gconf whatever crap. I just tell it to fix my two finger scrolling on my trackpad, and it does it.
AI can't make the Mandalorian or The Last of Us play, though. This may have been fixed or worked around now, but for sure Disney+ and HBO were holdouts that refused to work on a Linux Chrome, Widevine be damned.
I mean, sure, I can torrent a copy or whatever. But there's a point at which you just don't want to deal with that nonsense. ChromeOS is Linux, in all the ways I care to measure. But it codes as "not Linux" to all the corporate overlords afraid of the nerds and hippies, and that has value too.
A local abliterated AI model with computer use could totally do the drudgery of "torrent a copy or whatever". AI deals with "that nonsense" now.
> ChromeOS is Linux, in all the ways I care to measure.
It's Linux the same way Android is technically Linux. You get this little box called Linux, and /proc isn't actually the "real" /proc because it's inside a VM. To each their own, but it's not (GNU) Linux enough for me.
What is there to be afraid of? Don't you have backups?
Also, debian/ubuntu systems can easily be setup to auto update and reboot on a regular basis, leaving you manual maintenance only for the larger version upgrades.
Yes because you can always do a dusaster recovery by reinstalling and restoring data.
A reboot doesn't break anything. Bugs do.
Any time I had a regression after a kernel update on a linux distro I could boot it on a prior version from the grub menu. Any time I had a regression with a software package I could rollback to a prior version. Rolling back updates is a problem that has been solved for decades, at least on linux systems.
The key with unattended upgrade is you want to have decent monitoring to make sure you never run out of disc space and do not figure it out weeks later if you have had an issue.
You might want to restart services after they or libraries dependencies get updated. On debian based distros, updated packages automatically take care of restarting the service but it might not happen when only a dependency has been updated.
In the end it is easier to schedule a weekly reboot window if packages have been updated. You aren't running a single server if you are interested in 99.99999990% of uptime anyway.
Imho a regular reboot is good practice: you are more likely to remember what you did a week earlier if an app/service fail to restart after you tweaked a config file than if it happens months later.
There is no reason to be afraid of reboot when they happen on a regular basis.
This post resonates. I recently built a little web service to scratch an itch I've been having and after discussing the options with Claude we settled on Go, and honestly it's been fantastic. Highly performant, native threading, dead simple to deploy with containers. And I don't even know how to read or write Go.
Oh man... I like go because it is compiled, performant, strong and statically typed. But "fun" is not something I would say about it. The ergonomics of error handling, lack of ternary operator and other stuff that compiled 30yo languages already had ...
Idk, I'm having fun with it. The good outweighs the bad for me, and idk why people get so bristly about handling errors, it's more straightforward to debug than nested try/catches
That sort of syntactic sugar goes against the Go philosophy. Don't get me wrong, I share your frustration, but I also see the value of consistency in their philosophy.
I'm starting to think all these languages having their own pet "philosophies" that is "totally better than X" is a shitshow and just personal preference masquerading as standards.
I did go through the Go tutorial many many years ago, but it's been so long I don't remember anything. I do remember it was an enjoyable process though, and I'd love to pick it up again.
This is a very silly restriction, at least to apply uniformly to all Macs. I think if you buy a more powerful Mac they should let you virtualize more Mac instances. Like an M5 maybe limit to 2, but maybe let an M5 Pro do 4 and an M5 Max do 8 or something.
Because this limit isn’t about your hardware, but their software.
As appropriate a model this still is in the development VM scenario, you still need a valid license for each operating system copy you run.
Microsoft will sell you these individually; Apple apparently implicitly grants you up to three per Mac that you buy, and won’t let you pay for any more even if you want to.
In other words, what’s limited here is not really the hypervisor itself, but rather the “license granting component” that passes through the implicit permission to run macOS, but only up to some limit.
Yes they do. It's called "another Mac". And I'm not even being snarky here: I legitimately think someone at Apple thought this through and said "yeah if they need more than 2 VMs running at the same time, there are probably multiple users and they can each get their own Mac".
Nah, Apple has been extremely restrictive about virtual machines in all kinds of ways, e.g. the minimum terms anyone is able to lease out a VM or Mac to someone else is 24h, making cloud-like workloads practically impossible. For some reason, Apple really doesn’t like virtual machines, and it’s much more intentional than just “probably multiple users”.
I mean, as someone who was in that situation as a customer, we couldn't find a great cloud option for our needs, and we ended up building our first hardware lab with a bunch of macs.
It definitely caused us to buy macs we would have rented and shared.
Correct, us as well, but we’re mainly harvesting refurbished Mac Mini’s.
My biggest problem is the lack of a good CI/CD flow when you can’t work with images and virtual machines. We’re using ansible now to manage the fleet and I’m not a fan.
If they would more than 2 VMs, we’d still buy the hardware, we’d just buy larger ones and have more virtual machines on them. Very likely also use Linux as the host.
I hope one day Apple sees the light like Microsoft also did, but I’m not hopeful.
Frustrating for you, hilarious for me. I had no idea they had hobbled MacOS in this way. It doesn't surprise me at all really, and it's pretty ridiculous.
I'm not sure why people keep giving Apple their money, especially tech-savvy people that would want to run VMs.
The limit is for macOS running in a VM (which is mainly useful for developing iOS and macOS apps, for example cloud-based testing and CI/CD workflows.)
Most developers build web- and server-based systems that use Linux VMs as back-ends.
Most containers used for development are Linux containers, which also run in a Linux VM.
The option is you have to buy another machine. There are mac ec2 instances and several mac cloud hosts that all would abuse this if they could, instead to stay compliant they buy more machines.
You should be happy that you have such a financially aware IT dept. The machines are truly expensive and after managing a farm of 150 Mac minis at work I can tell why.
It is like 3 days running the EC2 buys you a Mac mini? And you can only rent the machine in day increments
Apple had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the world of virtualization and the idea of macOS running on anything besides "metal built by Apple." They've been pretty clear for decades that they only care about customers who buy Apple aluminum and silicon.
IMO they should sell appropriately priced licenses that allow the use of more VMs. Make the licenses expensive enough so that it doesn't eat into hardware sales, or explicitly prohibit VDI/virtual seats in the license agreement.
Currently services like Github Actions painfully and inefficiently rack thousands of Mac Minis and run 2 VMs on each to stay within the limits. They probably wouldn't mind paying a fee to run more VMs on Mac Studios instead.
Yeah that is what I was going to do until I discovered the two VM limit. I was building a MacOS GitHub Actions farm, or rather, looking into it. I had written most of the code but my inertia screeched to a halt when I discovered the two VM limit for MacOS VMs.
They don't want to be in the server business, they don't want there to be third party VM providers running Mac farms selling oversubscribed giving underpowered disappointing VM experiences to users who will complain.
A bunch of folks want Apple to enter a market Apple doesn't want to enter into. They have tools available which would enable that market which they are kneecapping on purpose so that nobody unwillingly enters them into it. The "two VMs per unit hardware" has been in their license for at least a decade.
Sure you can do it technically, but then you have a licensing compliance issue, so no reputable business will do it.
You can run x86 macOS VMs in Windows or Linux too with a little bit of technical trickery, but again, you end up with a license issue, so no-one reputable does it.
I've never really understood how Apple can let people download MacOS for free, and then tell them where and how they can run it - only on Apple's hardware. If I download a copy of Windows or any software ever written, I can run it on any hardware that exists that can run it. But somehow Apple gets to dictate to people where and how they can run freely available software that anyone can download?
>Why should they impose a limit at all? Your hardware is a natural limit
because imposing an artificial limit keeps them from exposing how low the natural limits turn out to be? Apple Silicon need always to be spoken with reverence, ye brother of the faith, do not fuel the faithless lest they rend and threadrip that which we've made of wholecloth.
The limit isn't really a resource issue, since you can run pretty much an "unlimited" number of non-Mac VMs. I suspect it's more of a business decision, such as preventing people from setting up shop as a low-cost Mac VPS provider.
But aren't Mx based macs supposed to be the fastest computers you can get? Why wouldn't they be able to run more than 2 VMs?
I can run a ton of Windows VMs at the same time, wouldn't Windows be a comparable resource hog to MacOS?
Apple M2 CPUs can have up to 192GB of RAM. If we look at the Mac Neo that has only 8GB of RAM, then an M2 host should be able to run at least 20 VMs before memory gets scarce.
There's no good reason Apple limits to 2 VMs except for greed, which they are well known for.
I've run multiple Windows VMs as well as multiple Docker sessions at the same time on different MBPs (my current one being an M3 Max). Didn't really budge the machine at all.
I buy a $100 Windows 11 Pro licence, and my limit is 1024 VMs
Hyper‑V on Windows 11 supports up to 1024 simultaneous VMs per host if the hardware can handle it. On my little Windows ARM laptop I can easily run 4 VMs before it runs out of steam.
I've run MacOS x86 VMs on Windows, it used to work great for a while. I haven't done that lately. I just don't care that much about supporting Apple users anymore, Apple makes it too expensive and difficult.
There's first class support for Linux on Windows, and Microsoft has a developers VM available for download so you can run as many Windows as you want. I do a Hyper-V Quick Create and there are three flavors of Linux to choose from, or Windows, with all the development tools pre-installed.
The only reason Linux exists on Windows is they're trying to redo the 90s playbook of dominating then destroying the competition. I was almost on board in the Windows 10 era, switching a whole lot of my time to doing things in WSL on Windows.
Windows 11 and the walled garden greed they're trying to enable is so bad that this dominating Linux attempt is certainly failing, the only reason I haven't completely ditched my Windows system is that my several TB external drive is at large and I haven't taken the time to actually do it.
Plus Steam and their Wine work is absolutely killing it so the one thing that was keeping me motivated to still have a Windows presence is pretty much gone.
It really is silly. The other day I decided to try this openclaw thing out but concerned about the security stuff, so I took VM for a spin only to find out the iCloud and the App Store were restricted.
I'm neither apparently, which I guess is a relief? Some of the questions I felt didn't have an answer I would select, like the inner monologue one. I generally don't have an inner monologue as I understand it described by people who do. Also, there's way more wrong with the world than those four answers.
I feel like Apple wouldn't want to make full Linux work on their hardware, but they could enable their Darwin kernel to emulate Linux syscalls and provide a way to boot into a mode that basically loads the kernel and whatever Linux shell you want
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