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Mixed feelings on this. As someone with two Chromebooks (one Pixel, one Samsung ARM Chromebook) , an Android phone, and two Android tablets, here's what I see a
by AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
Mixed feelings on this. As someone with two Chromebooks (one Pixel, one Samsung ARM Chromebook) , an Android phone, and two Android tablets, here's what I see as the potential benefits and tradeoffs:
+ Being able to run Android apps on a Chromebook would be awesome. There's already some limited support for this, but it would be nice for it to be official.
+ Taking over the Chromebook line would hopefully force Google to make document editing not suck on Android devices.
+ Android running on Chromebooks will hopefully make the display scale better on hi-DPI devices.
- ChromeOS is fairly lightweight and actually runs surprisingly well on cheap devices. I have no doubt that my Chromebook Pixel would run Android just fine, but the Samsung ARM Chromebook would probably chug, even though it's running ChromeOS well enough.
- Making Android run on laptops will hopefully make Google step up their Android document editing game, but as of right now it still sucks. Even the cheap Samsung chromebook was leagues ahead of using my tablet and a bluetooth keyboard in terms of trying to compose documents.
- The ability to install crouton on Chromebooks and have another Linux chroot on the side is an awesome feature of the Chromebook. I imagine that might be more difficult under Android, even though it still uses the linux kernel.
- bduerst 11y agoIt would be easier to convert to linux since Android is already a VM on top of it, right? I'm hoping that since they're now targeting the desktop OS market that they'll make it easier to run native linux programs on Android. My biggest complaint of using ChromeOS on a pixel 2 is that there are no good text editors on the level of Sublime Text (which works on linux).
- AdmiralAsshat 11y agoHave you tried Caret? I use it on my Pixel 1 and it seems to be modeled off Sublime/Ace.
- bduerst 11y agoYeah, it doesn't do regex find and replace, and crumbles under large files.
- mchahn 11y ago> My biggest complaint of using ChromeOS on a pixel 2 is that there are no good text editors on the level of Sublime Text (which works on linux). Atom works great in Crouton on my pixel 2. I've switched to that as my full-time dev machine. I run everything but Atom in terminals. I run Atom in an X window (xiwi) and have no linux desktop at all. Lean and mean.
- SXX 11y agoActually if Google going to push coreboot into Android/ARM market more aggressively it's going to help quite a lot with running GNU/Linux distributions there.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> ChromeOS is fairly lightweight and actually runs surprisingly well on cheap devices. I have no doubt that my Chromebook Pixel would run Android just fine, but the Samsung ARM Chromebook would probably chug, even though it's running ChromeOS well enough. Plenty of inexpensive ARM devices running Android. I don't see that this is likely to be a major problem. > Making Android run on laptops will hopefully make Google step up their Android document editing game, but as of right now it still sucks. Even the cheap Samsung chromebook was leagues ahead of using my tablet and a bluetooth keyboard in terms of trying to compose documents. If they're folding ChromeOS into Android, rather than just killing ChromeOS, I expect that (using similar Chrome apps) post-convergence Android devices will be at least as good as pre-convergence ChromeOS devices at document editing.
- seabrookmx 11y agoThere's quite a bit of info online on how to install a chroot under Android. Like with a Chromebook, you need root access though (aka. ChromeOS "developer mode" or a "rooted" Android device). If this is really where things are going, it wouldn't surprise me if crouton contributors continued the project for Android post convergence.
- jessaustin 11y agoYes I hope crouton keeps going. For me it has been the best combination of price, functionality, and convenience.
- voltagex_ 11y agoThe drawback to easy chroots is that no one tries to boot mainline Linux directly. Try looking for information on how to boot Debian on a Nexus 4.