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Chrome books are the best college laptops for the vast majority of students. The ability to have a ton of apps and then have the Microsoft suite on an App could
by baldfat 11y ago
Chrome books are the best college laptops for the vast majority of students. The ability to have a ton of apps and then have the Microsoft suite on an App could really over come a few hiccups which is normally based on professors' issue of only using Word.
THE ONE ISSUE is Printing. I have to help my daughter setting up cloud printing all the time
- Apofis 11y agoGet a printer that supports Google Cloud Print. It's awesome! It ties a Networked printer that supports it to a Google account and then you can print from anywhere as long as you're signed into your Google account in Chrome. You can even share the printer with others! Google Cloud Print : https://www.google.com/cloudprint/ https://www.google.com/cloudprint/
- bpicolo 11y agoTo be fair, printing is hard on pretty much every device :(
- stephenr 11y agoIt really isn't.
- jfoster 11y agoIt doesn't work well. USB flash drives work well. Charging cables work well. HDMI sometimes works well. WiFi (nowadays) sometimes works well. Chromecast sometimes works well. Printing is (at best) in the "sometimes works well" basket.
- stephenr 11y agoPrinting, like Wifi is entirely dependent on the devices you buy. Buy a decent print server and a decent wifi AP (or a decent device that does both). When I had a real job, HP were the print server to beat for us (a ~30 campus state-wide educational department). Now (in a home-office setup) I use an Airport Express with a Canon inkjet. Maybe your experience is with Windows based network printing without a corporate network? I'm sure that probably sucks donkey balls, but honestly that's just another issue with the tools you choose. Choose a shitty print server or a shitty OS and you can expect to get shit.
- Nullabillity 11y agoNever had issues after just adding the printer's IP (and PSD driver) to CUPS.
- mark_l_watson 11y agoAs a computer scientist, it is embarrassing to admit this, but I have given up on wireless printing. My wife and I now physically walk to the printer and plug in via a USB cable.
- thescriptkiddie 11y agoI've found that the only way to get network printing to work reliably is to buy a generic postscript printer and use an old linux machine (perhaps a raspberry pi) as a dedicated print server. I used to recommend that people buy enterprise gear, but lately I've had mixed results even with those - the printer in my office needs to be rebooted daily. Whatever you do, stay far away from consumer-grade networked printers. Half the time they won't even implement CUPS/IPP or LPD, they tunnel USB over ethernet and use the same shitty USB drivers that an intern wrote in 1997. Best to avoid printers altogether, really.
- some-guy 11y agoThis. All my problems went away when I bought a Brother laser printer, and connected my Raspberry Pi to it running CUPS. No issues with discovery on Mac/Windows/Linux.
- Bedon292 11y agoMy solution has been DDWRT on my router, acting as a print server with the printer plugged into it. It has worked great, and never have issues like I did before when the printer was plugged into the computer. It always just works.
- Bedon292 11y agoMy solution has been DDWRT on my router, acting as a print server with the printer plugged into it. It has worked great, and never have issues like I did before when the printer was plugged into the computer. It always just works.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- 11y ago
- k-mcgrady 11y ago>> "Chrome books are the best college laptops for the vast majority of students." How are they better than Windows or Mac laptops which don't have issues you've mentioned (printing/lack of MS Office)? They may be 'good enough' for a lot of students but they are certainly not the best.
- krakensden 11y agoHarder to mess them up via software, backup to the cloud by default, and they are more secure.
- zxcvcxz 11y agoWindows and Mac both have printer issues all the time. Just look at the Windows10 forums if you really don't believe it...
- hawski 11y agoThere is API now for printers [1]. There is HP driver for example, that probably uses that [2]. And it seems that someone made up driver for Brother AIOs. [1] https://developer.chrome.com/apps/printerProvider https://developer.chrome.com/apps/printerProvider [2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hp-print-for-chrome/cjanmonomjogheabiocdamfpknlpdehm?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hp-print-for-chrom... [3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wifi-printer-driver-for-c/hhcgnlnhaapiekdelngjichnccjfkbnc?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wifi-printer-drive...
- WayneBro 11y ago> Chrome books are the best college laptops for the vast majority of students. If they're not the best laptop for everybody outside of college, then they're not the best laptop for college students IMO. I wouldn't want my kids learning on something that next to nobody uses. - How are graphics arts students supposed to learn how to use Photoshop, Illustrator and other programs that professionals actually use in the real world? - How are CS students supposed to learn how to use the plethora of tools that don't run in ChromeOS? - How are business students supposed to learn how to use the full Office suite, which most of the rest of the world is using on Windows or even OS X? The "ton" of apps is kind of a moot point since Windows and Mac both also have a ton of apps. I don't get your other point - you want to avoid issues with Word by using the "Microsoft suite on an App" (which presumably includes Word)? > THE ONE ISSUE is Printing. There is way more than just that one issue I think, if we're going to be completely objective here.
- ghaff 11y agoI find Chromebooks are increasingly good for a lot of things but, no, I doubt they're ideal for a lot of college students. (Pre-college is a somewhat different matter, especially if there's a family computer they can use for those applications that aren't accessible through a Chromebook.) With things like Google Docs, Chromebooks are pretty powerful. I often travel with one rather than a laptop these days. But many college students are likely to run into situations where they need apps that aren't available for a Chromebook and, especially so long as Chromebooks aren't the norm, that's likely to be a problem.
- jitl 11y agoI used a Chromebook as my only laptop for my last 2 years at UC Berkeley. I did all my note-taking in Google's Docs stuff. For my CS course work, I used the excellent Chrome SSH app [1] to remote into department machines. Chrome SSH is so good that I now use it on all my Windows machines instead of PuTTY! The only thing I couldn't use my Chromebook for was for design-related activities -- running Illustrator or Photoshop to make posters or t-shirts and the like. I ended up setting up Guacamole [2] on my home network, so I could remote to my desktop windows box to use Illustrator on-the-go. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhechapfaindjhompbnflcldabbghjo?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec... [2] http://guac-dev.org/ http://guac-dev.org/
- stephenr 11y agoWelcome to the world of Google. Everything is a web service regardless of how practical that is. Oh your ISP has an outage and you want to print? Well sorry the printer 3 feet from you is a brick until you can send your document to google again. Who the fuck ever thought that was an acceptable design?
- redditplebs 11y agoWell, to be fair, they do mention 'cloud' in the name. What else would one expect off of a cloud feature?
- stephenr 11y agoMy complaint isn't that they 'misled' people into thinking their printing solution is better than it is. My complaint is that they force people to use it because they support no other printing system.
- jrnichols 11y ago> Who the fuck ever thought that was an acceptable design? Well, Google. :P
- agildehaus 11y agoNobody, considering every printer which supports cloud printing also supports Wifi printing and USB printing.
- theandrewbailey 11y agoI've tried to stay the hell away from printers (and their myriad issues) for about a decade, and I feel that my life is better for it. I use the printer at work for the 6 pages per year I need printed. I understand this situation might (will?) change, since I'm a single young childless guy.
- grahamburger 11y agoFinally changed for us a few months ago after about 8 years of being happily printer-free. One too many trips to FedEx to print 2 pages of something, can't even remember what it was - probably a Groupon for a cash-only store that would only accept it in print. Also I really wanted a sheet-feed scanner so I can electronically archive the stacks of paper piling up around the house. We got an HP OfficeJet Pro 8625 and have been pretty happy with it on Linux, Windows 10 and Mac.
- B1FF_PSUVM 11y ago> a sheet-feed scanner so I can electronically archive the stacks of paper That's the most 1995 thing I've read all year. What with all the smartphone apps which will provide you with PDFs of the casually snapped pics of whatever paper pieces you feel like shooting. (In the unlikely case the gummint doesn't already have all the info you may need, and you can't just ask for a copy. Which is mostly the case nowadays.)
- mmel 11y agoWhat smartphone app will produce an archival quality scan with searchable OCR'd text from a casually snapped photo of a piece of paper?
- grahamburger 11y agoOr better yet, of a stack of paper. If you can find me that I'll gladly pay for it. Well, at least up to the around half the cost of the sheet-feed scanner/printer.
- roywiggins 11y agoThey are good until you need to run real software, like your prof's favorite little simulation software, written in Java, that happily works on Linux and Windows... but not ChromeOS.