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Obviously there's no-one in the world that didn't know this was coming, but even so, I feel for the Remix OS guys. I assumed at the time their objective was to

Obviously there's no-one in the world that didn't know this was coming, but even so, I feel for the Remix OS guys. I assumed at the time their objective was to be acqui-hired by Google, but I can't see why there would be a reason for that now, or how they'd hope to compete in this situation. Congratulations to the Chrome O/S and Android teams. I was briefly on a Chromebook when my laptop packed in, and but for the absence of solid developer tools, I'd have stayed forever. There's a lot to be said for convenience.

jshevek 10y ago
"but for the absence of solid developer tools, I'd have stayed forever." Are you saying that Arch or Ubuntu and everything that runs on them aren't enough for you? Or that crouton hadn't evolved far enough at the time? These days you can run crouton in a window or a tab within ChromeOS. Launch an xterm or IntelliJ or whatever each into their own windows, displaying within ChromeOS. I'd say that the 2015 Pixel (plus crouton) is one of the best ultrabooks for devs.
- david-given 10y ago
  Crouton in a window doesn't really work so well --- on my Asus Flip it frequently forgets to redraw the window after changes, which makes it nigh unusable. I haven't tried rootless mode, though. I'll agree with you about Chromebooks for developers, though (well, if you like doing everything from text mode, which I do). My ARM-based Flip is a lovely machine. Cheap, ultraportable, completely silent, ludicrous battery life and the quad-core ARM flies. I just wish they'd get X running in a VC working. (The Flip uses a special graphics stack which apparently makes this hard.)
  - jshevek 10y ago
    That's too bad about the Flip and the screen not redrawing. The Pixel doesn't seem to have this problem, and its runs android studio on X no problem. It can do AS on X in a window or tab, or as a separate desktop. The last mode seems to require the two systems to handing over low level control of the hardware to each other, whereas the first two modes are more seamless. So yes trying the other approach might solve the redraw problem. Yes, for text mode only things are even easier. The "crosh window" app (plus tmux, etc) is all I need to perfectly happy with Crouton.
    - david-given 10y ago
      Okay, yeah, the Pixel's obviously using the older graphics stack. The new one's called Freon and is apparently loads simpler and faster... but has a few side effects. (It still has a VC, although the VC2 shell is actually a user-space program called frecon which draws text via Freon. Switching from VC1 to VC2 is super seamless. So it's obviously possible somehow to draw full-screen graphics through Freon.) Also, I agree; the crosh window is surprisingly good, and interacts nicely with full screen. Bit slow, though. `ls -lR` will wedge the window for a while until it flushes its buffer.
- jhasse 10y ago
  What about the missing Windows key?
  - jshevek 10y ago
    Yeah... That was one of my concerns also before hand, I forgot about that. I didn't think I'd be happy on a chromebook because I made regular use of those missing keys, like the windows key, page up, page down, f11, f12. I thought I needed those keys to prevent too much chording. But I saw the keyboard switch as an opportunity to remap things so that I stay closer to home row more of the time. Its nice. The old (windows style) key layout was also nice, but adapting was easier than I thought, thanks to the flexibility of most linux apps.
- headmelted 10y ago
  I must say Intellij was what I was thinking of primarily. Have you got a link? Previously when I looked at this, Crouton required me to root the Chromebook and effectively switch to Linux rather than run it under Chrome O/S. If that's changed (which from your post it sounds like it has), then I need to have another look at this!
  - jshevek 10y ago
    Crouton still requires you to root the chromebook, so you get the annoying white screen on every boot (unless you are willing to go farther and flash the firmware). As far as switching to linux rather than run under Chrome OS, I guess that depends on what you mean. Include "xiwi" as one of your components when installing crouton, and you can launch android studio and have it run within the chroot, but display as a window on your chromeOS desktop. Its not visually attractive but functionally i'd say its very well integrated. It 'feels' likes its running directly on chromeos. Sorry I can't recommend any particular link aside from https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton, but I think its worth a bit of googling to find discussions relevant to any questions you may still have.

jshevek 10y ago

"but for the absence of solid developer tools, I'd have stayed forever." Are you saying that Arch or Ubuntu and everything that runs on them aren't enough for you? Or that crouton hadn't evolved far enough at the time? These days you can run crouton in a window or a tab within ChromeOS. Launch an xterm or IntelliJ or whatever each into their own windows, displaying within ChromeOS. I'd say that the 2015 Pixel (plus crouton) is one of the best ultrabooks for devs.

david-given 10y ago
Crouton in a window doesn't really work so well --- on my Asus Flip it frequently forgets to redraw the window after changes, which makes it nigh unusable. I haven't tried rootless mode, though. I'll agree with you about Chromebooks for developers, though (well, if you like doing everything from text mode, which I do). My ARM-based Flip is a lovely machine. Cheap, ultraportable, completely silent, ludicrous battery life and the quad-core ARM flies. I just wish they'd get X running in a VC working. (The Flip uses a special graphics stack which apparently makes this hard.)
- jshevek 10y ago
  That's too bad about the Flip and the screen not redrawing. The Pixel doesn't seem to have this problem, and its runs android studio on X no problem. It can do AS on X in a window or tab, or as a separate desktop. The last mode seems to require the two systems to handing over low level control of the hardware to each other, whereas the first two modes are more seamless. So yes trying the other approach might solve the redraw problem. Yes, for text mode only things are even easier. The "crosh window" app (plus tmux, etc) is all I need to perfectly happy with Crouton.
  - david-given 10y ago
    Okay, yeah, the Pixel's obviously using the older graphics stack. The new one's called Freon and is apparently loads simpler and faster... but has a few side effects. (It still has a VC, although the VC2 shell is actually a user-space program called frecon which draws text via Freon. Switching from VC1 to VC2 is super seamless. So it's obviously possible somehow to draw full-screen graphics through Freon.) Also, I agree; the crosh window is surprisingly good, and interacts nicely with full screen. Bit slow, though. `ls -lR` will wedge the window for a while until it flushes its buffer.
jhasse 10y ago
What about the missing Windows key?
- jshevek 10y ago
  Yeah... That was one of my concerns also before hand, I forgot about that. I didn't think I'd be happy on a chromebook because I made regular use of those missing keys, like the windows key, page up, page down, f11, f12. I thought I needed those keys to prevent too much chording. But I saw the keyboard switch as an opportunity to remap things so that I stay closer to home row more of the time. Its nice. The old (windows style) key layout was also nice, but adapting was easier than I thought, thanks to the flexibility of most linux apps.
headmelted 10y ago
I must say Intellij was what I was thinking of primarily. Have you got a link? Previously when I looked at this, Crouton required me to root the Chromebook and effectively switch to Linux rather than run it under Chrome O/S. If that's changed (which from your post it sounds like it has), then I need to have another look at this!
- jshevek 10y ago
  Crouton still requires you to root the chromebook, so you get the annoying white screen on every boot (unless you are willing to go farther and flash the firmware). As far as switching to linux rather than run under Chrome OS, I guess that depends on what you mean. Include "xiwi" as one of your components when installing crouton, and you can launch android studio and have it run within the chroot, but display as a window on your chromeOS desktop. Its not visually attractive but functionally i'd say its very well integrated. It 'feels' likes its running directly on chromeos. Sorry I can't recommend any particular link aside from https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton, but I think its worth a bit of googling to find discussions relevant to any questions you may still have.