10 ms·

I think it's hilarious how little the HN community knows about Chromebooks. Every time it pops up, there's a wave of people saying "I don't know a single person

by j2kun 10y ago

I think it's hilarious how little the HN community knows about Chromebooks. Every time it pops up, there's a wave of people saying "I don't know a single person who has one!" and "They seem useless without an internet connection!" and "I wonder how they compare to mac books." People forget that most of the world doesn't write code, and doesn't need native applications. They write email, take selfies, and write extremely simple spreadsheets. It's way more important to have cheap, reliable, accessible, safe hardware. You'd be amazed how many people encounter a problem with their computer and give up because "it's mad at me." This isn't an educational problem. The technology is failing them. Wrestling with an operating system sucks. And then there's all of these amazing up-coming technologies like WebAssembly and WebRTC. If we can have the security and uniformity of a Chromebook and run Photoshop and Quake and BitTorrent directly in the browser with no overhead, then there's absolutely no point for users to deal with the muck and grime of whatever bad state they get their local filesystem into.

zobzu 10y ago
it is actually an educational problem - specially in the US. Educated people will favor the more flexible operating systems to create things (don't think just programming, think video, pictures, whatever), dumb people will care about "selfies" and "email". That said the reality is that the majority of people are the ones that do not want to learn, and thus to be successful it is necessary to cater to them. It makes sense and make their life easier. But do not fool yourself thinking it's not an educational problem for the "feel good" statement. Learning photoshop is a big deal and it's not because of UX. It's because of the concepts behind the editing.
- comboy 10y ago
  > Educated people will favor the more flexible operating systems to create things (don't think just programming, think video, pictures, whatever), dumb people will care about "selfies" and "email". It seems like a pretty biased view. Apart from the fact that even in HN-like circles for many people most part of their job is just answering e-mails, there's tons of people who don't need anything more than web. I wouldn't consider somebody who mostly does research, reading a lot of stuff and being satisfied with a simple editor "dumb". (there are even quite fine online latex editors too)
- gizmo385 10y ago
  > dumb people will care about "selfies" and "email" You know smart people can prefer a simple, less-modifiable system as well, right? Just because they don't share the HN communities view for an open product doesn't make them less intelligent.
  - spb 10y ago
    Not to mention Chromebooks essentially are open products. The entire source tree for the OS (minus a few proprietary twigs like the Widevine Encryption Module for DRM on Netflix) is a publically-accessible Git repository, and all Chromebooks allow the user to put them into a Developer Mode, which removes the low-level restrictions the system normally runs userspace in to ensure stability and security. Contrasted with the largely-locked-down proprietary development of Mac OS, whose few open-source concessions were shuttered a decade ago, the notion of Chrome OS being somehow less legitimately hacker-friendly just seems plainly absurd.
    - khedoros 10y ago
      > Not to mention Chromebooks essentially are open products. The OS itself is pretty open. If I'm not mistaken though, if you put it into dev mode, you get a scary screen at every reboot, and an opportunity to hit space to re-enable OS verification, and apparently wipe out whatever modifications you've made to the system. In theory, actually rebooting the system should be a fairly rare event, but that's one of the reasons I haven't considered a Chromebook. I understand the security concerns, but if the hardware makes it difficult to do what I'd like, then whatever security they implement is moot anyhow, right? Macs are basically the opposite; the OS itself is closed, but the hardware isn't difficult to install some other OS on. You've got options, because you aren't wedded to the software.
      - jonknee 10y ago
        > I understand the security concerns, but if the hardware makes it difficult to do what I'd like, then whatever security they implement is moot anyhow, right? "Difficult" as in a supported developer mode? Of course there is a way to reverse it otherwise they would have non-stop support calls from people who hit the button to see what it did and freaked out. The whole point of Chromebooks is that you can always get back to a usable state no matter what you do to it (even chuck it out the window, just log-in to a new one and you're 100% up and running).
- vitd 10y ago
  Do you realize that selfies and emails are creative endeavors? It takes a lot of work to take a good picture or compose an email that conveys anything useful.
cs702 10y ago
The "Year of the Linux Desktop" FINALLY arrived, and the HN community finds out about it after the fact from the mainstream media...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ekianjo 10y ago
  Well that's not the Linux Desktop we were referring to all along, to be fair. And the whole ChromeOS stack beyond the kernel is closed-source. Hardly a win for "Linux", unless you assimilate the OS to the Kernel.
  - lern_too_spel 10y ago
    Linus disagrees. https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/GPbJZX8fmtL https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/GPbJZX8fmtL
    - ekianjo 10y ago
      It's probably more of a joke than anything. Linus was calling in late 2014 or early 2015 for an ARM-based Linux laptop and he was certainly not referring to ChromeOS.
      - lern_too_spel 10y ago
        Read the comments under that post. Linus is not joking.
        ekianjo 10y ago
        Indeed he's not joking, but then that means he changed his mind compared to what he says 1-2 years ago.
        10y ago
ginkgotree 10y ago
Couldn't agree more. It honestly still seems nuts to me that the browser hasn't taken over the whole OS experience. It's clear that locally installed software is going away. But it's happening on a system that was designed decades ago to request a single markup document, and return it in a single response. Obviously, the browser has matured. JavaScript has matured. We now have more protocols to work with than just HTTP (SDP for which WebRTC, perfect example. WebSockets). But in my mind the Chromebook is the first step in what is going to become all of personal computing.
- irascible 10y ago
  Damn its refreshing to hear this.
- themartorana 10y ago
  Locally installed software is, if anything, more prevalent than ever before. Let's put aside mobile for a minute that so changed the landscape towards locally installed that it put Google's revenue model on its heels. You see WhatsApp, Slack, etc., releasing Electron apps just to try to appear locally installable. If there wasn't such a high demand for it, and people weren't clamoring for a stand-alone app instead of a browser tab, companies would never invest the time and money.
  - rtpg 10y ago
    Right, but it could be a browser feature right? The main issue (for example in OS X) is that everything gets subsumed by the browser process so things like Command+Tab don't work as well. There are, of course, also OS integration issues, but over time I think we'll get pretty far along on that front.
  - greggman 10y ago
    Who's clamoring for apps? AFAICT that's only the companies that want the apps because it lets them spy on their customers in more ways.
    - 10y ago
spb 10y ago
Moreover, Chromebooks, when paired with a good cloud IDE like https://c9.io https://c9.io, are excellent for writing code - more so than any "traditional" OS, since the local system is only dedicating resources toward keeping the interface responsive, and not wasting them on background distractions like local search indexing or filesystem defragmentation. Meanwhile, if you accidentally forkbomb a cloud development server, your music player doesn't freeze in an endless sample loop at max volume, and if your battery dies, you don't lose your uncommitted in-buffer file changes. Driver updates never break your system's ability to connect to the network, and (with separate workspaces for separate projects) compilation never breaks due to the installation of a conflicting SDK version. To be frank, I don't know how most developers can tolerate writing their code on anything else.
- wrsh07 10y ago
  Of course this all works on a MacBook, too. But it's a little sad that my high powered, sleek computer is only being used for SSH...
- cheez 10y ago
  If I can try and get to the root of what you're saying: with Chromebook and cloud-based applications, you do not have the resources of one computer, but many and the one closest to you is dedicated ONLY to making sure you have good interactivity. Interesting.
  - zzkt 10y ago
    you could think of them as a "client" and "server"
- jjnoakes 10y ago
  I bet I could use it for an hour and come up with a long list of why I would hate that environment. But off the top of my head: Not all developers work on projects which can be hosted by a third party company and require always-on super-stable internet access.
  - 10y ago
thaumasiotes 10y ago
> And then there's all of these amazing up-coming technologies like WebAssembly and WebRTC. If we can have the security and uniformity of a Chromebook and run Photoshop and Quake and BitTorrent directly in the browser with no overhead, then there's absolutely no point for users to deal with the muck and grime of whatever bad state they get their local filesystem into. I see a lot of excitement about WebAssembly. I also see a lot of people saying how java applets were obviously a bad idea, and deserved the obscurity they fell into. I don't really understand how to reconcile those viewpoints. :/
- seabrookmx 10y ago
  Web assembly gets first class access to browser API's and the DOM, which Applets never did. Applets had virtually zero ability to communicate with the webpage they were contained in. This paired with the fact that most users at the time (on Windows) had to download additional nagware to run them, and you have a recipe for disaster. Web assembly is a continuation of JavaScript and ASM JS and is poised to be a much better solution for all parties.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    Why would they need the ability to communicate with the webpage they were contained in? They can communicate with themselves. What's the difference between a single-page web application in WebAssembly and a single-page java applet in java bytecode? What's the DOM adding? Suppose I want to run Quake in the browser. Applets already do that. It's not a new idea or a new technology.
    - Lio 10y ago
      Well there's a certain consistency to what you can do in a browser. E.g. Opening part of the app in a new tab or searching for things on the page. A soon as you're in flash or an Applet all bets are off. It might work, might not. Its jarring. (Of course this ignores single page apps that deliberately break things like right click, etc.)
    - ssalazar 10y ago
ekianjo 10y ago
> You'd be amazed how many people encounter a problem with their computer and give up because "it's mad at me." This isn't an educational problem Wow, you'd have to wonder how everyone here actually learned how to use computers back when there was no Internet and no help from your friends because you were the only one using them. It's NEVER been easier to use a computer nowadays, not just because they have become better designed and more user-friendly, but also because documentation and help is readily available everywhere at every corner. Giving up when facing an issue these days is just called laziness, nothing else.
- vacri 10y ago
  Don't be so elitist. "Back in the old days", computers were a niche item that only called to enthusiasts. Now they're an everyday appliance. It's like calling people lazy because they call a refrigeration technician to fix their fridge rather than do it themselves. Computers are ridiculously complex, and you need a ton of knowledge to even start troubleshooting any but the most trivial problem.
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    I'm not elitist at all. I am simply pointing the fact that someone who has an attention span of 2 minutes and refuses to search for help when facing an unfamiliar situation has a problem in the first place. Let's not try to make everyone believe that our machines are the issue, where the issue is clearly cultural before everything else.
  - thomasz 10y ago
    Most of the old os related pain points have become rather trivial, like installing peripheral hardware, upgrading software and searching for stuff. 95% of the remaining complexity comes from applications, not the OS. They wont go away by porting those applications to html5.
- slantyyz 10y ago
  As someone who started using computers in 1982, I would have to disagree. Computers today are incredibly powerful, and because of that, operating systems and applications have become complex beasts themselves. My first computer only had 4K and a text based interface. As an end user, I only needed to know a handful of commands. Most navigation was done through multiple choice text menus. Even moving into the early 90s, when using System 6 and System 7 on Macs, the very notion of needing a second mouse button was considered a bad thing. If you needed that right button, your application design was too complex. Fast forward a quarter of a century, and I can't live without a context menu, but I have 35 years of accumulated knowledge that lets me take this stuff for granted.. IMO, the amount of stuff I need to know today to get around a computer is an order of magnitude more than "back when". Back in the old days, all you had to do was load and run stuff off discretely labeled physical media like a cassette or floppy. You only ran one program at a time. You didn't need to worry about network security, because the only network you could afford consisted of you putting your sneakers on and bringing a disk to another machine. Your computer was turned off with a switch. There was no need for a "shut down" command to fire. If you had a virus, it meant you caught a cold. Things were really simple back then.
ksec 10y ago
For the usage you describe, i would actually recommand a Tablet ( iPad ) rather then Chromebook. I was actually waiting to upgrade to iPad Air 3, but instead we got a 9.7" iPad Pro. From a hardware perpestive, once the iPad Air gets 4GB Ram, there is very little difference between it and the Chromebook.
- tkubacki 10y ago
  difference is $200
  - ksec 10y ago
    You are comparing the lowest Chromebook which are absolutely crap in quality to an iPad Air.
    - tkubacki 10y ago
      It's just a pun - have a good day.
SCAQTony 10y ago
I think you nailed it but I also think that people who don't want to learn how to code, or learn a software suite, or create something important or beautiful and simply prefer to look at a computer as a source of entertainment and communication (read as 70% of the population) are summarily doomed.
IndianAstronaut 10y ago
Oddly enough, I learned Javascript on a Chromebook.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
simula67 10y ago
Professional software ( Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, CAD etc ) and a large majority of games only runs on Windows. There is a plethora of software already developed for Windows which will continue to only run on Windows. There is a large number of people who have bet their careers on Windows and Microsoft. Microsoft has billions of dollars of runway even now and they are a very diversified company in terms of how their revenues are generated. I can still see this ending very badly for Google.
- nikcub 10y ago
  It is only a matter of time before the end of Windows only for those apps - the new Microsoft under Nadella is operating system agnostic. Losing out in the mobile space forced the abandonment of "devices and services" and vertical integration to a horizontal "platform first" strategy, but it was always going to happen (and many pundits wanted Microsoft to anticipate it rather than react to it). The kernel doesn't matter - developers can and will target runtimes not operating systems. Today we're in a situation that would have been infeasible a few years ago: Microsoft producing apps for iOS. The strategy here is all about blocking competitive software from establishing itself against Office (the real cash-cow) and thus Microsoft services (a potential cash-cow) while the runtime is developed and rolled out across all systems. What used to be vNext is now .NET Core and it is brilliant. It is largely open source[0], builds on open source tools and the runtime is small, fast and portable. VS Code is an example of this new strategy: if Microsoft can make VS[1] and their developer toolchain (which has always been the best environment, imo) cross-platform then any app can be made cross-platform (this is working, at least in my case - I was never a .NET developer until .NET Core). The advantage Windows will hold is DirectX and WPF - but for everyone else there is xwt[2] and coincidently (or not) Microsoft just bought Xamarin who wrote their cross-platform Studio product in xwt. In the interim developers can use the existing cross-platform GUI toolkit: html. Bind to a local port and open the browser and point it to http://localhost:random_port http://localhost:random_port (I just happen to install Sonarr[3] this morning which does this, it means you can distribute cross-platform binaries) or write a thin platform-specific frontend. [0] https://dotnet.github.io/ https://dotnet.github.io/ [1] https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/code-vs.aspx https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/code-vs.aspx [2] https://github.com/mono/xwt https://github.com/mono/xwt [3] https://sonarr.tv/ https://sonarr.tv/
dba7dba 10y ago
Smartphone is basically Chromebook, just in smaller form factor.
- stephenr 10y ago
  My smartphone isn't hobbled to only run shit in a Chrome runtime.

by j2kun 10y ago

zobzu 10y ago

it is actually an educational problem - specially in the US. Educated people will favor the more flexible operating systems to create things (don't think just programming, think video, pictures, whatever), dumb people will care about "selfies" and "email". That said the reality is that the majority of people are the ones that do not want to learn, and thus to be successful it is necessary to cater to them. It makes sense and make their life easier. But do not fool yourself thinking it's not an educational problem for the "feel good" statement. Learning photoshop is a big deal and it's not because of UX. It's because of the concepts behind the editing.

comboy 10y ago
> Educated people will favor the more flexible operating systems to create things (don't think just programming, think video, pictures, whatever), dumb people will care about "selfies" and "email". It seems like a pretty biased view. Apart from the fact that even in HN-like circles for many people most part of their job is just answering e-mails, there's tons of people who don't need anything more than web. I wouldn't consider somebody who mostly does research, reading a lot of stuff and being satisfied with a simple editor "dumb". (there are even quite fine online latex editors too)
gizmo385 10y ago
> dumb people will care about "selfies" and "email" You know smart people can prefer a simple, less-modifiable system as well, right? Just because they don't share the HN communities view for an open product doesn't make them less intelligent.
- spb 10y ago
  Not to mention Chromebooks essentially are open products. The entire source tree for the OS (minus a few proprietary twigs like the Widevine Encryption Module for DRM on Netflix) is a publically-accessible Git repository, and all Chromebooks allow the user to put them into a Developer Mode, which removes the low-level restrictions the system normally runs userspace in to ensure stability and security. Contrasted with the largely-locked-down proprietary development of Mac OS, whose few open-source concessions were shuttered a decade ago, the notion of Chrome OS being somehow less legitimately hacker-friendly just seems plainly absurd.
  - khedoros 10y ago
    > Not to mention Chromebooks essentially are open products. The OS itself is pretty open. If I'm not mistaken though, if you put it into dev mode, you get a scary screen at every reboot, and an opportunity to hit space to re-enable OS verification, and apparently wipe out whatever modifications you've made to the system. In theory, actually rebooting the system should be a fairly rare event, but that's one of the reasons I haven't considered a Chromebook. I understand the security concerns, but if the hardware makes it difficult to do what I'd like, then whatever security they implement is moot anyhow, right? Macs are basically the opposite; the OS itself is closed, but the hardware isn't difficult to install some other OS on. You've got options, because you aren't wedded to the software.
    - jonknee 10y ago
      > I understand the security concerns, but if the hardware makes it difficult to do what I'd like, then whatever security they implement is moot anyhow, right? "Difficult" as in a supported developer mode? Of course there is a way to reverse it otherwise they would have non-stop support calls from people who hit the button to see what it did and freaked out. The whole point of Chromebooks is that you can always get back to a usable state no matter what you do to it (even chuck it out the window, just log-in to a new one and you're 100% up and running).
vitd 10y ago
Do you realize that selfies and emails are creative endeavors? It takes a lot of work to take a good picture or compose an email that conveys anything useful.

cs702 10y ago

The "Year of the Linux Desktop" FINALLY arrived, and the HN community finds out about it after the fact from the mainstream media...

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ekianjo 10y ago
Well that's not the Linux Desktop we were referring to all along, to be fair. And the whole ChromeOS stack beyond the kernel is closed-source. Hardly a win for "Linux", unless you assimilate the OS to the Kernel.
- lern_too_spel 10y ago
  Linus disagrees. https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/GPbJZX8fmtL https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/GPbJZX8fmtL
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    It's probably more of a joke than anything. Linus was calling in late 2014 or early 2015 for an ARM-based Linux laptop and he was certainly not referring to ChromeOS.
    - lern_too_spel 10y ago
      Read the comments under that post. Linus is not joking.
      - ekianjo 10y ago
        Indeed he's not joking, but then that means he changed his mind compared to what he says 1-2 years ago.
        10y ago

ginkgotree 10y ago

Couldn't agree more. It honestly still seems nuts to me that the browser hasn't taken over the whole OS experience. It's clear that locally installed software is going away. But it's happening on a system that was designed decades ago to request a single markup document, and return it in a single response. Obviously, the browser has matured. JavaScript has matured. We now have more protocols to work with than just HTTP (SDP for which WebRTC, perfect example. WebSockets). But in my mind the Chromebook is the first step in what is going to become all of personal computing.

irascible 10y ago
Damn its refreshing to hear this.
themartorana 10y ago
Locally installed software is, if anything, more prevalent than ever before. Let's put aside mobile for a minute that so changed the landscape towards locally installed that it put Google's revenue model on its heels. You see WhatsApp, Slack, etc., releasing Electron apps just to try to appear locally installable. If there wasn't such a high demand for it, and people weren't clamoring for a stand-alone app instead of a browser tab, companies would never invest the time and money.
- rtpg 10y ago
  Right, but it could be a browser feature right? The main issue (for example in OS X) is that everything gets subsumed by the browser process so things like Command+Tab don't work as well. There are, of course, also OS integration issues, but over time I think we'll get pretty far along on that front.
- greggman 10y ago
  Who's clamoring for apps? AFAICT that's only the companies that want the apps because it lets them spy on their customers in more ways.
  - 10y ago

spb 10y ago

Moreover, Chromebooks, when paired with a good cloud IDE like https://c9.io https://c9.io, are excellent for writing code - more so than any "traditional" OS, since the local system is only dedicating resources toward keeping the interface responsive, and not wasting them on background distractions like local search indexing or filesystem defragmentation. Meanwhile, if you accidentally forkbomb a cloud development server, your music player doesn't freeze in an endless sample loop at max volume, and if your battery dies, you don't lose your uncommitted in-buffer file changes. Driver updates never break your system's ability to connect to the network, and (with separate workspaces for separate projects) compilation never breaks due to the installation of a conflicting SDK version. To be frank, I don't know how most developers can tolerate writing their code on anything else.

wrsh07 10y ago
Of course this all works on a MacBook, too. But it's a little sad that my high powered, sleek computer is only being used for SSH...
cheez 10y ago
If I can try and get to the root of what you're saying: with Chromebook and cloud-based applications, you do not have the resources of one computer, but many and the one closest to you is dedicated ONLY to making sure you have good interactivity. Interesting.
- zzkt 10y ago
  you could think of them as a "client" and "server"
jjnoakes 10y ago
I bet I could use it for an hour and come up with a long list of why I would hate that environment. But off the top of my head: Not all developers work on projects which can be hosted by a third party company and require always-on super-stable internet access.
- 10y ago

thaumasiotes 10y ago

> And then there's all of these amazing up-coming technologies like WebAssembly and WebRTC. If we can have the security and uniformity of a Chromebook and run Photoshop and Quake and BitTorrent directly in the browser with no overhead, then there's absolutely no point for users to deal with the muck and grime of whatever bad state they get their local filesystem into. I see a lot of excitement about WebAssembly. I also see a lot of people saying how java applets were obviously a bad idea, and deserved the obscurity they fell into. I don't really understand how to reconcile those viewpoints. :/

seabrookmx 10y ago
Web assembly gets first class access to browser API's and the DOM, which Applets never did. Applets had virtually zero ability to communicate with the webpage they were contained in. This paired with the fact that most users at the time (on Windows) had to download additional nagware to run them, and you have a recipe for disaster. Web assembly is a continuation of JavaScript and ASM JS and is poised to be a much better solution for all parties.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  Why would they need the ability to communicate with the webpage they were contained in? They can communicate with themselves. What's the difference between a single-page web application in WebAssembly and a single-page java applet in java bytecode? What's the DOM adding? Suppose I want to run Quake in the browser. Applets already do that. It's not a new idea or a new technology.
  - Lio 10y ago
    Well there's a certain consistency to what you can do in a browser. E.g. Opening part of the app in a new tab or searching for things on the page. A soon as you're in flash or an Applet all bets are off. It might work, might not. Its jarring. (Of course this ignores single page apps that deliberately break things like right click, etc.)
  - ssalazar 10y ago

ekianjo 10y ago

> You'd be amazed how many people encounter a problem with their computer and give up because "it's mad at me." This isn't an educational problem Wow, you'd have to wonder how everyone here actually learned how to use computers back when there was no Internet and no help from your friends because you were the only one using them. It's NEVER been easier to use a computer nowadays, not just because they have become better designed and more user-friendly, but also because documentation and help is readily available everywhere at every corner. Giving up when facing an issue these days is just called laziness, nothing else.

vacri 10y ago
Don't be so elitist. "Back in the old days", computers were a niche item that only called to enthusiasts. Now they're an everyday appliance. It's like calling people lazy because they call a refrigeration technician to fix their fridge rather than do it themselves. Computers are ridiculously complex, and you need a ton of knowledge to even start troubleshooting any but the most trivial problem.
- ekianjo 10y ago
  I'm not elitist at all. I am simply pointing the fact that someone who has an attention span of 2 minutes and refuses to search for help when facing an unfamiliar situation has a problem in the first place. Let's not try to make everyone believe that our machines are the issue, where the issue is clearly cultural before everything else.
- thomasz 10y ago
  Most of the old os related pain points have become rather trivial, like installing peripheral hardware, upgrading software and searching for stuff. 95% of the remaining complexity comes from applications, not the OS. They wont go away by porting those applications to html5.
slantyyz 10y ago
As someone who started using computers in 1982, I would have to disagree. Computers today are incredibly powerful, and because of that, operating systems and applications have become complex beasts themselves. My first computer only had 4K and a text based interface. As an end user, I only needed to know a handful of commands. Most navigation was done through multiple choice text menus. Even moving into the early 90s, when using System 6 and System 7 on Macs, the very notion of needing a second mouse button was considered a bad thing. If you needed that right button, your application design was too complex. Fast forward a quarter of a century, and I can't live without a context menu, but I have 35 years of accumulated knowledge that lets me take this stuff for granted.. IMO, the amount of stuff I need to know today to get around a computer is an order of magnitude more than "back when". Back in the old days, all you had to do was load and run stuff off discretely labeled physical media like a cassette or floppy. You only ran one program at a time. You didn't need to worry about network security, because the only network you could afford consisted of you putting your sneakers on and bringing a disk to another machine. Your computer was turned off with a switch. There was no need for a "shut down" command to fire. If you had a virus, it meant you caught a cold. Things were really simple back then.

ksec 10y ago

For the usage you describe, i would actually recommand a Tablet ( iPad ) rather then Chromebook. I was actually waiting to upgrade to iPad Air 3, but instead we got a 9.7" iPad Pro. From a hardware perpestive, once the iPad Air gets 4GB Ram, there is very little difference between it and the Chromebook.

tkubacki 10y ago
difference is $200
- ksec 10y ago
  You are comparing the lowest Chromebook which are absolutely crap in quality to an iPad Air.
  - tkubacki 10y ago
    It's just a pun - have a good day.

SCAQTony 10y ago

I think you nailed it but I also think that people who don't want to learn how to code, or learn a software suite, or create something important or beautiful and simply prefer to look at a computer as a source of entertainment and communication (read as 70% of the population) are summarily doomed.

IndianAstronaut 10y ago

Oddly enough, I learned Javascript on a Chromebook.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

simula67 10y ago

Professional software ( Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, CAD etc ) and a large majority of games only runs on Windows. There is a plethora of software already developed for Windows which will continue to only run on Windows. There is a large number of people who have bet their careers on Windows and Microsoft. Microsoft has billions of dollars of runway even now and they are a very diversified company in terms of how their revenues are generated. I can still see this ending very badly for Google.

nikcub 10y ago
It is only a matter of time before the end of Windows only for those apps - the new Microsoft under Nadella is operating system agnostic. Losing out in the mobile space forced the abandonment of "devices and services" and vertical integration to a horizontal "platform first" strategy, but it was always going to happen (and many pundits wanted Microsoft to anticipate it rather than react to it). The kernel doesn't matter - developers can and will target runtimes not operating systems. Today we're in a situation that would have been infeasible a few years ago: Microsoft producing apps for iOS. The strategy here is all about blocking competitive software from establishing itself against Office (the real cash-cow) and thus Microsoft services (a potential cash-cow) while the runtime is developed and rolled out across all systems. What used to be vNext is now .NET Core and it is brilliant. It is largely open source[0], builds on open source tools and the runtime is small, fast and portable. VS Code is an example of this new strategy: if Microsoft can make VS[1] and their developer toolchain (which has always been the best environment, imo) cross-platform then any app can be made cross-platform (this is working, at least in my case - I was never a .NET developer until .NET Core). The advantage Windows will hold is DirectX and WPF - but for everyone else there is xwt[2] and coincidently (or not) Microsoft just bought Xamarin who wrote their cross-platform Studio product in xwt. In the interim developers can use the existing cross-platform GUI toolkit: html. Bind to a local port and open the browser and point it to http://localhost:random_port http://localhost:random_port (I just happen to install Sonarr[3] this morning which does this, it means you can distribute cross-platform binaries) or write a thin platform-specific frontend. [0] https://dotnet.github.io/ https://dotnet.github.io/ [1] https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/code-vs.aspx https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/code-vs.aspx [2] https://github.com/mono/xwt https://github.com/mono/xwt [3] https://sonarr.tv/ https://sonarr.tv/

dba7dba 10y ago

Smartphone is basically Chromebook, just in smaller form factor.

stephenr 10y ago
My smartphone isn't hobbled to only run shit in a Chrome runtime.