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You can choose what kind of laptop you want. ChromeOS is one of the options, and security (+ trivial exchange-ability) is one of the selling points for using a

by dgacmu 9y ago

You can choose what kind of laptop you want. ChromeOS is one of the options, and security (+ trivial exchange-ability) is one of the selling points for using a Chromebook. I tried it for a while, but I'm too used to the Mac to have made the switch more easily, so I moved back. But I know quite a few folks who use and love them. Opinions, as I'm sure you can guess, vary widely. It was surprisingly not-bad, even for a diehard mac user, and that was on a model from two years ago.

candiodari 9y ago
I wonder about that. Can you use a mac laptop to write software for the Google infrastructure ? That seems unlikely, if only for the security implications (would apply to any laptop of course, nothing to do with macos or chromeos)
- dgacmu 9y ago
  Yes. Remember, there's not really "the Google infrastructure" as some separate component. With a few exceptions, it's all One Big Repository (https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor... ). Google is a very large engineering organization, and (my opinion here, but one shared by others) recognizes that there's a lot of diversity in what engineers like for their workflow. There's obviously a set of standards for what you can choose from as far as laptops (since the company is buying them), but it's pretty broad. Here's a Quora answer that goes into more detail: https://www.quora.com/What-computer-or-laptop-do-software-engineers-or-programmers-at-Microsoft-Google-Facebook-Amazon-and-or-other-big-tech-companies-use https://www.quora.com/What-computer-or-laptop-do-software-en... You can read more about Google's security model in a USENIX ;login article from last year: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/44860.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... (source: The above cited sources, plus I'm part-time at Google.)

by dgacmu 9y ago

candiodari 9y ago

I wonder about that. Can you use a mac laptop to write software for the Google infrastructure ? That seems unlikely, if only for the security implications (would apply to any laptop of course, nothing to do with macos or chromeos)

dgacmu 9y ago
Yes. Remember, there's not really "the Google infrastructure" as some separate component. With a few exceptions, it's all One Big Repository (https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor... ). Google is a very large engineering organization, and (my opinion here, but one shared by others) recognizes that there's a lot of diversity in what engineers like for their workflow. There's obviously a set of standards for what you can choose from as far as laptops (since the company is buying them), but it's pretty broad. Here's a Quora answer that goes into more detail: https://www.quora.com/What-computer-or-laptop-do-software-engineers-or-programmers-at-Microsoft-Google-Facebook-Amazon-and-or-other-big-tech-companies-use https://www.quora.com/What-computer-or-laptop-do-software-en... You can read more about Google's security model in a USENIX ;login article from last year: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/44860.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... (source: The above cited sources, plus I'm part-time at Google.)