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My solution is connecting the best of three worlds. I am running ChromeOS on Macbook Pro 13 so I am having Mac's touchpad, Pro keyboard, Retina screen and Mac's
by chewz 8y ago
My solution is connecting the best of three worlds. I am running ChromeOS on Macbook Pro 13 so I am having Mac's touchpad, Pro keyboard, Retina screen and Mac's durability. It get's little hotter with ChromeOS but battery life is generally as good as under macOS.
Graphical enviroment is ChromeOS which is basically just Chrome and extensions. Yes - HBOGo, Spotify, Inbox, Photos could be used as apps but they are still working in a browser.
And with crouton I have Debian stretch CLI which is just that - Debian - solid, stable and there is solution to most problems.
This setup is amazingly portable. I make regular backups with crouton and keep USB stick with ChromeOS installer on my keychain. Now I am spending summer vacation and I have left my Mac at home. So I have just installed ChromeOS on 10-year old Acer laptop, Google downloaded all documents and extensions in 15 minutes and I have installed crouton and recreated Debian from backup.
In 15 minutes I had been up and running in my home environment. Of course - touchpad on Acer sucks compared to Mac, laptop gets hot and screen estate is 1/4 of Mac's Retina but every single setting in environment is 1:1 with my Macbook.
I have never been heavy user of macOS native apps and I have slowly moved from Apple/iCloud walled garden to Google (Photos, Drive etc.) so jumping ships had been painless for me. My memories of macOS is of never fixed annoying glitches, heavy 'obligatory' updates and tons of unnecessary files cluttering my drive.
- PascalW 8y agoHow do you install ChromeOS on any old laptop? Last I looked into that it wasn't really possible.
- chewz 8y agoIt's really easy using one of Neverware builds (but you won't have dual boot, they have removed that option) https://www.neverware.com/freedownload https://www.neverware.com/freedownload