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I really hope they figure out a good solution for this problem. One way I distinguish between a "real" computer and a toy or appliance is whether you can use th

• tmpz22 6y ago
  Tablet companies really need to realize that a decent tablet with a decent dev experience is going to lead to an explosion of developers on their platform and result directly in way higher quality apps and therefore way better sales and brand. Imagine if websites couldn’t be developed on normal desktop computers and you had to run an extremely inefficient emulator every time you wanted to make a small notification.
  • AgloeDreams 6y ago
    That would be ChromeOS tablets. Full linux terminal in container and all. Hasn't really made any difference.
    • toohotatopic 6y ago
      >Android 10 Is killing Termux terminal app Remember who owns Android. It's not worth investing time into a platform that will be further restricted sooner or later. Why should they treat the tablet differently?
      • ta17711771 6y ago
        Yes, but who owns AOSP?
    • Legogris 6y ago
      Also Microsoft Surface.
      • barbecue_sauce 6y ago
        Aren't Surfaces just Windows laptops?
        • jbay808 6y ago
          Aren't tablets just laptops without keyboards?
          • mkl 6y ago
            And Surface Pro keyboards are bought separately.
            • ta17711771 6y ago
              Surface Pro 1-3 w/ keyboard is $120-$200 on eBay...
        • tenebrisalietum 6y ago
          With touchscreens and Microsoft branded/built UEFI. Except the RT - that was an ARM tablet.
      • neogodless 6y ago
        For clarification... Surface Pro - full Windows tablet with separate keyboard Surface Laptop - normal Windows laptop Surface Book - Windows laptop with beefy detachable keyboard/battery (may have dGPU!) Surface Pro X - (almost full) Windows tablet on ARM Surface RT - Ran Windows RT (no desktop x86) on ARM Surface Studio - Windows All-in-one PC with very nice big screen
        • jefftk 6y ago
          And even earlier: Surface - interactive table (now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense)
    • AsyncAwait 6y ago
      As a Linux user, the last thing I want to do is use a computer controlled by Google. I am however typing this on a Mirosoft Surface Pro 7 running Linux.
    • MereInterest 6y ago
      About once every 2-3 months, something would be changed in ChromeOS that would break the crouton installation. The solution could be as simple as updating crouton, only 15-30 minutes of lost time, to switching to/from a later development version of ChromeOS, 3-4 hours of lost time as the entire hard drive is wiped and you need to rebuild the environment. The use of a Linux environment in ChromeOS should only be viewed as a toy, because the ChromeOS developers are willing to break it at any time.
      • hsitz 6y ago
        I'm not sure what you're talking about. Crouton is different from Crostini, and it's Crostini that is the default/built-in Linux container on Chromeos (on a Pixelbook). I've been using Crostini on Chromeos since November 2018 and I've never had "the hard drive wiped" or had to rebuild the environment. I'm trying hard to recall anything that's actually been a bug. I'm sure there've been some. Mostly they've been rolling out increased features on a pretty regular basis, with few hiccups. It's not a great solution for everything, but, to me, it's been surprisingly robust and useful. It certainly is not "a toy". The Pixelbook is a beautiful piece of hardware, but I wouldn't be using it (at least not as a contented Chromeos user) if it didn't have the built-in Linux container. I do follow Chromeos/Crostini/Pixelbook forums somewhat online. I know I've seen some people griping about problems caused by updates. From what I can tell, a very large percent of these people are ones who were using Chromeos/Crostini with the 'dev' or 'beta' branch, so they could get new features on their device sooner. I've been on 'Stable' and have had few complaints.
        • MereInterest 6y ago
          Looks like Crostini is the official tool that duplicated the functionality of the the more homebrew Crouton. Crostini came out in early 2018, which was about half a year after I gave up on using linux on chromebooks out of frustration. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/containers_and_vms.md#How-is-Crostini-related-to-Crouton https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/c...
        • michaelmrose 6y ago
  • jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
    Why would anyone want a tablet if a laptop is an option?
    • mst 6y ago
      I carry an 8" android tablet and a 10" bluetooth keyboard w/trackpoint in my jacket basically any time I leave the house. The tablet functions as a messaging device and phone, and then if I want to sit in a coffee shop and code I break out the keyboard. Admittedly so long as I could get mosh as an app I'd probably survive without termux, but it wouldn't be nearly as nice a setup.
    • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      This never made any sense to me -> going from a multi-monitor setup to a laptop feels like i am handicapped man suffering from tunnel vision. I can't imagine what coding on a tablet feels like.
  • RandallBrown 6y ago
    I'm not sure that an explosion of developers would lead to higher quality apps.
    • choeger 6y ago
      I certainly know about some developers that would increase software quality by exploding...
  • chx 6y ago
    > Tablet companies really need to realize that a decent tablet with a decent dev experience is going to lead to an explosion of developers on their platform What do you base this statement on?
  • jlarocco 6y ago
    I don't buy that argument. Game console developers don't develop on the device they're targeting, and it hasn't really hindered them. So why do mobile devs need to develop on those devices? Mobile form factor and UI just isn't suitable for software development, and the companies making them realize it. There's a lot wrong with Android development (IMO), but the lack of an on-device dev environment isn't one of them...
  • distantaidenn 6y ago
    About 3 years ago my 2012 MBP finally gave up the ghost. I was traveling frequently at the time and still had my trusty Mac Mini. So I decided to get a tablet. I did tons of research and it came down to a spec’d iPad Pro with all the bells and whistles vs. a mid range MS Surface. I’m an engineer so I need to code. I got caught up in the Apple fanfare, and shame on me for not doing better research, but the thing was near impossible to use for coding. It’s a beautiful tool, but not one that fit my development needs. I ended up using it as a 2 monitor for my Mac Mini and a media consumption device. In hindsight, I shoulda went with the Surface. All I wanna do is be able to code on an iPad. Yeah I know it’s currently possible, but have you tried it!? Is that asking too much?
• AsyncAwait 6y ago
  The only "real" solution is to get an actual Linux phone, such as the PinePhone[1] or Librem 5[2]. 1 - https://www.pine64.org/pinephone https://www.pine64.org/pinephone 2 - https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5
  • zozbot234 6y ago
    Linux phones are nice since they provide things like mainline kernel support which is important for the long term, but many cheap Android devices can be modded to run custom firmware. (The PostmarketOS is working on providing "baseline" Linux installs for those devices.)
    • kagenouta 6y ago
      Also worth noting that one of Google's long-term goals is to make Android bootable on mainline. They've been slowly upstreaming the patches they built into Android's base kernel, and their Treble roadmap involves further isolating the hardware drivers, to enable running a generic kernel across devices.
      • zozbot234 6y ago
        Yes and AIUI, libhybris is working on supporting those userspace hardware drivers on a non-AOSP install. The postmarketOS folks would rather do without using downstream code/drivers/firmware at all and keep everything upstream based, but some devices will need this and it might also be useful for quick bring up on new devices.
    • djsumdog 6y ago
      I am a big fan of PostmarketOS, but that being said, you still need to patch the Mesa libraries to get hardware acceleration working on an old Nexus 7. They want to do a lot more work, but it's difficult with all these garbage/trash ARM devices out there. If Google gave a shit about e-waste, they'd mandate UEFI+ARM like Microsoft did with their phones (except without the locked bootloader). Trying to get drivers to load an work on every ARM variant is a nightmare compared to x86.
• liveoneggs 6y ago
  where do chrome books fall on this spectrum?
  • seph-reed 6y ago
    By default, similar field as screens, keyboards, and mouses. A rather advanced peripheral to some other computer.
  • zozbot234 6y ago
    Depends on whether you have bothered to open them up and remove the hardware-based firmware write protect. The process is highly device-dependent, and seems to be entirely undocumented for many Chromebooks and other ChromeOS devices. YMMV.
    • Dylan16807 6y ago
      That's a pretty high standard. You don't need to open it up for developer mode, which lets you mess around as root, chroot into a Linux distro, give the chroot control of the screen...
      • zozbot234 6y ago
        "Developer mode" is incredibly brittle. If you don't press the right key combination at boot, your user partitions get formatted without warning and you lose all data. That makes it essentially a toy, not a real "developer" device.
        • Dylan16807 6y ago
          I see your point, but it's not as bad as that. Pressing the right key combination is optional, and all it does is skip an annoying beep. Factory reset isn't triggered by inactivity, it's triggered by pressing space and then confirming.
          • MereInterest 6y ago
• fwip 6y ago
  If you had a non-terminal-based app that included a code editor and could compile code, does that still count as a "real" computer? Or do you want access to the whole terminal experience?
  • Koshkin 6y ago
    > terminal experience Sounds like a horror title.
• giancarlostoro 6y ago
  Hell I have ran a Go and Python web server that my phone can access and even my laptop. That is impressive.