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Linux on Chromebooks just might get me through a masters in computer science

179 points by every 5y ago

johndoe0815 5y ago
I don't understand why people buy expensive Chromebooks - the author's Samsung device seems to cost $699 refurbished (16 GB RAM/128 GB SSD). To compare, a basic configuration Macbook Air M1 (8 GB RAM/256 GB SSD) can be bought for $899 new with education discount; if you're lucky, you can also buy a Thinkpad X13 at similar prices.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  It depends on the Chromebook, but having owned a personal Chromebook Pixel of the first two generations, it's because, the Pixel at least, represented something that I couldn't find anywhere else. In no particular order: * We MUST MAKE MORE 3:2 screens. Content is not wide, except video which I don't watch. Content is vertical. A 3:2 screen makes for an amazing laptop shape that is very well suited to the way humans view content, especially on the web. * I've done computer security stuff for a while. Chromebooks are, by far, the best computer security model I've seen. Trusted boot, hashed root filesystems, fast updates that are as painless as possible (they even keep entered text in textareas on pages). They are, by default, secure enough that I would log into my core accounts on someone else's Chromebook (given a fresh reboot to ensure it wasn't in developer mode - physical firmware attacks aren't in the scope of things I worry about from people I know). Yet, I can twiddle a few keys and get one to be a properly nice Linux laptop with all sorts of great features, that also manages to "just work." * OS resolution scaling is amazing. Eyes tired at the end of a day? A keystroke or two and you've rescaled the entire UI to match. Throw in the super high res, high def modes on the high DPI screens, and it's good for just about anything. * Almost everything can be done on the web today, even if one probably shouldn't. I've used them as primary computers for many years, and I only rarely ran into something that I couldn't do (or couldn't do with Crouton and a Linux chroot environment). Those things included "a handful of Windows applications" (wine covers a lot) and "some kernel interfaces for Linux Internals classes" (the kernel simply lacks things that the OS doesn't need). I know it's popular to hate Chromebooks, but if you're willing to toss them in developer mode for a few things, the value you get for your money, even at the high end, is legitimately impressive.
  - canadianfella 5y ago
    > except video which I don't watch. Content is vertical. A 3:2 screen makes for an amazing laptop shape that is very well suited to the way humans view content, especially on the web. You say humans, but you mean you and the other 3 people that “don’t watch video”.
  - salawat 5y ago
    Give me an SSD and an OS distro on a thumb drive with USB3.0 support, and you get the same guarantees computer security-wise on literally any UEFI secure boot enabled system. Fast updates are enabled by heavily locking in what user's are able to do with them. No exotic checks to be done. I am not impressed by Chromebooks in those regards at all. Different strokes I suppose. I might give you the screen, but to be honest, most of the time Chromebooks find their way to me it's because they're broken, and I'm everybody's computer guy of last resort due to high tolerance for frustration. All of them have had their screens or MOBO's rendered inoperable. Further, I philosophically reject anything that cannot be side loaded or is so locked down you can't load software onto it from external media. Yes, security people may love that, but in reality, the entire point of processors is to run code. If I can't get my code to the processor that needs to run it without hostage negotiations, then that is not a useful machine to me. That is a niche PoS. Which all power to those who need it as such. Just isn't high on my list of things to actively purchase.
    - Syonyk 5y ago
      > Further, I philosophically reject anything that cannot be side loaded or is so locked down you can't load software onto it from external media. But they're not. You can, with the proper incantations of "fiddling keys you can't do remotely," boot anything you want on them. Just disable the secure boot stuff, which is a designed in, required feature for a Chromebook, and run whatever. > Yes, security people may love that, but in reality, the entire point of processors is to run code. If you let a computer, connected to the internet, run any code that is sent its way, it will eventually run mostly malware. Probably foreign, and while well behaved, still quite unwelcome.
      - 5y ago
- Maxburn 5y ago
  This. For a while I did the Chromebook thing and it was actually pretty nice running android apps on it along with chrome OS but just kept slamming into chrome limitations. Looked at all the hoops necessary to sideload or try linux stuff and noped out to a regular X1 carbon thinkpad. Common Linux distros on a regular laptop is so much easier.
  - tedk-42 5y ago
    Battery life on linux laptops are always bad. Unless you want to try a bunch of custom hacks that could break things in the future for you (when you update) in the name of saving battery... It's the last thing that's stopped me from using linux on a laptop day to day. A macbook is far superior for mobile needs (though more pricey) and I can justify a linux desktop for my day-to-day development activities because it's plugged into the power.
    - dcm360 5y ago
      Battery life depends a lot on which laptop you buy. With an old Elitebook Revolve with an Intel 5200U and a new Envy X360 with an AMD 4700U the battery life on Linux is about the same when compared to reviews on Windows. Especially the Envy has some issues with running Linux, but battery life isn't one of them.
      - tedk-42 5y ago
        Interesting - i haven't heard about the battery life performance of the new AMD chips and linux. I might have a go after all!
- wearywanderer 5y ago
  I bought the original Chromebook Pixel when it was new for something like $1.3k. At the time, I believed this the best way to get a slim laptop with a high resolution screen and good linux support. Debian did run well on it, as I expected, but I soon came to regret the purchase and will never buy hardware from Google again. EDIT: It lost audio about 3 or 4 months after it was out of warranty, both out of the speakers and headphone jack. Left speaker failed first, then the right, then the headphone jack. I can only assume it was some sort of hardware fault, since sound no longer worked in ChromeOS either (and HDMI audio continued working in both). But good fucking luck getting such a thing fixed on a product like that from a company like that. Now I have a Dell XPS with a 1080p screen, which is good enough, particularly considering Dell has a much better reputation for support/repairs.
  - thekyle 5y ago
    Why did you regret the purchase?
    - wearywanderer 5y ago
      My edit includes some details. Basically, the warranty was too short and when audio (except HDMI out) broke, I couldn't get it fixed. There was also the matter of the secure boot nonsense, where if you press the wrong key on boot, secure mode would be re-enabled. With secure boot re-enabled, the only image that would boot would be a ChromeOS installation image, which would wipe your linux install. So you couldn't re-flip that secure boot bit without losing your linux installation. This bit me once, before I got better about regular backups..
  - discordance 5y ago
    My chromebook pixel from 2013 stopped receiving OS updates a few years ago. My MacBook Pro from 2012 still receives updates and works a charm.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  3:2 aspect ratio screens are amazing for productivity, and sadly very rare outside top end chromebooks Chromebooks are just polished Gentoo linux machines too that don't have nightmare headaches of driver incompatiblity issues. A M1 macbook would have to run linux in a VM (even docker containers) and deal with the overhead/tax of that issue. A chromebook will just run chroot/container stuff against the native kernel with very little overhead and maximum access to the machine's available memory.
  - johndoe0815 5y ago
    For a lot of use cases there's no need to boot a Linux VM, since you have a perfectly fine Unix already (though you have to fiddle with the security settings so macOS Big Sur becomes less annoying). Of course, it's a matter of taste and use case if you prefer one of the Linux package managers to homebrew or MacPorts. I use Macports, which still has some problems with more exotic packages on the M1, but in general seems to be running fairly well. But then, I'm used to compile my own software (such as exotic cross-compilers) and fix compilation problems when I need it. Docker containers are problematic, of course, and I often wondered why macOS never implemented functionality similar to FreeBSD Jails or Solaris Zones. I see both as superior approaches compared to Docker, especially if you can combine them with ZFS. The overhead for running VMs on a M1 Mac seems to be pretty reasonable, though, at least when you buy the 16 GB RAM version (though I also think it's overkill for something like Docker). Apple's hypervisor framework seems to work well and provides standard VirtIO devices to the guest OS, so many popular guest OSes that run on other virtualization solutions should be easy to adapt. The limited RAM expansion capabilities of the M1 Macs is probably the most problematic thing for these use cases.
- blagie 5y ago
  Well, my experience is that in practice, older refurb high-end Chromebooks can be had song. Chromebooks expire, losing security updates, and buying an older model is almost always a bad deal. Figuring out expiration dates is a PITA. In practice, COVID19 shortages aside, they typically carry very low resale value. If you're running Linux, you don't care. A rather premium model can be had for under $200 easily. That's cheap enough that you can do things with it that you'd never do with a real laptop.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  It’s an Acer spin 13 and not a Samsung, but the 16G price seems to be in the same 700$ range. For the Macbook Air, the 16G version starts at 1079$ with education discount so roughly 1.5 more expensive (they explicitely choose the 16G version of the ACER, so the RAM shouldn’t be ignored IMO) The thinkpad X13 at 16G of RAM is around 1380$ on amazon [0], so twice as much. I don’t know the Acer spin 13, but if the screen is as good as Samsung’s one, it is well worth the price, especially as you usually get more battery life, and the chrome OS + android + linux mix is actually good. There are still rough edges, but the good parts largely outweigh those. [0](https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-20T2003YUS-13-3-Notebook/dp/B089GVNT9Q/ref=sr_1_4?crid=32SCL4DDYOI37&dchild=1&keywords=thinkpad+x13&qid=1623628437&sprefix=thinkpad+x13%2Caps%2C323&sr=8-4 https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-20T2003YUS-13-3-Noteb...)
  - johndoe0815 5y ago
    Oops, Acer, correct (that was also the price I looked up), thanks for the correction. The 16 GB version of the Macbook Air is more expensive, but I wonder how much more RAM a Chromebook needs for similar tasks since most of the software runs in Chrome instead of native? I don't know US Thinkpad prices in detail, but you can buy the 16 GB RAM/512 GB SSD Thinkpad X13 AMD (no OS) for 1025 Eur (edu discount) including 19% VAT in Germany (https://www.lapstars.de/thinkpad-campus/x-serie-campus/x13-amd-campus.html https://www.lapstars.de/thinkpad-campus/x-serie-campus/x13-a...). This makes 861 Eur before tax (US$1042 at current conversion rates). Of course, in the end it's all a matter of taste and use case and I'm happy to see more variety in the personal computing market.
    - makeitdouble 5y ago
      For the RAM use, I also think a 8Gb M1 MBA would be fine for most people, including the OP if they stay within the confine of the OS. Now, in CS we're one of the edge cases where booting VMs and parallel systems is part of the deal. In the Chromebook configuration it's actually 3 systems running at the same time so more RAM has a direct impact on performance. (point taken on the Thinkpad price, I also think if we settle on a refurbished Chromebook, we could so the same for the Thinkpad and perhaps get it a bit lower)
- esalman 5y ago
  I agree. In fact if I chose a chromebook, I'd automatically restrict the budget to $250 max even for a brand new one. For $950 or more, I wouldn't accept anything less than a performance laptop with a discrete GPU. So the question is, can you get through the Master's program with a brand new $250 chromeook? I'd say yes- you basically need to set it up as a remote coding machine. Georgia Tech (and most other universities with decent graduate programs) provide access to educational and research computing clusters these days. Also, Google Collab is your friend, especially during the assignment deadlines when those clusters will be occupied by other students.
  - MonaroVXR 5y ago
    >I agree. In fact if I chose a chromebook, I'd automatically restrict the budget to $250 max even for a brand new one. For $950 or more, I wouldn't accept anything less than a performance laptop with a discrete GPU. A laptop with a DGPU within that price range is mostly a NVIDIA MX-series GPU. But you can get a good NVIDIA GPU with the Acer Nitro 5 (from 2020 and upwards) series and maybe an Ideapad gaming.
- p1necone 5y ago
  As long as I can run Linux easily, edit/compile smallish code projects and watch Youtube smoothly CPU/GPU/RAM specs don't matter a whole lot for me when it comes to a laptop - I've got a beefy desktop at home for that (and I could remote into it from the laptop too). However battery life, ruggedness, 3:2 display, small size etc (note: not thickness, I don't actually care about that, just the other dimensions so it easily fits in a backpack) are all features I do look for in a laptop, and Chromebooks usually have that in spades (stuff that's intended to be handed out to high school kids is probably pretty indestructible). If Apple releases an 11" MacBook Air for a reasonable price that would be pretty compelling for me too though, knowing I do have the processing power should want it (and the very high dpi display).
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  So with an education discount, you can spent $200 more for half the RAM? Maybe if you need the disk space (although if it's replaceable, $200 will buy a lot of aftermarket SSD), but that's certainly not an obvious tradeoff to me.
- sologoub 5y ago
  Chromebooks frequently go on crazy sales - bought my 8Gb/i5 Acer Spin 713 for less than $500. As work machine it’s perfect for me and is also disposable if something were to happen to it. Linux support rounds out what I need, though it’s not perfect for GUI tools.
- lrem 5y ago
  I have a hefty budget for personal computing. My current laptop cost me almost 2400USD equivalent. The only reason that's not a Pixelbook is that Chrome doesn't run real Lightroom.
- pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
  > $699 refurbished (16 GB RAM/128 GB SSD). To compare, a basic configuration Macbook Air M1 (8 GB RAM/256 GB SSD) can be bought for $899 new with education discount This is an odd comment. Imagine I walked up to you, asked if you were happy with your computer, you said yes, and then I proceeded to try to "sell" you on an "upgrade" to half the RAM for the same price. Now consider if we weren't talking about the same price; I'm suggesting that you spend an extra $200+ on this. Why would anyone take that deal?
- swebs 5y ago
  Didn't Apple make it extremely difficult to boot Linux on modern Macbooks?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
azinman2 5y ago
And why wouldn’t it? CS education is rarely taxing in terms of processor/memory requirements. I doubt the curriculum is all that different than 10 years ago or more with far less specs. It’s about theory and writing algorithms. And if this is a program specializing in ML, the models are still likely to be toy, and anything more can use cloud computing like Google’s Collab.
- ThinkBeat 5y ago
  I must politely disagree with that. It may be that we have been to distinct types of CS programs. Some of my work as an under grad was taxing on my computer and much more so as a grad. Even simple things like compiling a system can quickly get taxing and slow. Some classes require models, algorithms that takes a lot of power to process or to prove. My master thesis was system would run for 48 hours on the desktop I had then, after some optimization got it down from 65 hours. Ideally though you have access to a lab / server that you can offload your hard work on. In my experience those resources were already under maximum load during most of the day and parts of the night. Being able to just run them locally was convenient.
  - mbreese 5y ago
    > Ideally though you have access to a lab / server that you can offload your hard work on. And I think this is the key point here. Most CS things you can easily handle with the horse power of a Chromebook. And when you hit the 10% of the coursework that you can’t use a Chromebook for, you probably wouldn’t use a “normal” laptop for it either. You’re always going to have jobs that will take a bit more horsepower. Those should be farmed out to a cluster or server anyway. Where I think the OP will have issues is what resources they will need for their research, which again will probably need a server or cluster. Likely, the most taxing thing they will likely need to work on locally is their thesis. This is where I’d think they might run into issues, especially with figures. But even here, Overleaf should be up for the job.
  - codeisawesome 5y ago
    Not to mention being on video calls with classmates / actual classes and also having a few other windows running (lets say Slack / Discord), and maybe driving a decent-resolution monitor.. these relatively basic sounding things can push the CPU/gfx memory/RAM of even higher-end hardware to their limits! Especially if you choose to / need to run all these together and multi-task. That might partially be an indictment of software performance, though.
shams93 5y ago
You might not even need an egpu if you are using google collab which provides much faster gpus for free.
comprev 5y ago
It does seem a rather unnecessarily complicated task given much cheaper second hand/refurbished units could be picked up on eBay and happily run a Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu Linux.
rootusrootus 5y ago
Maybe. It depends on the classes you choose. Some OMSCS classes require VMs, and at least one uses Windows.
- antonvs 5y ago
  Chrome OS is built around VMs, so depending on the reason for that requirement, it might be fine.
  - sneak 5y ago
    You don't get to run your own VMs on ChromeOS.
    - lights0123 5y ago
      Nested virtualization is supported, and you can just use KVM directly in developer mode.
every 5y ago
I posted this for several different reasons. I was one of the beta testers for Chrome OS and have used it exclusively for the past decade. I am always interested in how it continues to improve. Secondly, the terminal Debian is a dream come true for me. It is the best CLI I have ever enjoyed. It is also well integrated with the OS. Lastly, while I know that Chrome OS has made many inroads into public education, I had no idea it might be applicable for something like an MA in a technical degree...
jacobmischka 5y ago
I can only remember two courses in my CS Master's program that had any actual programming whatsoever, mostly it was manual algorithms, proofs, and theory.
sircastor 5y ago
I remember many many years ago taking an intro CS class and learning that the Java compiler was available on The newly released Mac OS X. I thought “Thank goodness I won’t need to use Windows” unfortunately, I never really got it to work. Some obscure errors prevented me from making progress and I wasn’t proactive enough to follow it any further. The hardest thing about going against the grain in structured learning is that you’re giving yourself extra work - translating the instructions into whatever your toolset is, solving errors that don’t exist on the approved platforms. I wish the author the best of luck.
- analog31 5y ago
  There's also a social aspect, where any problem that you encounter is immediately pinned on your choice of a peculiar setup, and becomes a story that gets told and repeated. You may have a professor who is suspicious that you are wasting time on what seems like a quixotic pursuit. So you actually have to go way overboard to ensure that your stuff always works perfectly, and that nobody ever sees you trying to troubleshoot something.
thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
The performance of running Linux in a container on a VM is noticeably bad, even on a Google Pixel with Core i7 and 16 GB of RAM. It works okay for most tasks, but is laggy when running JetBrains IDEs compared to bare metal Linux distros. Edit: Chromebooks are nice in terms of laptop hardware support compared to some hardware / Linux distros I have used over the years. No issues with suspend / resume, printers and scanners work, great touchscreen and Android tablet functionality. Some tasks that require more direct access to the hardware (e.g. device drivers used to read lab instrument hardware, debugging devices over USB, etc.) might not work as well (or work at all) due to the Linux VM and container sandboxing.
coding123 5y ago
Pretty soon you could get through it with an unmodified iPad... https://www.andreafortuna.org/2021/03/13/coding-on-ipad-pro-my-own-setup/ https://www.andreafortuna.org/2021/03/13/coding-on-ipad-pro-... Not sure when it's going to be out of beta.
- tedk-42 5y ago
  Remote development machines aren't for everyone and availability will always be an issue. I remember as a student trying to debug an issue on a train. I would have been so frustrated if the internet connection to my remote machine was impeding my ability to think through a debugging scenario. I've been waiting on the beta list for almost a year I think and haven't heard anything.
  - ja27 5y ago
    One solution I've seen is to carry a Raspberry Pi, especially a Zero, and connect to that from the iPad via WiFi or USB-C. Can even VNC to it for a full desktop experience. Pretty portable and low-power.
nickjj 5y ago
It is a good idea IMO, especially with GalliumOS (a Chromebook optimized variant of xubuntu) so you can run Linux natively. Back in 2016 I picked up a Toshiba CB35 Chromebook with a 13" 1080p IPS display, 4gb of memory, 1.7ghz Celeron and a 256GB SSD for $350. It weighs under 3 pounds and has a backlight keyboard too. It still runs great today and despite the low end specs it can deal with some programming work loads (Dockerized web apps, a bunch of browser tabs, mp3 player, editor with 40+ plugins, multiple workspaces, etc.). It's not slow either. Even decently sized Rails apps with Webpacker reload nearly instantly while developing and there's no type delay. It's been a really nice outdoors / travel laptop for someone like me who normally uses a desktop workstation. I wrote up a whole review of it here: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromebook-cb35-into-a-linux-development-environment-with-galliumos https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromeboo... If you can still find this exact model at that price point I'd consider it today. It's one of those rare combos of hardware that's really good at a fair price. I wouldn't insta buy it, but I'd at least keep it in the runnings vs a 2021 model, especially at that price point. With lower end machines, newness isn't always a deciding factor for goodness.
- nyolfen 5y ago
  i have one of these with gallium as well -- cannot recommend it highly enough, though i wish the memory weren't soldered in. daily driver for normal web stuff for six or seven years now.
- IntelMiner 5y ago
  +1 to Chromebooks, though I was never much interested in Gallium I picked up one of the original Acer C720's back in 2013. Anemic 2c1t (dual core) Celeron at 1.2 Ghz and 2GB of memory. But Gentoo on it with XFCE was incredibly nippy. Add a processor optimized Firefox at the time and it was an extremely good tiny laptop A year or so later I upgraded to its "big brother" the core i3 variant (2c2t, quad core) with 4GB of RAM. Same experience. Extremely happy with both machines Eventually as the Chrome browser started to eclipse things though I moved to Dell's Chromebook 13 "Lulu" with a beastly Broadwell i5 quad core and 8GB (soldered) RAM The biggest draw for me is these were the first Linux machines I'd used where everything didn't "just work" or "it works okay but you can tweak XYZ" it worked in the sense it was explicitly designed __to run Linux__ For all the flak Google deservedly gets, the decision to enforce a "no binary blobs, everything must be upstreamed to mainline Linux" kernel and Coreboot (BIOS) as well as making "jailbreaking" the thing with a permanent firmware flash as simple as removing a hardware screw was commendable These days I'm stuck using an MSI Modern 14, which while "okay" is nowhere near as delightful as the Chromebooks were previously
readonthegoapp 5y ago
That dude doesn't have a real chromebook. Try 32GB HDD, 4 GB RAM, 1.6 GHz CPU. Been using it for light web dev. It's a disaster.
- kart23 5y ago
  Yeah, that's what a chromebook is. The machine in the article was $1000 MSRP. An M1 Macbook Air is the same price, and $900 with education pricing.
- esalman 5y ago
  This. I did not even realize OP was talking about a $1000 chromebook.
nicklaf 5y ago
Whether or not a chromebook is adequate for cash-strapped students in my painful experience depends on whether or not your model has soldered RAM. Doing research in school will likely have you opening a lot of browser tabs. Running Firefox on a non-ChromeOS Linux install is going to eat up more than the measly amount of soldered RAM that cheap Chromebooks offer.[0] I used Acer Chromebooks in college and very much came to regret this aspect whenever my machine slowed to a crawl the moment I opened an important PDF in Firefox. In hindsight, I probably should have set up zRAM on my machine, which expands the amount of RAM available by compressing it, just like ChromeOS does. However, as soon as I had money I chucked the Chromebook and bought standard a standard Acer notebook with upgradable RAM at a lower price than the fancy Chromebooks. [0] Don't underestimate this: at the moment I have hundreds of tabs open in a saved browser session, with htop pegging Firefox at 16GB RAM utilization! It goes down when I restart the browser maybe to 5GB or so, but it also doesn't matter much when you have 32GB or more available.
- estaseuropano 5y ago
  I dont mean to offend, but it sounds as if the problem is your workflow rather than the device. There's no reason to keep 100+ tabs open unless you don't know how to use bookmarks/citation software/save pages offline effectively. I also find myself with many tabs open once in a while, but if I see FF above 8GB of RAM I'm not going to think the issue is the hardware. Opening PDF in FF also always is a pain but there are plenty of lightweight readers.
  - nicklaf 5y ago
    Yeah. The workflow I use for serious work actually ends up using less tabs because I tend to take care of stuff. I also bookmark/tag/close the important stuff. I talked a bit about my setup a few months ago in an HN post. [0] But just for casual browsing? I prefer to leave stuff open as a reminder to pick it back up again. My home office is also pretty messy in terms of books scattered about though, so this probably boils down to a personal preference. Come to think of it, maybe there's an analogy between people who keep their desk neat and tidy / those who program in languages requiring manual memory allocation versus those who like to leave books open and scattered / prefer the decreased mental overhead of working in garbage collected languages. :-P [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25612092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25612092
awslattery 5y ago
Tried to upgrade to a Dell XPS 13 (9310) on sale at Costco. Webcam wasn't connected from the factory. In a post-2020 world, this doesn't fly, and for a $1500+ device, I shouldn't need to spend hours doing firmware updates, driver updates, only to find it's a hardware fault. Back to my Google Pixelbook, but the final software update date is a terrifying prospect [1], as is it's woefully inefficient Intel 7th generation processor (I've been spoiled by Ryzen for years). Oh how I wish I could just build my own laptop with COTS components, like my desktops for the last 16 years. Or, if I'm just not looking in the right place, I'd love to find something with a great display, lightweight, great typing experience, and something that won't hit 45*C+ on the keyboard deck after boot. In another life, I might have bought into the Apple ecosystem, but I have been Android since 2009 and have already traded my soul to Google for it's scrambled attempts at a cohesive ecosystem. [1] https://support.google.com/pixelbook/answer/9413900?hl=en https://support.google.com/pixelbook/answer/9413900?hl=en
- bloqs 5y ago
  Similar experience with dell xps except touchpad froze intermittently. Had 2 engineer visits and two motherboards and no fix. Hilarious to think they want to throw hands with apple.
- 3np 5y ago
  You may find Framework interesting: https://frame.work/ https://frame.work/
- epmaybe 5y ago
  I think the framework laptop company May interest you if you want a more customizable laptop. Still not full desktop component choice though
- soared 5y ago
  I didn’t know about these dates - is google just done making pixel books at some point before then? I’ve had mine for years and I can’t imagine going back to anything else.
- solarkraft 5y ago
code_duck 5y ago
I tried using a chromebook for general development and it was not a pleasant or efficient experience. My goal was to compile and write something using Python and OpenCV, a computer vision library. While one can indeed run Linux apps, the vast majority of what I needed was not pre-compiled. Compiling led to issues with having to compile parts of the toolchain, which went up a couple levels of recursion. Compile some library so you can compile some other library so you can compile a program to compile some thing that she used to compile some package. Then library conflicts, and so forth. I haven’t needed to do this since about 2004. Plus, then waiting for a Chromebook to compile large packages can take all day. There’s no way I’d try this again versus just getting a normal laptop and installing Linux.
- schwartzworld 5y ago
  Why not install Linux on your Chromebook?
  - code_duck 5y ago
    The chromebook I had was not intel based, which complicates things along similar lines. From what I recall I wasn't able to install actual linux for some reason. Most likely compilation would be required at some point (and starting the JVM) and this machine was rather slow for such tasks, regardless of OS.
jayd16 5y ago
Do CS students not ssh into the computer lab these days? A Chromebook is more than enough. I was able to get Android Studio running on mine. I'm pretty sure most of the JetBrains suite would run as well if you need an IDE.
jackconsidine 5y ago
I'm toying with the idea of getting a chromebook for my day job (software development). I already use the vscode ssh [1] plugin, so that my IDE runs on a remote server which has been a great experience. For Jupyter notebook type tasks, Google's collab sheets [2] run on a remote server (there's a bit to be desired of course). I even use Genymotion in the cloud [3] such that my android APKs are run on the cloud and rendered through a browser emulator. At this point I'm 85% of the way there, and can't wait for the day where no serious computation needs to be done locally. [1] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh [2] https://colab.research.google.com/?utm_source=scs-index https://colab.research.google.com/?utm_source=scs-index [3] https://cloud.geny.io/ https://cloud.geny.io/
- gofreddygo 5y ago
  I don't get the appeal of taking local task metadata, executing on a remote machine and then consuming results locally. I can imagine this for a collaborative task, but not much else. Local computation has always led teams I've worked in to a superior (personalized, decentralized, fault tolerant, highly parallel) mode of operation. My tryst with working with remote computation ended when the 5 VMs we were using as a team for development were locked out and decommissioned without a notice due to a devops error. Thankfully, I did have local equivalents, which I habitually worked on and copied over to the VM for execution, not so much for my team members.
  - jackconsidine 5y ago
    To each his own. In my work, standardizing environments is a point of frustration to the extent that it's better for us to figure out the environment once remotely than for every OS locally.
- nmfisher 5y ago
  I've really wanted to move into this direction too. What's the remaining 15%?
  - jackconsidine 5y ago
mraza007 5y ago
Has anyone had success running Arch Linux on Chromebook?
whitetrump 5y ago
any computer should do, no?
schwartzworld 5y ago
I actually learned web development on a Chromebook running Linux, originally with Chrouton, later with GalliumOS. The Chromebook is around 7 years old and still runs pretty well. There's a lot you can't do, but it has no problem spinning up a Rails or Node server. Now I mainly use it for GCompris for my kids.
haliskerbas 5y ago
Some OMSCS classes require certain proctoring software that may not work on Linux or ChromeOS. Please make sure you have an alternative ready to go as course staff do not make accomodations for this. (source OMSCS grad, seen this happen to others)
- atdt 5y ago
  How long did it take you to go through the program? Any advice / regrets?
- jay3ss 5y ago
  You're absolutely right. My main driver is a Linux machine which isn't compatible with Honorlock. I'm very lucky to have inherited another laptop that is compatible.
bdefore 5y ago
System 76 engineers: for your upcoming ultralight, please make a 3:2 screen!
vzaliva 5y ago
If you are spending more that 50% of your time in Linux emulation mode under ChromeOS you'd better off running Linux natively.
tumblewit 5y ago
as an alumni of OMSCS here are a few things I want to say: 1. exams can be taken on a chromebook now (you couldn’t until a year ago) so that part should be covered. 2. more ram is good because classes will give you a VM so you can buils it locally and test it in a VM (what almost everyone in class would do) 3. unfortunately some VMs only work well in a windows virtual box environment . and that’s where I think you might run into problems. the thing is the TA will automate his tests for grading. So if the testing on your end was not done correctly (like let’s say locally instead of the VM provided or the environment suggested) then you will fail the grading tests. So be very careful there. 4. You might want to automate things yourself to get things done faster. In that case you may want to run multiple instances of the VMs provided. My MBP was broken so i ended up using a desktop for completing the whole thing which was a mistake because it was too inconvenient especially during tests. however many students were able to finish the course with a 200$ thinkpad so it’s doable. But then there were those who also had a powerful ryzen desktop for classwork with dual monitors and a laptop for test. So i guess it all depends on your comfort level with your setup.
allanrbo 5y ago
What a waste of time. Just get a refurbished Thinkpad for less than the price of a Chromebook and focus on the actual course content instead.
TrackerFF 5y ago
As for GPU (ML/DL) intensive classes or projects, using google colab worked just fine - at least if you're going to write in Python. Also, schools tend to have their own dedicated machines with good GPU power - you could always just SSH into these and let them do the heavy lifting.
kixiQu 5y ago
I got through my BS in CS without more than crouton. It was good that it forced me to * be judicious and focussed with my lab time when I needed to use an IDE for Java or such, and * get real comfortable with SSHing to the school's server and operating remotely on the command line real early
- kixiQu 5y ago
  Fun story, though: Up until internship money allowed me to replace it (with another chromebook!) for my senior year, the chromebook I was using would crash if I had more than ~5 tabs open. Good times!
ianbooker 5y ago
I wrote my master thesis some time ago on a Samsung Chromebook equipped with an ARM CPU. Back then it was the perfect machine for me: fanless / silent, cheap and it ran Linux and i3wm after 10 minutes of setup. Even the keyboard was ok. Had no problems with Latex, just some minor hiccups with software not compiled for ARM that should be resolved by now.
may13noon 5y ago
What is the exact point? Is Chromebooks a pretty good choice, or not bad as expected?
kubb 5y ago
Does anyone know the knowledge graph visualization tool that they're using?
- mdotmertens 5y ago
  Looks like the Graph View in RoamResearch.
pgsimp 5y ago
I started my degree in 1997 using a PC with a 66MHz CPU and a dial up modem. Why should a Chromebook not be sufficient?
xorcist 5y ago
It wasn't even that long ago that you could get a computer science degree without even owning a computer.
chimbosonic 5y ago
I graduated in 2017 in Computer Science using a Thinkpad x210 that cost me £50 (~70$). And never had a issue. I haven't used a chromebook in a while but back then they where less powerful than a x210. Nowadays, if I have to recommend a laptop for coding or CS course I would recommend whichever Thinkpad X-series you can afford.
- chimbosonic 5y ago
  if ram is required DDR2 or DDR3 sodimm ram is cheap. And any SSD for storage works (I used the HDD that came with it until the 3rd year where I got a Samsung Evo SSD).
riccardomc 5y ago
I have a MSc in computer science and used the university workstations and saved my work on a 128MB USB stick for a very long time before my parents helped me buy a laptop.
martin_a 5y ago
> without splurging on a new computer costing $1,500, $2,000, or more. Well, just buy a used ThinkPad (or whatever business machine) then. My T460 cost me 200 Euro and will probably be good for two or three more years. Then I'll buy the next used one for the same price and will be happy for four more years...
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  200 Euros buys you a very old and low end Thinkpad right now, at least in Europe, that's a slouch when dealing with modern web apps. Sure, it's probably fine for running linux and coding in vim but on the modern web and electron apps it shows its age. Unless you're cash strapped, I'd much rather spend 500-800 Euros and get a machine with a modern Ryzen or Tiger-Lake chip that makes a much more usable experience for a variety of tasks.
  - martin_a 5y ago
    You're right, maybe I made a good deal, also by buying from a private seller. But for 100 or 200 Euro more, you should be fine, according to this list: https://www.thinkpad-gebrauchtpreisliste.de/ https://www.thinkpad-gebrauchtpreisliste.de/ And is performance really better with that Chromebook?
  - charwalker 5y ago
    Was helping a friend look for a sub $300 PC for their sibling abroad and could not find anything reputable that wasn't like a 2c/2t 4th or even 3rd gen Intel part. And those listed with an SSD did not have one, based on reviews.
globular-toast 5y ago
I'm not sure why this is a big deal. Why would you need a powerful computer to study computer science? If any of the courses involve huge computations then I expect the university would have a supercomputer of sorts they can use.
kleiba 5y ago
I got my CS master's degree from a university that came from a math tradition (rather than from an engineering one). There was only one class in all of my studies where a computer was needed at all, the rest was all theorems and proofs.
- mnw21cam 5y ago
  I did a degree in computer science from one of the top universities in the world. When I started, it was recommended that we not bring a computer at all.
swebs 5y ago
>Use the Chromebook for the 90% that I think I can use it for and use virtual machines in the Georgia Tech Computing Center. Most universities also have some sort of high performance computing cluster available, so you're not limited to just a simple VM.
raxxorrax 5y ago
OpenCV takes a few megabyte of storage. Opening a few images for pixel access, meaning you have an uncompressed copy in memory, can quickly bring any system down. Same problem with Matlab. Not really sure, but there are probably precompiled modules of OpenCV for popular distros. I think a Chromebook would work if you are indeed able to install Linux. But I don't really get why people studying computer science don't have a dedicated machine for that. > on a new computer costing $1,500, $2,000, or more I don't know current prices, but you get an Intel Nuc for < 150$. Add a monitor to that... Even on a cost basis, I don't think Chromebooks can compete and I would not recommend them for learning overall.
mihevc 5y ago
I wrote my master thesis on Acer C720 (2013) running xfce. I used some octave but I mostly needed it for latex. These days I don't use it anymore because the screen is not that great but it aged incredibly well.
Vahkesh 5y ago
I don't understand what the issue is here. OP is using a Linux laptop to get a CS degree? I did that 10 years ago with less compute resources. At this point I would assume that a majority of CS students are using laptops (with a significant amount on a tighter budget). In my experience at 2 Universities, compute resources are supplied to complete the required course work (cloud or lab).
jmcnulty 5y ago
Linux on Chromebooks is Debian buster running in an LXD container. Being LXD there's no reason why you're limited to just one container either. I don't like to mess around with the default "penguin" container too much so I've added more. I've currently added centos7, centos8, ubuntu and another debian container. Plus you can take LXD snapshots, rollback, publish images etc. Hint: Add a Ubuntu container and install LXD, then copy the lxc binary to your "penguin" container and setup a trust between it at the Chrome OS "termina" hypervisor. Then you can manage all your containers from the default linux install. I have a Pixelbook Go with 8GB of ram and a 128GB drive.

179 points by every 5y ago

I don't understand why people buy expensive Chromebooks - the author's Samsung device seems to cost $699 refurbished (16 GB RAM/128 GB SSD). To compare, a basic configuration Macbook Air M1 (8 GB RAM/256 GB SSD) can be bought for $899 new with education discount; if you're lucky, you can also buy a Thinkpad X13 at similar prices.

Syonyk 5y ago
It depends on the Chromebook, but having owned a personal Chromebook Pixel of the first two generations, it's because, the Pixel at least, represented something that I couldn't find anywhere else. In no particular order: * We MUST MAKE MORE 3:2 screens. Content is not wide, except video which I don't watch. Content is vertical. A 3:2 screen makes for an amazing laptop shape that is very well suited to the way humans view content, especially on the web. * I've done computer security stuff for a while. Chromebooks are, by far, the best computer security model I've seen. Trusted boot, hashed root filesystems, fast updates that are as painless as possible (they even keep entered text in textareas on pages). They are, by default, secure enough that I would log into my core accounts on someone else's Chromebook (given a fresh reboot to ensure it wasn't in developer mode - physical firmware attacks aren't in the scope of things I worry about from people I know). Yet, I can twiddle a few keys and get one to be a properly nice Linux laptop with all sorts of great features, that also manages to "just work." * OS resolution scaling is amazing. Eyes tired at the end of a day? A keystroke or two and you've rescaled the entire UI to match. Throw in the super high res, high def modes on the high DPI screens, and it's good for just about anything. * Almost everything can be done on the web today, even if one probably shouldn't. I've used them as primary computers for many years, and I only rarely ran into something that I couldn't do (or couldn't do with Crouton and a Linux chroot environment). Those things included "a handful of Windows applications" (wine covers a lot) and "some kernel interfaces for Linux Internals classes" (the kernel simply lacks things that the OS doesn't need). I know it's popular to hate Chromebooks, but if you're willing to toss them in developer mode for a few things, the value you get for your money, even at the high end, is legitimately impressive.
- canadianfella 5y ago
  > except video which I don't watch. Content is vertical. A 3:2 screen makes for an amazing laptop shape that is very well suited to the way humans view content, especially on the web. You say humans, but you mean you and the other 3 people that “don’t watch video”.
- salawat 5y ago
  Give me an SSD and an OS distro on a thumb drive with USB3.0 support, and you get the same guarantees computer security-wise on literally any UEFI secure boot enabled system. Fast updates are enabled by heavily locking in what user's are able to do with them. No exotic checks to be done. I am not impressed by Chromebooks in those regards at all. Different strokes I suppose. I might give you the screen, but to be honest, most of the time Chromebooks find their way to me it's because they're broken, and I'm everybody's computer guy of last resort due to high tolerance for frustration. All of them have had their screens or MOBO's rendered inoperable. Further, I philosophically reject anything that cannot be side loaded or is so locked down you can't load software onto it from external media. Yes, security people may love that, but in reality, the entire point of processors is to run code. If I can't get my code to the processor that needs to run it without hostage negotiations, then that is not a useful machine to me. That is a niche PoS. Which all power to those who need it as such. Just isn't high on my list of things to actively purchase.
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    > Further, I philosophically reject anything that cannot be side loaded or is so locked down you can't load software onto it from external media. But they're not. You can, with the proper incantations of "fiddling keys you can't do remotely," boot anything you want on them. Just disable the secure boot stuff, which is a designed in, required feature for a Chromebook, and run whatever. > Yes, security people may love that, but in reality, the entire point of processors is to run code. If you let a computer, connected to the internet, run any code that is sent its way, it will eventually run mostly malware. Probably foreign, and while well behaved, still quite unwelcome.
    - 5y ago
Maxburn 5y ago
This. For a while I did the Chromebook thing and it was actually pretty nice running android apps on it along with chrome OS but just kept slamming into chrome limitations. Looked at all the hoops necessary to sideload or try linux stuff and noped out to a regular X1 carbon thinkpad. Common Linux distros on a regular laptop is so much easier.
- tedk-42 5y ago
  Battery life on linux laptops are always bad. Unless you want to try a bunch of custom hacks that could break things in the future for you (when you update) in the name of saving battery... It's the last thing that's stopped me from using linux on a laptop day to day. A macbook is far superior for mobile needs (though more pricey) and I can justify a linux desktop for my day-to-day development activities because it's plugged into the power.
  - dcm360 5y ago
    Battery life depends a lot on which laptop you buy. With an old Elitebook Revolve with an Intel 5200U and a new Envy X360 with an AMD 4700U the battery life on Linux is about the same when compared to reviews on Windows. Especially the Envy has some issues with running Linux, but battery life isn't one of them.
    - tedk-42 5y ago
      Interesting - i haven't heard about the battery life performance of the new AMD chips and linux. I might have a go after all!
wearywanderer 5y ago
I bought the original Chromebook Pixel when it was new for something like $1.3k. At the time, I believed this the best way to get a slim laptop with a high resolution screen and good linux support. Debian did run well on it, as I expected, but I soon came to regret the purchase and will never buy hardware from Google again. EDIT: It lost audio about 3 or 4 months after it was out of warranty, both out of the speakers and headphone jack. Left speaker failed first, then the right, then the headphone jack. I can only assume it was some sort of hardware fault, since sound no longer worked in ChromeOS either (and HDMI audio continued working in both). But good fucking luck getting such a thing fixed on a product like that from a company like that. Now I have a Dell XPS with a 1080p screen, which is good enough, particularly considering Dell has a much better reputation for support/repairs.
- thekyle 5y ago
  Why did you regret the purchase?
  - wearywanderer 5y ago
    My edit includes some details. Basically, the warranty was too short and when audio (except HDMI out) broke, I couldn't get it fixed. There was also the matter of the secure boot nonsense, where if you press the wrong key on boot, secure mode would be re-enabled. With secure boot re-enabled, the only image that would boot would be a ChromeOS installation image, which would wipe your linux install. So you couldn't re-flip that secure boot bit without losing your linux installation. This bit me once, before I got better about regular backups..
- discordance 5y ago
  My chromebook pixel from 2013 stopped receiving OS updates a few years ago. My MacBook Pro from 2012 still receives updates and works a charm.
qbasic_forever 5y ago
3:2 aspect ratio screens are amazing for productivity, and sadly very rare outside top end chromebooks Chromebooks are just polished Gentoo linux machines too that don't have nightmare headaches of driver incompatiblity issues. A M1 macbook would have to run linux in a VM (even docker containers) and deal with the overhead/tax of that issue. A chromebook will just run chroot/container stuff against the native kernel with very little overhead and maximum access to the machine's available memory.
- johndoe0815 5y ago
  For a lot of use cases there's no need to boot a Linux VM, since you have a perfectly fine Unix already (though you have to fiddle with the security settings so macOS Big Sur becomes less annoying). Of course, it's a matter of taste and use case if you prefer one of the Linux package managers to homebrew or MacPorts. I use Macports, which still has some problems with more exotic packages on the M1, but in general seems to be running fairly well. But then, I'm used to compile my own software (such as exotic cross-compilers) and fix compilation problems when I need it. Docker containers are problematic, of course, and I often wondered why macOS never implemented functionality similar to FreeBSD Jails or Solaris Zones. I see both as superior approaches compared to Docker, especially if you can combine them with ZFS. The overhead for running VMs on a M1 Mac seems to be pretty reasonable, though, at least when you buy the 16 GB RAM version (though I also think it's overkill for something like Docker). Apple's hypervisor framework seems to work well and provides standard VirtIO devices to the guest OS, so many popular guest OSes that run on other virtualization solutions should be easy to adapt. The limited RAM expansion capabilities of the M1 Macs is probably the most problematic thing for these use cases.
blagie 5y ago
Well, my experience is that in practice, older refurb high-end Chromebooks can be had song. Chromebooks expire, losing security updates, and buying an older model is almost always a bad deal. Figuring out expiration dates is a PITA. In practice, COVID19 shortages aside, they typically carry very low resale value. If you're running Linux, you don't care. A rather premium model can be had for under $200 easily. That's cheap enough that you can do things with it that you'd never do with a real laptop.
makeitdouble 5y ago
It’s an Acer spin 13 and not a Samsung, but the 16G price seems to be in the same 700$ range. For the Macbook Air, the 16G version starts at 1079$ with education discount so roughly 1.5 more expensive (they explicitely choose the 16G version of the ACER, so the RAM shouldn’t be ignored IMO) The thinkpad X13 at 16G of RAM is around 1380$ on amazon [0], so twice as much. I don’t know the Acer spin 13, but if the screen is as good as Samsung’s one, it is well worth the price, especially as you usually get more battery life, and the chrome OS + android + linux mix is actually good. There are still rough edges, but the good parts largely outweigh those. [0](https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-20T2003YUS-13-3-Notebook/dp/B089GVNT9Q/ref=sr_1_4?crid=32SCL4DDYOI37&dchild=1&keywords=thinkpad+x13&qid=1623628437&sprefix=thinkpad+x13%2Caps%2C323&sr=8-4 https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-20T2003YUS-13-3-Noteb...)
- johndoe0815 5y ago
  Oops, Acer, correct (that was also the price I looked up), thanks for the correction. The 16 GB version of the Macbook Air is more expensive, but I wonder how much more RAM a Chromebook needs for similar tasks since most of the software runs in Chrome instead of native? I don't know US Thinkpad prices in detail, but you can buy the 16 GB RAM/512 GB SSD Thinkpad X13 AMD (no OS) for 1025 Eur (edu discount) including 19% VAT in Germany (https://www.lapstars.de/thinkpad-campus/x-serie-campus/x13-amd-campus.html https://www.lapstars.de/thinkpad-campus/x-serie-campus/x13-a...). This makes 861 Eur before tax (US$1042 at current conversion rates). Of course, in the end it's all a matter of taste and use case and I'm happy to see more variety in the personal computing market.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    For the RAM use, I also think a 8Gb M1 MBA would be fine for most people, including the OP if they stay within the confine of the OS. Now, in CS we're one of the edge cases where booting VMs and parallel systems is part of the deal. In the Chromebook configuration it's actually 3 systems running at the same time so more RAM has a direct impact on performance. (point taken on the Thinkpad price, I also think if we settle on a refurbished Chromebook, we could so the same for the Thinkpad and perhaps get it a bit lower)
esalman 5y ago
I agree. In fact if I chose a chromebook, I'd automatically restrict the budget to $250 max even for a brand new one. For $950 or more, I wouldn't accept anything less than a performance laptop with a discrete GPU. So the question is, can you get through the Master's program with a brand new $250 chromeook? I'd say yes- you basically need to set it up as a remote coding machine. Georgia Tech (and most other universities with decent graduate programs) provide access to educational and research computing clusters these days. Also, Google Collab is your friend, especially during the assignment deadlines when those clusters will be occupied by other students.
- MonaroVXR 5y ago
  >I agree. In fact if I chose a chromebook, I'd automatically restrict the budget to $250 max even for a brand new one. For $950 or more, I wouldn't accept anything less than a performance laptop with a discrete GPU. A laptop with a DGPU within that price range is mostly a NVIDIA MX-series GPU. But you can get a good NVIDIA GPU with the Acer Nitro 5 (from 2020 and upwards) series and maybe an Ideapad gaming.
p1necone 5y ago
As long as I can run Linux easily, edit/compile smallish code projects and watch Youtube smoothly CPU/GPU/RAM specs don't matter a whole lot for me when it comes to a laptop - I've got a beefy desktop at home for that (and I could remote into it from the laptop too). However battery life, ruggedness, 3:2 display, small size etc (note: not thickness, I don't actually care about that, just the other dimensions so it easily fits in a backpack) are all features I do look for in a laptop, and Chromebooks usually have that in spades (stuff that's intended to be handed out to high school kids is probably pretty indestructible). If Apple releases an 11" MacBook Air for a reasonable price that would be pretty compelling for me too though, knowing I do have the processing power should want it (and the very high dpi display).
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
So with an education discount, you can spent $200 more for half the RAM? Maybe if you need the disk space (although if it's replaceable, $200 will buy a lot of aftermarket SSD), but that's certainly not an obvious tradeoff to me.
sologoub 5y ago
Chromebooks frequently go on crazy sales - bought my 8Gb/i5 Acer Spin 713 for less than $500. As work machine it’s perfect for me and is also disposable if something were to happen to it. Linux support rounds out what I need, though it’s not perfect for GUI tools.
lrem 5y ago
I have a hefty budget for personal computing. My current laptop cost me almost 2400USD equivalent. The only reason that's not a Pixelbook is that Chrome doesn't run real Lightroom.
pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
> $699 refurbished (16 GB RAM/128 GB SSD). To compare, a basic configuration Macbook Air M1 (8 GB RAM/256 GB SSD) can be bought for $899 new with education discount This is an odd comment. Imagine I walked up to you, asked if you were happy with your computer, you said yes, and then I proceeded to try to "sell" you on an "upgrade" to half the RAM for the same price. Now consider if we weren't talking about the same price; I'm suggesting that you spend an extra $200+ on this. Why would anyone take that deal?
swebs 5y ago
Didn't Apple make it extremely difficult to boot Linux on modern Macbooks?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

azinman2 5y ago

And why wouldn’t it? CS education is rarely taxing in terms of processor/memory requirements. I doubt the curriculum is all that different than 10 years ago or more with far less specs. It’s about theory and writing algorithms. And if this is a program specializing in ML, the models are still likely to be toy, and anything more can use cloud computing like Google’s Collab.

ThinkBeat 5y ago
I must politely disagree with that. It may be that we have been to distinct types of CS programs. Some of my work as an under grad was taxing on my computer and much more so as a grad. Even simple things like compiling a system can quickly get taxing and slow. Some classes require models, algorithms that takes a lot of power to process or to prove. My master thesis was system would run for 48 hours on the desktop I had then, after some optimization got it down from 65 hours. Ideally though you have access to a lab / server that you can offload your hard work on. In my experience those resources were already under maximum load during most of the day and parts of the night. Being able to just run them locally was convenient.
- mbreese 5y ago
  > Ideally though you have access to a lab / server that you can offload your hard work on. And I think this is the key point here. Most CS things you can easily handle with the horse power of a Chromebook. And when you hit the 10% of the coursework that you can’t use a Chromebook for, you probably wouldn’t use a “normal” laptop for it either. You’re always going to have jobs that will take a bit more horsepower. Those should be farmed out to a cluster or server anyway. Where I think the OP will have issues is what resources they will need for their research, which again will probably need a server or cluster. Likely, the most taxing thing they will likely need to work on locally is their thesis. This is where I’d think they might run into issues, especially with figures. But even here, Overleaf should be up for the job.
- codeisawesome 5y ago
  Not to mention being on video calls with classmates / actual classes and also having a few other windows running (lets say Slack / Discord), and maybe driving a decent-resolution monitor.. these relatively basic sounding things can push the CPU/gfx memory/RAM of even higher-end hardware to their limits! Especially if you choose to / need to run all these together and multi-task. That might partially be an indictment of software performance, though.

shams93 5y ago

You might not even need an egpu if you are using google collab which provides much faster gpus for free.

comprev 5y ago

It does seem a rather unnecessarily complicated task given much cheaper second hand/refurbished units could be picked up on eBay and happily run a Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu Linux.

rootusrootus 5y ago

Maybe. It depends on the classes you choose. Some OMSCS classes require VMs, and at least one uses Windows.

antonvs 5y ago
Chrome OS is built around VMs, so depending on the reason for that requirement, it might be fine.
- sneak 5y ago
  You don't get to run your own VMs on ChromeOS.
  - lights0123 5y ago
    Nested virtualization is supported, and you can just use KVM directly in developer mode.

every 5y ago

I posted this for several different reasons. I was one of the beta testers for Chrome OS and have used it exclusively for the past decade. I am always interested in how it continues to improve. Secondly, the terminal Debian is a dream come true for me. It is the best CLI I have ever enjoyed. It is also well integrated with the OS. Lastly, while I know that Chrome OS has made many inroads into public education, I had no idea it might be applicable for something like an MA in a technical degree...

jacobmischka 5y ago

I can only remember two courses in my CS Master's program that had any actual programming whatsoever, mostly it was manual algorithms, proofs, and theory.

sircastor 5y ago

I remember many many years ago taking an intro CS class and learning that the Java compiler was available on The newly released Mac OS X. I thought “Thank goodness I won’t need to use Windows” unfortunately, I never really got it to work. Some obscure errors prevented me from making progress and I wasn’t proactive enough to follow it any further. The hardest thing about going against the grain in structured learning is that you’re giving yourself extra work - translating the instructions into whatever your toolset is, solving errors that don’t exist on the approved platforms. I wish the author the best of luck.

analog31 5y ago
There's also a social aspect, where any problem that you encounter is immediately pinned on your choice of a peculiar setup, and becomes a story that gets told and repeated. You may have a professor who is suspicious that you are wasting time on what seems like a quixotic pursuit. So you actually have to go way overboard to ensure that your stuff always works perfectly, and that nobody ever sees you trying to troubleshoot something.

thesuperbigfrog 5y ago

The performance of running Linux in a container on a VM is noticeably bad, even on a Google Pixel with Core i7 and 16 GB of RAM. It works okay for most tasks, but is laggy when running JetBrains IDEs compared to bare metal Linux distros. Edit: Chromebooks are nice in terms of laptop hardware support compared to some hardware / Linux distros I have used over the years. No issues with suspend / resume, printers and scanners work, great touchscreen and Android tablet functionality. Some tasks that require more direct access to the hardware (e.g. device drivers used to read lab instrument hardware, debugging devices over USB, etc.) might not work as well (or work at all) due to the Linux VM and container sandboxing.

coding123 5y ago

Pretty soon you could get through it with an unmodified iPad... https://www.andreafortuna.org/2021/03/13/coding-on-ipad-pro-my-own-setup/ https://www.andreafortuna.org/2021/03/13/coding-on-ipad-pro-... Not sure when it's going to be out of beta.

tedk-42 5y ago
Remote development machines aren't for everyone and availability will always be an issue. I remember as a student trying to debug an issue on a train. I would have been so frustrated if the internet connection to my remote machine was impeding my ability to think through a debugging scenario. I've been waiting on the beta list for almost a year I think and haven't heard anything.
- ja27 5y ago
  One solution I've seen is to carry a Raspberry Pi, especially a Zero, and connect to that from the iPad via WiFi or USB-C. Can even VNC to it for a full desktop experience. Pretty portable and low-power.

nickjj 5y ago

It is a good idea IMO, especially with GalliumOS (a Chromebook optimized variant of xubuntu) so you can run Linux natively. Back in 2016 I picked up a Toshiba CB35 Chromebook with a 13" 1080p IPS display, 4gb of memory, 1.7ghz Celeron and a 256GB SSD for $350. It weighs under 3 pounds and has a backlight keyboard too. It still runs great today and despite the low end specs it can deal with some programming work loads (Dockerized web apps, a bunch of browser tabs, mp3 player, editor with 40+ plugins, multiple workspaces, etc.). It's not slow either. Even decently sized Rails apps with Webpacker reload nearly instantly while developing and there's no type delay. It's been a really nice outdoors / travel laptop for someone like me who normally uses a desktop workstation. I wrote up a whole review of it here: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromebook-cb35-into-a-linux-development-environment-with-galliumos https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromeboo... If you can still find this exact model at that price point I'd consider it today. It's one of those rare combos of hardware that's really good at a fair price. I wouldn't insta buy it, but I'd at least keep it in the runnings vs a 2021 model, especially at that price point. With lower end machines, newness isn't always a deciding factor for goodness.

nyolfen 5y ago
i have one of these with gallium as well -- cannot recommend it highly enough, though i wish the memory weren't soldered in. daily driver for normal web stuff for six or seven years now.
IntelMiner 5y ago
+1 to Chromebooks, though I was never much interested in Gallium I picked up one of the original Acer C720's back in 2013. Anemic 2c1t (dual core) Celeron at 1.2 Ghz and 2GB of memory. But Gentoo on it with XFCE was incredibly nippy. Add a processor optimized Firefox at the time and it was an extremely good tiny laptop A year or so later I upgraded to its "big brother" the core i3 variant (2c2t, quad core) with 4GB of RAM. Same experience. Extremely happy with both machines Eventually as the Chrome browser started to eclipse things though I moved to Dell's Chromebook 13 "Lulu" with a beastly Broadwell i5 quad core and 8GB (soldered) RAM The biggest draw for me is these were the first Linux machines I'd used where everything didn't "just work" or "it works okay but you can tweak XYZ" it worked in the sense it was explicitly designed __to run Linux__ For all the flak Google deservedly gets, the decision to enforce a "no binary blobs, everything must be upstreamed to mainline Linux" kernel and Coreboot (BIOS) as well as making "jailbreaking" the thing with a permanent firmware flash as simple as removing a hardware screw was commendable These days I'm stuck using an MSI Modern 14, which while "okay" is nowhere near as delightful as the Chromebooks were previously

readonthegoapp 5y ago

That dude doesn't have a real chromebook. Try 32GB HDD, 4 GB RAM, 1.6 GHz CPU. Been using it for light web dev. It's a disaster.

kart23 5y ago
Yeah, that's what a chromebook is. The machine in the article was $1000 MSRP. An M1 Macbook Air is the same price, and $900 with education pricing.
esalman 5y ago
This. I did not even realize OP was talking about a $1000 chromebook.

nicklaf 5y ago

Whether or not a chromebook is adequate for cash-strapped students in my painful experience depends on whether or not your model has soldered RAM. Doing research in school will likely have you opening a lot of browser tabs. Running Firefox on a non-ChromeOS Linux install is going to eat up more than the measly amount of soldered RAM that cheap Chromebooks offer.[0] I used Acer Chromebooks in college and very much came to regret this aspect whenever my machine slowed to a crawl the moment I opened an important PDF in Firefox. In hindsight, I probably should have set up zRAM on my machine, which expands the amount of RAM available by compressing it, just like ChromeOS does. However, as soon as I had money I chucked the Chromebook and bought standard a standard Acer notebook with upgradable RAM at a lower price than the fancy Chromebooks. [0] Don't underestimate this: at the moment I have hundreds of tabs open in a saved browser session, with htop pegging Firefox at 16GB RAM utilization! It goes down when I restart the browser maybe to 5GB or so, but it also doesn't matter much when you have 32GB or more available.

estaseuropano 5y ago
I dont mean to offend, but it sounds as if the problem is your workflow rather than the device. There's no reason to keep 100+ tabs open unless you don't know how to use bookmarks/citation software/save pages offline effectively. I also find myself with many tabs open once in a while, but if I see FF above 8GB of RAM I'm not going to think the issue is the hardware. Opening PDF in FF also always is a pain but there are plenty of lightweight readers.
- nicklaf 5y ago
  Yeah. The workflow I use for serious work actually ends up using less tabs because I tend to take care of stuff. I also bookmark/tag/close the important stuff. I talked a bit about my setup a few months ago in an HN post. [0] But just for casual browsing? I prefer to leave stuff open as a reminder to pick it back up again. My home office is also pretty messy in terms of books scattered about though, so this probably boils down to a personal preference. Come to think of it, maybe there's an analogy between people who keep their desk neat and tidy / those who program in languages requiring manual memory allocation versus those who like to leave books open and scattered / prefer the decreased mental overhead of working in garbage collected languages. :-P [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25612092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25612092

awslattery 5y ago

Tried to upgrade to a Dell XPS 13 (9310) on sale at Costco. Webcam wasn't connected from the factory. In a post-2020 world, this doesn't fly, and for a $1500+ device, I shouldn't need to spend hours doing firmware updates, driver updates, only to find it's a hardware fault. Back to my Google Pixelbook, but the final software update date is a terrifying prospect [1], as is it's woefully inefficient Intel 7th generation processor (I've been spoiled by Ryzen for years). Oh how I wish I could just build my own laptop with COTS components, like my desktops for the last 16 years. Or, if I'm just not looking in the right place, I'd love to find something with a great display, lightweight, great typing experience, and something that won't hit 45*C+ on the keyboard deck after boot. In another life, I might have bought into the Apple ecosystem, but I have been Android since 2009 and have already traded my soul to Google for it's scrambled attempts at a cohesive ecosystem. [1] https://support.google.com/pixelbook/answer/9413900?hl=en https://support.google.com/pixelbook/answer/9413900?hl=en

bloqs 5y ago
Similar experience with dell xps except touchpad froze intermittently. Had 2 engineer visits and two motherboards and no fix. Hilarious to think they want to throw hands with apple.
3np 5y ago
You may find Framework interesting: https://frame.work/ https://frame.work/
epmaybe 5y ago
I think the framework laptop company May interest you if you want a more customizable laptop. Still not full desktop component choice though
soared 5y ago
I didn’t know about these dates - is google just done making pixel books at some point before then? I’ve had mine for years and I can’t imagine going back to anything else.
solarkraft 5y ago

code_duck 5y ago

I tried using a chromebook for general development and it was not a pleasant or efficient experience. My goal was to compile and write something using Python and OpenCV, a computer vision library. While one can indeed run Linux apps, the vast majority of what I needed was not pre-compiled. Compiling led to issues with having to compile parts of the toolchain, which went up a couple levels of recursion. Compile some library so you can compile some other library so you can compile a program to compile some thing that she used to compile some package. Then library conflicts, and so forth. I haven’t needed to do this since about 2004. Plus, then waiting for a Chromebook to compile large packages can take all day. There’s no way I’d try this again versus just getting a normal laptop and installing Linux.

schwartzworld 5y ago
Why not install Linux on your Chromebook?
- code_duck 5y ago
  The chromebook I had was not intel based, which complicates things along similar lines. From what I recall I wasn't able to install actual linux for some reason. Most likely compilation would be required at some point (and starting the JVM) and this machine was rather slow for such tasks, regardless of OS.

jayd16 5y ago

Do CS students not ssh into the computer lab these days? A Chromebook is more than enough. I was able to get Android Studio running on mine. I'm pretty sure most of the JetBrains suite would run as well if you need an IDE.

jackconsidine 5y ago

I'm toying with the idea of getting a chromebook for my day job (software development). I already use the vscode ssh [1] plugin, so that my IDE runs on a remote server which has been a great experience. For Jupyter notebook type tasks, Google's collab sheets [2] run on a remote server (there's a bit to be desired of course). I even use Genymotion in the cloud [3] such that my android APKs are run on the cloud and rendered through a browser emulator. At this point I'm 85% of the way there, and can't wait for the day where no serious computation needs to be done locally. [1] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh [2] https://colab.research.google.com/?utm_source=scs-index https://colab.research.google.com/?utm_source=scs-index [3] https://cloud.geny.io/ https://cloud.geny.io/

gofreddygo 5y ago
I don't get the appeal of taking local task metadata, executing on a remote machine and then consuming results locally. I can imagine this for a collaborative task, but not much else. Local computation has always led teams I've worked in to a superior (personalized, decentralized, fault tolerant, highly parallel) mode of operation. My tryst with working with remote computation ended when the 5 VMs we were using as a team for development were locked out and decommissioned without a notice due to a devops error. Thankfully, I did have local equivalents, which I habitually worked on and copied over to the VM for execution, not so much for my team members.
- jackconsidine 5y ago
  To each his own. In my work, standardizing environments is a point of frustration to the extent that it's better for us to figure out the environment once remotely than for every OS locally.
nmfisher 5y ago
I've really wanted to move into this direction too. What's the remaining 15%?
- jackconsidine 5y ago

mraza007 5y ago

Has anyone had success running Arch Linux on Chromebook?

whitetrump 5y ago

any computer should do, no?

schwartzworld 5y ago

I actually learned web development on a Chromebook running Linux, originally with Chrouton, later with GalliumOS. The Chromebook is around 7 years old and still runs pretty well. There's a lot you can't do, but it has no problem spinning up a Rails or Node server. Now I mainly use it for GCompris for my kids.

haliskerbas 5y ago

Some OMSCS classes require certain proctoring software that may not work on Linux or ChromeOS. Please make sure you have an alternative ready to go as course staff do not make accomodations for this. (source OMSCS grad, seen this happen to others)

atdt 5y ago
How long did it take you to go through the program? Any advice / regrets?
jay3ss 5y ago
You're absolutely right. My main driver is a Linux machine which isn't compatible with Honorlock. I'm very lucky to have inherited another laptop that is compatible.

bdefore 5y ago

System 76 engineers: for your upcoming ultralight, please make a 3:2 screen!

vzaliva 5y ago

If you are spending more that 50% of your time in Linux emulation mode under ChromeOS you'd better off running Linux natively.

tumblewit 5y ago

as an alumni of OMSCS here are a few things I want to say: 1. exams can be taken on a chromebook now (you couldn’t until a year ago) so that part should be covered. 2. more ram is good because classes will give you a VM so you can buils it locally and test it in a VM (what almost everyone in class would do) 3. unfortunately some VMs only work well in a windows virtual box environment . and that’s where I think you might run into problems. the thing is the TA will automate his tests for grading. So if the testing on your end was not done correctly (like let’s say locally instead of the VM provided or the environment suggested) then you will fail the grading tests. So be very careful there. 4. You might want to automate things yourself to get things done faster. In that case you may want to run multiple instances of the VMs provided. My MBP was broken so i ended up using a desktop for completing the whole thing which was a mistake because it was too inconvenient especially during tests. however many students were able to finish the course with a 200$ thinkpad so it’s doable. But then there were those who also had a powerful ryzen desktop for classwork with dual monitors and a laptop for test. So i guess it all depends on your comfort level with your setup.

allanrbo 5y ago

What a waste of time. Just get a refurbished Thinkpad for less than the price of a Chromebook and focus on the actual course content instead.

TrackerFF 5y ago

As for GPU (ML/DL) intensive classes or projects, using google colab worked just fine - at least if you're going to write in Python. Also, schools tend to have their own dedicated machines with good GPU power - you could always just SSH into these and let them do the heavy lifting.

kixiQu 5y ago

I got through my BS in CS without more than crouton. It was good that it forced me to * be judicious and focussed with my lab time when I needed to use an IDE for Java or such, and * get real comfortable with SSHing to the school's server and operating remotely on the command line real early

kixiQu 5y ago
Fun story, though: Up until internship money allowed me to replace it (with another chromebook!) for my senior year, the chromebook I was using would crash if I had more than ~5 tabs open. Good times!

ianbooker 5y ago

I wrote my master thesis some time ago on a Samsung Chromebook equipped with an ARM CPU. Back then it was the perfect machine for me: fanless / silent, cheap and it ran Linux and i3wm after 10 minutes of setup. Even the keyboard was ok. Had no problems with Latex, just some minor hiccups with software not compiled for ARM that should be resolved by now.

may13noon 5y ago

What is the exact point? Is Chromebooks a pretty good choice, or not bad as expected?

kubb 5y ago

Does anyone know the knowledge graph visualization tool that they're using?

mdotmertens 5y ago
Looks like the Graph View in RoamResearch.

pgsimp 5y ago

I started my degree in 1997 using a PC with a 66MHz CPU and a dial up modem. Why should a Chromebook not be sufficient?

xorcist 5y ago

It wasn't even that long ago that you could get a computer science degree without even owning a computer.

chimbosonic 5y ago

I graduated in 2017 in Computer Science using a Thinkpad x210 that cost me £50 (~70$). And never had a issue. I haven't used a chromebook in a while but back then they where less powerful than a x210. Nowadays, if I have to recommend a laptop for coding or CS course I would recommend whichever Thinkpad X-series you can afford.

chimbosonic 5y ago
if ram is required DDR2 or DDR3 sodimm ram is cheap. And any SSD for storage works (I used the HDD that came with it until the 3rd year where I got a Samsung Evo SSD).

riccardomc 5y ago

I have a MSc in computer science and used the university workstations and saved my work on a 128MB USB stick for a very long time before my parents helped me buy a laptop.

martin_a 5y ago

> without splurging on a new computer costing $1,500, $2,000, or more. Well, just buy a used ThinkPad (or whatever business machine) then. My T460 cost me 200 Euro and will probably be good for two or three more years. Then I'll buy the next used one for the same price and will be happy for four more years...

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
200 Euros buys you a very old and low end Thinkpad right now, at least in Europe, that's a slouch when dealing with modern web apps. Sure, it's probably fine for running linux and coding in vim but on the modern web and electron apps it shows its age. Unless you're cash strapped, I'd much rather spend 500-800 Euros and get a machine with a modern Ryzen or Tiger-Lake chip that makes a much more usable experience for a variety of tasks.
- martin_a 5y ago
  You're right, maybe I made a good deal, also by buying from a private seller. But for 100 or 200 Euro more, you should be fine, according to this list: https://www.thinkpad-gebrauchtpreisliste.de/ https://www.thinkpad-gebrauchtpreisliste.de/ And is performance really better with that Chromebook?
- charwalker 5y ago
  Was helping a friend look for a sub $300 PC for their sibling abroad and could not find anything reputable that wasn't like a 2c/2t 4th or even 3rd gen Intel part. And those listed with an SSD did not have one, based on reviews.

globular-toast 5y ago

I'm not sure why this is a big deal. Why would you need a powerful computer to study computer science? If any of the courses involve huge computations then I expect the university would have a supercomputer of sorts they can use.

kleiba 5y ago

I got my CS master's degree from a university that came from a math tradition (rather than from an engineering one). There was only one class in all of my studies where a computer was needed at all, the rest was all theorems and proofs.

mnw21cam 5y ago
I did a degree in computer science from one of the top universities in the world. When I started, it was recommended that we not bring a computer at all.

swebs 5y ago

>Use the Chromebook for the 90% that I think I can use it for and use virtual machines in the Georgia Tech Computing Center. Most universities also have some sort of high performance computing cluster available, so you're not limited to just a simple VM.

raxxorrax 5y ago

OpenCV takes a few megabyte of storage. Opening a few images for pixel access, meaning you have an uncompressed copy in memory, can quickly bring any system down. Same problem with Matlab. Not really sure, but there are probably precompiled modules of OpenCV for popular distros. I think a Chromebook would work if you are indeed able to install Linux. But I don't really get why people studying computer science don't have a dedicated machine for that. > on a new computer costing $1,500, $2,000, or more I don't know current prices, but you get an Intel Nuc for < 150$. Add a monitor to that... Even on a cost basis, I don't think Chromebooks can compete and I would not recommend them for learning overall.

mihevc 5y ago

I wrote my master thesis on Acer C720 (2013) running xfce. I used some octave but I mostly needed it for latex. These days I don't use it anymore because the screen is not that great but it aged incredibly well.

Vahkesh 5y ago

I don't understand what the issue is here. OP is using a Linux laptop to get a CS degree? I did that 10 years ago with less compute resources. At this point I would assume that a majority of CS students are using laptops (with a significant amount on a tighter budget). In my experience at 2 Universities, compute resources are supplied to complete the required course work (cloud or lab).

jmcnulty 5y ago

Linux on Chromebooks is Debian buster running in an LXD container. Being LXD there's no reason why you're limited to just one container either. I don't like to mess around with the default "penguin" container too much so I've added more. I've currently added centos7, centos8, ubuntu and another debian container. Plus you can take LXD snapshots, rollback, publish images etc. Hint: Add a Ubuntu container and install LXD, then copy the lxc binary to your "penguin" container and setup a trust between it at the Chrome OS "termina" hypervisor. Then you can manage all your containers from the default linux install. I have a Pixelbook Go with 8GB of ram and a 128GB drive.