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> The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook doesn’t learn that his machine can’t handle it. He learns that Google decided he’s not allowed to. Or they l

• t-writescode 7mo ago
  Switching to developer mode is very likely something he won’t be doing nor allowed to do on the Chromebook his parents bought him or the school assigned him.
  • sagarm 7mo ago
    Will a managed MacBook allow the installation of random native apps, either? Though let's be realistic, here: $600 is much more than the typical school-assigned Chromebook.
    • raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
      Yes
    • hyperhello 7mo ago
      It’s $500 for a kid, a full time student.
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
• wolvoleo 7mo ago
  You can't install a different OS on these? Are they different from the M series? Because those have Asahi Linux.
  • artimaeis 7mo ago
    Asahi only supports M1 and M2 series Macs currently. The Neo uses an A18 Pro, which was only ever in an iPhone before. I wouldn’t count on Asahi coming to these soon.
    • MBCook 7mo ago
      I see no reason they couldn’t. But we know there’s lots of other models that they’re already working on. We don’t know how similar or different it is from an OS perspective.
      • adrian_b 7mo ago
        The reason is the lack of documentation from Apple. Reverse engineering needs a lot of time and hard work, which may not be worthwhile. Sometimes someone does this work, and everyone may benefit from it, but you should never count on this happening, unless you do the work yourself.
        • zozbot234 7mo ago
          Reverse engineered documentation is very often preferable to the internal kind, which is not necessarily accurate. So either way, the Asahi folks are doing valuable work.
    • gedy 7mo ago
      Maybe some of these agentic AI superstars can point their 100x engineering chops at this. This would impress me but not going to hold my breath for that.
  • TheDong 7mo ago
    Asahi linux effectively only supports the M1 and M2 chips, so even a modern macbook air won't work, and even on "supported devices" you can't use thunderbolt or a usb-c display yet. These use the A series chip, and even supporting new M chip revisions has been enough of an undertaking that I wouldn't really expect this to get Asahi linux anytime soon.... And apple can lock down the bootloader to be closer to the iPad/iPhone at any time with no notice, and based on their past actions, it would be quite in-line with their character to do so.
• pseudocomposer 7mo ago
  There’s an entire Linux distro (Asahi) for MacBooks. Apple has never released a Mac with a locked bootloader. And macOS frankly provides a far better Unix experience than ChromeOS, in my experience, having actually used both (including for development, though only for a short time on ChromeOS because it was horrible).
  • adrian_b 7mo ago
    Apple did not lock the bootloader, but they do not provide documentation for their products. What would have been a trivial porting work with documentation, becomes extremely time-consuming and hard work without documentation. That is why Asahi Linux lags by several years with the support for Apple computers, and it is unlikely that this lag time will ever be reduced. Even for the old Apple computers the hardware support is only partial, so such computers are never as useful for running Linux as AMD/Intel based computers.
• rafram 7mo ago
  The bootloader isn’t locked. Asahi’s developers have written about how Apple specifically built support for third-party OSes into the bootloader.
  • pjerem 7mo ago
    The same Asahi developers also wrote about how Apple didn’t document anything and especially, Apple never talked in public about this. Apple betting Apple, If they had cared a single second about this, they would have called this Bootcamp 2. Honestly I’m pretty convinced that this « open » bootloader was just there to avoid criticism and bad press from specialized outlets when they presented the M1 because, for once, they needed specialized outlet to benchmark the M1 performance and not have anything bad to say about anything else. They constantly break everything year after year without documenting any change which effectively makes Asahi unusable in anything recent. I’m betting that they are just patiently waiting for Asahi to die by being too late of several years (which is already the case) to announce « The most secure Mac ever » silently releasing with closed bootloader when nobody and especially the press will care anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I love Asahi and I even have it installed on my M2 Air, the project is doing incredible quality work. But I don’t believe it will last long. Hope I’m wrong, though.
    • derefr 7mo ago
      For them to call it Bootcamp 2 (a "product" per se), they'd have had to have another OS they could actually demo installing. Otherwise "Bootcamp 2" is just a mysterious empty chooser window. But at the time there was nothing, because Apple Silicon wasn't a platform anyone but them was targeting, because they had just created it. So they built the infrastructure, and then waited for someone to actually start taking advantage of it, before bothering to acknowledge it. And because that "someone" isn't a bigcorp (i.e. Microsoft) wanting to do a co-marketing push, but just FOSS people gradually building something but never quite "launching" a 1.0 of it — Apple just "acknowledged" it quietly, at developer conferences, exposing it only via developer-centric CLI tooling, rather than with the sort of polished UI experience they would need if Microsoft was trying to convince Joe Excel User to dual-boot Windows on their Apple Silicon MBP. > announce « The most secure Mac ever » silently releasing with closed bootloader That's extremely unlikely to happen, as Apple's hardware and OS developers build Macs and macOS (and all the other hardware + OSes) using Macs and macOS. And those engineers (and engineers working at Apple's hardware and accessory manufacturing partners) will always need to be able to diddle around with the kernel and extensions "in anger" without needing to go through a three-day-turnaround code-signing process. There's a whole proprietary, distributed kernel development and QC flow for macOS, that looks a lot like the Linux one (i.e. with all the same bigcorps involved making sure their stuff works), but all happening behind closed doors. But all the same stuff still needs to happen regardless, to ensure that buggy drivers don't ship. Thus macOS kernel development mode being just one reboot-and-toggle away.
• ToucanLoucan 7mo ago
  > Or they learn to enable developer mode, unlock the bootloader, and install Linux, or use the officially supported Crostini, or so on. There's like 3 different ways to run Linux desktop apps on a modern Chromebook. Oh so all our hypothetical child has to do to discover what computers can actually do is completely rebuild one's software from scratch with no prior knowledge. Next you'll tell me F1 drivers in their teens just have to LS swap a Saturn SC2 and book time at a track.
  • jayd16 7mo ago
    It's really not that hard. Someone who can follow a tutorial can do it. 5 seconds of googling will get you an answer to "install blender on a Chromebook"
    • ToucanLoucan 7mo ago
      > It's really not that hard. Of course not. I could do it in a coma. I've also been using computers since 2004, and you're probably similar.
      • throwawaytea 7mo ago
        I've been using computers since 1991 (I'm 42, from 1984), and to be honest this stuff is getting harder and more confusing, not easier. Mostly because it keeps changing, and not based on any logic towards improvement. Sure I'm good at getting my questions and problems solved now, especially with AI, but I don't believe I have the ingrained mastery I felt after a while with computers in the 90s.
    • eru 7mo ago
      And these days, you can ask your favourite LLM for step by step advice, and you can even give it shaky phone camera shots of the error message on your screen.
    • zzyzxd 7mo ago
      I used to be the cool tech guy in school because I memorized the tutorial to jailbreak iPhone or to cheat in games with a memory editor. You know, stuff like "when you see this screen, click that icon", "find row 5 and change the second value to 0", or "open terminal, copy paste this command and hit enter". I don't think I learned anything useful from those.
• VladVladikoff 7mo ago
  ?? I installed Omarchy on an old MBP simply by inserting the usb stick into a USB port and holding a key combo during boot. Didn’t have to unlock anything.
  • stavros 7mo ago
    Try it on a new one.
• nickvec 7mo ago
  I was sadly too dumb in high school to figure out how to get Linux running on my Chromebook.
• sipjca 7mo ago
  This is an argument, but it’s also fundamentally comparing a computer that works out of the box to one that doesn’t.
  • Spivak 7mo ago
    I really don't get this comment section. You get a Macbook then you have a perfectly usable machine which will run all the mainstream software you ask of it, and then you get natively compiled well supported developer tooling, no VM required. The best argument for Chromebooks is that you can throw away ChromeOS and install Linux or use Linux in a VM. These are not even close to the same. I think folks want to hate Apple more than they want to admit that Chromebooks kinda suck.
• xbar 7mo ago
  Some kids undoubtedly get there, exactly as you say. That's not at all the same experience as opening a device that has a MUCH bigger sandbox to begin with and lets them start exploring with boundless applications from the beginning. The bootloader kids get my deep respect. I think I'd rather give my kid a Neo to begin with.