4 ms·
I received the same Chromebook on Thursday, and also gave Crouton a shot. I pretty much completely agree with this review. Although I've since ditched Crouton a
by city41 14y ago
I received the same Chromebook on Thursday, and also gave Crouton a shot. I pretty much completely agree with this review. Although I've since ditched Crouton and returned to the verified OS, at least for now. Overall the machine and ChromeOS are very pleasant, and I hope this style of computing keeps growing and catches on.
The hardware is very impressive for $250. I especially find the keyboard and trackpad very functional, much more so than many PC laptops that cost 4x as much or even more.
The wifi issues are very annoying, and I suspect they are at the hardware level and probably not fixable. I would have gladly paid another $20-50 or whatever it would have taken to get a better wifi chip in the machine.
Another alternative to Crouton is using dev_install, which is how Chrome OS developers get a decent dev environment going on their machines. I've not yet tried this, but plan to.
I truly hope to eventually find myself using ChromeOS as it was intended and still developing with it. This basically means using something like Cloud9.
Oh and another thing I am finding nice about this machine is it's a great test bed for HTML5 games. The current game I am working on crashes on the Chromebook if I enable sound, I suspect I am loading too many sound files and running out of memory. It's good to have a handy "lower end" baseline to test things with.
EDIT: I forgot to mention, I really wish ChromeOS would let me pin bookmarks to the taskbar. You can only pin apps, not websites.
- djeikyb 14y agoI might not have bought this machine if I'd known about the wifi problems. I'm in an apartment with eight to ten ssids visible on each channel. My other wifi devices work great, but the chromebook frequently lost connection. As in, lose connection, try-fail, try-fail, try-fail, try-succeed just long enough to load another page, repeat. I've mitigated the problem somewhat by boosting the signal strength (thanks to tomato+linksys-wrt54gl). Other than that I'm pretty happy with it. I do spend most of my time in the ssh app..
- VLM 14y ago"I do spend most of my time in the ssh app." Is there a decent VNC client? Also is this a "real" SSH client like I can X-window forward and share ssh keys or just a "sorta SSH" like I'm better off using ajaxterm? For portable use I've been using a very old netbook with android-x86 installed for some years now, but I'm not too happy with the (pitiful) battery life and I've used the heck out of it so I'm sure the battery is not long for this world. So its either a new chromebook or something like a new android tablet with a bluetooth keyboard is in my near future. Its probably going to be the tablet/keyboard route unless something/someone convinces me a chromebook would be better.
- djeikyb 14y ago> Also is this a "real" SSH client like I can X-window forward and share ssh keys First, I use Google's Secure Shell app [1]. X-fowarding does "work", but (and I'm using the default window manager) the wm doesn't give you access to the window. I just see it briefly. I haven't had problems using ssh keys. Port forwarding options work great. > Is there a decent VNC client? If by decent you mean a client not requiring you to hit third party servers, not that I've found. I'm optimistic about both these problems being fixed, one way or another. If by neither Google nor chrome app, then by installing your own software and switching between x servers. [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhechapfaindjhompbnflcldabbghjo https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec...
- jrockway 14y agoI haven't had any trouble with the wifi. I have whatever the high-end Cisco 3x3 MIMO router is, and the Chromebook connects flawlessly every time. I also have no trouble on the GoogleGuest network at work.