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I can get the same functionality in terms of hardware at the more or less same cost, certainly not $1000 more as you claim. A 1.7gighz ARM or the other versions

I can get the same functionality in terms of hardware at the more or less same cost, certainly not $1000 more as you claim. A 1.7gighz ARM or the other versions aren't more powerful than a 1.6gighz or higher Atom processor at the same price point. And I can run a real operating system on that hardware with no problems. My laptop boots in less than 10 seconds and I trust Ubuntu just as much as a Chromebook for security. If you are worried about the security of local files you can encrypt your drive, very simply in the last few versions of Ubuntu but I don't bother, if needs be. None of the points you make in favour of the Chromebook are exclusive to it, what's exclusive to it though is you can't get access to the vast flexibility of a local system and have to go through NX. That's all fine for people who only do back-end stuff, or Google if they want their employees to "dog food" living in the cloud, but for someone who wants to be able to do normal everyday things like edit images, test locally or any of the many other advantages of a flexible system it doesn't really cut it. If there were locally running JavaScript equivalents for image editing and everything else we'd be a bit closer to feature parity but I still wouldn't see the major attraction.

w0utert 13y ago
>> None of the points you make in favour of the Chromebook are exclusive to it, what's exclusive to it though is you can't get access to the vast flexibility of a local system and have to go through NX. Adding to that working with remote GUI apps simply sucks compared to running them locally, for all kinds of reasons. It's less responsive, applications don't always integrate well with the rest of the OS (think keyboard/language settings, terminal capabilities, reliable copy/paste), you lose things like local search, some applications you rarely use will not be available on the remote, and if your network connection goes down you lose your session. And who's going to set up and maintain the NX service? If having your work in the cloud matters a lot, I would much rather just mount some remote filesystem for storing it, and run all my dev tools locally. I tend to agree I don't see the point here, since when is a cheap machine to SSH to some other box anything special, let alone a viable replacement for a dev system? I did stuff like this (SSH-ing to a remote host, editing webpages there, viewing the result locally) literally 10 years ago on a Pentium-233 laptop you couldn't even give away for free today because no-one would want to have it. For $250 there's a lot of decent notebooks that would do everything a Chromebook does, and adequately run a modern linux distro to boot.
6ren 13y ago
$1000 is an exaggeration, but chromebooks really are significantly cheaper than netbooks/laptops: $250 ARM and $199 Celeron. But you know, just now considering the restrictions that Apple, Google and Microsoft put on their mobile machines, because they can, creates a real opportunity for Firefox OS (and yes ubuntu). Though niche, as most consumers won't care... unless the restrictions go too far.
lelandbatey 13y ago
Can you link to this notebook you're talking about? I'd love a $200 notebook that's better than a Chromebook.
- alphamale3000 13y ago
  It's called a Chromebook with Ubuntu on it.

w0utert 13y ago

>> None of the points you make in favour of the Chromebook are exclusive to it, what's exclusive to it though is you can't get access to the vast flexibility of a local system and have to go through NX. Adding to that working with remote GUI apps simply sucks compared to running them locally, for all kinds of reasons. It's less responsive, applications don't always integrate well with the rest of the OS (think keyboard/language settings, terminal capabilities, reliable copy/paste), you lose things like local search, some applications you rarely use will not be available on the remote, and if your network connection goes down you lose your session. And who's going to set up and maintain the NX service? If having your work in the cloud matters a lot, I would much rather just mount some remote filesystem for storing it, and run all my dev tools locally. I tend to agree I don't see the point here, since when is a cheap machine to SSH to some other box anything special, let alone a viable replacement for a dev system? I did stuff like this (SSH-ing to a remote host, editing webpages there, viewing the result locally) literally 10 years ago on a Pentium-233 laptop you couldn't even give away for free today because no-one would want to have it. For $250 there's a lot of decent notebooks that would do everything a Chromebook does, and adequately run a modern linux distro to boot.

6ren 13y ago

$1000 is an exaggeration, but chromebooks really are significantly cheaper than netbooks/laptops: $250 ARM and $199 Celeron. But you know, just now considering the restrictions that Apple, Google and Microsoft put on their mobile machines, because they can, creates a real opportunity for Firefox OS (and yes ubuntu). Though niche, as most consumers won't care... unless the restrictions go too far.

lelandbatey 13y ago

Can you link to this notebook you're talking about? I'd love a $200 notebook that's better than a Chromebook.

alphamale3000 13y ago
It's called a Chromebook with Ubuntu on it.