The only upside you seem to have there is the hardware itself, and that updating whichever OS (you don't specify) was harder before. It's not like I don't have

The only upside you seem to have there is the hardware itself, and that updating whichever OS (you don't specify) was harder before. It's not like I don't have ssh here on my Ubuntu machine (similar model Thinkpad to yours), I don't see why you are trying to sell that as an upside. Indeed I have iPython in shell mode and a local copy of vim customized to my needs, and I have that as well as a server I can connect to at any time with all my sessions. Sometimes I might want to do an experiment locally rather than on a server though. I can not only edit video (is anyone going to upload HD over the network to edit it on YouTube's editor?) , I can edit images, use my Wacom tablet, program things locally, I can record audio into Audacity and edit and change it. I can run LaTeX and actually work on academic documents. I can apt-get programs to resize many images, encode music or do just about anything. I can use R or python to generate graphs and save them locally rather than copy them from a server save or some crazy cloud save. On smaller data problems I can have a spreadsheet open for GUI editing in Libre Office and be saving to csv for a program to ingest after quick edits. Peripherals work without having to program an entirely new driver. It's a full desktop and it's fully featured, you can use it in a cloud-oriented way if you so choose as well so there doesn't seem to be any advantage to the Chromebooks other than this supposedly easier updating and nice sounding hardware. The problem here is people are trying to sell an unfinished consumer OS as being good for developers or power users who already have powerfully polished desktop operating systems that are consumer oriented AND developer oriented as soon as you lift up the hood. In comparison the Chromebook simply doesn't stack up. The article was trying to push boot time as a feature for example, it just leads me to believe he hasn't installed Ubuntu in two years (or more actually). I'm a power user so I need to work on images, video and audio, I need to be able to generate academic papers. I need to have OpenCV running locally on webcam feeds for testing things. I need advanced networking features from command line tools on localhost. It's all fine and dandy for them to come up with cut down device like a tablet with a keyboard, but after my experience of them turning off tethering on a Nexus device I am just not going to jump on board with anything until it's actually got more features and those features are actually not going to disappear at the whim of some advertising dollar driven decision. I don't think they'll ever be able to guarantee that properly. That OS sounds like it's years away from being remotely usable for a power user who's across a number of domains.