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Did your wife have to support a perpetual international war to support the fuel for her chromebook? Was the chromebook responsible for thousands of deaths per
by diydsp 13y ago
Did your wife have to support a perpetual international war to support the fuel for her chromebook? Was the chromebook responsible for thousands of deaths per month? Was the Chromebook that much better than the horse? Was your analogy glib but off the mark?
no, no, no and yes. Arguing for Chromebook is arguing for limitation. If the Chromebook actually was as much of an improvement on web-surfing as the car was to the horses, your analogy might start to gain traction. The fact that it just barely holds its own, for a similar price, with much huger limitations doesn't appeal to a rational mind.
Chromebook is moving the goalposts for a machine. "Just forget about running any software that's not a web browser and you'll be fine! <waves hands> My grandfather only reads the web, so it's fine for him."
Here's a tip: every platform starts off lightweight and accrues cruft. Even Linux (cough ubuntu) and OSX (cough 10.6). If Chromebook grows in popularity, they'll hit the same issues other major OS vendors have hit. There's nothing magic about them, except they've lowered the goalposts of acceptability criteria.
If you want a lightweight machine, put linux on a laptop with an SSD and it will blow your socks off.
- VikingCoder 13y agoI did put Linux on a laptop with an SSD, and I also switched my workflows to be either entirely online, or through Chrome Remote Desktop. That machine is a Chromebook. The best parts for me is that my data is completely backed up, I have to use two-factor authentication to get into it, my machine updates itself, and I don't worry about viruses. Just switching to linux on a laptop doesn't do those things for me.
- VikingCoder 13y agoAnd by the way, no one ever won any prizes for pointing out that an analogy was flawed, if you took it too far. I can have eight computers, and be working on the same document on all of them. Web-based document creation, for my workflows, is vastly superior to the old school way of doing things. And Google Docs is the best instance of it, for me, so far. You'll try to destroy the analogy again, so I shouldn't bother, but once upon a time, you BOOTED your computer to a game disk. And people like you opined that people would never run their games from inside Windows, because the performance was BY DEFINITION worse, and why would you want to, anyway? The cruft of a Chromebook is poorly designed web pages. And unlike other systems, which build their cruft in, Google has been keeping Chrome relatively clean - it's the minimum browser you need. The magic is they didn't build anything in.