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Then again, having a Chromebook is way better than some crappy linux machine/cheap windows laptop. Why? It's a much more limited device with much less potentia

Then again, having a Chromebook is way better than some crappy linux machine/cheap windows laptop. Why? It's a much more limited device with much less potential for learning essential skills. A Chromebook can only be used to surf the web. It's the polar opposite of what an educational institute needs.

Alterlife 13y ago
Apart from the good points that other folks are making, this isn't necessarily targeted at engineering students. A decent screen, a decent keyboard, comes with a word processor, is low maintenance, doesn't get viruses (theoretically at least) and it can access the web. That sounds pretty good to me.
userbinator 13y ago
Indeed, a bootable browser has little use outside of... web browsing. Even an old machine with an old OS is more usable, especially when there's no network connectivity. That happens a lot more than you think with a laptop.
- Mikeb85 13y ago
  Really? Have you ever tried to use good 'ol run-of-the-mill Firefox to browse files, photos and videos? Or open local HTML or JS files? Etc...? There's HTML5/Javascript IDEs which run entirely client-side which you can install in the browser's cache, or keep the file in your file system. You can give web apps native features and define how it installs/behaves using the App Manifest. A browser nowadays can do nearly as much as a full OS, even within a full OS.
rwbt 13y ago
It depends. A regular laptop can do more things, but most of the time students just need a laptop to research and write articles and the Chromebook does that very well, without exposing the internals of a traditional desktop system. If I'm a college student, I really don't want to deal with OS upgrades, malware and other things. I just want something that works out of the box and Chromebook does that perfectly. If I really want to tinker, it's not that hard to install a linux distro in a Chromebook and not everyone desires to tinker with their computers.
- shaneofalltrad 13y ago
  I think Linux (Ubuntu or Mint) would be great, so students can help build what the big corps are trying to crush and the fact that it really is an outstanding platform to learn from. I wish people would see how these proprietary boxes are not only crap but undermine the open-source community. The comment "I really don't want to deal with OS upgrades...", does not make sense, as I would think a student (at least when I was one) we wanted to upgrade our OS and for free made it even better. You can also customize a Linux REALLY easy, and that is something as a student I was looking for. So low cost and great power is what at least a tech student would be looking for.
- pavanred 13y ago
  Say you use Windows, 1. Turn on automatic updates (default option, I think) 2. Use something like MS Security essentials And, if you use Linux, 1. Update regularly, again I guess most distros have a default option to check for updates on boot. And, you don't need to upgrade your OS unless you want/have to. How much more do you want to dumb it down? For basic use as you mentioned, to research and write articles, you are almost doing nothing already with windows/linux
  - eitally 13y ago
    ChromeOS is dumbed down so much more than that, insofar as nothing ever breaks, update reboots only take a few (<10) seconds, behavior encountered is always 100% predictable, and with a browser being the only available interactive display mode, WYSIWYG. My wife has a MacBook and I have a cheap Acer Revo mini-PC, but she also has a new HP Chromebook and I spend most of my time on either the Pixel in my office or the Samsung Chromebook I'm typing on now. Except for things like needing a traditional OS for random third party hardware support (e.g. Fitbit sync, printer, scanner) or extremely rare requirements for MS Office or photo management, we'd function very well with just browsers. I know this is an aside, but one of the things that irritates me most about the modern web, and Google's "solution" especially, is photo management. Picasa on the desktop is simplistic but generally 100% ok, but Google+ Photos leads to horrifically unpleasant workflows, and god help you if you want print anything or share on non-Google properties.
_delirium 13y ago
It's a little hard to tell from the article what the goal is. If the goal is just to use the computers as a means to some other (non-tech) educational end, e.g. as browsers for accessing online information, then Chromebooks seem like a reasonable method of doing so. If the goal is computer education, then I agree they're suboptimal; even something like a Raspberry Pi might be better for that kind of education. One lingering unease I have about the first use-case, though, is that it forecloses some unplanned exploration. I largely got into tech by fiddling around with lightweight programming on machines that weren't explicitly bought to teach programming. Perhaps web-based dev environments will fill that gap, though; someone with a Chromebook can still experiment with anything from Codeacademy to jsFiddle to sketchpad.cc.
agumonkey 13y ago
With everything javascript, a browser can get you quite far. You have : - repl for a handful of languages from javascript to haskell with lisps in between. - jsfiddle to learn ~basic client-side webdev. - canvas/webgl to learn ~basic graphic programming. - if you dig deep enough you have VPRI OMeta for parser/metaprogramming. - if you're not in a hurry you can even learn ~basic unix (busybox, gcc 4.3) on Fabrice Bellard's jslinux I don't think you can learn prolog easily though.
- patrickaljord 13y ago
  If you install crouton, you can learn prolog or anything or if you just hit Ctrl+Alt+T you already have access to bash and chroot into any linux distro or ssh to a cheap vm.
  - agumonkey 13y ago
    I know, I said that as a snarky conclusion. It's just that you really don't need a full OS in these days of 'everything in the browser' to learn. I say to learn, because web-based everything is often a little bit too slow and resource consuming as of now, but to learn you don't need snap fast interfaces and interpreters.
Mikeb85 13y ago
Funny how people believe things that get repeated, no matter how false. > A Chromebook can only be used to surf the web. It's the polar opposite of what an educational institute needs. Chrome OS is a highly customized version of Gentoo at its core. When you activate developer mode, you get access to a full Linux distro. Some people use Portage to install extra tools, some use Crouton to install Ubuntu alongside Chrome OS (they share the same kernel as opposed to dual-booting). Heck, even if you don't use developer mode, there are some cool JavaScript programming tools that you can download and run locally in the browser.

Alterlife 13y ago

Apart from the good points that other folks are making, this isn't necessarily targeted at engineering students. A decent screen, a decent keyboard, comes with a word processor, is low maintenance, doesn't get viruses (theoretically at least) and it can access the web. That sounds pretty good to me.

userbinator 13y ago

Indeed, a bootable browser has little use outside of... web browsing. Even an old machine with an old OS is more usable, especially when there's no network connectivity. That happens a lot more than you think with a laptop.

Mikeb85 13y ago
Really? Have you ever tried to use good 'ol run-of-the-mill Firefox to browse files, photos and videos? Or open local HTML or JS files? Etc...? There's HTML5/Javascript IDEs which run entirely client-side which you can install in the browser's cache, or keep the file in your file system. You can give web apps native features and define how it installs/behaves using the App Manifest. A browser nowadays can do nearly as much as a full OS, even within a full OS.

rwbt 13y ago

It depends. A regular laptop can do more things, but most of the time students just need a laptop to research and write articles and the Chromebook does that very well, without exposing the internals of a traditional desktop system. If I'm a college student, I really don't want to deal with OS upgrades, malware and other things. I just want something that works out of the box and Chromebook does that perfectly. If I really want to tinker, it's not that hard to install a linux distro in a Chromebook and not everyone desires to tinker with their computers.

shaneofalltrad 13y ago
I think Linux (Ubuntu or Mint) would be great, so students can help build what the big corps are trying to crush and the fact that it really is an outstanding platform to learn from. I wish people would see how these proprietary boxes are not only crap but undermine the open-source community. The comment "I really don't want to deal with OS upgrades...", does not make sense, as I would think a student (at least when I was one) we wanted to upgrade our OS and for free made it even better. You can also customize a Linux REALLY easy, and that is something as a student I was looking for. So low cost and great power is what at least a tech student would be looking for.
pavanred 13y ago
Say you use Windows, 1. Turn on automatic updates (default option, I think) 2. Use something like MS Security essentials And, if you use Linux, 1. Update regularly, again I guess most distros have a default option to check for updates on boot. And, you don't need to upgrade your OS unless you want/have to. How much more do you want to dumb it down? For basic use as you mentioned, to research and write articles, you are almost doing nothing already with windows/linux
- eitally 13y ago
  ChromeOS is dumbed down so much more than that, insofar as nothing ever breaks, update reboots only take a few (<10) seconds, behavior encountered is always 100% predictable, and with a browser being the only available interactive display mode, WYSIWYG. My wife has a MacBook and I have a cheap Acer Revo mini-PC, but she also has a new HP Chromebook and I spend most of my time on either the Pixel in my office or the Samsung Chromebook I'm typing on now. Except for things like needing a traditional OS for random third party hardware support (e.g. Fitbit sync, printer, scanner) or extremely rare requirements for MS Office or photo management, we'd function very well with just browsers. I know this is an aside, but one of the things that irritates me most about the modern web, and Google's "solution" especially, is photo management. Picasa on the desktop is simplistic but generally 100% ok, but Google+ Photos leads to horrifically unpleasant workflows, and god help you if you want print anything or share on non-Google properties.

_delirium 13y ago

It's a little hard to tell from the article what the goal is. If the goal is just to use the computers as a means to some other (non-tech) educational end, e.g. as browsers for accessing online information, then Chromebooks seem like a reasonable method of doing so. If the goal is computer education, then I agree they're suboptimal; even something like a Raspberry Pi might be better for that kind of education. One lingering unease I have about the first use-case, though, is that it forecloses some unplanned exploration. I largely got into tech by fiddling around with lightweight programming on machines that weren't explicitly bought to teach programming. Perhaps web-based dev environments will fill that gap, though; someone with a Chromebook can still experiment with anything from Codeacademy to jsFiddle to sketchpad.cc.

agumonkey 13y ago

With everything javascript, a browser can get you quite far. You have : - repl for a handful of languages from javascript to haskell with lisps in between. - jsfiddle to learn ~basic client-side webdev. - canvas/webgl to learn ~basic graphic programming. - if you dig deep enough you have VPRI OMeta for parser/metaprogramming. - if you're not in a hurry you can even learn ~basic unix (busybox, gcc 4.3) on Fabrice Bellard's jslinux I don't think you can learn prolog easily though.

patrickaljord 13y ago
If you install crouton, you can learn prolog or anything or if you just hit Ctrl+Alt+T you already have access to bash and chroot into any linux distro or ssh to a cheap vm.
- agumonkey 13y ago
  I know, I said that as a snarky conclusion. It's just that you really don't need a full OS in these days of 'everything in the browser' to learn. I say to learn, because web-based everything is often a little bit too slow and resource consuming as of now, but to learn you don't need snap fast interfaces and interpreters.

Mikeb85 13y ago

Funny how people believe things that get repeated, no matter how false. > A Chromebook can only be used to surf the web. It's the polar opposite of what an educational institute needs. Chrome OS is a highly customized version of Gentoo at its core. When you activate developer mode, you get access to a full Linux distro. Some people use Portage to install extra tools, some use Crouton to install Ubuntu alongside Chrome OS (they share the same kernel as opposed to dual-booting). Heck, even if you don't use developer mode, there are some cool JavaScript programming tools that you can download and run locally in the browser.