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>Yesterday I was setting up Crouton on my 11 year old daughter's Chromebook Yet you decided to buy her a Chromebook, which is the most locked down laptop out t

>Yesterday I was setting up Crouton on my 11 year old daughter's Chromebook Yet you decided to buy her a Chromebook, which is the most locked down laptop out there with heavy DRM with everything locked to Google's services and only Google code being allowed to run natively. Even Windows is much more open in comparison and doesn't wipe the hard disk when you try to install an alternate OS. Nor do you have to "root" it.

sounds 12y ago
I unfortunately had to downvote your comment because this is not the conversation about DRM, Google Services, etc. I'm as passionate as anyone about fighting the walled gardens out there. But it's not germane to the current thread.
- glory_df 12y ago
  >But it's not germane to the current thread. In a thread about the value of open platforms, how is questioning the decision to buy a chromebook not useful or relevant?
yellowapple 12y ago
I think you're confusing Chromebooks for Android devices; running non-Google operating systems on Chromebooks is very-well-documented. I think you're also missing the parent commenter's point: that even on ChromeOS (via Crouton), his daughter's newly-learned skills will be much more universally-applicable, since she's working directly with free development tools available universally and on virtually all modern platforms (plus Windows) instead of working with toolchains specific to only one not-really-all-that-modern platform.
chernevik 12y ago
It costs $250, we can walk away the moment it becomes limiting. It's a lot harder to walk away from hours spent learning to do something some particular way.
malkia 12y ago
My son enjoys my croutonized chromebook, he gets to play minecraft on it (he has it also on his iPad, and on my PS3). But along with that the older version of Scratch, a very cool open sourced game called froogle. I also told him that he has to type some magic incantations to get them installed: "sudo apt-get install froogle" and he kind of loves it (and then forgets it right away... or do I know)... But really for a $179 (that's how I got it) device I don't mind. He actually "blew" it once, by pressing SPACE at the booting screen and reseting the whole device (unlocked chromebooks are like that, there is a way to disable that, but haven't done it yet). I told him that minecraft is now gone because of that, but we can install it again, though his maps are not saved. He's not doing it anymore, and surely he'll be more careful than me in the future (he opened the chromebook without asking me)

sounds 12y ago

I unfortunately had to downvote your comment because this is not the conversation about DRM, Google Services, etc. I'm as passionate as anyone about fighting the walled gardens out there. But it's not germane to the current thread.

glory_df 12y ago
>But it's not germane to the current thread. In a thread about the value of open platforms, how is questioning the decision to buy a chromebook not useful or relevant?

yellowapple 12y ago

I think you're confusing Chromebooks for Android devices; running non-Google operating systems on Chromebooks is very-well-documented. I think you're also missing the parent commenter's point: that even on ChromeOS (via Crouton), his daughter's newly-learned skills will be much more universally-applicable, since she's working directly with free development tools available universally and on virtually all modern platforms (plus Windows) instead of working with toolchains specific to only one not-really-all-that-modern platform.

chernevik 12y ago

It costs $250, we can walk away the moment it becomes limiting. It's a lot harder to walk away from hours spent learning to do something some particular way.

malkia 12y ago

My son enjoys my croutonized chromebook, he gets to play minecraft on it (he has it also on his iPad, and on my PS3). But along with that the older version of Scratch, a very cool open sourced game called froogle. I also told him that he has to type some magic incantations to get them installed: "sudo apt-get install froogle" and he kind of loves it (and then forgets it right away... or do I know)... But really for a $179 (that's how I got it) device I don't mind. He actually "blew" it once, by pressing SPACE at the booting screen and reseting the whole device (unlocked chromebooks are like that, there is a way to disable that, but haven't done it yet). I told him that minecraft is now gone because of that, but we can install it again, though his maps are not saved. He's not doing it anymore, and surely he'll be more careful than me in the future (he opened the chromebook without asking me)