CHChristianBundy·Nov 14, 2018
I don't mind my Chromebook, but I don't think I'll ever go back to Chrome OS.
I purchased my Chromebook Pixel (2015, codename Samus) with the same idea, and it was great for the first few months: I slowly started using Google products for everything, so my development work usually meant using the SSH extension[0] and connecting to a Google Cloud machine I rented. It appealed to my "digital nomad" tendencies, and really made me feel like I could work from anywhere.
Unfortunately, the "digital nomad" tendency is often expensive and unsustainable, and I found myself spending $50/mo for a VPS with sufficient resources and storage that I didn't even own. I was excited that Chrome OS and Android are open source, but when I looked into making changes I quickly realized that the core was open source while most of the actual applications were prop
Read the rest
rietary (from the clock to the calculator to the SMS app, everything).
I started down the road to Chrome OS because I thought it would be a liberating exercise in minimalism, but it turns out that I was overpaying to rent a server so that I could use an often-proprietary OS from a gigantic corporation funded by adtech. Bad.
It took some time, but I eventually figured out how to install another OS on my machine (Arch Linux) and I've seen a boost to both my productivity and my computer knowledge. A VPS is a great place to learn the basics of Linux, but I've learned a ton just managing my own device and understanding how all of the various pieces work together.
Plus, now I can run applications on my computer (!) without the requirement that they're Android apps (!!) or Chrome extensions (!!!). Sure, the UX isn't quite as polished as Chrome OS, but who cares?
Chrome OS aside, the Chromebook is fine. Sure, it was a massive pain in the ass to realize that Google doesn't run mainline Linux, so it took about a year or two to get Google's patches merged into mainline so I didn't have to use a fork[1], but for the most part the device itself is fine. I've had some weird impossible-to-debug issues (e.g. half of the screen going dim) and a handful of annoyances (e.g. you can never remove Google's "WARNING: THIS IS NOT CHROME OS" warning on boot), but I can live with them.
In the future I'll never buy another Chromebook, and I'll likely never buy another Google product, but at the time it was what I wanted and I learned a lot from my experience.
Good luck!
[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell-exten...
[1]: https://github.com/raphael/linux-samus