Anyone have any opinions on these? I already own a relatively powerful PC for gaming and other things, so this would just sort of be the lightweight beater that gets brought around everywhere I go.
just get a thinkpad mang
>>62302889
Works pretty well as a dumb terminal or a light-weight linuxbox with cruton. Hard to beat the battery life and price point. If your primary tools are a browser and a text editor, you'll be quite pleased. If you need local storage or a heavy IDE, you're in for a bad time.
>>62303223
Thanks for the serious response. The reason I ask is because I've found an "open box" one for $150~ that has a touch screen, a quad-core processor, 4GB ram, 32GB ssd, etc. Which honestly sounds REALLY nice for the price. Again, all of my "heavy" use gets put on the desktop, this thing is pretty much to take to classes/type notes/general media consumption.
Not worth the $249 desu. They're a nice idea but the fundamental problem with Chrome OS is that it doesn't do the only things it CAN do very well. It's a very unstable OS.
They're actually pretty stable and more importantly secure machines if you're willing to plug in deep into Google. The best thing about them is that you can wipe everything instantly, then log in with your Gmail and recover everything in minutes like it never happened. So you can not give a shit about losing it or breaking it, just get another and instantly get back your shit 5 minutes after turning the new one on.
I don't bother with making it a Linux machine though, just Chrome apps.
+ Usually cheap unless you're buying a Chromebook Pixel
+ God-tier battery life. Never used a Chromebook with less than 9 hours average.
+ A lot of Chromebooks have oddly good sound quality for whatever reason.
+ You can actually get a lot done offline, contrary to popular belief. Write/edit documents, play (light) gaming (like Angry Birds or whatever), listen to music, etc.
+ Chrome OS has by far one of the most painless, seamless, nearly invisible updating processes I've ever seen. Apple and especially Microsoft need to take notes.
+ Chromebooks apparently have really nice trackpads, considering the price.
: File Manager is one of the best I've ever seen due to its insane simplicity and huge thumbnails but it's so laggy and slow even on good hardware there's a good 50% chance it'll freeze if you try to use it for virtually anything
: Mute button doesn't unmute. This is hard to get used to. It's been like this since Day 1, on every Chromebook out there.
: Display and build quality depends on what you buy. Very few manufacturers are making cheap Chromebooks with non-shitty panels.
- Chrome OS is just fucking horrible performance-wise. It's a very logical OS with nice keyboard shortcuts and trackpad gestures but good luck keeping more than 10 tabs open without your brand new computer freezing and restarting itself.
- Good luck finding a Chromebook with more than 16 GB of storage. If you like saving images for shitposting, you might not one of these things.
>>62305206
Oh, and one more thing
: caps lock is still there, just hidden. you have to hit alt+search. Chrome OS isn't so bad once you learn the hotkeys
>>62305119
Worth $150 though?
I just picked up this R 11 for casual browsing around the house and while working and/or traveling. I slapped ubuntu with xfce using crouton and it works great. I've got super stable always working chrome OS for casual stuff and linux at the ready for when I need desktop functions. I can even stream Steam on it while laying in bed.
is it worth it to buy a refurbished chromebook and turning it into a linux machine? something like dell cb 13?
>>62303196
This.
I own both a Thinkpad T420 and an HP Falco Intel Chromebook, and the difference between them is night and day.
Once in a while I'll play around with ChromeOS give Gallium Linux a shot, but the lack of an open BIOS and local storage SERIOUSLY gimps you.
People might have their preferences (you can see that fact in the flesh in any desktop thread where someone Windows user thinks W10 actually looks good, or when a mac user shows us his wallpaper with a big ol fuckin penis on the desktop), but there's only one flaw in any computer that you might use:
Do you wish it could do more?
In that case, a chromebook doesn't cut it. Buy a thinkpad.
>>62305359
$249 is bad. $150 is usually worse.