RE: Chromebooks Are Great (in theory) but Still TOO SLOW with x86!
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From the very beginning, I have always thought of Chromebooks as super low-end laptops. There only real advantage is price. If they went to higher end hardware then they would be more expensive and lose what is really their only advantage. I would rather just get a cheap laptop and run Linux on it.
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Chromebooks (ChromeOS) runs on Linux, but it's limited. For example, my Chromebook is already Linux, but I have to enable the full Linux experience in the settings which allows me to run Debian alongside the ChromeOS distro.
Don't get me wrong, my current Chromebook is fine (if I had a reasonable amount of Chrome tabs opened), but when I enabled Linux so I can use the desktop version of Brave (and not the Android version of Brave) and run GIMP, it began being a little slower.
Also, every once in a while, Chrome will start downloading updates or the system would get randomly slow for no reason, making the CPU unable to handle a handful of tabs.
The upside of ChromeOS is that I can run most Android apps I use on it and play some Android games without needing a separate Android emulator.
The CPU is really the biggest limiting factor and I'm stuck on 4 gigs of ram, which is BS, but it is manageable considering I only use Chromebook for browsing the web. It's definitely a fast OS, but the hardware limitations suck ass.lol
I've never tried it, but AFAIK you can download chrome for any PC, so if you want better hardware, you just have to buy better hardware. I guess I would just rather have a slightly more capable machine (including, for example, the ability to upgrade RAM if I want) and install a "normal" Linux distribution vs. using the more limited Chrome OS.
There's not a whole lot of price difference (depending on the deals available at the time I guess) between a chrome device and a low end Windows notebook that has a little bit better hardware. I may or may not keep Windows on it but I would chose the latter every time.
I have an Android phone but I guess I don't really use any apps I care about using on a desktop/laptop. I do wish modern operating systems were a bit lighter. There's so much bloat. Except for the lack of newer app support, I'm perfectly comfortable using Windows XP, Windows 7, OS X 10.4 or 10.5, etc. I use Xubuntu as my go to Linux distro which uses the XFCE desktop which is relatively light but 'relatively' is the key word. Seems like these days you need what would have been considered a super computer not all that long ago just to run the OS.