Quarantine Day 28: I think like this stupid Chromebook

1

As part of the plethora of machines I grabbed when they sent us home for ‘WFH’ I grabbed the Pixelbook that we had in the back just in case something bad happened to my work laptop (a 2017 macbook pro).

I’ve come to like this stupid chromebook.

It’s light, has a great screen, a good keyboard, killer battery life and a fantastic trackpad. Took a little bit of googling to get things to where I want them but for a personal / work machine (all SaaS applications) it’s really good. Of course I turned Linux on, and doing things in the terminal is great, but gui apps mostly run like hot garbage.

Specs are:
Processor: Core i5-7Y57
RAM: 8GB
SSD: 128gb

Is it perfect? Nope. There are just some things I can’t do (like play subtitled MKVs natively). And there are apps that I’m struggling to get working, like VLC.

But the 5 second boot time and 3 seconds shutoff time cannot be beat. As a ‘at the side of the bed’ machine for those middle of the night support calls, it’s top notch.

I WISH a big time Linux vendor like Canonical or Red Hat would make a machine like this. This quality of device with the same super fast boot times and dead simple cloud management would be a killer in the enterprise and possibly the home as well.

Sorry to waste your time with this post but it’s been a real weird few weeks. If you told me at the start of this I would fall in love with a Chromebook I would not have believed you.

2

I bought a budget Dell 11" 2-in-1 a couple of years ago, and while it’s slow on the start up, I find it perfect for light everyday use, basically anything you can do in a browser. Then again System 76 is coming out with the Lemur Pro 14". It might not start up as fast, but you don’t have to run Crostini to use Linux apps. I also don’t know how the prices will compare with what you have. The Lemur offers the most hours on a laptop that I’ve seen, spec wise, but then again, I ain’t seen them all. The only problem is that the Lemur is way out of my budget.