Most of the posts in this blog (including this one) and most of I would call "personal computing" that I do nowadays is mostly done in one of the most unremarkable devices that I own: a cheap Chromebook Duet 3, that I bought for around EUR300. I was thinking why, because it is woefully underpowered: a Snapdragon 7c Gen 2, a CPU that was already considered slow 3 years ago, coupled with an eMMC for storage, that is not much faster than a HDD. At least I have the 8GB RAM version instead of the 4GB one.
It is a hybrid device, one that can be used as either a tablet or laptop, but it is compromised experience in both cases: as a tablet, it lacks the better touch optimised interface from iOS or Android; as a laptop, you have to depend on the stand to adjust the screen, and the detachable keyboard is worse than any laptop I have ever owned: getting keys stucked and characters being duplicated as a result is a common occurence. It is not so bad that I can't get things done though. About the trackpad: its biggest quality is that I never feel the need to use the touchscreen in laptop mode, that is to say that it is acceptable. Just crank up the pointer speed in ChromeOS settings, otherwise you never get anywhere since the trackpad is so small. There is also an active stylus, that helped me sometimes when I needed to sign something but otherwise I can't comment too much.
But I really love this device. It is generally the only device that I bring in trips nowadays, because while it is compromised it works well enough: I can use to consume media in tablet mode (the fact that ChromeOS supports Android apps is a plus in those cases), browse the web and even do Linux stuff (more about this later). The fact that it is small (the size remembers me of a netbook), lightweight (~1KG, including the keyboard), has a good screen (that is bright and HiDPI) and good battery life (I don't have numbers but I almost never worry about it) is what makes this device the perfect companion to trips.
Also, it has 2 USB-C ports and supports DisplayPort alt-mode, so it means you can charge it, connect to a external display and peripherals, all at the same time. Sadly, the maximum output resolution I got was 1080p, although some people at Reddit seems to have success at 1440p, and the specs suggests it supports 4k. It may be my Dell S3423DWC monitor being wonky, the fact that it is Ultrawide or the cable, who knows? I even tried to change the monitor to "High Resolution" mode in settings, but to no avail.
ChromeOS is also really interesting nowadays. To start, it is designed from the ground up to be a secure computing environment, probably the most secure OS for consumers right now. Being a Chrome-first OS makes it a compromised experience, for example, it is the only device that I use Chrome as my main browser (since I personally prefer Firefox). But having a OS that boots fast is great: I never worry about OS updates because I know the device will be ready in seconds after a reboot. And the whole desktop experience inside the ChromeOS desktop is good, having shortcuts for many operations so you can get things done fast, and support for virtual desktops (ChromeOS call it "desks") means you can organise your windows as much as you want.
And what I think makes ChromeOS really powerful is Crostini, a full Linux VM that you can run inside ChromeOS. It runs Debian (it seems you can run other distros though) with a deep integration with ChromeOS, so you can run even graphical programs without issues (including OpenGL!):
This is all thanks to Sommelier, a nested Wayland compositor that runs inside Crostini and allow both Wayland and X11 applications to be forwarded to ChromeOS. The integration is so good that I can run Firefox inside Crostini and works well enough, but sadly Firefox is too slow in this device (I am not sure if the issue is ChromeOS or Firefox, but I suspect the later since Google does some optimisation per device).
One interesting tidbit about the OpenGL situation in this device: this seems to be the first Chromebook to ship with open source drivers, thanks to Freedreno. There is this very interesting presentation done by Rob Clark in XDC 2021, that I recommended anyone interested in free drivers to watch (the reference design of Duet 3 is Strongbad).
The Crostini integration is probably the best VM integration with Linux I ever saw in an OS: you can manage files inside the VM, share directories between the OS and VM, copy and paste works between the two, GUI applications installed inside the VM appear in the ChromeOS menu, memory allocation inside the VM is transparent, etc. Even the themes for Linux GUI applications are customised to match ChromeOS. It is unironically one of the best Linux desktop experiences I ever had.
Of course I am using Nix, but since the Crostini integration depends on some services being configured and installed, I decided to run Nix inside Debian instead of NixOS and run Home-Manager standalone. I recommend checking the official NixOS Wiki article about Crostini, that details how to register applications in ChromeOS (so desktop applications appear in menu) and use nixGL to make OpenGL applications work.
Like I said at the start of the article, the device is woefully slow thanks to its CPU and eMMC. It does mean that, for example, activating my Home-Manager configuration takes a while (around 1 minute, vs a few seconds in my laptop). But it is much faster than say, nix-on-droid, that the last time I tried in a much more powerful device (Xiaomi Pad 5), took 30 minutes until I just decided to cancel the operation. Having a proper VM instead of proot makes all the difference here.
I can even do some light programming here: using my ZSH and neovim configuration (including LSP for coding) is reasonable fast. For example, I did most of the code that powers this blog using this Chromebook. If I need more power, I can use the Tailscale app for Android to connect to any other of my hosts via SSH. Yes, the Tailscale app works in Crostini, sadly without MagicDNS, so you need to use the internal Tailscale IPs instead.
Until Google decides to give us a proper VM or user namespaces in Android or release a hybrid Chromebook device with better specs, this small Chromebook will probably stay as my travel companion, and is one of my favorite devices.