My favorite device used to be a Chromebook. I got a maxed out Pixelbook in 2018 and I loved it, especially as Crostini got better and better over the years. It was my primary dev laptop and I loved using it.
I think we know where this is going... Like many other things Google over the past decade, it died on the vine - IIRC Google killed their Chromebook devices group a couple years ago. I would have loved a Pixelbook 2. I'm back on a Macbook because I was just never able to find a Chromebook that had sufficient processing power and memory after the Pixelbook.
it's an i7 chromebook with 16GB RAM and 500GB ssd. that's still unheard of to this day...
runs linux apps natively
runs android apps natively
runs windows apps through linux/wine/steam layer
it's lightweight (2 lbs), very thin and fanless
has a high DPI touchscreen
3:2 aspect ratio
the battery lasts 10+ hours
it can be folded over into tablet mode and supports a wacom stylus
it's a chromebook so it's secure, and i don't have to fuss w/ drivers, or linux dependency hell... it just works, but lets you dive into the guts through containers if you want it.
this is a laptop from 2017, mind you... it's 2024 now, and there is still nothing else like it, 7 years later. it's kinda sad...
as usual, google pushes the boundary, and then kills the product. it was supposed to spur other manufacturers to do similar things but that hasn't happened.
there are various assortments and combinations of machines, chromebook or plain PCs that run windows/linux, but nothing actually hits all the marks: high dpi, powerful CPU, lots of memory, touchscreen, small and light, fanless, with a long-lasting battery.
there's nothing else like it.
you can find medium-DPI chromebooks with 4-8GB of RAM, and no touchscreen, and fans, with crappy batteries. you can find 16GB RAM chromebooks w/ FHD (low DPI, and no touchscreen). there are chromebooks w/ 8GB RAM, no touchscreen, high dpi, and fans... there are all sorts of combos in between, but nothing is the form factor of the pixelbook with the features it has. i don't want a plastic piece of crap that breaks.
the closest thing is a macbook air, perhaps, but apple will never make touchscreens on laptops because they want to sell people ipads and macbooks
Can I ask what made you move on? I'm still using mine for basic tasks from the couch and as a travel device. It's perfect for taking to a cafe and crushing some email for a few hours. And the screen is a beauty.
The demise of Lacros indicates to me that CrOS is dead as an independent project. Inertia will keep it going for a while but in the long run it is doomed to be subsumed by Android in an unsatisfying way. Which is what a lot of people have predicted for a long time. I think they will eventually be right.
My favorite device is an android phone these days.
With termux, I can get most of my work done right away. This is especially true since I switched from VS Code to yazi+helix in the command line as an IDE.
The rest of what I need works in a proot ubuntu instance[1]
Also, since Android 13, the overall OS is pretty good with floating windows.
Some brands (Samsung, Honor, etc.) have full on desktop experiences now with kb+m. Google is slow rolling this into core android since 2017, though, to protect their Chromebook market.
A long time ago, I bought an Acer Chromebook off of Groupon for $100. It was surprisingly performant despite being woefully underpowered. The screen wasn’t big but was bright and had a nice resolution. I too was able to get Crostini up and running but hit the limit with certain windowed apps.
I’ve been on the hunt for a Chromebook these days but they feel like poor value to me these days. They tend to have bad speakers, resolution, and frequently processors that run hot and much worse battery life than the Acer.
They seem like a worse value today because I expected them to be cheap and run all day while letting me browse the internet quickly. They can do that but at a much higher price and at that point you’re looking at a used MacBook Air or a Windows device.
You need to look for sales. I have an acer Chromebook for $80 which is my daily tagalong computer (I bring it EVERYWHERE) in case I have downtime unexpectedly and want to get stuff done.
But I also am an oldster and hate typing on the phone, so a keyboard is a huge draw for me.
Battery life is like 6 hours (it says 9 but I’ve never tested it). It charges off a USBC port so can even charge (slowly) from car charger. Decent keyboard and pad.
I'm big on digital minimalism and have relied on Chromebooks for everything for well over a decade now. I have Gimp, Inkscape, and the other flagship Linux apps I need. I have ssh and my tmux/shell/vim development environment I prefer.
It would be nice if there were an open source alternative, but all that the open source community wants to deliver is rip-offs of the Windows XP experience. Chromebook is what desktop Linux was supposed to be, but nobody understood that the browser was the Linux desktop the whole time.
I have one, but I never use it. It sits in a corner. I want to love it, for it’s simplicity if nothing else, but it’s slow and then I’ll want to run something it doesn’t support.
Interestingly, I’ve fallen for a Kindle Fire lately. An even more limited device. I also have the pen. My Chromebook has a pen too, but the keyboard folds around and is awkward when in tablet mode.
If you have a stylus though, I highly recommend the Squid app. It’s a pretty great app for handwritten notes and drawings. I might have loved the Chromebook more if I had discovered this app on it.
Mine's a first gen 8GB Surface Go; very light, decent life, pretty good note-taking functionality with a pen, absurdly cheap used and just about powerful to do the job for situations where I'm travelling and _may_ need to do some minor dev work
I use a macbook for dev work generally but the Surface Go has been a godsend for separation of concerns.
I just got a duet 3 two weeks ago and I am surprised by how much I like it. Got it mostly for reading/annotating pdfs but I am finding that I use it for all general computer stuff. The small keyboard took abit to get used too and the chromebook's lack of many common keys with the caps lock being more a function shift still throws me off but is growing on me.
I think what is always lacking in these reviews is: compared to what?
I’m always curious to see what other devices authors have used prior to this “best device”.
For example, I started with a 2010 MacBook Pro, then a T430 Thinkpad, then a dell, then a desktop computer, then Apple finally fixed the butterfly keyboard so now I use a 2021 MacBook Pro.
In my experience nothing comes close to the trackpad of the MacBook. But I haven’t tried something like a Framework or a Chromebook. So maybe those are better.
I really wish there was a “rent a laptop” service where you could check out a different laptop every month and see if you really like it.
He is not claiming it to be a best device and clearly says it is deficient in most everyway but the complete package results in something so useful and handy and easy to carry around that it makes up for all of its faults. A favorite is generally not the best, the word implies being colored by emotion and lacking in logical reasoning.
I find them criminally underrated. Mine is also my favorite device, and I've worked months at a time on it as a programmer as my only device.
I liked it so much I wanted to install it on my own desktop machine, but unfortunately ChromeOS Flex at least runs an older kernel that doesn't work on newer hardware. In my case it doesn't even try to boot.
There might be something more to it. There are a world of software engineers who have access to all that, including me, who find chromeos an excellent env to work on. I have a mac, google isn't spying on your when you write code in crostini and compile it.
While both technically wrong and true of every computer, many Chromebooks can run non-Googled Linux distros and far outlive their support term… $50 might get you a very nice, lightweight, and portable “netbook” on the used market that you can use another 5 years for basic tasks.
ChromeOS, outside of being Googled, is quite capable (crostini is really nice), well secured (minus Google privacy concerns), and generally a nice user experience. You can even run Firefox and avoid browsing with Chrome.
You are wrong on everything. Google gives 10 years of updates, once the support lifetime ends you can put flex on it, linux, but chromeos keeps working, you just stop getting updates. Mostly that is because a 10 year old device is pretty slow, you'll want to faster device.
I have one 10 year old mac laptop, all I can do it boot it and wait minutes for the login panel to show. Actually I should get rid of that as ewaste.
I'm at seven years and counting with my OG Pixelbook and still getting regular updates. Although it is currently serving as a dedicated Home Assistant dashboard using a fantastic app called WallPanel (via the Android compatibility layer on ChromeOS).
I think we know where this is going... Like many other things Google over the past decade, it died on the vine - IIRC Google killed their Chromebook devices group a couple years ago. I would have loved a Pixelbook 2. I'm back on a Macbook because I was just never able to find a Chromebook that had sufficient processing power and memory after the Pixelbook.
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