I'm looking at getting a new laptop this summer, and I've been leaning towards a Dell XPS 13, but this chromebook is intriguing to me. I had a an Acer c720 chromebook for a while and I had a really good experience running Chromeos and Ubuntu through Crouton. Having 16 gb of RAM is an important feature to me, and I'm disappointed the non-touch XPS 13 doesn't offer it. I'm probably also all right with having limited on-device storage because usb 3 is fast and external storage is cheap.
How capable is the Core m7? Is it hefty enough to drive a KDE desktop smoothly? What about playing light linux games like Civ 5 or Crusader Kings?
The thing that kind of annoys me about the XPS is the location of the camera. It's in the bottom bezel of the monitor. They should have simply not put a camera in the machine because all you will ever get are upshots of your nostrils, closeups of your hands while typing, or the bottom half of the image being a close up panoramic shot of your keyboard if you try to bring the camera up to eye level.
I don't know what Dell was thinking, but clearly they weren't thinking much. It's horrible.
> What about playing light linux games like Civ 5 or Crusader Kings?
It appears to use the HD Graphics 515 processor, which seems to have performance in the same ballpark as Intel's HD4000/HD4400 graphics processors. I've played Civilization V on both those (HD4000 OSX & HD4400 Windows), and it runs fine on the lower end settings. I don't see why the HD515 would be significantly different.
> What about playing light linux games like Civ 5 or Crusader Kings?
It uses an integrated Intel graphics chip -- it won't be able to do any decent gaming.
At the 16GB price point of this thing ($1k), you could get a more conventional laptop instead of Google Chrome/Pixel OS systems and get a lot more power and flexibility out of it.
> > What about playing light linux games like Civ 5 or Crusader Kings?
> It uses an integrated Intel graphics chip -- it won't be able to do any decent gaming.
Depending what you mean by decent gaming. I've played Civilization V on Intel Graphics (HD4000 OSX & HD4400 Windows), and it runs fine on the lower end settings. Not ideal by any means, but the newer Intel Graphics chips are OK for some games.
How capable is the Core m7? Is it hefty enough to drive a KDE desktop smoothly? What about playing light linux games like Civ 5 or Crusader Kings?