Just curious, what are your use cases with it? I've been considering one as a cheap Linux dev box but it seems like installing a second OS is a pain and that there's little to no HD space left after doing so. I've been eyeing a Sony laptop that costs ~$370 bit it is quite bulky.
This. As much as I like Google, I've griped before that the Chromebook is a tempting but raw deal for a power user.
[1] You get a pretty locked down laptop that you have to boot into developer mode to do anything useful (which adds an additional 5-second boot time)
[2] I'm a happy camper at setting up dual-boot systems with Windows laptops, but crouton sounds like a pain to me.
[3] Limited disk space: I would think we would need at least a 64 GB or 128 GB SSD to do anything useful.
Note that I'm only speaking as a power-user. IMHO, the Chromebook is actually a great laptop for the older generation and people who use web-based products all the time ... but I do wish Google had put in some more though on how to make it useful for power users who need the Linux utilities as well as Eclipse, Thunderbird, and other X-based applications etc.
I really hate having to buy a good laptop that has Windows pre-installed and having to wipe it out just to install Ubuntu/variants, but it still is my only choice at this point. (Yes, I realize there are companies that produce pre-installed Linux laptops, but their build quality doesn't compare to the HP/Dell/Asus/Samsung kind.)
Note: not that I'm suggesting you get one, I'm just adding what I know. I've been tempted by the screen: the LTE version with a DigitalOcean SSD-based VM to do all the painful work (and completely disposable, my favorite part), combined with that screen for text editing, makes a lovely combination.
But, I just run Arch on a thinkpad. I still get a little kick when I boot a machine the first time I get it, try out the hardware to make sure it all works, get annoyed with windows being utterly awful, and then get to wipe it over. I might dd it with all zeroes first, depending on how annoying it was :-)
I find the 32GB Pixel more than adequate, but admittedly I am probably weird that way. The last time my primary computer happened to have 32GB was only 2007 and I've never really grown out of those usage patterns.
> IMHO, the Chromebook is actually a great laptop for the older generation and people who use web-based products all the time
I think a lot of us in the younger generation do this too, including the more tech savvy. I'm a software engineer in my 20s and my Chromebook is just fine for me 95% of the time. Sometimes I wish it had a little more RAM for when I get lazy about closing tabs, but that's about it: it's rare that I care about desktop apps.
Chromebooks are convenient if you fall on the lightweight side of the "power user" spectrum. With the help of Crouton, a chrooted "traditional" Linux environment is easy to set up. If all you need is Emacs, your command line utilities, and 10 gb of disk space for active development, then you would be surprised at how capable chromebooks are as lightweight development machines.
Yeah I have been wanting to pick a Chromebook up for exactly the same thing. I can imagine Arch with Awesome being great on one but it seems Google have made it a pain in the ass to get rid of Chrome OS and stick something else on. While I live in my browser I still work in a text editor/IDE and need a terminal with GCC and other bits. Lenovo have some nice portable machines but, like you said about the Sony, they are bulky.
I would love a Chromebook I could easily install a Linux distro on (I don't mind which, I can work within any distro quite happily although I would pick Debian if I had a choice) with a good 13" screen of 1440x900 (IPS). Don't care or want touch. A solid trackpad with multitouch. All the ports on the left (like this HP) as I am right handed an use a mouse to the right mostly so anything plugged in there gets in my way. A 128GB PCIe SSD. 8GB RAM. 8+ hour battery life. CPU I don't really mind but an Intel i3 would be the best (for me) due to compatibility with everything else. Backlit keyboard would be awesome. I am sure they could do all that for $500 or less. Even if I can't take Chrome OS off and have to dual boot that is fine with me as I quite like Chrome OS for a lot of things and only need a real OS for work. If anybody knows of such a machine please let me know!
Ok I am pushing it a bit with the 128GB SSD but if you stick a standard HDD in there they should be able to keep it at £500 or less quite easily. There are similar spec machines in the 15" range from Acer and others for that sort of price it would just mean scaling down to 13" :)
Seems like your best bet would be an Intel Chromebook like the Acer C7 - you can easily swap the SSD with bigger one, add RAM and install XFCE/Unity using one of the many options.
It has fans though and you will notice those! And the battery life isn't stellar. But at least it is cheap and relatively light weight and comes with USB ports.
The Acer C720 actually looks quite nice although AFAICT you still can't wipe and install your own OS? You have to use the same methods as we currently have like crouton.
That's right. Something to do with the different type of firmware used in the Chromebooks you couldn't install Windows on them. XFCE on ChromeOS is as close as you'll get.
I don't care about Windows but Chrome OS is based on Gentoo so why the hell can't I just install some other Linux distro like I do on any other computer? It annoys me that it is coming to the end of 2013 and I still can't get the kind of laptop I want running Linux. The closest I can get is the Dell XPS 13 DE but I don't want to run Ubuntu and people I know with them have found getting other distros to work well a pain in the ass. I don't know if things are any better now as I know Dell was trying to improve things for other distros by making drivers more available outside of Ubuntu.
