I didnāt get the impression the SSD was optional - I read the description of the lower-spec model as describing only the differences. It didnāt mention the storage, so I figured that part was the same.
Still, Iād only be interested in a Chromebook if I could coerce it into booting a distro of my choice. Iām not always online, and I want to control where my documents are stored.
Intel Atom based processor and graphics driving a 1920x1080 display? I hope you donāt have anything else to do today.
The 16GB SSD is a bit of an insult too. I get that weāre supposed to do everything in the cloud on a Chromebook, but I got a 32GB SD card for free just for walking in the door of a Microcenter the other day. Itās not optional either, all Chromebooks use SSDs.
There is an annoying nag-screen on boot if you disable paranoid mode; but doing so is a documented and supported feature(supported as in āthe vendor designed it so you could do thatā not as in āthe vendor assures you that Gentoo 4.5 funroll loops will work on itā). The ARM-based ones tend to need a little fiddling because the relationship of various ARM SoCs with the standard kernels is āitās complicatedā; the Intel ones are basically just plug 'n go.
Not obviously superior to just a normal laptop if you are planning to pave and linux-ize the thing; but this isnāt an iDevice.
I picked up one of the Samsung Exynos ones a while back, to poke around with, and got Debian working without incident(albeit with some help from tutorials from people smarter than I am).
The real point of the Chromebook in my opinion is not to use Google Docs or try to make it a generic Linux box by hacking it, but to run Google Remote Desktop to connect to your home or office computer. Itās by far the best of remote tools Iāve used ā with a good connection it is nearly indistinguishable from actually being in front of the machine.
Itās no powerhouse, nor would I game on one; but the Intel 2995u is a Haswell-based part, not an Atom, and shares a GPU architecture with other Haswell parts(although it is cut down somewhat from the HD4400/5000 of the nicer parts) and most of the āextrasā related to decent virtualization support and enterprise management widgetry (vPro, VT-d, TSX-NI, SIPP, etc.) have been cut.
Itās a slow Haswell; but itās no Atom.
Plus, the savings on licensing can beā¦considerable: RDP has gotten pretty good, and ICA is even better; but you can use RDP only for āhelp requestsā on home versions of Windows, and concurrent RDP sessions are server only, and Citrix/Xenapp is bowel-looseningly expensive on top of that. Depending on the Chromebook, Iām pretty sure you can get one for less than youād pay for a Citrix terminal services seatā¦
Thereās a soft spot in my heart for VNC, just because it has a client and a server for basically everything Turing complete; but it isnāt architecturally pretty or particularly efficient.
Um, this laptop has a N2840 in it, not the 2995u. It is a Bay Trail chip. The 2995u was what they used in their first Chromebook.
My mistake, they appear not to have updated their āChromebookā page to reflect the existence of a totally new model.
So, the anticipated FUD over cloud storage caused by the celebrity nude photo scandal hasnāt kicked into full gear yet?
I was kind of hoping it would kick off a big backlash against the whole ālocal storage is for squares, man!ā thing.
I tried a Toshiba in 2010-2011. Have they fixed the toobrite screens and the processor squeal?
For some people an increase in leaked celebrity nudes is a reason to evangelize the cloud even more.
You and J-Law, p-shaw!
I donāt condone stealing peopleās shit. But now that itās stolen ā¦all I can say is hwow man.
I got the chance to fiddle with the crazy-expensive Google Chromebook over the weekend and it was a lot of fun until I needed to do anything that involved actual non-web software. Then it became less useful than my phone, as I couldnāt even make a call with it.
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