$330 Chromebook the best

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I didnā€™t get the impression the SSD was optional - I read the description of the lower-spec model as describing only the differences. It didnā€™t mention the storage, so I figured that part was the same.

Still, Iā€™d only be interested in a Chromebook if I could coerce it into booting a distro of my choice. Iā€™m not always online, and I want to control where my documents are stored.

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Intel Atom based processor and graphics driving a 1920x1080 display? I hope you donā€™t have anything else to do today.

The 16GB SSD is a bit of an insult too. I get that weā€™re 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. Itā€™s 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 ā€˜the vendor designed it so you could do thatā€™ not as in ā€˜the 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 ā€œitā€™s 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 isnā€™t 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).

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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. Itā€™s by far the best of remote tools Iā€™ve used ā€“ with a good connection it is nearly indistinguishable from actually being in front of the machine.

Itā€™s 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 ā€˜extrasā€™ related to decent virtualization support and enterprise management widgetry (vPro, VT-d, TSX-NI, SIPP, etc.) have been cut.

Itā€™s a slow Haswell; but itā€™s 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 ā€˜help 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, Iā€™m pretty sure you can get one for less than youā€™d pay for a Citrix terminal services seatā€¦

Thereā€™s a soft spot in my heart for VNC, just because it has a client and a server for basically everything Turing complete; but it isnā€™t 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 ā€˜Chromebookā€™ page to reflect the existence of a totally new model.

So, the anticipated FUD over cloud storage caused by the celebrity nude photo scandal hasnā€™t kicked into full gear yet?
I was kind of hoping it would kick off a big backlash against the whole ā€œlocal 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.

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You and J-Law, p-shaw!

I donā€™t condone stealing peopleā€™s shit. But now that itā€™s 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 couldnā€™t even make a call with it.

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