I switched from Mac to a Lenovo Chromebook (opens in new tab)

Going from complaining about Apple not having enough polish in the fine details of their UI to suggesting we all switch to Chromebooks is so completely inconsistent that there must be other motivations.

In one post they're complaining about things like Apple having the search bar in different locations in different apps, and in the next post they're seriously trying to tell us that a laptop that requires modifying the software and running shell commands copied from the internet so you can run a text editor to change settings and drivers is the solution? They dropped a note about how they haven't actually tried development on the chromebook at the end but say they assume it would be okay. For someone telling us to switch to Chromebooks, they haven't even finished doing their own homework

Linking to an SEO spam website called technical.city for performance comparisons is another clue that this choice was driven by something else first and the reasoning was backfilled. The new MediaTek part is fast, but there's more to laptop performance than a single bar chart from a site citing ancient benchmarks like PassMark.

I can't read this as anything other than an attempt to make a contrarian choice and then present it as the superior alternative.

I can't think of any valid reason for a person with sane mind to do this. Yes, macOS is somewhat closed, but it's definitely more open than ChromeOS.

> Figma and Spotify have some of the best web apps out there as well, so that's all good too!

The Spotify web app is still much more limited than the desktop app.

> Did you know that Adobe ported Photoshop etc to web, with all the AI bells and whistles and the web apps perform incredibly well?

Perfect if all you need out of Photoshop is the AI portion, I guess.

> As a side note, it is no surprise that Adobe's suite of creative apps [...] now work incredibly well on the web across all operating systems

They literally don't.

> Quickshare (the Airdrop alternative) ACTUALLY WORKS

Saying this like Airdrop isn't one of Apple's most bulletproof "just works" features ever

I don't really get what the problem with MacOS is. It never gets in my way, so why would I switch? Yes, I found Liquid Glass ugly and two days later I completely forgot about it.

Author admitted he did nothing worthwhile that justified a full fledged workstation and adopted a tablet with keyboard.

As a Mac user I was pleasantly surprised when I switched to a arch Linux based distribution.

Not even a Mac user and have been legitimately considering a move like this.

My desktop and Thinkpad run Gentoo. A NAS I have at home is the build host. I am a business software consultant, and a common thread in all of my interactions is: I need to be prepared. If I'm fiddling with "hang on my mic doesn't work" or "i need to reboot", I look silly.

An onsite visit might be in an executive board room, or a closet in the back of a warehouse with a TV from 2007 and a VGA connector.

If I need software installed quick, like Zoom or something, Flatpak gets me 95% there. Yes, I could use Ubuntu or something normal, but I like portage and long for the day I can use FreeBSD seriously on the desktop.

So enter Chromebooks, which come with portage, can use Flatpak, and the OS is basically just a web browser. Plus, I don't have to wrestle with SELinux, or any of the other nitty gritty stuff that gets in the way of real work™. It's either a PWA or an Android app, and it just works.

I went the other way: from a Pixelbook to a Macbook Air. I mostly do SW development in the CLI, so the Linux subsystem on the chromebook was fine, as is macports/homebrew/etc. on the mac. I would still be using the Pixelbook if I could have replaced its battery. The low-end Air had good price-performance tradeoff, and the Neo would probably be today's choice.

I don't know why the author plays down the versatility of Chromebooks/ChromeOS so much. You can install the Linux Dev VM with 5 clicks in the settings. You get a fully featured Debian VM with nested virtualization support and seamless Wayland, VirGL and USB passtrough.

I’m expecting delivery of a used Lenovo yoga thinkpad simply to run one piece of software that I previously ran on an older intel Mac using a virtual windows drive, sadly the security on that software (dongles!!) will not and possibly will never run on new Apple silicon, so I’m gonna be lugging a win machine around for any projects that call upon that security software. I worked with the developer and tried a a patched software key for the same security, but sadly it didn’t work either. I’ll still be sticking to Mac for most of my work as I just prefer the way things predictably operate, but I am now going to have a windows toy to play with too, even if it’s actually for work !

Chrome OS? No, thank you. I'll stay with macOS and keep hoping for the Asahi Linux dream

Choosing an OS 101

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/mx4dni/cho...

Do you fear technology?

> Yes

Is your daddy rich?

> No

ChromeOS

>> it seems that Signal's team is actively working on linking additional Android devices, and very soon we can simply solve this by using Signal for Android.

Wishful thinking, this has been a problem since tablets (android or ios) were a thing and trying to use one linked to your phone.

I just have a workstation at home that I SSH into from whatever device I feel like (within my tailnet). All my tools available on the CLI and vscode available via remote-ssh. You can connect from an iPad, macbook, chromebook, etc. The only thing it doesn't handle well is creative apps (video editing, blender, photoshop, etc.).

Obviously this whole setup requires an internet connection, but I'm rarely without one so it works great for me. Anyone else do something similar?

I have to switch between an M4 macbook pro and a Lenovo Chromebook Plus multiple times a day and I will say, while it isn't terrible, the keyboard and trackpad on the Lenovo have nothing on the Macbook. The experience with using USB devices (yubikey in particular) through the android layer is also real shitty.

Good Lord, what next? “I switched from Mac to Windows and you can too”?

Might make sense if the Chromebook can be degoogled and set up with a clean Linux distro. Barring that, a regular laptop with Linux may be an option.

I have this exact laptop - I just use it for casual web browsing, but it does have a significant problem that I've encountered - although it has a 3.5mm stereo port, it's unusable due to static sounds.

Possibly this bug that's been floating around for the past 6 years: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/172339479

Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I really enjoy ChromeOS, though I'm worried a lot of its simplicity will go away as Google transitions to Android-based laptops. My wife and I use an Asus Chromebook Flip as a kitchen/living room computer that we don't need to think about. No software updates, it just surfs the web and we can flip it into tablet mode if we want to.

Are these ARM Chromebooks actually fully hackable to use any other Linux OS? AFAIK Google upstreams DTBs for them?

I actually tried this last year and the show stopper was Citrix. The version for Chromebooks is some abomination that hasn't been kept recent and so fails validation with my employer's Citrix infra.

A Mediatek chip rivalling Apple M2? Is this claim supportable?

Grass is greener works at month two. By month nine your muscle memory is still wrong.

To me the most amazing thing of using Chromebook is that you can run the Tailscale _Android_ app and get your ChromeOS connected to your tailnet.

So we're calling normal usb ports "old school" now?

> no fucking way there's a Mediatek chip out there that's as good as M2?!? right!?

Actually Mediatek is pretty underrated. Isn't the upcoming Dimensity 9600 Pro on par with the M5 [0]? And they also designed the CPU part of the GB10 in the NVIDIA DGX Spark, which is roughly on par with the CPU of the AMD AI Max+ 395 and M3 Max 14 core [1] [2].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1so1wyv/dimensity...

[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/17762799?baseli...

[2] https://browser.geekbench.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=m3+max

I love these articles. I await the inevitable post-mortem 6-9 months down the line.

I am not very tech-savvy, mostly into Analytics - DS. I love my Mac. The whole UX is far superior compared to Windows or a Chromebook.

Might become more interesting if the Android powered laptop rumors are true.

> Apple's software incompetence is absolutely universally hated

Weird. Maybe he spent too much time on ChatGPT and got AI psychosis.

no, thanks

Some of us actually want to get work done

Just look at the submissions from the "speckx" account and you get it. In a nutshell: don't waste your precious time.

Ragebait pandemic spread here too?

But I don't want to.

> - If you rely on / heavily use AI tools, you can easily use Claude's Web App etc so that's super cool but also things like Jan also exist for Linux and I haven't tried, but you can use that as well for a more native experience.

Sure, Claude Web App is an adequate replacement to full-fledged Claude Code, and then there is also something that I didn't bother to try but maybe you can try it after you bought a new laptop. What the hell.

No, no I can't.

I do not agree with what he wrote, but I had an enjoyable reading experience, which is rare these days. That is some clean blog design.

What is that terrible font? I've never seen an "h" look like that

But why?

I'm relatively uniquely qualified to weigh in here... I've been linux-native for decades now on my home desktops (debian), and the last time I used windows for work was ~2005-ish with work Mac laptops, and "disposable" chromebooks at home for personal use + travel.

1) It started with Crouton (open source, "let's get access to the underlying linux system"), and worked pretty well. IIRC you had to switch to "dev mode" to get access to it.

2) Crostini and all the layer-cake isolation is wildly impressive! ...it's more VM-based with suuuper adjudicated interaction boundaries between `chromeos` and the underlying linux vm.

Arch overview: https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-library/guide...

Seneschal (file management/isolation): https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform2/+/HEA...

Sommelier (gui passthrough/punch-through): https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform2/+/HEA...

3) I've recently (intentionally) switched to their new "Baguette" beta VM/Container (you can talk to google AI mode about it, but general access docs and links are fairly sparse: "...a ChromeOS architectural shift (arriving around v142-146) that enables containerless Linux Virtual Machines, running directly via KVM instead of LXD. It removes the middle container layer for increased efficiency and flexibility, allowing for advanced features like direct PCI passthrough, while providing improved storage management compared to legacy Crostini."

4) I think over the last ~15 years I've gone from 4gb => 8gb => 16gb (just recently) and sticking with "premium-ish" dev-centric laptops (mostly: linux, git, web dev, inkscape, random hacking, etc). Currently the Acer Spin 714, previously Samsung XE930QCA... both "tablet adjacent" with full fliparound or "tent style" for watching a movie or doodling with styluses.

Bang-for-Buck, I was able to get the Spin714 for ~$300 @ 16gb ram (used-ish, off ebay) which is a STEAL, and similar story for the Samsung one. They're definitely very capable machines, and treating them as "dumb terminals with a VM I can pop open and scp files to a remote host or git push" is fantastic!

HOWEVER: beware! Google w/ Baguette is stupidly complicated on how to open a port on the device itself for other computers to be able to access servers on the local device. I argued with the google AI for like an hour trying to figure out the best way to allow `git pull my-chromebook.localdomain:./Git/some-repo` and eventually had to settle on a raw `ssh` reverse proxy pipe where I was pulling from `my-other-machine.localdomain:localhost:2222:./Git/some-repo` which was forwarded back (over SSH) to the chromebook itself.

It used to be that you could rationally: `python -m http`, open an "enable port forwarding" thingy in the terminal settings and be able to connect to the service w/o much ceremony. Nowadays they're effectively nanny-ifying the OS and it's getting much harder to do the same thing (removing visible UI for port forwarding, needing hidden settings deep links or `chrome://flags` stuff to be able to access a server/service RUNNING ON YOUR OWN MACHINE FROM WITHIN YOUR OWN NETWORK). Supposedly the cool kids are using tailscale or whatever, but it's literally `localhost<->localhost` and I don't want to have to set up a VPN or whatever to make that work, I just want to doodle on local web services in a VM on a machine that can get stolen and not end up losing all my personal/private files.

Also, ask google AI mode: "when is google phasing out chromebook and chromeos and presumably near-native linux support on their machines?" => """Court documents and executive statements reveal a plan to retire the existing ChromeOS software stack by 2034. This legacy system is expected to be replaced by a unified platform internally codenamed "Project Aluminium," which migrates ChromeOS fully onto the Android tech stack."""

...so ~8 more years of `chromeos`/`linux` and then it'll no longer be the year of linux on the desktop!

Yes, they can be very comfortable and very capable machines, but they're losing a bit of their central spirit and developer-friendliness over time.

Sounds like the author could have used just about any laptop in the world and it would serve him well.

So, what's the point of the article?

Why would I do that?

Death to liquid glass!

I mean I could. I could also do fent. But I don't.

I'll use Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, ReactOS, Haiku, anything but not ChromeOS.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

No.

The idea that I could do the things I do regularly on a Chromebook is laughable in the extreme, and I'm not even that much of a crazy power user. No thanks.

I love Liquid Glass. I think a lot of the complaints are whiny and pedantic. I do agree a bit of tender love and care could be used to clean up some GUI elements, but people act like Liquid Glass fried their logic board and rendered their machine utterly unusable.

TL;DR: The author traded a full-fledged workstation with “Liquid Glass” for a web browser with a keyboard.