Chromebooks

[Kchrpm]

The best I can do is go by the anecdotal comments from this article: http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/108...the-divergence

And she uses the touchscreen constantly. It is her primary input method; she hates trackpads. When I was still planning to buy her a MacBook, she insisted that I buy her a mouse as well. I might still buy her one for the Pixel, because there's a lot of clicking to be done on her work system, but the touchscreen is letting her get around the web extraordinarily well. It has completely changed my opinion about the value of touchscreens on laptops.

I'd also be worried about getting both screens to work correctly and talk to each other.

[thesameguy]

I know someone got it going with Windows 10, but that's obviously a little easier given the Windows legacy...

[Kchrpm]

Native Android app support, delivered through the Play Store, coming this year: http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/19/11...romebook-video

[Kchrpm]

An epic bump just to say that my second Chromebook should be delivered tomorrow: a Pixelbook Go with an 8th Core i5, 16 GB of RAM, and a 128 GB SSD. Is it a rational choice for most humans? No, but I think it will keep me happy for 5+ years.

[dodint]

So how is it?

[Kchrpm]

It's great.

The hardware is excellent. Nice screen, keyboard feels good, whole device is a good size and weight. Everything is much faster, even just GMail, so it improves my every day workflow. No SD card slot means I need to be smarter about what I keep locally on the 128 GB SSD, but I should have been doing that anyway. Everything I kept on the SD card was backed up anyway, so it's a bit redundant.

From purely a software standpoint, the ability to use Android apps isn't a panacea, but it allows for downloading music and movies from streaming services that wouldn't have worked otherwise. I still can't do my ideal version of hosting trivia via Zoom, because you need the Windows or Mac version of the Zoom app to include your computer's audio, but at least my video and audio should be ok.

[dodint]

Awesome, glad it worked out.

[Jason]

Can the Pixelbook run a virtual windows environment?

[Kchrpm]

Through Linux, yes/maybe. I wouldn't expect the performance to be good.

https://www.howtogeek.com/173353/how...-a-chromebook/

[Tom Servo]

On the plus side the Linux support is much better than when that article was written and no longer requires development mode. I have not attempted to run wine with it, though. I got Steam for Linux to start, but none of the games worked very well, though a fair bit of that may be that I have a way less powerful Chromebook.