Slashdot Mirror
7 Days With a Google Chromebook
jfruhlinger writes "Now that Chromebook laptops are finally here, the question is: can you really do serious work with them? The only way to find out is to dive on in, and so Steven Vaughn-Nichols spent a week using a Chromebook for all his daily computing tasks. In the end, he was mostly positive on the experience — but was frustrated by a number of rough edges, including poor documentation and a failure of some components of the system to work together."
Why would you want to?
Because it looks like a pretty nice netbook.
That begs the question. He's asking why you'd want to work on such a computer. Netbooks aren't exactly a pleasure to use even for the simplest of tasks, and software development is far from being the simplest of tasks.
It's called using the right tool for the job.
The tool in question is a generic CPU connected to all the usual laptop extras (screen, keyboard, mousr, USB, etc).
That's why a C64 and a quad Xeon workstation are wholly interchangeable.
In other words the machine is a fully featured laptop. This tool should be able to do anything that a similarly specced tool can do. If not, then it is artificially limited by poor software.
No, it's not a "fully featured laptop". And software *is* a spec. Is the Chromebook "artificially limited" if it can't read .doc files? No. An artificial limit (the way you seem to be using it) would be if it could, but that functionality has deliberately been disabled.
ChromeOS is a solution looking for a problem. Or, more specifically, a solution for a problem that *Google* has, but that their customers don't. ChromeOS is about getting people to see more Google ads, but there's no compelling reason to run such a lame device. Once you have the notebook form factor, you might as well run Windows or Mac OS X.