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After Negative User Response, ChromeOS To Re-Introduce Support For Ext{2,3,4}
NotInHere writes: Only three days after the public learned that the ChromeOS project was going to disable ext2fs support for external drives (causing Linux users to voice many protests on websites like Slashdot and the issue tracker), the ChromeOS team now plans to support it again. To quote Ben Goodger's comment: "Thanks for all of your feedback on this bug. We've heard you loud and clear. We plan to re-enable ext2/3/4 support in Files.app immediately. It will come back, just like it was before, and we're working to get it into the next stable channel release."
Correct response. Thanks Google for listening. I definitely would consider a Chromebox however ext support is manditory!
No zombified, closed-down Linux for me. I will continue to use the real thing.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
So now bitching and moaning constitutes contributing to F/OSS? Awesome! I'm an open source contributor! Now to put this on my resume.....
Google hit piece - published
Florian Mueller sockpuppet chat - published
Microsoft docker press release - published
Lockheed invents practical nuclear fusion device - ehhhh not that interesting from a financial perspective
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Now where can I bitch and moan about Chrome loading all tabs at once on startup? Such a pain to launch it and wait for a.couple dozen js- and flash-ridden pages to load..
So a bug is a feature and per Google, a removed feature is a bug? Okay, I think I have it.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I wonder if Android can at least do IPv6 correctly now. At the moment you can only use IPv6 in combination with an IPv4 DNS server (which has to be assgined using DHCP (IPv4). (RDNSS value from IPv6 is not used and you can't even specify IPv6 namservers manually for WiFi, thus a pure IPv6 environment is not possible)
Move Sig. For great justice.
Next up, after negative user response, ChromeOS to publish full source code and become free user-respecting software.
ChromeOS tends to ship on Tivoized hardware, which isn't exactly Gnu-Freedom; but, in terms of the software on top of the bootloader, what are the deficiencies? I know it ships a proprietary Flash, and whatever bullshit makes Netflix work; but is there anything else?
Have you ever tried to use Android in a desktop context? I used it for a while on my netbook (in the form of Android-x86) and let me tell you, it sucked ass.
Android is made for the "singletasking one fullscreen app" paradigm of phones and tablets, with large touch-friendly controls for small-screen devices. There are a couple of Android-based laptops available, and you know what? They're not selling, because Android sucks for the desktop.
ChromeOS on the other hand, is made for the desktop paradigm of multiple simultaneous overlapping windows, with controls that are sized for mouse/touchpad usage, not direct touch usage. Sure, Chromebooks have large touchpads now for gesture controls that are kinda sorta similar to what you get on touchscreen devices, but I know I'd much rather use a touchpad than drag my grubby mitts all over the screen, leaving greasy fingerprints.
Tell us what Android does that ChromeOS currently can't do? Even the most popular apps for Android are severely limited (due to their small-scren touch interface designs), whereas ChromeOS runs the full-on Chrome browser, bells and whistles included. Everything you can do in Chrome on your Windows/Linux/Mac desktop, you can do in ChromeOS. Try that with Android.
Eat the rich.
Now if they would just support LUKS I would be a happy camper.
At least they are listening. But, it would be nice if they pushed a unified OS between the Chrome stuff and Android. Annoying when a phone/tablet has more software available than a "laptop".
A completely new Java runtime is not just a minor tweak. It's a pretty significant task and, from the looks of it, the results are pretty significant as well.
$(echo cm0gLXJmIC8= | base64 --decode)
A responsive development team. That's pretty cool! Now if only Google would put some time into improving Gmail because their web based product sucks ass.
Next up, after negative user response, ChromeOS to publish full source code and become free user-respecting software.
ChromeOS tends to ship on Tivoized hardware, which isn't exactly Gnu-Freedom; but, in terms of the software on top of the bootloader, what are the deficiencies? I know it ships a proprietary Flash, and whatever bullshit makes Netflix work; but is there anything else?
I'd like to hear this to. Googles been generally friendly to my FOSS concerns. Perfect? No... but we really are a tiny minority. I appreciate that they understand what we're about and are making an effort. If all you ever do when these companies offer things like this is get pissed and scream "NOT GOOD ENOUGH!!!" they will eventually stop trying in the first place.
Then Google would have completely ignored the complaints claiming that their research showed absolutely everyone just loved elimination of support for external drives.
We talked, they listened.
Sitting here at breakfast, happily using my little Chromebook that boots into Linux when I need it.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Unfortunately not every time they respond to feedback like that. There has been a longlasting circus of people wanting to Google to reintroduce "tree style tab" functionality in Chrome, a feature that was available for a while as an experimental thing. Currently the discussion is around Chrome bug #344870. I would appreciate if some engineer had at least the balls to say "no, we are not implementing that". Of course, maybe even Google itself hasn't made the final decision on the matter, and they are kind of avoiding the issue for now.
By "full support", you probably mean "unsupported extensions that Samsung has piled their own hacks onto". It is not a standardized solution at all, and it requires apps to be specifically written to make use of it.
Chrome OS seems to be selling quite well (refer to the oft-repeated "best selling laptop type on Amazon" etc.), to people who just want a straightforward web browsing device and to schools. It's true that right now ChromeOS only runs a handful of Android apps, but the plan is for full Android compatibility. Please explain how ChromeOS is not "a full OS". Sure, it's locked down by default, but so is Android. You have to jump through basically the same hoops to get root access, and literally everything Android can do, ChromeOS can do as well or better.
In my case, I want a device that will primarily let me use a browser, mail and a couple of other minor things like some games to waste some time. I want it to have great battery life and a physical keyboard. I also don't want to have to drag my fingers all over the screen to use it, leaving greasy fingerprints everywhere. I've had a tablet before, and I don't want another one.
I know there are Android-based laptops out there, but they're just not a very good option. The browsing experience alone is severely limited on Android compared to ChromeOS. There's no support for plugins on Android Chrome, and there are very few for Android Firefox. Not to mention that every single app is designed for touch input, with big fat buttons and super-simplified interfaces.
Eat the rich.
Say it again, brother!
"If you love someone, set them free. If they come home, set them on fire." - George Carlin
Other android smartphones flash drives with OTG cables out of the box, why don't you?
Of course we're going to rant.
Fix the old shit first before pushing something new and similarly broken upon us so we at least have something stable to fall back upon.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Are you joking?
If I have an IPv6 only internal network (not really exotic) I shouldn't be required to set up an IPv4 nameserver and DHCP server etc.etc. just for android.
Also your examples of NETBIOS and IPX are backwards. This is more like having to use a NETBIOS server in order to use IPv4... which would be equally stupid to having to use an IPv4 server in order to use IPv6.
Move Sig. For great justice.
Maybe. If the pushes are in the right direction it gradually moves the overall discussion in the way you want it to go.
I'm a linux user, and a ChromeOS user. I failed to see why everyone got their painties in such a bunch over this. ext* external file systems don't really seem to be in the scope of the ChormeOS devices, what would be the use case for 99.99% of users of ChromeOS to do this? Heck, I don't even format my detachable external drives as ext* on my linux boxen as those are the drives I use to transfer bits around to other computers.
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate
> ChromeOS tends to ship on Tivoized hardware
Quite the opposite. At least Acer, Dell, Samsung, HP and Lenovo Chromebooks all support developer mode, where you have full root access and can even boot any other Linux from a USB stick or SD card. Is there another manufacturer that makes a Chromebook, and locks it?
Lockheed did no such thing.
To quote Ben Goodger's comment: "Thanks for all of your feedback on this bug. We've heard you loud and clear. We plan to re-enable ext2/3/4 support in Files.app immediately. It will come back, just like it was before, and we're working to get it into the next stable channel release."
It's not a bug unless it was an accident.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
The minute Google touches Gmail again to do any improvements, they're going to change the interface to their new cardifided bullshit, just like Google+ and Drive. I don't want them gimping the Gmail interface on the web with unremovable whitespace and hidden details.
Which is exactly what happens with Android (see: microSD support debate). I'm glad the Chromebook community is nascent enough to avoid the sheeple.
Even if you don't, others do. I read plenty of comments on the link in TFA where people explained their setups. Many users are using ext for its featureset, and don't need compatibility with Windows systems.
You really sound like you have a bunch of Samsung stock, or maybe you're on Samsung's payroll, because no right-thinking individual can love Samsung that much. I have Samsung smartphones (S3 Mini and S4 Mini), and some of my family and colleagues have them too. The default interface TouchWiz is absolute garbage. Samsung insists on doing everything their own way, and they just end up breaking stuff. That's why my own S4 Mini has Cyanogenmod on it, which is much better, but still suffers from the limitations of an OS and applications primarily made for simplistic touch interfaces. It's fine for a phone or if a tablet satisfies your limited needs, but it completely breaks down for any sort of moderately-advanced use case.
And no, phones/tablets/phablets are not "the new style of laptop", they will never replace the laptop form factor. They may displace it slightly for simplistic use cases, but for anything even moderately advanced, the laptop (and desktop) is king. You could say that you're getting closer if you add a physical keyboard to your tablet, but then you've just recreated the physical layout of a laptop, while still being constrained by simplistic apps.
ChromeOS is not "Windows 7 with fewer apps", it's a fulfillment of the proclamation made by Marc Andreessen (head of Netscape at the time): "The browser will be the operating system". Even 3D graphics and games now run great within the browser, thanks to WebGL and asm.js. For instance, I haven't fired up Libreoffice in years, I use Google Docs instead. In ChromeOS, you can do literally everything that you can do in a Chrome browser on your fully-featured desktop. You can't do that with Android. And now ChromeOS (and desktop Chrome) will be running Android apps soon, as well. There's going to be a convergence, where the OS you run doesn't really matter in relation to what apps you can run, but the input system you're using determines which tasks are going to be feasible on any given type of device.
Eat the rich.
Show me the Lockheed device in production in the real world before i get excited about it. I have lived a lifetime of cold fusion promises.....
Good-bye
It bugs me when you describe the people that insist that wrenches stay wrenches as a 'tiny minority'.
Good-bye
This is true with one big caveat: the kernel still comes from the cromeOS partition, not the linux partition. I learned this the hard way with my chromebook....I could never get it to a 2.6 Kernel (never mind 3.x) because the system had actually booted the kernel from the chromeOS partition, but the rest of linux from my ubuntu partition.
We laughed at Andreeson then, we laugh at you now. Mainframing personal computing is dumb, and Google (and you) should know better. Andreesen's promise is the road to idiocracy. 'I dont want to learn computers, someone else manage the OS for me...' The people arent rising up to meet the challenge, the tech is lowering to pick them up, and Chrome OS is bad idea that gets shoved on us. I would be fine with Chrome OS if they respected offline use as much as online. I would like chrome OS if i could plug in other data vendors besides Google.... Chrome OS is a dead end.
Good-bye
It bugs you that I said it? Or it bugs you that it's true?
Where did you hear this? I have a stock 3.16 kernel running on my Acer C720 Chromebook, plus all the hardware is fully supported by Linux
This Sig does not Exist.
Personally, I think that Android (and iOS for that matter) sucks on anything bigger than a phone screen. They just about work for a 7 inch tablet. With a 10 inch tablet, they really start to show their weaknesses. The fact that you can't show 2 apps on the screen is a major downfall. Also, the default on-screen keyboard has all this extra space, but doesn't display important keys like arrows or ctrl that are quite useful if you want to copy/paste text. Copy and paste on a Windows 10 inch tablet works a lot better than on Android. No more futzing around with the touch screen trying to tap on a specific character. tap in the general area you want to highlight, and use the left/right arrow keys to home in on exactly where you want to be. And Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V just work even on the onscreen keyboard.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Here are 2.6 and 3.4 kernels with Chromebook drivers:
http://www.chromebook-linux.co...
You don't have to use a kernel built for Chromebook, but it makes sense to in order to ensure you have the drivers you need, without a bunch of other drivers for raid cards and stuff that you don't have.
It occurred to me you might have run a chrooted environment, where you're running both ChromeOS AND the other Linux distribution simultaneously.
Yeah, a CPU can only run one kernel at a time without virtualization, so if you want to run two operating systems at once they'll share a kernel.
Its only true because people like you lack vision and prescience. Removing EXT 2/3/4 shows they have CHILDREN developing their OS. Few salty devs would do that.
Good-bye
People tend to laugh at visionaries when they are far ahead of their time. He made the proclamation 20 years ago, but it's only in the last couple of years that we have actually gotten there, through wider 3G/4G coverage and HTML5/WebGL/asm.js and so on.
SaaS and cloud services are full steam ahead, and I really do think subscription-based software will be even bigger in the future. Why do you think centralizing computing power is such a bad thing? It has giving us things like voice recognition on mobile devices (Siri/Google Voice/Cortana), even though the devices in question have nowhere near the processing power to do it themselves. By centralizing the heavy lifting, consumer devices can become sleeker, more featureful and have much better battery life, all of which are things the average consumer wants.
And why would Google want to offer alternative data vendors on their platform? You can install apps from Dropbox, Spideroak and various other cloud hosting services, but why would Google ever allow you to rip out Chrome and replace it with Firefox or another browser? Nevermind that Chrome literally is the OS, without it there is no ChromeOS.
Eat the rich.
first and last: define what a tablet is? I can tell you now that the new iPhone 6 (larger model, can't remember what the model is) is considered a tablet even though it's marketed as a large screen phone. Hell, you can type on it almost as easily as you can type on an iPad. Yet, it's a phone. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 3G is a phone with a nearly 8 inch screen! Is it a phone? Yes. Is it a functional tablet? Yes. Where is the blurry line between phone and tablet?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Some centralization is good, full-on EVERYTHING being centralized is VERY bad. The full steam ahead mentality is exactly what im talking about. Mainframing is DUMB, we learned those lessons decades ago. Thats what Personal Computing was all about, breaking mainframing and bringing the power back to the users.. Now, we arent advancing nearly as much as we are dumbing everything down to widen the audience. This is good in some ways, but relying ONLY on centralization for this is silly. Google should allow other vendors because they pretend to be FOSS champions, and that means allowing choice.
Good-bye
Tablets can (and have) replaced laptops for some uses such as reading news, playing simplistic games and fighting boredom while on the toilet. But for literally anything that requires more detailed input than what glorified fingerpainting can achieve, you need more featureful computers with hardware keyboards and more precise pointing devices. Sure, you can add a keyboard and a mouse to a tablet, but then you've just made a laptop that is still hobbled by the simplistic tablet-designed apps.
I used to own an Android tablet. I currently own an iPad Air that was given to me. Both systems are absolutely horrible for anything more involved than pointing or swiping, and that goes for the apps as well. They're fine for reading news or forums or watching videos on Youtube, but everything else is terrible. The app I use the most on my iPad is Paper by FiftyThree. Fittingly enough for the tablet platform, it's a fingerpainting app.
Eat the rich.
I agree 100%. Android/iOS are absolutely brilliant for phone-sized screens, where the lack of multi-window multitasking isn't an issue and the use cases are generally very simple. But having owned and used tablets with both OSes, it's not something I really want to go back to. Why limit yourself to single-application glorified fingerpainting, when a mouse/touchpad and keyboard offers so much more functionality? I don't understand it.
Of course, some people have their needs served perfectly by tablets, and that's fine. But they obviously have very simplistic use cases.
Eat the rich.
Except this is from Lockheed. While I would not stop all other research Lockheed has a history of making things that most people think is impossible possible.
First production US jet fighter.
First aircraft to fly over 70,000ft "level flight".
First US mach 2 fighter.
First Spysat.
First Mach 3 aircraft.
First stealth aircraft.
I really would not dismiss this one. It is as least very interesting.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
No, of course centralization is not the answer for everything. Stuff like games need a certain amount of processing and graphical power on the local machine.
But for big data crunching tasks, compiling and the like, why should that be centralized?
Eat the rich.
Samsung suffers from a major case of NIH syndrome, and TouchWiz is the most visible manifestation of it. They really really want to run their devices on an in-house built OS, but it's failed every time. Tizen is just the latest example.
It's painfully obvious why they fail if you've ever used a piece of Samsung software for any amount of time. It's just shit, all of it. Shitty thrown-together applications with no semblance of stability or any kind of thoughtful UI design. Kies is the very worst of them, never have I ever had to use a piece of software as shitty as that turd.
Eat the rich.
down with chrome, down with chrome, down with chrome.
now, please.
In the IT department, I presume?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Yes, the system has multitasking abilities, but Android is not designed for user-level multitasking. GUIs, frameworks, etc... are all designed for full-screen and developers usually don't expect their apps to be resized. Peripherals like keyboards and mice are supported but like with resizing, apps typically don't use them effectively.
If you adapt android to properly support desktop-style usage, you need to rethink the user experience for all apps, living you with something that is basically just linux with dalvik support.
"OtherOS would be OtherOS all over again"
No!?!
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
No zombified, closed-down Linux for me. I will continue to use the real thing.
Please be sure to stop using your DVR, automobile, and the other 47 Linux systems you intereact with every day which don't offer you a bash prompt. :)
I do get what you're saying, but the purpose of a Chromebook is not the same as the purpose for the general-purpose Linux distro I'm typing this on.
https://chromium.googlesource....
Google supports running Chromium OS on any Chromebook. It basically has everything but a few plugins, which I believe you can install (though those are not FOSS).
I wouldn't say it is any less FOSS than something like the Linux Kernel if you don't de-blob it.
So they're great at killing and spying. They don't have a track record in doing 'good' things like providing cheap, clean energy.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
E: "Why shouldn't that be centralized?" is what I meant, of course.
And of course just mentioning games is shortsighted. There are plenty of tasks that need local processing power, such as CAD, (most) video editing and other heavy tasks where you need to work directly on the data or work in a latency-critical situation. There are a lot more tasks than can easily be centralized and accessed through thin clients or web-based solutions.
Eat the rich.
Argh, "a lot more tasks that can easily be centralized", of course.
Fat fingers definitely need to be dealt with locally ;-)
Eat the rich.
I guess. But WTF were you people thinking? That course of action was a not only a colossal blunder, it was an obviously colossal blunder. What twisted reasoning could possibly have made that seem like a good idea.?
Sad little person.
Spysats and spy aircraft save lives. The have prevented more wars than you can count. Sorry that that world is not all fairy farts and unicorn poop but the reality is that Lockheed's spy planes and spysats are what allowed the first arm limitation treaties and later arms reduction treaties.
Lockheed's greatest planes the U-2 and SR-71 never fired a single shot in anger.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
And when you plug in a keyboard, you've just made a laptop! Which just underlines the fact that tablets by themselves have limited usable value. And that's before you take the severely limited phone/tablet apps into consideration. I would hate having to be locked into a watered down mobile edition of a browser.
Eat the rich.
Developer mode is often a pain to invoke. Oftentimes there's no way to boot developer mode by default -- you have to press a key combination to override the default, and you have to do it every single time you boot into developer mode. On the Chromebook Pixel it imposes a 30-second delay on you every time you boot into developer mode without pressing the key combination.
ChromeOS on the other hand, is made for the desktop paradigm of multiple simultaneous overlapping windows, with controls that are sized for mouse/touchpad usage, not direct touch usage. Sure, Chromebooks have large touchpads now for gesture controls that are kinda sorta similar to what you get on touchscreen devices, but I know I'd much rather use a touchpad than drag my grubby mitts all over the screen, leaving greasy fingerprints.
And the reverse is true as well. There are several ChromeOS with touch on the market right now, and I own one of them, but the problem is that ChromeOS is useless for the touch paradigm.
It's not really the greasy fingerprints that annoy me. For me, it's the fact that I almost never use touch, except occasionally by accident. And the higher end ChromeBook laptops with touch have much lower battery life than the lower end models without touch.
so... did you even read what I posted?
I think you're the poster child for why industry ignores us.
I think the Lenovo Yoga Chromebook with the screen that folds 360 degrees around to make a superfat tablet is probably the only reasonable touch Chromebook right now. Load up web pages in fullscreen portrait mode and you can browse away kinda like on a tablet. That's probably the only use I can think of, though.
Eat the rich.
I have exactly zero of those. And yes, I know where these things are found.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
When basically all of the other developers go "WTF, why was this even suggested?" at something, maybe it's time to rethink whether you're in the right place. How can someone be so damn pigheaded about a stupid-ass decision?
Eat the rich.
Because you're wrong. Android doesn't have a desktop or file manager, and isn't centered around running remote applications using web standards. ChromeOS is built for cloud computing, Android is primarily a mobile device operating system designed for situations where limited bandwidth is available.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Ext2/3/4 are very stable filesystems, and widely supported by the GNU/Linux community, why in the world they would not support them is anybody's guess. Thankfully they have reversed course and will continue its support.
If you have one of the models with a rotating disk rather than an SSD, the C720 is nearly identical to Windows systems that Acer sells. (Only the bootloader and the Google keyboard are different.) Even the SSD is bog-standard hardware, though Acer doesn't offer a Windows version of that particular platform with it. So it's not surprising that there would be no driver issues. The other Intel-based Chromebooks don't have exact Windows counterparts but also are unlikely to have driver issues.
ARM-based Chromebooks are another story. Since there are no ARM systems for full Windows, hardware support for that platform is more limited. Though I know that boot of a full Linux distribution has been done on the cheap Samsung ARM Chromebook, so it's not impossible.
The C710 had a terrible keyboard. The C720 is an improvement; not perfect but not awful either. Both have decent but not earthshaking TN screens. If you want a Chromebook with a good screen you want one of the HP models with an IPS display.
The Pixel was a statement product. I don't think Google had any expectation of selling a significant number of them. I doubt that the number sold matches the number that were issued to employees or given away at Google I/O.
the purpose of a Chromebook is not the same as the purpose for the general-purpose Linux distro I'm typing this on.
So which 10" laptops ship with a general-purpose Linux distro? Dell used to offer the Inspiron mini 1012, but it's since been discontinued.
For mobile usage, it skews even further towards the browser.
For me it skews the opposite way. My laptop is offline while I ride the city bus to and from work because otherwise, I'd have to pay another $400 a year recurring bill. So I surf while on Wi-Fi and code while offline.
Android has full support for a windowing system
True, but if you actually implement it, you are legally prohibited from shipping Google Play Store on any device you make or sell. The Android Compatibility Definition Document, published by Google, states that the window size presented to an application shall never change after installation on a device. This effectively implies that the windowing system shall implement an "all maximized all the time" policy. And if your device doesn't conform to the CDD, Google won't license Gapps to you.
it's only in the last couple of years that we have actually gotten there, through wider 3G/4G coverage
Which carries a substantial recurring fee. I already pay for Internet at home. Why should I have to pay again to be able to use my own computer while riding the city bus?
Why do you think centralizing computing power is such a bad thing?
Because as implemented, it restricts me from choosing with whom to centralize computing power.
And why would Google want to offer alternative data vendors on their platform?
Because a country's competition regulator may decide that Google has market power over operating systems that ship on laptop computers with 10" displays and thus require them to do so.
But for big data crunching tasks, compiling and the like, why should that [not] be centralized?
I see two reasons. For one thing, I've have to pay a cellular ISP beaucoup bucks to move the bits between my laptop on the bus and the service-as-a-software-substitute provider. For another, I don't necessarily want the service-as-a-software-substitute provider to be able to data-mine what I'm compiling. Finally, for a lot of projects I work on, it takes ten seconds or less to rebuild a project from make clean even on a 4-year-old laptop with a dinky little 1-core 2-thread Atom N450 CPU, and rebuilding with only a few changed files is even faster. It'd take at least that long to push the source over 3G to a SaaSS provider, wait for build, and pull down the binary, and that's if the SaaSS provider supports all the custom data conversion steps that my build process uses.
On the other hand, if you're just keeping a bunch of pages open every single session because you'll want to go back to them at some point, why not just save them as bookmarks instead?
Say I have a bunch of pages that I've opened in tabs, and then the browser crashes. When I restart the browser, I want the pages to reload completely so that I can keep reading them even after I lose Internet access. This usually happens when I put my laptop to sleep, board the city bus for work, and wake my laptop.
Have a look at Google("Linux in Laptops") and install one yourself. Yes, takes a bit of time, but you recover that by not having to clean the pre-installed machine of all unwanted "goodies" the manufacturer added. For example, putting Mint 17 on my Acer Netbook took 5 Minutes of work and 1 h of waiting.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Have a look at Google("Linux in Laptops") and install one yourself.
Should people try to avoid paying the Windows "tax"? Or should they be glad to get a copy of Windows to which to dual-boot in order to run those few essential apps that happen to be rated garbage in Wine?
Yes, takes a bit of time
A lot of which is spent beforehand to research hardware compatibility. For example, last time I checked, Linux could reliably boot on BIOS or on 64-bit EFI, not on 32-bit EFI with no BIOS fallback option. Wireless chipsets (WLAN and Bluetooth) might not be supported. Audio and OpenGL graphics might not work. Suspend might not work. I've had to deal with problems getting each of those to work under Linux on laptops, and Xubuntu still isn't letting me turn on Bluetooth in my present laptop.
After all, there's a basic text editor ;-)
So I've written code. Now I need to test it. Does Chrome Web Store have compilers and environments in which to run compiled code? Or would I essentially be stuck writing JavaScript for a web page and later hand-translating that to the language used by the target platform?
Mobile data plans are cheap as chips in most first-world countries
By "most first-world countries", do you include the United States or somewhere else where most able-bodied people born in the United States can easily qualify for a work visa? If so, to which countries are you referring?
plus odds are you'll have wifi access available in a lot more places than you'd think.
My laptop sees the beacons, but the bus has pulled off before it can finish associating, let alone transferring packets to and from the Internet. And I've found plenty of stores whose public Wi-Fi is limited to 30 minutes, after which the AP's captive portal enforces an hours-long cooldown period before the same MAC can regain an Internet connection. This hurts when I'm waiting for the roommate to finish shopping, eating, or whatever, or if the roommate has run into an old friend from her previous job.
But really, your use case falls outside of what a Chromebook is meant for.
Which is ultimately my point. Too many laptop makers disappoint me by selling only Chromebooks in the form factor I want, not something that better fits my use case.