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Chrome OS Receives Extreme Makeover With Material Design and Google Now
MojoKid writes Late last week, Google quietly began inviting people to opt into the beta channel for ChromeOS to help the company "shape the future" of the OS. Some betas can be riskier than others, but Google says that opting into this one is just a "little risk", one that will pay off handsomely for those who crave new features. New in this version is Chrome Launcher 2.0, which gives you quick access to a number of common features, including the apps you use most often (examples are Hangouts, Calculator, and Files). Some apps have also received a fresh coat of paint, such as the file manager. Google notes that this is just the start, so there will be more updates rolling out to the beta OS as time goes on. Other key features available in this beta include the ability to extract pass protected Zip archives, as well as a perk for travelers. ChromeOS will now automatically detect your new timezone, and then update the time and date accordingly.
Honestly, the most noticeable change was that the font changed on the tabs and URL bar.
I know- it's so terrible to have a sub-$200 laptop that boots in seconds and that has everything stored in the cloud so if my kids break it I can replace it trivially.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
No? Watching http://trailers.divx.com/divx_... just fine on my Acer C720; CPU hasn't bumped over over 40%.
you're only giving google a head start on tracking your kids' every move online. not the greatest move a parent can make.
I'd rather pay $250 for a real laptop running an OS that has an actual software library. I'd also rather keep MY data to myself instead of storing it online where some corporation has full access to it and that requires an internet connection just to get at it.
Some of us use computers for more than Facebook and YouTube.
know- it's so terrible to have a sub-$200 laptop that boots in seconds and that has everything stored in the cloud so if my kids break it I can replace it trivially.
If your kid breaks your laptop, that's accompanied by an ass whooping to ensure it never happens again, right?
Intelligent countries with intelligent people don't treat laptops as throwaways items.
Nor do they store their vital data in "the cloud."
Google fanboys are not intelligent.
If you mount it on your wall, sure. But a laptop on my lap fills up my field of view much more than the 40" TV in my living room does.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
I know- it's so terrible to have a sub-$200 laptop
that would be nice, in reality new Chromebook Pixel is $999, £670, AU$1,320
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
You know, by now I'm used to articles in the mainstream news who confuse an operating system, applications (which may or may not ship with an operating system), and the look/feel that a particular GUI puts on both. However, a web site like Slashdot - self-proclaimed home of "news for geeks" - should be able to do a little bit better.
Come on Stallman, no shame in posting under a name.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
In actual reality, I went to amazon.com, typed "Chromebook", selected OS: "Chrome OS", then sorted by price resulting in 14 models below the $200 mark
HOLY MOTHER OF FUCK, is this for real?
I've just been reading The systemd Project Forks the Linux Kernel from DistroWatch, which I presume is what you were referring to.
This isn't an April Fool's Day joke, is it? It is dated March 30, so I have to assume that it isn't.
Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. Systemd is utterly destroying the Linux community. It's doing this so much better than Microsoft or SCO could have ever done.
I would like to run this as a secure browser in a VM that I can revert to a clean state regularly.
The only ChromeOS VMs I've seen are very old. Anyone know of a good source for current ChromeOS as a (vmware) VM?
The remaining 5% makes me money. So yes, it is that important to me.
Then don't buy a Chromebook. It is not a professional workstation. I don't have one either. But my kids do. Chromebooks are also popular with schools. They are cheap, and are difficult for students to screw up, because ... well because there is nothing on them. But if all you need is a broswer and Google docs, they are fine. You can buy five of them for the price of a Macbook.
both on phone and labptop
I love my Chromebook. I use Chrubuntu and/or Chroots in developer mode when I'm not traveling. The ARM architecture has incidentally given me an incentive to become much better at compiling from binary. If you don't want to do that: there are plenty of x86/x64 Chromebooks to choose from.
Every time I go to the airport I powerwash my device and reinstall from .tar.gz backups when I get home.
ChromeOS is lovely, it always makes me a little sad when I have occasion to go back to XFCE or LXDE as my primary on-boot.
>>Could you imagine a prospective employee showing up to an interview with a P.O.S chromebook instead of a macbook?
Depends on the job person is applying to. If in the course of work his only tool is browser - then chromebook is a sign that this person knows his stuff and doesn't feel uncontrollable compultion to buy bling-bling stuff just because it's trendy and cool.
and those are shite.
look, you can buy a crappy windows laptop for the same price.
which gets us to: do you want to buy a laptop that does one thing or a real laptop? with both you can use the cloud apps.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The "apps" that run on chromeos are toys and web pages^H^H^Happs instead of the standard software people expect, with the one exception being the browser.
The only way to turn a chromebook into a traditional laptop is to install another operating system on the machine and use that. In other words, a chromebook is a sub $200 web browser appliance. That's nice, but I'm not sure it's worth $200ish .
Not if you already have it like that.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Or a movie coming off torrents in that format.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Contextless, textless, unlabelled icons I take it then?
No separation of data using small 1 pixel width dividing lines, shading, or anything really, just one big flat white (or whatever colour they choose) mess?
Difficulty in easily identifying data because it's not highlighted or accentuated in any particular way?
Yep, love that material design. It's clever stuff.
laptops already have a fairly well defined meaning in people's minds from the fact that laptops have been around for 20+ years.
Yup. A clamshell design with a screen on the top and a keyboard on the bottom. For most of those 20 years though a laptop also meant it costs half the price of a reasonable car, weighs 10 pounds, has 45 minutes of battery life and zero capability until you bought software separately from a store. Trust me, consumers HATED those things. These new devices have more Gees so are like 5 times more capable!
Out of interest, do you have any evidence that they are tracking people's every move online? I think it would be a big scandal if it were true.
For example, obviously they scan Gmail accounts to deliver targeted advertising, but do you have evidence that if you use a Yahoo email account they monitor the content of your email?
What about your Facebook posts, do they read those? Or your online banking sessions, do they track them?
Or did you mean something else by "tracking your kids' every move"?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
And I see plenty of sub-$200 Windows laptops, which are far more useful.
Sure. Windows. Useful.
There are plenty of good options for a small laptop there. Personally I have a desktop computer that can do all the great things I want it to. For a laptop I wanted something small and light that I wouldn't have to worry about. A 13in Chromebook worked perfectly for that. I never use it for gaming or image development, usually just web browsing and email. Occasionally I'll do some development by SSHing into a Linux box, and if I really want to do something more intensive, I can remote desktop to my machine at home. It takes 6 seconds to boot, updates also take 6 seconds (and my windows are opened after), and it doesn't get loaded down with crapware. Worst case I can do a factory reset.
Now I realize some people want a mobile primary computer and this isn't the machine for them. Judging by the tablet market, people are quite happy to get machines that do one thing, so maybe it would be better if you saw this as a cheap tablet with a keyboard and USB ports.
"New standard", hah. It's been this bad for the better part of a decade. That's part of the reason why RON PAUL was so big here.
Why not merge with Android, already?
My Chromebooks are pretty poor performers and as the months move on they get slowly worse.
Why haven't Google already replaced the ad-hoc, stripped-down Linux distribution with their much more sucdessful other ad-hoc, stripped-down Linux distribution?
Kriston
Why is someone taking a laptop into an interview?
Because I already own the fucking video. What would you do, convert it just because "hey it ain't fittin'"?
I can watch 1080p MKVs on my crappy Samsung S4 Mini without a hitch, it works, doesn't consume much power (30% battery for a 2h long movie is pretty darn good) and yeah the phone resolution is crap but I don't care. I care about playing the damn video.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I know- it's so terrible to have a sub-$200 laptop that boots in seconds and that has everything stored in the cloud so if my kids break it I can replace it trivially.
You don't know anything about what you're talking about, per the usual. It looks like you've been listening to gweihir too much. There were at least two other projects looking to replace init, and half a dozen more providing some form of process tracking. Lumping two things that you hate and fear together must feel good, but systemd's development and adoptation has been a public process, and both systemd and pulseaudio offer important technical improvements (that apparently you don't understand). I realize all you do here is go off on ill-informed rants, but this one is only tangentially connected to reality; you might want to dial back the frothing a bit. I mean, you don't even use Linux — what's it to you?
P.S. That bit about "by the time he's done the kernel will be just a VM running on top of systemd!" was hyperbole, right? Because otherwise it's so far beyond crazy that it makes me wonder if you know what those words mean.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
"Some of us use computers for more than Facebook and YouTube."
The smugness here is pathetic.
I downloaded it, and played it off my chromebook's SSD. If I had wanted, I could have thrown it on an external hard drive or USB stick.
Unless you're taking a course in programming or programming as a professional, you don't really need a computer for computing.
Even for learning programming, a Chromebook is good enough. At my neighborhood school they start teaching Scratch in 4th grade. It runs in a browser. For older kids, they move on to the Khan Academy programming lessons, which use JavaScript, which also runs in a browser. A "real" computer isn't needed until high school, for the 5% of the students that take AP-CS, which uses Java.
Link me a test file to play, and I'll play it and let you know how it goes.
Nah, then you'll come back at me with "oh no, I meant the SuperSecretUltra H264 profile, the "High 10" profile isn't good enough for the real modern world. What's with only using ASCII characters in the subtitles - everyone knows that the cost of supporting UTF-8's extended character set is essential for everyone's laptop and also going to magically kill your computer's performance."
If you cared at all about actual real life rather than FUD, it'd be easy to link me one.
burden of proof is on the person who made the assertion ("chromeos pants heavily when you watch a 1080p MKV on it"). :)
Please tell... which computer and software would you use to convert a 10 GB large, 2h long 1080p video to 1366x768 in 2 minutes? Keeping embedded subtitles in is a requirement.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
This guy did: https://rolandh31.wordpress.co...
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I asserted that "an obsolete video format knowing that nobody uses DivX or considers it a viable codec any more" plays just fine, and it does. :)
So close to 8 minutes on a top machine. Not two.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Absolutely no problem on my Acer Chromebook 13. 1080p60 Youtube videos play just fine, too.
Eat the rich.