Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Most Chromebook-Like Unofficial ChromeOS Experience?
An anonymous reader writes: I am interested in Chromebooks, for the reasons that Google successfully pushes them: my carry-around laptops serve mostly as terminals, rather than CPU-heavy workhorses, and for the most part the whole reason I'm on my computer is to do something that requires a network connection anyhow. My email is Gmail, and without particularly endorsing any one element, I've moved a lot of things to online services like DropBox. (Some offline capabilities are nice, but since actual Chromebooks have been slowly gaining offline stuff, and theoretically will gain a lot more of that, soon, I no longer worry much about a machine being "useless" if the upstream connection happens to be broken or absent. It would just be useless in the same way my conventional desktop machine would be.) I have some decent but not high-end laptops (Core i3, 2GB-4GB of RAM) that I'd enjoy repurposing as Chromebooks without pedigree: they'd fall somewhat short of the high-end Pixel, but at no out-of-pocket expense for me unless I spring for some cheap SSDs, which I might.
So: how would you go about making a Chromebook-like laptop? Yes, I could just install any Linux distro, and then restrain myself from installing most apps other than a browser and a few utilities, but that's not quite the same; ChromeOS is nicely polished, and very pared down; it also seems to do well with low-memory systems (lots of the current models have just 2GB, which brings many Linux distros to a disk-swapping crawl), and starts up nicely quick.
It looks like the most "authentic" thing would be to dive into building Chromium OS (which looks like a fun hobby), but I'd like to find something more like Cr OS — only Cr OS hasn't been updated in quite a while. Perhaps some other browser-centric pared-down Linux would work as well. How would you build a system? And should I go ahead and order some low-end 16GB SSDs, which I now see from online vendors for less than $25?
So: how would you go about making a Chromebook-like laptop? Yes, I could just install any Linux distro, and then restrain myself from installing most apps other than a browser and a few utilities, but that's not quite the same; ChromeOS is nicely polished, and very pared down; it also seems to do well with low-memory systems (lots of the current models have just 2GB, which brings many Linux distros to a disk-swapping crawl), and starts up nicely quick.
It looks like the most "authentic" thing would be to dive into building Chromium OS (which looks like a fun hobby), but I'd like to find something more like Cr OS — only Cr OS hasn't been updated in quite a while. Perhaps some other browser-centric pared-down Linux would work as well. How would you build a system? And should I go ahead and order some low-end 16GB SSDs, which I now see from online vendors for less than $25?
My main grip with ChromeOS is that it tries to needlessly tie you to cloud services when perfectly functional local or LAN equivalents exist. Network computing is a great idea. It's also an OLD idea. Resources should be as close to the device as possible. The first ring of your cloud should be your own home network.
I just put a SSD in my 9 year old ThinkPad T60 and took that as an opportunity to switch from Windows 7 to LXLE (Lubuntu based) on it. It *flies* now and I can actually watch Netflix on it fullscreen - it pegs the CPU pretty hard but doesn't get A/V sync issues like it did on Windows. It has 2.5GB RAM, but I've yet to use half that even with quite a few tabs open in Chrome (not Chromium). The only other things I have installed are Dropbox, Remmina (RDP client) and an IMAP client. I can't imagine ChromeOS being much more polished than LXLE with a few defaults - the only major difference being that Chrome had a few hiccups to get it installed, but nothing I couldn't figure out in five minutes with Google... not bad considering I don't have a whole lot of Linux experience.