Google ending ChromeOS support two years early Google’s basic mathematical skills appear a little fragile, after the company revealed its promise of ten years of support for new Chromebooks will only last for eight years. The web giant’s calculation problem appeared in a support document titled “What the Googlebook announcement means for your ChromeOS devices.” Googlebooks …
I seem to remember coming across a few embedded type distributions that allowed you to set them up in a "kiosk" mode, effectively running a copy of Firefox and little else. Alpine for example can be set up with effectively no pre-installed software beyond the basic desktop environment, and a copy of Firefox added.
Very lightweight and quite usable even on 15+ year old hardware although its not the friendliest to use if you don't have much experience with the terminal etc.
To be honest, though...its not likely the desktop or distribution that is the issue, more the bloat of modern web browsers and indeed the modern internet. If it struggles with an up-to-date desktop, it won't cope with modern web browsing well at all.
The weakest computer I own is a 18 year old Netbook with a single-core Atom processor, giving it performance akin to that of something like an early Pentium 4. It'll run a lightweight desktop environment like XFCE just fine, but modern Firefox or Chromium are both very heavy on such a low-power device. Anything beyond a basic website is very sluggish and awkward to both load and navigate.
Equally I wonder how good Google's support will be for some of the more niche hardware configurations out there on Chromebooks. The very low end ARM powered ones with tiny eMMC flash storage likely won't take to Googlebook OS (what a stupid name) well, assuming they can run it at all or the hardware support exists.
Isn't it the case that ChromeOS has its own graphical stack on top of a linux kernel and userland? So basically just the browser? I used neverware for a bit before Google bought them and yes it was sprightly on older kit. Suspend was hit and miss though. Only certain specific machines supported I recollect.
In a previous comment not long ago I mentioned the CrowView Note, NexDock, or Uperfect Lapdock which connect to phones and Pis.
The CrowView Note has ports which line up with a Pi 5, the only problem is the Pi hanging off the side when you use it. The other two lapdocks connect to the Pi with cables. If lapdock makers could find some way of sticking the last couple of generations of Pi inside the case then they'd be perfect and pick up where the Pi-top left off, which was discontinued and unfortunately also a bit too green and plasticky.
I have the Argon40 One Up, it does actually fulfil the portable Pi role very well. I just shut it down complete and start it up when I need it. It's very quick. Standby is a luxury that wasn't available for the first few years of portable PCs.
A 3rd party developer has created his own OS for it which simulates suspend/resume/hibernate. It's call Sway.
That may be, but standby is a luxury that everybody has had for decades now, so bringing them a computer and telling them they have to turn it off every time they want to stop using it for a while then wait for it to boot every time they want to use it again is going to convince many of them that they have better options. If you compound that weakness by lecturing them that they don't need it, they would probably assume that there will be more problems you're not going to admit.
A lot of things that were normal in the early days of computing no longer are. Few people would accept a laptop that didn't have turnkey multichannel sound or working WiFi, even though there was a time where you couldn't get those without expensive additional hardware and people then often chose to do without them. Now, they're the basics and things without them are enthusiast class at best, and non-enthusiasts will reject that hardware.
If they could be arsed to take it.
If Raspberry Pi could be arsed to make something suitable. The best they have on offer is the Pi 400/500/500+ range which all need mains power plus an additional monitor. That's not appealing outside computer labs, and all the risks Chromebooks were intended to mitigate raise their heads again.
There are some third-party options, but all expensive, and none come from the big players who got on-board with Chromebooks.
Raspberry Pi appear to have no interest in battery powered netbooks, laptops or tablets. Best you can do is cobble something together yourself.
> Raspberry Pi appear to have no interest in battery powered netbooks, laptops or tablets
Any reason they should? Even the 400/500 series are stepping away from their core (and.
not really convinced that they went the right way with the overpowered 5)
> Best you can do is cobble something together yourself
You mean, the best you can do is take a Pi and then add onto it whatever random assortment of extra components make it play the game you want it to, today? Heavens, how appalling.
"Any reason they should?"
I suppose that's for them to decide. The thread you're in, though, suggests a reason they should: to get a share of the education market, the area they were ostensibly founded to be in, which would allow them to succeed at their stated goals, both charitable from the Foundation (increasing availability of computers suitable for more advanced STEM education) and commercial from the manufacturing company (obtaining large new customers who can consistently buy new hardware). I'm not sure I care, as the things they'd probably want to do for that goal would be different from the things I'd be most interested in, but again, which if either of us they decide to please is a strategy decision for Raspberry Pi.
"You mean, the best you can do is take a Pi and then add onto it whatever random assortment of extra components make it play the game you want it to"
No, they mean that the best you can do is to try to work around the many reasons that Raspberry Pi probably doesn't want to build laptops. Power management is a serious problem with the Pi, which is an even bigger problem for trying to cobble together a laptop from one than the hardware is. Of course, obtaining the components needed to make a sort-of laptop from a Pi is not as simple or as functional as your rephrase suggests.
Yeah, Raspberry Pi Holdings are off in a completely different world - they're not even vaguely interested in you or me as customers. Much like how Nvidia aren't, SK Hynix, Micron aren't and Samsung aren't.
Supply-side economics is dead.
We're probably going to have to do general purpose compute for ourselves - though I haven't figured out how consumers are going to be able to build chip fabs yet: but I haven't given up either.
Yeah, you are so right.
Every company must be focused on supplying what *you* and I want.
I'm going to write a stiff letter, complaining that Cow and Gate don't cater to my tastes (have you tried it, it is all rather bland and the texture, no crunch at all).
>> they're not even vaguely interested in you or me as customers. Much like how Nvidia aren't, SK Hynix, Micron aren't and Samsung aren't.
Raspberry Pi Holdings is a great British technology company traded on the London Stock Exchange. Stop moaning. It's not there for your amusement.
> will still be in service come 2034.
That shoddily made, are they?
I mean, can understand school leavers not wanting to continue with the childish machines they had in the classroom, but that isn't the entire market for Chromebooks...
They aren't exactly built to the highest standards on the whole, some look a bit flashier than others but there is a distinct "all fur coat and no knickers" to many I've been "blessed" with the honour of looking at .....
Chromebooks aren't shoddy but if you give them to kids they're going to get beaten up. Laptops for kids should be ruggedized and/or cheap, preferably both. They don't need to be top of the range devices and when they get broken, as they do, it would be better they cost less to replace.
Again, are kids so much the majority of the market that "It’s hard to imagine many Chromebooks" still working?
> it would be better they cost less to replace
Have you seen the price of RAM? Is ChromeOS and GooglebookOS getting more memory efficient?
> if you give them to kids they're going to get beaten up.
Agreed they are more likely to have genuine accidents and will get scuffed in the bag, but beaten up? You know, I've still got delicate things, like my SLR cameras, from my childhood, (10 years old onwards) which are still in good nick*. Perhaps we were just taught to take better care of things when we asked to. Kids these days and all that.
* actually, it'll be the recent years of neglecting the film cameras, not exercising their moving parts and risking the foam packing deteriorating in the loft, which'll have done more damage
You probably cared a lot about that camera as a child and took good care of it. If you issue a computer to every child, you're going to find some who don't care about protecting it and don't treat it nicely. This might be a reason not to give every child a laptop*, but if it happens, I'd expect there are going to be a subset who treat it very negligently and cause damage that is difficult to imagine.
* In my childhood, I would expect my parents to allow me to have expensive things only once they trusted me to treat them with sufficient care and, if I violated that trust, to take things away. Therefore, I acted to gain and retain that trust. If a school starts with the theory that every student must have a computer so that they can be given tasks that require one, then they won't have any individual standards of trust to meet first and they probably have to repair or reissue machines to people who break them because their system depends on every student having one. I think that's a risky proposition.
To clarify that, it might be possible to hack a Chromebook. Or, for many models, none of the methods work and you have no options. It all depends on the hardware and firmware that happens to be on yours, and that's if it's AMD64. If it's ARM, which many are, it's almost guaranteed that you're going to be stuck. The site you name says the same thing:
Buying any Chromebook with the intention of running Windows or Linux is not a great idea. Many can't boot anything other than ChromeOS. Those that can boot Linux (or Windows) often have functional deficiencies — DO NOT EXPECT EVERYTHING TO WORK OUT OF THE BOX. Older models fare better compatibility-wise, but there are still lots of caveats, and it's generally not recommended to buy a Chromebook as a cheap Linux device.
[source]
Exactly this ^^^.
It may be possible, with varying degrees of buggering about, to get some Linux distro working, but absolutely no guarantees, so best to assume not, and what it ships with and whatever updates do get released; are, basically it.
I think it’s not too dissimilar to the old ‘hackintosh’ idea, get MacOS running on cheaper hardware. Except the sheer number of hoops you had to jump through, the time you expended on doing it, plus the ever-present possibility of the next update breaking the whole lot; factor all of that time and effort in and probably better just to have bought a Mac in the first place.
We did do our research. That's why I, at least, didn't buy a Chromebook. I saw the choice between hardware where I definitely can't replace Chrome OS without reverse engineering the boot system from scratch, hardware where I probably can but there's still annoying work to do, and hardware where installing the OS of my choice involves figuring out which key launches the boot menu, and I went with option 3. Of course, a large part of the problem is people who didn't do that research because they intended to run Chrome OS and will now have it taken away earlier, people who didn't know that that was research worth doing, or people who didn't know how to do that work, all of whom might be stuck and might call on people like us to help. You're not backing up your original claim very well.
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