Going from complaining about Apple not having enough polish in the fine details of their UI to suggesting we all switch to Chromebooks is so completely inconsistent that there must be other motivations.
In one post they're complaining about things like Apple having the search bar in different locations in different apps, and in the next post they're seriously trying to tell us that a laptop that requires modifying the software and running shell commands copied from the internet so you can run a text editor to change settings and drivers is the solution? They dropped a note about how they haven't actually tried development on the chromebook at the end but say they assume it would be okay. For someone telling us to switch to Chromebooks, they haven't even finished doing their own homework
Linking to an SEO spam website called technical.city for performance comparisons is another clue that this choice was driven by something else first and the reasoning was backfilled. The new MediaTek part is fast, but there's more to laptop performance than a single bar chart from a site citing ancient benchmarks like PassMark.
I can't read this as anything other than an attempt to make a contrarian choice and then present it as the superior alternative.
"After my last blog post I received tons and tons of emails from people mentioning that they switched to X or Y because of Liquid Glass, and much like them, I switched away from the Apple ecosystem thanks to these ongoing issues as well."
Then within 2 sentences: "So this blog post is about my painful journey trying to find a nice piece of hardware that works and feels just as good as Apple's hardware as a web developer."
A Chromebook gets you the elegant UI, touchpad gestures, slim vertically integrated system architecture and the reliable sleep mode of a MacBook without Liquid Glass.
Plus Chromebooks have the better keyboard layout IMHO.
It's possible that your own opinions are coloring this perspective. As a Linux user, if you gave me the choice between switching back to macOS or dailying ChromeOS instead, it's objectively (sadly) true that the ChromeOS machine would do a better job handling my daily tasks. Going back to macOS would require me to keep multiple desktop machines around for gaming, filesystem manipulation and native Linux containers. ChromeOS would be viable for all of those.
> You can technically game on some Chromebooks, but come on.
I just want the Steam edition of Dwarf Fortress, really =)
> If you were trying to do native Linux development on a Chromebook you'd be going through more obstacles.
Not really. Crostini has been supported for years, and it uses less resources than macOS containers while supporting normal filesystems instead of virtualizing it on APFS like Docker does.
According to their GitHub, this should solve the issues you mentioned with Linux development on macOS. Note: I have not used it myself as I find macOS+Brew sufficient for my tasks.
Can I put Ubuntu on this and it works exactly the same as on any other ARM machine? Supposedly yes https://docs.getutm.app/guides/ubuntu/ but have you actually done it?
Honestly this and Crostini both look like there are too many caveats. I'd just SSH into an Rpi for anything that won't natively run in macOS. Would not even deal with Chromebook.
P.S. I +1'd bigyabai's comment only to save it from being marked dead; why is someone downvoting that??
What do you mean by open and closed? ChromeOS is based on ChromiumOS, which is open source. I guess macOS is based on Darwin technically, but the ratio of open source to proprietary is much higher for ChromeOS than macOS, no?
What is it that you want to install on ChromeOS that you are unable to? All of the usual Linux and open-source stuff works fine on the built-in Linux environment on it. Possibly even a little better than MacOS in some cases, since you don't need to worry about Apple app signing. There's not literally nothing you can't do, but the list is a lot shorter than most people think, especially those who haven't really tried ChromeOS in a decade and think they're all a glorified web browser on $200 hardware.
ChromeOS is the absolute last desktop operating system I would choose to use for myself. Linux, macOS, and Windows would have to be completely dead and buried before I would switch, and at that point I might just consider abandoning tech altogether and joining an Amish commune or something.
I don't really get what the problem with MacOS is. It never gets in my way, so why would I switch? Yes, I found Liquid Glass ugly and two days later I completely forgot about it.
I went the other way: from a Pixelbook to a Macbook Air. I mostly do SW development in the CLI, so the Linux subsystem on the chromebook was fine, as is macports/homebrew/etc. on the mac. I would still be using the Pixelbook if I could have replaced its battery. The low-end Air had good price-performance tradeoff, and the Neo would probably be today's choice.
I am in a similar boat. I already have Mac Mini M4 and don't do any fancy development stuff, especially not in my free time. But can't for the sake of me decide if I should go with Air M4 to match the specs, or just go full lightweight and get Neo.
Not even a Mac user and have been legitimately considering a move like this.
My desktop and Thinkpad run Gentoo. A NAS I have at home is the build host. I am a business software consultant, and a common thread in all of my interactions is: I need to be prepared. If I'm fiddling with "hang on my mic doesn't work" or "i need to reboot", I look silly.
An onsite visit might be in an executive board room, or a closet in the back of a warehouse with a TV from 2007 and a VGA connector.
If I need software installed quick, like Zoom or something, Flatpak gets me 95% there. Yes, I could use Ubuntu or something normal, but I like portage and long for the day I can use FreeBSD seriously on the desktop.
So enter Chromebooks, which come with portage, can use Flatpak, and the OS is basically just a web browser. Plus, I don't have to wrestle with SELinux, or any of the other nitty gritty stuff that gets in the way of real work™. It's either a PWA or an Android app, and it just works.
No. It's all native Arm. In the UTM app, when creating a new VM, there's an option to say it's going to be "Linux" (generically at that point), which exposes a checkbox which allows you to specify use of Apple Silicon hypervisor.framework, and specifically _not_ x86 emulation.
I use hypervisor.framework, never use x86 emulation, and the result is great. Tested with both Fedora for ARM and Arch for ARM (perhaps CachyOS's bundling of Arch works there, but i did it lower level because i'm an old nerd).
Apple portable hardware is unparalleled. Linux is what runs the internet.
For now, my old gaming PC runs as a Linux server hosting all my dev services and home lab projects and my MacBook is where I work with them and build apps that consume them.
It would be nice to have the server setup mirrored on a laptop I could take places with me.
I don't know why the author plays down the versatility of Chromebooks/ChromeOS so much. You can install the Linux Dev VM with 5 clicks in the settings. You get a fully featured Debian VM with nested virtualization support and seamless Wayland, VirGL and USB passtrough.
I really enjoy ChromeOS, though I'm worried a lot of its simplicity will go away as Google transitions to Android-based laptops. My wife and I use an Asus Chromebook Flip as a kitchen/living room computer that we don't need to think about. No software updates, it just surfs the web and we can flip it into tablet mode if we want to.
Same, but they are a bit expensive. I assume if TFA put himself through the pain of a Chromebook in the first place, it’s because cost was a significant factor.
If I could choose only 1 criterium to select a laptop, it's the quality of the trackpad. So far, I haven't tried anything that comes close to a Macbook.
*criterion. criterium is not even a typo, it’s an actual word but it doesn’t mean what you think it means, unless you’re planning to use your laptop while bicycling.
I actually tried this last year and the show stopper was Citrix. The version for Chromebooks is some abomination that hasn't been kept recent and so fails validation with my employer's Citrix infra.
> - If you rely on / heavily use AI tools, you can easily use Claude's Web App etc so that's super cool but also things like Jan also exist for Linux and I haven't tried, but you can use that as well for a more native experience.
Sure, Claude Web App is an adequate replacement to full-fledged Claude Code, and then there is also something that I didn't bother to try but maybe you can try it after you bought a new laptop. What the hell.
My initial guess was that migrating to a non-MacOS machine precludes the freedom to view the original Futura typeface on one's personal website. "The Future" must be some shoddy free alternative.
Except "The Future" is a paid typeface inspired by Futura and designed by the Klim Type Foundry. [0] The odd lowercase "h" is an alternative glyph probably meant for display sizes. [1] In addition to this for some reason the author is using the Light weight font for body text instead of Regular weight...
I'm relatively uniquely qualified to weigh in here... I've been linux-native for decades now on my home desktops (debian), and the last time I used windows for work was ~2005-ish with work Mac laptops, and "disposable" chromebooks at home for personal use + travel.
1) It started with Crouton (open source, "let's get access to the underlying linux system"), and worked pretty well. IIRC you had to switch to "dev mode" to get access to it.
2) Crostini and all the layer-cake isolation is wildly impressive! ...it's more VM-based with suuuper adjudicated interaction boundaries between `chromeos` and the underlying linux vm.
3) I've recently (intentionally) switched to their new "Baguette" beta VM/Container (you can talk to google AI mode about it, but general access docs and links are fairly sparse: "...a ChromeOS architectural shift (arriving around v142-146) that enables containerless Linux Virtual Machines, running directly via KVM instead of LXD. It removes the middle container layer for increased efficiency and flexibility, allowing for advanced features like direct PCI passthrough, while providing improved storage management compared to legacy Crostini."
4) I think over the last ~15 years I've gone from 4gb => 8gb => 16gb (just recently) and sticking with "premium-ish" dev-centric laptops (mostly: linux, git, web dev, inkscape, random hacking, etc). Currently the Acer Spin 714, previously Samsung XE930QCA... both "tablet adjacent" with full fliparound or "tent style" for watching a movie or doodling with styluses.
Bang-for-Buck, I was able to get the Spin714 for ~$300 @ 16gb ram (used-ish, off ebay) which is a STEAL, and similar story for the Samsung one. They're definitely very capable machines, and treating them as "dumb terminals with a VM I can pop open and scp files to a remote host or git push" is fantastic!
HOWEVER: beware! Google w/ Baguette is stupidly complicated on how to open a port on the device itself for other computers to be able to access servers on the local device. I argued with the google AI for like an hour trying to figure out the best way to allow `git pull my-chromebook.localdomain:./Git/some-repo` and eventually had to settle on a raw `ssh` reverse proxy pipe where I was pulling from `my-other-machine.localdomain:localhost:2222:./Git/some-repo` which was forwarded back (over SSH) to the chromebook itself.
It used to be that you could rationally: `python -m http`, open an "enable port forwarding" thingy in the terminal settings and be able to connect to the service w/o much ceremony. Nowadays they're effectively nanny-ifying the OS and it's getting much harder to do the same thing (removing visible UI for port forwarding, needing hidden settings deep links or `chrome://flags` stuff to be able to access a server/service RUNNING ON YOUR OWN MACHINE FROM WITHIN YOUR OWN NETWORK). Supposedly the cool kids are using tailscale or whatever, but it's literally `localhost<->localhost` and I don't want to have to set up a VPN or whatever to make that work, I just want to doodle on local web services in a VM on a machine that can get stolen and not end up losing all my personal/private files.
Also, ask google AI mode: "when is google phasing out chromebook and chromeos and presumably near-native linux support on their machines?" => """Court documents and executive statements reveal a plan to retire the existing ChromeOS software stack by 2034. This legacy system is expected to be replaced by a unified platform internally codenamed "Project Aluminium," which migrates ChromeOS fully onto the Android tech stack."""
...so ~8 more years of `chromeos`/`linux` and then it'll no longer be the year of linux on the desktop!
Yes, they can be very comfortable and very capable machines, but they're losing a bit of their central spirit and developer-friendliness over time.
The idea that I could do the things I do regularly on a Chromebook is laughable in the extreme, and I'm not even that much of a crazy power user. No thanks.
In one post they're complaining about things like Apple having the search bar in different locations in different apps, and in the next post they're seriously trying to tell us that a laptop that requires modifying the software and running shell commands copied from the internet so you can run a text editor to change settings and drivers is the solution? They dropped a note about how they haven't actually tried development on the chromebook at the end but say they assume it would be okay. For someone telling us to switch to Chromebooks, they haven't even finished doing their own homework
Linking to an SEO spam website called technical.city for performance comparisons is another clue that this choice was driven by something else first and the reasoning was backfilled. The new MediaTek part is fast, but there's more to laptop performance than a single bar chart from a site citing ancient benchmarks like PassMark.
I can't read this as anything other than an attempt to make a contrarian choice and then present it as the superior alternative.
Then within 2 sentences: "So this blog post is about my painful journey trying to find a nice piece of hardware that works and feels just as good as Apple's hardware as a web developer."
So yeah I really don't get the motivation
Plus Chromebooks have the better keyboard layout IMHO.
> You can technically game on some Chromebooks, but come on.
I just want the Steam edition of Dwarf Fortress, really =)
> If you were trying to do native Linux development on a Chromebook you'd be going through more obstacles.
Not really. Crostini has been supported for years, and it uses less resources than macOS containers while supporting normal filesystems instead of virtualizing it on APFS like Docker does.
According to their GitHub, this should solve the issues you mentioned with Linux development on macOS. Note: I have not used it myself as I find macOS+Brew sufficient for my tasks.
https://github.com/apple/container
Honestly this and Crostini both look like there are too many caveats. I'd just SSH into an Rpi for anything that won't natively run in macOS. Would not even deal with Chromebook.
P.S. I +1'd bigyabai's comment only to save it from being marked dead; why is someone downvoting that??
What concrete points makes you put macos as more open ?
I don't think that's entirely true. For instance, ChromeOS supports Mesa, which macOS has spent the past decade pretending doesn't exist.
As a Mac user I was pleasantly surprised when I switched to a arch Linux based distribution.
are you suggesting they are a bot? a lenovo employee?
just say what you mean instead of being cryptic about it
My desktop and Thinkpad run Gentoo. A NAS I have at home is the build host. I am a business software consultant, and a common thread in all of my interactions is: I need to be prepared. If I'm fiddling with "hang on my mic doesn't work" or "i need to reboot", I look silly.
An onsite visit might be in an executive board room, or a closet in the back of a warehouse with a TV from 2007 and a VGA connector.
If I need software installed quick, like Zoom or something, Flatpak gets me 95% there. Yes, I could use Ubuntu or something normal, but I like portage and long for the day I can use FreeBSD seriously on the desktop.
So enter Chromebooks, which come with portage, can use Flatpak, and the OS is basically just a web browser. Plus, I don't have to wrestle with SELinux, or any of the other nitty gritty stuff that gets in the way of real work™. It's either a PWA or an Android app, and it just works.
it works fantastic magic. i had dual booted Asahi for a year or so, but really for no good reason once i realized UTM existed.
I use hypervisor.framework, never use x86 emulation, and the result is great. Tested with both Fedora for ARM and Arch for ARM (perhaps CachyOS's bundling of Arch works there, but i did it lower level because i'm an old nerd).
For now, my old gaming PC runs as a Linux server hosting all my dev services and home lab projects and my MacBook is where I work with them and build apps that consume them.
It would be nice to have the server setup mirrored on a laptop I could take places with me.
Might make sense if the Chromebook can be degoogled and set up with a clean Linux distro. Barring that, a regular laptop with Linux may be an option.
The real question is if you have enough patience to power through making it work.
Sure, Claude Web App is an adequate replacement to full-fledged Claude Code, and then there is also something that I didn't bother to try but maybe you can try it after you bought a new laptop. What the hell.
So, what's the point of the article?
Except "The Future" is a paid typeface inspired by Futura and designed by the Klim Type Foundry. [0] The odd lowercase "h" is an alternative glyph probably meant for display sizes. [1] In addition to this for some reason the author is using the Light weight font for body text instead of Regular weight...
[0]: I love Söhne – https://klim.co.nz/blog/soehne-design-information/
[1]: https://klim.co.nz/fonts/the-future/#open-type/ss06/example
1) It started with Crouton (open source, "let's get access to the underlying linux system"), and worked pretty well. IIRC you had to switch to "dev mode" to get access to it.
2) Crostini and all the layer-cake isolation is wildly impressive! ...it's more VM-based with suuuper adjudicated interaction boundaries between `chromeos` and the underlying linux vm.
Arch overview: https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-library/guide...
Seneschal (file management/isolation): https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform2/+/HEA...
Sommelier (gui passthrough/punch-through): https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform2/+/HEA...
3) I've recently (intentionally) switched to their new "Baguette" beta VM/Container (you can talk to google AI mode about it, but general access docs and links are fairly sparse: "...a ChromeOS architectural shift (arriving around v142-146) that enables containerless Linux Virtual Machines, running directly via KVM instead of LXD. It removes the middle container layer for increased efficiency and flexibility, allowing for advanced features like direct PCI passthrough, while providing improved storage management compared to legacy Crostini."
4) I think over the last ~15 years I've gone from 4gb => 8gb => 16gb (just recently) and sticking with "premium-ish" dev-centric laptops (mostly: linux, git, web dev, inkscape, random hacking, etc). Currently the Acer Spin 714, previously Samsung XE930QCA... both "tablet adjacent" with full fliparound or "tent style" for watching a movie or doodling with styluses.
Bang-for-Buck, I was able to get the Spin714 for ~$300 @ 16gb ram (used-ish, off ebay) which is a STEAL, and similar story for the Samsung one. They're definitely very capable machines, and treating them as "dumb terminals with a VM I can pop open and scp files to a remote host or git push" is fantastic!
HOWEVER: beware! Google w/ Baguette is stupidly complicated on how to open a port on the device itself for other computers to be able to access servers on the local device. I argued with the google AI for like an hour trying to figure out the best way to allow `git pull my-chromebook.localdomain:./Git/some-repo` and eventually had to settle on a raw `ssh` reverse proxy pipe where I was pulling from `my-other-machine.localdomain:localhost:2222:./Git/some-repo` which was forwarded back (over SSH) to the chromebook itself.
It used to be that you could rationally: `python -m http`, open an "enable port forwarding" thingy in the terminal settings and be able to connect to the service w/o much ceremony. Nowadays they're effectively nanny-ifying the OS and it's getting much harder to do the same thing (removing visible UI for port forwarding, needing hidden settings deep links or `chrome://flags` stuff to be able to access a server/service RUNNING ON YOUR OWN MACHINE FROM WITHIN YOUR OWN NETWORK). Supposedly the cool kids are using tailscale or whatever, but it's literally `localhost<->localhost` and I don't want to have to set up a VPN or whatever to make that work, I just want to doodle on local web services in a VM on a machine that can get stolen and not end up losing all my personal/private files.
Also, ask google AI mode: "when is google phasing out chromebook and chromeos and presumably near-native linux support on their machines?" => """Court documents and executive statements reveal a plan to retire the existing ChromeOS software stack by 2034. This legacy system is expected to be replaced by a unified platform internally codenamed "Project Aluminium," which migrates ChromeOS fully onto the Android tech stack."""
...so ~8 more years of `chromeos`/`linux` and then it'll no longer be the year of linux on the desktop!
Yes, they can be very comfortable and very capable machines, but they're losing a bit of their central spirit and developer-friendliness over time.
No.