Longtime Windows & Mac User Tries a Chromebook
Hello Readers,
A friend and I were recently in the local Best Buy and I was looking around I found a Chromebook for the right price so I bought it I was always intrigued by the idea of a Chromebook so I decided to go ahead and pick it up to replace my MacBook Air (A secondary laptop with a dying SSD that’s job is to live next to my bed for the more basic tasks) My Primary laptop is a 2016 MacBook Pro and my primary desktop is a Machine I built myself back in 2015. I have used Linux but wasn’t the best with it as it can be a bit tricky to learn the distro I have used are
Ubuntu
Linux Mint
Zorin
Raspian
Xubuntu
Debian
Arch Linux
And probably many more
I have used never wares cloud ready it was great to speed up my aging acer netbook however I didn’t really use it much due to the limited amount of things that operating system had and IMO a cheap tablet could do more for me than this because literally everything except the file browser was run via chrome. And that doesn’t work for me. So what would make me want to go out and spend hard earned money on a Chromebook when it doesn’t do much for me. While I didn’t use chrome books very often I have been keeping tabs on them… See what I did there… I would do research on the project and I was visiting some cousins who ended up getting chrome books for Christmas and one of them had the play store and that seemed really good idea. It was now equal to and android tablet and I have seen plenty of videos of how to get a Linux VM or install windows outright on a Chromebook but that wasn’t the kind of solution I was looking for that was until Google Project Crostini which has a Debian VM tied directly into the Chrome OS this was something special so now we have cheap laptop with the a lightweight form of Linux with the large app support of android this is what I have been looking for finally. So when the opportunity came up and the price was right I jumped on it.
The Chromebook I bought is an
Asus C202SA
The laptop features
11.6” 1366×768 Display
An Intel Celeron N3060 @ 1.60 Ghz Dual Core
2GB Of Ram
16 GB Of Storage (eMMC)
Not the most powerful system and something that would behave very slowly on a Windows, Mac or even certain distributions of Linux. But appears to be running fine as configured with the odd hiccup here and there.
But you aren’t here for a Hardware review you’re here for a Software review something that is harder to find than you may think even on Youtube.
So that is why I’m here to help going into this
My first Impressions were positive it booted up quickly had a brain dead simple setup and has a clean interface with a very easy to learn layout it is like a mix between Windows on the Left, Mac OS in the middle, and Linux on the right. And that is a strong choice thanks to not knowing what system people come from they can quickly become comfortable with this
Focusing on the compatibility layers I notice the fact that the operating system is strange while it does have linux doesn’t do the best job talking to Chrome OS like I was working on a photo with GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) so I open chrome find the photo I want I try to copy it paste it in GIMP and it doesn’t work probably because its running a VM so when you take this out of beta google please give a universal clipboard or something similar to the logitech MX Mice however there are ways around this but they involve a lot more work. The android integration is a lot better likely because google has a lot more control over that system as opposed to the debian based system. There has also been a few bugs with the system like certain app on the android system crashing or certain functions not working as intended but it’s better than not having them at all and it has indeed made the chromebook more viable honestly this laptop can work better with facebook messenger thanks to a dedicated app than any mac or windows computer I own and I personally love the fact i can respond to a notification outside of the app. Personally they should re-add the Beta Tag to android apps as its not perfect yet but google has shown which are more suited than others. Thankfully. I am now starting to see Google’s Vision I wouldn’t say that i’m ready to switch to Chrome OS it just isn’t suited for that yet as the functionally isn’t there yet it’s getting there but its not there yet. I can really only recommend this to younger kids, People that want a small secondary device or people like a certain grandparent I’m thinking of who doesn’t use their computer for more than Microsoft Word and of course Chrome. The chromebook is not a Bad computer. It’s just not a finished computer we have come a long way from the CR38 Prototype google showed off years back but this is still not a device I would use to replace my MacBook or even my iPad for the tasks it does for me but I will keep it and use it as a laptop next to my bed something I use to google the odd question or to send a message to my buddy and of course to do what I’m doing now this review and all accompanying media was created on this chromebook
