When I was a kid, they had a special room in the school for kids like me, who wanted to learn about computers. But then suddenly, poof! Out goes the computer lab, and in comes these things. Google's partners have sold 100 million Chromebooks in the last three years. A hundred million! Though, it kind of makes sense when you consider how many of these devices are purchased by schools, or by parents who were forced to buy them by schools. But it may not just be schools in the future. Come think of
it, with that many of them out there, there may be one in your house right now, and you better get used to it. Because Google has made their Linux-based OS so polished over the years, that these students are growing up with an experience that may just be good enough for them to not think of this as a Chromebook, but just as their laptop. Could 2020-something finally be the year of the Linux desktop? But dressed in a Chrome costume? I believe it will, which is probably horrifying to just about e
veryone. So, let me explain, after a quick word from our sponsor. Build Redux! They build fully customizable gaming PCs, suitable for any budget. Pick your favorite games and see how they perform using their online PC builder. It's simple! Head to the link below and create your new rig today. Chromebooks were originally launched with miserable specs. I mean, even iPhones had more storage space. Not to mention useful apps you might want to fill it with. And given their limited functionality, not
to mention their short commitment to software updates, compared to a Windows or a macOS machine, it's no wonder that people saw the first Chromebooks for what they were. Underpowered junk. But Google's been playing a long game. Something that Softpedia recognized way back in 2015 when they said, Microsoft is engaged in a silent war and is losing. Just four years after being introduced, Chromebooks were slowly eating up market share. Not at home, but in schools. Which, I mean, kind of makes sense
. Most students, especially below the college level, only really need email, a web browser, and the Google productivity suite. And getting the schools on board was easy due to the cost. The cheapest iMac, which is what many schools used to have in their computer labs, is over $1,200 now. So, let me see. I can have 30 of these, and they don't even move. Or I can have 150 of these. Tough call. Google also helped the schools manage these enormous fleets of machines by investing heavily in administr
ative tools for the Google workspace environment. Account management, shared access to files and storage, support for group collaboration. These have all made it easy to adopt the Google ecosystem. And that's even ignoring the general ease of use and convenient cloud synchronization. So, in this way, Google's kind of the pusher, giving kids their first hit, hooking them while they're young. If you think about it, do you know anyone who buys an iPhone just because they already have an iPhone and
they just need a new one? Familiarity is king. But come on, Linus! I can hear you saying, I mean, how does any of that help with this supposed long game if Chromebooks are still underpowered e-waste? Well, that's the thing. Google recognized that problem, and this is the fix. Chromebook Plus promises a new minimum standard for Chromebook devices, delivering improved performance, powerful included software, and longer support, up to 10 years, all while targeting a $400 starting price. This unit f
rom Acer is right around that baseline of Chromebook Plus. It has a 1080p 15-inch display, a Core i3 12th Gen processor, 8 gigs of DDR5 RAM, and 128 gigs of storage. And we saw this thing for as cheap as $270 at Best Buy. Now, there are entry-level Windows machines around that same price, or in some cases, even lower. But they make awful compromises on everything from performance to display, while also running a heavier operating system. And by the time you're looking at something running Window
s with a 1080p display, you could be paying $50 to $100 more for that Windows license. Well, you know what's not heavy and has no license fee? Linux, which has always been the beating heart of Chrome OS. Just now, it's a lot easier to unleash. These days, it is literally one checkbox to enable a Linux terminal and to start downloading Linux-native software, like Blender. Just a simple command, and Blender's installed. Classroom takes about 30 minutes to run, with BMW sitting at around 15 minutes
. So, all right, it's not the fastest thing in the world. But guys, if this was a Windows machine at this price and these specs, you'd be very impressed. For about $250, this is very usable for day-to-day tasks. And in a pinch, as we've shown, you can even do some light, real work on it. And it's not just Blender. Kdenlive is a video editor that works on here, as well as Audacity, which is a powerful open-source audio capture and editing program. The list of native Linux applications really is l
ong and continues to grow with the help of the open-source community and, of course, some corporate players who have played a role as well, with a huge driving force behind the recent gaming renaissance on Linux being Valve, who has dumped significant resources into the Proton compatibility layer, allowing tons of non-native Windows games to be played on Linux. And, as of quite recently, as soon as this loading bar ever goes away, even Chrome OS. Time for some distractions from my studies. Let's
give it a little restart. Look, I didn't say it was fast. This is very slow with screen capture running. This could be a problem. I will try. Yeah, you won't be kick-starting your Twitch streaming career with this setup, I'm afraid. Ooh. Yeah. I'm gonna stop screen recording. All right. Yeah, this'll work. Oh. Okay. Yeah, I think it's basically just when it needs to animate quite literally anything, it struggles. Tried plugging it in. No improvement. I don't think it's a performance issue. I th
ink it's more of a Proton translation layer issue. Let's try something that I know runs a little better. Holo Knight. All right, this is more like it. This is great. This is perfectly playable. Let's try a different game. This is running great, too. Look, obviously, you're not gonna be playing AAA games, but within the confines of what the hardware can handle, you can use ProtonDB to show what games are natively supported, you can use Steam Link to remote into a different computer, or a cloud-ba
sed gaming service. It's all pretty cool, right? I mean, when I was a kid, I would have loved to be able to play even simple games and have an affordable device that I could call my own. And even the camera is reasonably decent, so is the microphone, and I don't even have anything too negative to say about the keyboard, considering the price. Now, you might still think that these devices are just e-waste, and I get it. It's not like I'm gonna be switching to Chrome OS as my daily driver anytime
soon. But how many people do you know who basically use their computer to call Nan on the weekends or pull up a recipe for baking? You might not agree with me about this, but guys, mark my words. Acceptance for cloud applications, even heavy ones like 3D modeling, animation tools, and video editing, is at an all-time high, and Chrome OS will work its way into the market as a daily driver operating system for many people after they leave school and join the workplace, where the onboarding process
could be as simple as adding their work account to their Chromebook that they already own. It might not be this year, and it might not be next year, but I see you, Google. And I'm kind of into it if it means that the year of the Linux desktop can finally move beyond meme status. What will never move beyond meme status is this segue to our sponsor. Red Magic. They recently released their new flagship gaming phone, the 9 Pro, specifically engineered to strike fear into the hearts of the enemy tea
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eck out the one where I went and bought my son a Chromebook, or excuse me, a laptop. Chrome-based folding device? What's the term we're using for these? Either way, they've definitely improved since then, and I see that trajectory continuing.
Comments
4:18 my PTSD thought it was going to an ad
Picked up a cheap Chromebook that i honestly didn't need and thought i would use it for a few days and then it would get locked away and gather dust. I was so wrong. Its not a daily driver but it just sits on the coffee table and as soon as its needed its up and running in 5 seconds. The battery lasts longer than i can keep my eyes open in a day. Leave it on, no worries as soon as the screen goes to sleep it uses virtually zero power. It has a bright 1080p IPS panel and is plenty fast enough. Yes they keyboard isn't the best and neither is the trackpad and its all cheap plastic, but it cost £80 ($100). It also will get updates until 2030.
You should have mentioned one of the biggest reasons which is that most schools had Office licensing and it was getting more and more expensive. So the logical step was the free Google workspace which existed for years and is still available to most edu's. Moving to Google cut down significantly on not just OS licensing but also word processing, spreadsheets, email, and presentation software's. Add in the Google forms and other education based software's that made assigning homework and in class work super easy and it was an amazing offering for an insanely low price for schools.
My mother-in-law is in her 70s and ALWAYS had issue with the dirt cheap Windows laptops she would get. A few years ago we bought her a 17" Chromebook (for the bigger screen) and it's been problem-free for her. Email, Facebook, some of the online games she plays all run just fine. And it was about $350. Chromebooks ARE the computer that most people actually need. The newer ones with upgradeable RAM, proper NVMe SSDs (also upgradeable), and i3/i5 processors shoud perform quite well for years to come. Especially compared to the absolute DOGS of eMMC cards they have been saddled with. Never get those. Ever.
I had a chromebook in school and without knowing better I got one for college (because they were cheap). I made it work and 4 years later I’m still using it.
Installed latest flexOS on my panasonic Letsnote I picked up for 80 bucks here in Japan, and its amazing. Everything works perfectly out of the box too. Had put Windows 11 on it via registry hack, but it ran like a dog, even with 8GB of memory. This thing absolutely flies now.
My school gives everyone a Chromebook for general school stuff but we still have a computer lab full of dell optiplex PCs for specific computer related courses.
When most people use laptops only as "phone with keyboard and bigger screen" Chromebooks do really make sense. On the other hand a similar i3 pc laptop can be had for just $50 more which makes sense as well in many cases.
I am on my third chromebook. The first one was an original Cr-48 courtesy of Google itself. Most recent one is an Asus C302C. I have used thhem mostly as travel machines. Main disadvantage was the five year end of life limitation, but the new Chromebook Plus line with ten years of support has eliminated that issue. May the chromebook live long and productive!
I bought a cheap ARM Chromebook to experiment with Kali Linux. Unfortunately, Kali wasn’t optimized for that ARM chip and it ran dog slow so I reinstalled ChromeOS and used it for web browsing, Gmail, Google Office apps (mostly spreadsheets and word processing), and watching YouTube videos. It had great battery life and I didn’t have the usual computer anxiety baggage: instability, security, patching, where my files were, backups, etc. I did miss having a caps lock key (seriously, wtf? I remapped the Search key to caps lock) but other than that, it was a wonderful business machine! 😊
I both work with children who use chromebooks and use a pixelbook myself (in addition to a windows desktop). I'm certainly in a bit of a niche, but between my work using primarily online productivity tools and the ability to run linux/android apps, chromeOS is absolutely fine. Anything computationally intensive is done on my main PC anyways, so the weaker specs don't really factor into my use case. As for students, the one gripe I have is that those administrative tools mean that student usage is heavily locked down. How you want your child/student to use their chromebook is a matter of personal opinion, but I'll offer one concern: the batch of students growing up with chromeOS is not going to develop the same tech skills that many previous generations were able to. I have never seen a student chromebook that enabled linux, and many have harsh restrictions on app downloads. The tech skills that I have today started from mucking around on school computers and that option just isn't available for most current students.
The shift towards Chromebooks is more and more apparent. The strides Google has made with its OS over the years are truly commendable. And with the increasingly acceptable cloud applications, a substantial market acceptance can be expected in the upcoming years.
Back in 2018 my grandmother asked with help because she needed a computer for email and checking for baking / knitting stuff, I got her a chromebook. It's easy to set up all you need is a Google account, a thing basically every adult has with their email, the UI is perfectly simple for someone who hasn't used a computer before, and you don't need a very powerful computer to browse the internet. As far as I know, it's still going strong, and I'm planning to buy her a new chromebook at some point this year because nothing beats that price.
During the times of COVID-19, I frequently visited libraries. I owned a 17-inch Asus laptop that weighed over 3 kilograms with the adapter, and its battery lasted only 2 hours. Naturally, it was often difficult to find an available charging point in libraries, cafes, etc. Consequently, I contemplated purchasing a new laptop with a battery life of 8-10 hours at a reasonable price point. However, they were quite expensive, typically costing upwards of 800 euros. That's when I came across the Acer 314 Chromebook, priced at 250 euros at the time and promising an 8-hour battery life. As a computer engineering student, I decided to give it a try. It was used primarily for watching recorded lectures and programming. The Chromebook even featured a terminal for use. So I bought it and was thoroughly impressed. The battery consistently lasted more than 8 hours, and coding with "vim" in the terminal was a game-changer. Also, when I needed to charge it, I didn't bring the Chromebook charger; instead, I used a 25W Samsung fast charger, which worked quite well. I have since passed on my Chromebook to my brother, who is a teacher, and he is perfectly happy with it. So, indeed, Chromebooks are excellent products.
I work in IT support and in the past couple of years a couple of nationwide retailers we support have transitioned to Chromebook boxes (not laptops). If some folks are learning to use Chromebooks at school, arguably a smaller but growing number are also getting exposure at work.
We use this at work for "grab and go" devices for those who forget their macbook or if your device is being repaired etc. I also bought an older one for my mother from work as it was being replaced with newer ones. For her basic home needs its perfect, just needs google docs/sheets, browsing etc and all her android phone accounts etc were already there.
I used to have a Chromebook in the early days of ChromeOS that I used for school and I loved it. I had a desktop PC at home for gaming and other tinkering and could take the chromebook with me. It may not be ideal for heavy users that need a versatile device but I would recommend it for basically anyone else. Especially older people and students
I own 2 chromebooks myself, my wife has one, my daughter has two and my desktop is a dual screen beautiful little chromebox that is just so insanely fast that nothing I throw at it slows it down. My office at work I've moved everything over to chrome os flex and now we are totally windows free. For entertainment I have a nice amd rig in the livingroom that runs chimeraos for steam. Being windows free is the best.
7:12 I showed my daughter this image of Linus and his HS pic, and she said "bro looks the same" 😂
Five Chromebooks in our house right now - some old, some newer. All still work great, although a couple of them are pretty dated. I take my HP 14" 2 in 1 Chromebook Plus with me on the road. PS: One Windows 11 Desktop PC (mine) and one Macbook Pro (recent college grad Daughter's).