I was FORCED to buy a Chromebook….

[James]

Take a look at the available Chromebooks below:

Amazon: https://geni.us/jj8ruZ

Best Buy: https://geni.us/BF9Jru

Newegg: https://geni.us/OCdFABC

 

My son needs a Chromebook for school so I began my search to find the best bang for the buck Chromebook...and of course, we tried to game on it.

 

 

[kumicota]

Linus, you probably didn't knew but chrome OS is based on gentoo and the bootloader of all chromebooks are based on coreboot, so you can flash on it a unlocked bios and then boot/install windows or linux on it

[Somerandomtechyboi]

Wouldnt chromium os also work? Just buy a cheap laptop and change the os to chromium os, for all i know its the same thing except chrome os is for chromebooks only

[OscuroMeteoro]

Hey James, I don't know if you will be reading this, or someone on the team, but the sponsor links are not correct, you have Freshbooks and cablemod and on the video, you have Cablemod and Wealthfront 
Loved the idea of having a guide with some "IRL" reactions to the display of the chromebooks inside the store 

[Zodiark1593]

Kind of slightly off topic, but there was a time (in college) I turned in my written homework as .pdf files, because between the textbooks and tuition, and not having a job yet (graduated just in time for the recession), forking out for Office 2007 was entirely out of the question. Not that my teachers were happy, but at least all the school computers had Adobe Acrobat. 
 

Still never played a dime for Office. Used OpenOffice a lot in school, and now LibreOffice, which has vastly improved in file compatibility in the past decade. 
 

While Chrome isn’t ideal, it seems to be a step in the right direction. 
 

Also, when are we getting a Stardew Valley stream? I’d totally watch that. 

[williamcll]

There seems to be a lack of middle ground: It's either you go chrome or you go mac.

[UsersInpoos]

Im still unsure why he NEEDS a chromebook, I think I missed something in the video

[UsersInpoos]

8 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Kind of slightly off topic, but there was a time (in college) I turned in my written homework as .pdf files, because between the textbooks and tuition, and not having a job yet (graduated just in time for the recession), forking out for Office 2007 was entirely out of the question. Not that my teachers were happy, but at least all the school computers had Adobe Acrobat. 
 

Still never played a dime for Office. Used OpenOffice a lot in school, and now LibreOffice, which has vastly improved in file compatibility in the past decade. 
 

While Chrome isn’t ideal, it seems to be a step in the right direction. 
 

Also, when are we getting a Stardew Valley stream? I’d totally watch that. 

WPS Office is a thing, its like a free word alternative, but doesn't look ugly like libre office, the only downsides is that it is made by a China based-company, they shove their stupid cloud service up your arse and they (Might collect data), one way to avoid this is to delete all the .exe files of the WPS cloud services & signin services, then it becomes like a nice looking libre office, if you need help finding the "bad" .exe files DM me

[UsersInpoos]

33 minutes ago, kumicota said:

Linus, you probably didn't knew but chrome OS is based on gentoo and the bootloader of all chromebooks are based on coreboot, so you can flash on it a unlocked bios and then boot/install windows or linux on it

And then make a Chrome OS VM that his child can boot into so the PC is allowed

[creesch]

40 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

Wouldnt chromium os also work? Just buy a cheap laptop and change the os to chromium os, for all i know its the same thing except chrome os is for chromebooks only

Probably not as it is likely Linus's son will need to log into it with the school account making it a school managed product. It is very likely that chromium will not work for that. 

 

 

14 minutes ago, UsersInpoos said:

Im still unsure why he NEEDS a chromebook, I think I missed something in the video

Is said in the introduction, it is a school requirement for his son. 

[matteo_z]

I have a Lenovo Flex 5 (14ARE05, windows version) and i had problems with the included pen (random disconnects).
After I RMAed the pen (so I now have 2 pens), I found out that half a normal ink pen spring had to be screwed to the negative terminal, because the battery was making bad contact. So be aware.

 

Sorry for bad english, it's not my first language.

[Zodiark1593]

25 minutes ago, UsersInpoos said:

WPS Office is a thing, its like a free word alternative, but doesn't look ugly like libre office, the only downsides is that it is made by a China based-company, they shove their stupid cloud service up your arse and they (Might collect data), one way to avoid this is to delete all the .exe files of the WPS cloud services & signin services, then it becomes like a nice looking libre office, if you need help finding the "bad" .exe files DM me

LibreOffice certainly looks dated (kinda early 00’s vibe), but it does what I need it to without getting in the way, and is light both on install size, and system resources. Thank you for the offer, but I’ll pass.

[GhostRoadieBL]

would love to see a head to head with some of these different price brackets. Battery claims are obviously taken with an ocean of salt since most of these have just a few AA's worth of mAh and claim >10h of use.

How do these hold up to an equal priced Win or Linux laptop with a VM of ChromeOS so the laptop can at least be resold or used for college/university after ChromeOS is no longer supported?

[GodAtum]

Linus, your need to put your son in a different school. mine in Ontario issue Chromebooks to children without parents having to pay

[William Payne]

29 minutes ago, Caroline said:

Sorta clickbait title but AFAIK those ewaste spy devices laptops are "required" by schools nowadays as depts of ed. pact with the devil google for IT services or cheaper internet in exchange for students using the devices, services like kahoot, g classroom, zoom, and so on are used at school.

And you know (poorly educated) kids, if Toby and Hannah have cheap plastic truck robots your son will ask for one as well because it's a trend, and if you don't get him one he'll be mocked by other kids at school. It's hard to make kids understand certain things sometimes, not impossible though.

 

The virus was a perfect excuse for forcing those devices into chidren, even if they already had a computer at home, that plus unaware/ignorant parents and smartphones is the perfect combo to obliterate privacy. We're so deep into the rabbit hole that google and googling are commonly used words by people instead of search/ing proving how deep the company is into the lives of avg joes.

 

Control education and you control the future, by modifying content and childrens minds, even subtly, you can subvert an entire nation to your will without the use of force. Kids will learn something and school and share it at home and if one as a parent is not aware enough they'll assimilate and start repeating it.

 

Be subtle! use your spies for every kind of business.

Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.

(The Art of War)

Technically it was not really clickbait and has been going on a long time. My sister is a school principal and we have had this discussion. 

 

The reason is standardization, it allows them to make sure that every student is going to have the same thing and everything will work on everyone's machine. Also by standardizing it everyone pays the same price, you don't have any "mines better than yours" or rich vs poor fights. 

 

You have to remember all it is is a computer to let them do their work on, that is all it needs to be able to do.

[apostlkpl]

Slight correction, all Chromebooks released after 2018 have the ability to run Linux the Google-approved way. Keep in mind though that Crostini is a VM which runs a Container with Debian 11. Performance hit is more than obvious, especially in entry level Chromebooks that usually come with Celeron and 4GB of RAM.

[sub68]

2 hours ago, Caroline said:

Knowing children are being monitored and fed bullshit by Google is straight sickening.

HAHA.

my school district have Google accounts since 4th grade.

And besides the accounts are so locked down it doesn't matter.

also the fact the account terminate after our senior year

[Blademaster91]

50 minutes ago, Caroline said:

Sorta clickbait title but AFAIK those ewaste spy devices laptops are "required" by schools nowadays as depts of ed. pact with the devil google for IT services or cheaper internet in exchange for students using the devices, services like kahoot, g classroom, zoom, and so on are used at school.

And you know (poorly educated) kids, if Toby and Hannah have cheap plastic truck robots your son will ask for one as well because it's a trend, and if you don't get him one he'll be mocked by other kids at school. It's hard to make kids understand certain things sometimes, not impossible though.

 

The virus was a perfect excuse for forcing those devices into chidren, even if they already had a computer at home, that plus unaware/ignorant parents and smartphones is the perfect combo to obliterate privacy. We're so deep into the rabbit hole that google and googling are commonly used words by people instead of search/ing proving how deep the company is into the lives of avg joes.

 

Control education and you control the future, by modifying content and childrens minds, even subtly, you can subvert an entire nation to your will without the use of force. Kids will learn something and school and share it at home and if one as a parent is not aware enough they'll assimilate and start repeating it.

 

Be subtle! use your spies for every kind of business.

Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.

(The Art of War)

All I had in school was a Google account, any computer use was done in the library with computers on desks, and laptops were allowed to be checked out if you needed to take one to class. But otherwise it was textbooks, and I would've rather had a chromebook than carry around a bunch of books.

[sub68]

I take a different perspective than most people do at Chromebooks.

Most people at my school only have there phones, no personal PC's at home, so they need something so everyone is issued a device.

I treat my Chromebook as a work PC and I NEVER USE IT AT HOME.

Alot of schools are treating them like business(replaced every 5 years and onsite IT).

As IT they are splendid to troubleshoot software wise and virus are not a thing as all docs are on google drive.

So we mostly do to software issues, restart device or wipe the drive.

If its hardware we change out the part, its that easy.

I personally like the Lenovo thinkpad 11e chromebooks.

They felt like tanks and they never had to many problems,I really loved that keyboard and everything was easy to replace.

1 hour ago, Caroline said:

The virus was a perfect excuse for forcing those devices into chidren, even if they already had a computer at home, that plus unaware/ignorant parents and smartphones is the perfect combo to obliterate privacy.

I know some schools allow for students to bring personal machines, Heck I could bring my whole workstation.

other parts are completely your own opinion

[Quackers101]

very nice of LTT to hit on that LTS (long term support). was wondering how it was for chromebooks, I guess it can have it's own "android" issues, not sure how well they will keep the 8 year support and if they have the decent spec in all of them for it.

[William Payne]

Linus makes a really good point is that really a chromebook does exactly what it is designed to do. What I see more of is that people judge them based on things they were never designed to do. 

[Ultraforce]

2 hours ago, GodAtum said:

Linus, your need to put your son in a different school. mine in Ontario issue Chromebooks to children without parents having to pay

 It could be that his kid goes to a private school

 

2 hours ago, William Payne said:

Technically it was not really clickbait and has been going on a long time. My sister is a school principal and we have had this discussion. 

 

The reason is standardization, it allows them to make sure that every student is going to have the same thing and everything will work on everyone's machine. Also by standardizing it everyone pays the same price, you don't have any "mines better than yours" or rich vs poor fights. 

 

You have to remember all it is is a computer to let them do their work on, that is all it needs to be able to do.

Related to standardization for a variety of reasons I was given a laptop by the school from the start of grade 7 to grade 12 and the lack of standardization did cause issues as the people in charge of giving the laptops were the school councillors and so if a laptop stopped working they would have no clue what was going on and usually would just give one of the other slightly different laptops that wasn't taken out. I was really used to using USBs and made sure to remember the tag for the laptop I regularly used since we weren't even told about network drives so if you got the laptop someone else used depending on where they saved or downloaded stuff from you'd be able to see their stuff instead. So I definitely think standardization and utilization of cloud services makes sense for what schools tend to be trying to do.

[William Payne]

Honestly at the prices listed in the video if the item only lasts a persons school years than becomes garbage who cares. It is only a digital replacement to pen and paper to do school work on that is all.

[SkyHound0202]

You don't have to buy a Chromebook for Chrome OS experience, most K-12 education won't use or need the enterprise/education features any way (except when you got the laptop from school). IMHO Chromebook are just one tier above actual E-waste. Simply use Brunch framework + Chrome OS image on any compatible computer to turn them into a "Brunchbook".

 

Of course it's not a hassle-free experience like a true Chromebook, but it still functions infinitely close to a true Chromebook. You will need to run the install script from a Linux environment, you have to update both Brunch and Chrome OS instead of one click in setting, rollout could brick or powerwash the device, certain hardware are just not going to work, etc.

 

But converting laptop into "Brunchbook" allows you can control what hardware the device has, like having a balanced screen (an 1080p IPS screen instead of a crappy TN or an overkill 4K one), better performance (Ryzen APU with "zork" image or Tiger Lake i3 with "volteer") and upgradability (SSD & RAM, may require reinstallation).

 

And if AUE date came, just flash a new image and voilà, it got a new lease of life (your data are mostly in Google Drive or cloud so it should be painless). Even when kids finishes education, they easily revert the "Brunchbook" back into a normal laptop running Windows/Linux.

[GuiltySpark_]

 @made zos ion@Grabhanem@Rageodontist@Paralecticand @Stadiz, nice cameo's.