Yep, Looks Like I'm Sticking with ChromeOS

With some travel coming up, I've been looking around for a better laptop.

My circa 2013 Samsung Chromebook is showing its age. With an ARM CPU and only 2Gb of RAM, it slows to a crawl with only a few tabs open or apps running. Also, it's an 11.6" screen and my eyes just aren't what they were even five years ago. Don't get me wrong. It's been a fine machine. But time to move on and up.

On the other hand, I do not want a Windoze machine, after my most recent Mac experience that's not where I want to go either, and just about any new laptop I'd want to put Linux on (other than a Chromebook, which I might use Crouton to turn into a dual boot machine) doesn't compare well on price for specs (versus my needs) to the Lenovo IdeaPad 14" Chromebook.

4Gb of RAM and a dual core Intel processor slightly faster than the one in my Asus Chromebox, which is still working just fine for me. A 16Gb solid state drive, and likewise that has proven plenty of on-board storage for me over the years across Chromebooks, Chromeboxes, an old "netbook" that was my first machine with an SSD rather than an old fashioned hard drive. If the reviews I've read are correct, it is part of the new generation of Chromebooks that will run Android apps, too.

Yes, it is ChromeOS. Yes, ChromeOS is Google. I know that many people decline to trade as much personal information and personal privacy as Google demands in return for its "free" browser, OS, email client, word processor, etc. Can't say I blame them. But the deal works for me. So I've arranged with a client who buys me a new machine every few years to make the IdeaPad the next one.

Five ChromeOS Extensions I Wouldn't Want to Live Without

Yes, I am going to become a "listicle" terror. Blame Thane.

As a user of (almost exclusively) Chromebooks and Chromeboxes since 2012, I've used quite a few extensions. Some I've discarded or at least disabled. Others make my life better and/or easier and I'd hate not to have them. Here (in no particular order) are five of the latter kind.

The Great Suspender -- This extension "suspends" tabs that haven't been visited for a certain (user-set) amount of time to cut back on memory usage. You can whitelist sites that you never want suspended, and when you go back to a suspended tab, you can click on a link and reload the web site that was running in that tab. The Great Suspender was my first solution to the slowdown phenomenon that comes with running lots of browser tabs on a machine with only 2Gb of RAM (my Asus M004U Chromebox, which I upgraded to 4Gb last week), and it helped. A lot.

uBlock Origin -- Yes, I finally went over to the dark side and started using an ad blocker, for the same reason I use The Great Suspender. That is, to not have my RAM eaten up by a bunch of extraneous crap. Yes, I still feel guilty sometimes. No, not really. uBlock Origin was the extension I settled on after trying several, and I'm quite satisfied with it.

Keep Awake -- The Chromebox doesn't come with user-adjustable power management settings. You can get around that by going to command line in Chrome Shell ("crosh") and directly editing crap. But then you'd have to remember what you edited and how if you wanted to change or undo it. Keep Awake gives you three convenient settings to switch between with a click. Normal (after a certain amount of time, the machine goes into sleep mode and the displays go dark), a setting that keeps the system awake (and doing stuff if you have something running) even when the displays shut down, and a setting that doesn't even let the displays shut down. When I have the Chromebox web mining cryptocurrency overnight while I sleep, I use that middle setting.

Screen Shader --  A Chrome extension take on f.lux, a program that adjusts the color tone of your computer screen to "to decrease eye-strain, eye fatigue and to appease your brain's day/night cycle." I've only recently started using it, but it feels easier on the eyes. I suppose I might come back later and deprecate it. But I doubt it.

File System for Dropbox -- On most operating systems, if you want to use Dropbox you install some software that creates a Dropbox folder where you save the stuff you want synchronized/backed up to cloud storage. ChromeOS isn't most operating systems. Until this extension came along, if I wanted to store a file in Dropbox I had to go to the web site, log in, and upload the file. File System for Dropbox appears in my file manager as an additional drive, and acts like one. I can save to it, load from it, copy files to and from it, etc.

The Dark Side of Chrome

Yes, I am a Chrome and ChromeOS cheerleader. Maybe even a bit of an evangelist. You hardly ever see me complaining about any aspect of the browser or the OS framework. But all is not well in Chromeland. Here are two complaints -- one minor in immediate effect, but both major in long-term implication:

1. In the beginning, when you opened a new tab in Chrome, it was beautiful -- you could do anything you wanted in the new tab, but by way of assistance you saw some tiles representing frequently opened sites, and at the bottom drop-down lists of "recently closed tabs" and other things. Marvelous. Worked like a charm. Absolutely, positively nothing whatsoever to complain about. Then Google yanked that format and made the new tab much less useful ... but with just a tiny bit of work, you could revert to the better setup. And apparently lots of people did. So last week, Google made it impossible to do that, forcing all users to move to the much uglier, much less useful new setup. You can partially undo the damage by adding some extensions, but it's just not the same.
2. Now I'm hearing that the new Chrome beta (which I haven't seen yet -- I'm on the stable build channel, and apparently this is Windows-only at the moment anyway) restricts users to apps available from the Chrome store.

The first item is an annoyance, but points to Google having a penchant for exerting undue control over the user experience.

The second item puts Google in the same league as Apple with its "walled garden" approach of trying to tell users, in very fine-grained detail, what they can and can't do with their machines.

I was kind of amped up for the new Asus Chromebox coming out this month. Now I think I'm going to wait on that, because if things keep going in the direction they appear to be going, I'll be abandoning Chrome. And while I can certainly root my Chromebox and Chromebook and turn them into (fairly light) Linux boxes, my next piece of hardware won't be one of those kinds of units.

(Chrome)Boxing Day!

I've had my Samsung Chromebox for about a year-and-a-half, and I'm still pleased as punch with it. For those who use a computer primarily as a "web appliance," ChromeOS just can't be beat. But I may replace it later this year -- with another Chromebox.

ASUS announced its Chromebox offering this morning. Available in March, starting at $179.

The specs look fairly similar to my Samsung, except that instead of an Intel Celeron, the ASUS box will use the new Intel "Haswell" CPUs. What that means for performance, I don't know. The raw GHz speed looks lower on the newer chips, but maybe there's some caching stuff or whatever that weighs in in ASUS's favor.

Other differences:

• My Samsung Chromebox is about 7.5 inches square (OK, rounded corners, but you get the idea). The ASUS model will come in at just under 5 inches square and it will have one of those rigs for mounting it on the back of a monitor if that's your space-saving desire.
• My box has a DVI port, while the ASUS model sports only HDMI and DisplayPort for monitor output. So I'll have to adapt there.
• The ASUS box has a built in card reader.

Anyway, it's not a done deal. I may just stick with the Samsung until it keels over and dies (if it does -- I have a Samsung Chromebox, a Samsung Chromebook, a Samsung TV ... and I've never had a piece of Samsung gear die yet).

My main reason for considering the ... "upgrade" ... is my younger son, Liam.

He loves Windows.

He insists that Mac and Linux and ChromeOS suck.

But every time I vacate the chair in front of my Chromebox for more than 30 seconds or so, he's on it. The only justification he can come up with is that he's looking at sites which might have Windows malware on them. You know, sites like Amazon.com and Wikipedia.

So, he secretly loves the Chromebox. If I get a new one, I can retire/wipe the old one and stick it in his room. Then he can indulge his secret love in secret instead of hogging MY machine.

Brief Addendum: In the original post, when I mentioned that the new ASUS Chromebook will roll out at $179, I meant to add something along the lines of "wow ... my Samsung was $329!" I thought the machine was a good deal at almost twice the price; at less than $200, it's just a no-brainer - TLK]

Another Addendum: It's just come to my attention that there's someone out there who really needs a new computer, who certainly deserves a new computer, and whose having of a new computer would measurably benefit the libertarian movement to the extent that it increased his blog output. And a Chromebook sounds like it would fit the bill just about perfectly. If this sounds like something you'd like to help with, here's the link. I'm throwing $5 at it myself, so if it pleases you to think of this as a "match me challenge," please do so.

Finally, an Intractable Problem in Chrome

The Chromebox/Chromebook are kind of like Macs in the sense that most stuff just ... works. If you use Windoze, you're used to weird error messages and inexplicable system crashes. That stuff just doesn't happen much on Mac, nor in ChromeOS.

But, finally, more than a year in the ChromeOS world, I've run into a problem that doesn't seem to want to fix:

For quite some time, I've used a text editor called Sourcekit (in conjunction with Writebox -- that way I can have two editors open at once, which I need for certain things). One important feature of Sourcekit is that I can load/save files directly from and to Dropbox. But starting the other day, I get re-authorization requests to connect Sourcekit/Dropbox, and when I approve, nothing happens. I just get a blank tab, and the next time I open Sourcekit, I get the request again.

Writebox also integrates with Dropbox and is working just fine. But I tried out another app, Writekit, and got the same error (yes, I've noticed the kit/box/write ubiquity). So I'm thinking the problem is probably at Dropbox, not with Chrome/ChromeOS per se. Or maybe it's with my Chromebox in particular (haven't used the Chromebook recently); I think that may be the case because I haven't seen any recent panicked "why can't I ..." threads on the web about the problem.

Fortunately, there's an easy work-around -- I installed yet another text editor, Caret. It isn't integrated with Dropbox, which means there's some extra futzing around, but it gets the job done.