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Aurornis 4 hours ago

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.

traderj0e 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"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."

So yeah I really don't get the motivation

nolist_policy 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

lukan 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I .. don't get how anyone can consider ChromeOS to have a elegant UI.

I have a chromebook for traveling and light web dev work since years .. and it works, because I rooted it and allmost do not have to use the UI(I need the terminal and chrome dev tools). In general it got better, but is still horrible inefficient and not ergonomic. Or did you mean it looks good? Well, maybe, but for me a elegant UI means it does not get into my workflow and can do quickly what I want. Which .. it nativly cannot.

nolist_policy 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As someone using a Chromebook as my daily driver, not getting into my workflow and quickly doing what I want is exactly ChromeOS's UI. Especially virtual desktops combined with the touchpad: Switching between tabs, going forwards and backwards in history, switching virtual desktops and apps is all done with a few gestures.

lukan 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Hm, maybe that part is more polished, but I don't use it. My pain points are very basic stuff, quickly opening a file explorer, finding files, copy paste, navigating folders. It all improved, but still feels awkward and is way slower (takes more clicks/key presses) than in linux or windows.

2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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traderj0e 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh I misread the author's complaints about hardware as "software." Ok assuming the author hates liquid glass enough to switch cause of that, and doesn't have the same standard of polish for hardware, at least the post is self-consistent.

I don't believe the claims of Lenovo hardware (esp trackpad) being as good as a MacBook's, but he thinks it is, so up to him. The keyboard layout is annoying cause control-C is both copy and kill.

nolist_policy 2 hours ago | parent [-]

With the default terminal you copy by selecting, like X11, and paste with right-click.

traderj0e 2 hours ago | parent [-]

So select is select or copy, right click is open menu or paste, both depending on whether or not you're in the terminal. Control-C is also copy or kill, and iirc shift-control-c is nothing or copy.

There's a meta key on the keyboard, idk why they can't just do meta-c meta-v everywhere. Same in Ubuntu.

carlosjobim 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So does a MacBook on Sonoma or Monterey.

caycep 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean, it’s prob easier to run chromeos in utm on the Mac…

bigyabai 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

inventor7777 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Have you heard of this?

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

pico303 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Or just develop your app on macOS and run it on Linux. I’ve been doing that ever since OSX came out and had no problems. Worst case these days I have a virtual machine build an app or library for x86, but I still do all the dev on the Mac.

I find people who make these complaints about Linux just like Linux better. Totally fine. From my perspective, sure, some things are slightly different or need a homebrew install, but there’s plenty about Linux that’s as big or bigger pain as some of the stuff on the Mac.

That said, if Liquid Glass is the complaint and your solution is a Chromebook, wow. Just, wow.

traderj0e 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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. And 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??

inventor7777 39 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I've used UTM before to install Ubuntu on my Mac Studio (M4) and it even supported my 4K70 monitor.

To be fair there is some config and tweaking required, but for a free tool it seems pretty good. Parallels has a better EXPERIENCE but I don't use VMs often; when I need raw Linux I just use one of my homelab servers.

hirvi74 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> have you actually done it?

Yes.

What do you mean by "works exactly the same?" The same as Ubuntu installed on an ARM laptop? No, there is not GUI, DE, and a lot of tools are stripped.

You can literally pull this down and get it up and running in minutes:

https://hub.docker.com/_/ubuntu/

Rosetta is not necessary to get this working either. Now, there maybe some warts with DNS that you might encounter depending on if you have a certain VPNs running, use dnsmasq, etc.. But there are potential workarounds for many issues.

If you want a full VM, I would recommend Lima/Colima. If you need a full VM with GUI and all, then maybe use something like Parallels, VMware Fusion, etc..

traderj0e an hour ago | parent [-]

I mean like same as Ubuntu on an x86 laptop for general work. This is assuming you don't have any specific need for x86 binaries, but you also never know what might randomly require it. Would've tried it myself but I'm away from my Mac rn. I'll try again.

Last time I tried UTM specifically for reading an ext4-formatted SD card in my MacBook's internal slot, I couldn't get it to interface with the reader, but that works on Chromebooks' Linux VM supposedly.

hirvi74 24 minutes ago | parent [-]

> I mean like same as Ubuntu on an x86 laptop for general work.

I would say no, but then again, I would also not recommend using any type of container for that type of work either.

I use Container on macOS to build containers for things like Claude Code, Node.js, Java, etc.. You know, software I want no where near my host OS. I mount a directory in the container, if needed, and it's smooth sailing.

I do believe Container allows for one to run x86 containers with Rosetta, but I also know once you enable Rosetta, it's easier to reinstall your OS than to uninstall. I like to keep things tidy, so I will not go down this path.

> ext4-formatted SD card in my MacBook's internal slot

I would not use Container nor any other containerization tool for this task regardless of whether it is possible or not. I would be surprised if any VM client would be able to get this working too, but I've been out of the VM world for a bit.

It's also worth mentioning that come macOS 28, Rosetta will be dead and gone except for a select set of video games. That version of Rosetta will essentially be stripped down to the point of working just enough for those games and nothing more. So, I would not get too attached to the idea of running x86 binaries on macOS for too much longer.

I believe there may be some tools that can read ext4 on macOS, but UTM not reading from the host's SD Card is unsurprising. I have never used UTM, but I would imagine it would not have the capability to pass the SD reader through, but I could be entirely wrong.

I'd seriously recommend buying the cheapest burner Chromebook, x86 machine, VPS, or whatever you need if you think running x86 binaries and reading/writing to/from ext4 formatted storage will be in your future. You could maybe try an external USB SD reader, but I cannot comment if that would work either.

hirvi74 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I use this tool all the time. Mainly for running various LLM cli tools and whatnot. No way will I install those tools on my host OS due to my unfounded paranoia.

Container still has a few warts. Mainly, Container and mDNSResponder on macOS do not always play nicely together. If you use a VPN that binds to port 53, you will also have a bad time. Container-to-Container name resolution is also hit or miss.

However, none of these issues have prevented me from accomplishing what I need. Though, I can see where friction may arise between some corporate network environments and Container.

4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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