Since the arrival of my chromebook, I've had some mixed feelings


Let me tell you about the things I can't stand.

First is the keyboard. It works fine I guess, after all I am typing all of this out on in.
After using it for awhile though, you start to miss what it lacks.
Not to mention start to despise what it adds.
While I typed that last sentence I misspelled despise, luckily I pressed backspace a bunch of times and fixed it. The issue is that If I missed the backspace button and hit the button above it, my computer would shut off.
It's like suicide linux but with poweroff.
Second, missing fuction, del and meta keys make text editing and window controlling more annoying.
There is nothing more aggravating than learning all the key bindings and then having to remap them all to alt.

Second, chromeos has proved to be quite frustrating.
When I heard about its gentoo base I was excited to dive in and mess around.
The thing is, diving into chromeos is like diving into a swimming pool that has no water.
Core tools are stripped away, functionality and openness lost, I had no compiler and no essential cli tools. Instead I had a bunch of apps on the chrome app store.
I started to regret not buying a used thinkpad.

Realizing how much I hated chromeos I set my sights on installing native linux. While it was not very difficult, it does void the warrenty. Lucky for me, I didnt have a warrenty to start with.

Installing native linux is a pain and really boils down to this:
- boot into dev mode (lose everything saved)
- navigate the chrome shell (miss actually useful shells in the process)
- remove all 5 million screws (rip the thing apart)
- take out hardware screw (The warrenty is sooo dead at this point)
- change gbb flags (shorten annoying boot screen & seabios)
- boot from live linux cd (append mem=1024mb else it wont boot)

as opposed to just skipping to the last step


I used native linux for awhile but it really started to become an issue.
I went back to school and had issue upon issue with CUPs and Networking with the school equipment. Spending time trying to resolve these things and fighting the school to changing the printer settings was too much work.
Especially since this year has already been a boatload of work.

It was with great regret that I returned to chromeos.

Chromebrew makes things a little better, its worth a look but the packages are limited.

crouton is a life saver right now, whenever I am not typing up some school paper I can escape to the ivory tower of my debian sid chroot.

I still miss my old laptop.