Oh, certainly. Chromebooks never made a bit of sense before they came down to $250. At that price (or lower) you can give one to your kid and not be heartbroken if it gets stolen or broken.
I know you’re being hyperbolic for effect, but it is pretty simple to run a “real” Linux install on any Chromebook including the ARM one.
There are all sorts of options available for doing this including just fully wiping ChromeOS and installing Linux instead, but I recommend crouton:
After you install that (and installing that is easy, it is just a script you run on the box after switching the device to developer mode, this isn’t like Android ROM hacking or anything) you can just run a fully graphical Linux chroot that you can change over to as if it were another virtual terminal running X (because basically that is what it becomes).
I do sometimes use my Chromebook as intended in ChromeOS/Aura, but most of the time it is running off the Ubuntu/XFCE chroot, with full access to virtually any software you would normally use under Linux (minus closed-source apps with no ARM ports, like Sublime Text, unfortunately, but the list of closed-source Linux apps anyone cares about is very small).
I totally get why mainstream people would be hesitant to buy a Chromebook, but I think it fits the niche this thread is about really well and it also happens to fit the niche of being a fast, fanless, tiny, easily portable Linux notebook that only costs $250.
Well, geekstuff, sure. (And don’t get me wrong, that’s legit cool.) But for a random person buying that out of the box, I don’t think you want to count on that as a capability.
For some reason, I never quite put this together until you said it that way, but guess which two devices I sold or gave away due to horribly, wildly erratic performance? Which two were massive disappointments to me in daily use?
Yep, both the ARM Chromebook and the Nexus 10.
I never made that connection until now. What do these two things have in common?
Compare with the iPad 4 and iPhone 5 which regularly make me cream my jeans they go so fast – and consistently so.
Tegra 3 ain’t fast these days – particularly once you have experienced iPad 4, you will think everything else is balls fucking slow – but it is consistent.
Something is foul in the state of Exynos, man.
With Laptops with CoreI3 being so cheap these days don’t see the point of buying such an underpowered machine. Also I think that giving a kid a chromeboook as is only computer severely limits is access to creative tools, sure most kids won’t be programmers or engineers but at least give in a computer that allows him to play with the tools. Also Minecraft.
I still disagree with you about the Nexus 10’s performance. I’ve used it as my primary computer for a month or so now, and I have no perf problems with it; it sounds like other people in this thread have no perf problems with the Chromebook.
But if you think there’s an Exynos problem, I have to raise an eyebrow, because Exynos is really a vanilla Cortex A15 implementation, as Tegra 4 will be. I’d be very, very surprised if any other A15 device performed meaningfully different from Exynos 5 devices.
Tegra4 isn’t at all vanilla A15. It’s another 4+1 configuration and comes with nVidia’s very fast custom graphics. It also integrates with their soft modem tech which is truly revolutionary.
Fair enough, and I can see where that stuff might make a difference. But the cores are still A15 cores, not custom cores like Apple or Qualcomm makes.
Oh, sure. It’s just a vast oversimplification to say that tegra4 and the exynos are essentially the same. There are lots of differences.
And if there really were a performance problem with Exynos (I don’t think there is), it’s possible it could be some implementation detail that would change, yes.
But barring that, I bet when you look at Tegra 4 tablets compared to Exynos 5 tablets, the performance is going to be within a small margin on just about everything, though it’s possible the 3D graphics benchmarks will have some differences.
CPU-bound performance will, certainly. Memory and GPU-bound performance will differ, as will battery life with the 5th core dedicated to low-power active standby.
I can’t speak to the Nexus 10 experience but I do a lot of Go programming (and a little bit of C/C++ programming) on the Exynos 5 platform and the chip is crazy fast relative to the other ARM platforms I use (haven’t programmed for a Tegra4 yet).
If the Nexus 10 has performance problems (never used one, have to take wumpus’ word for it), I’d assume they are software related, the chip is fine.
Certainly possible to be software related. On the Chromebook in particular, it had awesome sunspider scores – whereas the Nexus 10 has shit sunspider scores. Very similar hardware, different OS, technically the same browser.
Part of it really is that the iPad 4 spoils you. It’s so much faster, and consistently fast, all the time.
But it’s all “just ARM”, right?
That’s sort of the point. We want to limit his ability to play games while he’s supposed to be doing his homework.
Do Chromebooks have Flash? If so, this may be a. . . difficult enterprise.
I know I’ve spent more time on forums and noodling around on the web on time-sucking sites like wikipedia and tvtropes than I’ve ever spent playing games, by several orders of magnitude.
So your vote is we get him a typewriter?
We want to limit his ability to waste time, not circumvent the need for self control entirely.
Have you considered an eMachine circa 1997? Or would that constitute child abuse?
Drawing solely for my childhood memories: never underestimate an 11-year-old’s ability to waste time when he ought to be working / studying. And that was long before the Internet came along to suck up my free time like a turbo-charged Hoover. :-)
Seriously, it seems to me one advantage to a cheap Windows laptop would be configuring it so your son had a standard user account and couldn’t install anything without an admin password (i.e., your permission). Disable Flash & install a decent firewall and you’ve cut down on the potential timewasters significantly. I dunno if Chromebooks support such a setup.
IANAParent, but at some point, you either have to trust your son to be responsible with his time-management skills or oversee his activities to ensure he’s doing so (or some combo of both); relying on technology to do it for you will only get you so far (IMHO).
FWIW, with today’s kids limiting them to the web browser isn’t going to do much to keep them productive.
I built my 10-year-old a really nice PC with a Core i3, GeForce 560Ti, good speakers… Installed Steam and a bunch of my games on it. (Portal, Need for Speed, etc.) Yet I’d say that, outside of using Office for homework, he spends 90% of his time in web browsers, playing all of the crappy web games his friends play too, and watching YouTube, which has replaced TV for many of today’s kids.
About the only thing he runs on the thing outside of Office and the web browser is Minecraft.