Vladimir's page

But this is not a real computer!

It actually is. For months, I’ve been running ChromeOS as ChromeOS Flex. My spare laptop was listed in the supported devices, and everything worked and was rather snappy.

I can’t say I missed anything - but to mention here, I don’t really use my laptop as the main machine, prefer desktop computers. So, for a glorified typewriter, I did not feel cramped. Not without tinkering and facing a few minor problems, but everything I wanted worked either through sensible web alternatives or from the Linux container.

Why Chromebook

This test-drive intersected with time to get a new laptop. Retrospectively, the best notebook I owned was Macbook Air 13, purchased in 2012. It felt natural to upgrade to a Pro model in 2018. I hate that laptop - the only nice thing was the screen, somehow Apple is the only company that pairs their devices with decent displays. Still, the screen came with that absolutely horrible “anti-glare” coating, prone to stains and wears. The keyboard was a disaster, and the overall feel of a fragile glass-and-metal slab was not that enjoyable. Also, I have some personal questions about recent OSX iterations, not worth speculating.

A natural choice would be to run Linux on a new laptop, let it be X1 or XPS13. However, I am uncertain about how well community Linux performs there. Don’t get me wrong – I use Fedora daily on a desktop and am quite enthusiastic about it. Yet, when it comes to the laptops, there are issues with power management, and more adjustments than I would prefer are required. For instance, a touchscreen. It’s a nice feature, compensating well for the crappy touchpads most laptops have. Perhaps, I am still traumatized by the experience with libinput years ago. These things have matured over time, but I would still prefer a good default experience.

The price is also of question. For a machine I don’t earn money with and don’t do any serious work, but rather use in travels and bump now and then, it felt silly to spend 1500+ EUR. Yet, I wanted quality, glossy and bright touchscreen, with a ratio 16:10 or lower. Charging ports on both sides, for versatility. A camera privacy shutter. This narrowed options to higher-end Chromebooks, and I settled with Acer Spin 714, 2023 model, which I managed (oh, EU pricings!) to acquire for 800 EUR via some discounts.

Yet another product review

The screen is good; it promises 350 nits and is bright. This laptop is a 360 degrees convertible, but the tablet mode is not something I used after the first days. The touchpad is a generic plastic touchpad. It works OK, but nothing fantastic and feels cheap. Again - with a touchscreen, I don’t really care.

A really pleasant surprise was the keyboard. It may not be a Thinkpad keyboard, but still a pleasure to work with. And of course it is a significant upgrade to Apple’s butterfly, though everything is.

Both left and right Thunderbolt ports are capable of power delivery. Plastic and aluminum do not feel premium, but given the price, they should not. The keyboard’s topcase is plastic and gets nasty quickly.

The hardware is specced around i5-1335U. For my use case, it is excessive, and even with my old laptop (i5-8259U) I probably loaded the CPU continiously only when building something from Macports. This Chromebook has a normal NVMe drive (upgradable!), which is a crucial feature. Many Chromebooks have eMMC - fine for web-apps and cloud-based workflows, but slow memory makes native programs sad, and I rely on the Linux container. Excessive hardware qualifies this laptop to a Chromebook Plus, which promises embed AI tools in the future. Somehow and considering EU GDPR and AI regulations, I am not sure this future is close for me

As for the 10+ h of battery, it holds up. There is a clear win against a typical Linux laptop. I know, TLP daemons, but from my experience, it is not that great (with past gen power-hungry processors, at least), or it is very heavy, literally heavy; my homelab x260 boasts a chunky external 6-cell battery for the same 10 h.

Experience

For a cold startup to the desktop, it takes ca. 20 s minus the time to enter the password. Impressive.

While I expected everything to work out of the box, what I did not expect is how well it would. The touch input pairs with ChromeOS flawlessly. The stylus is a funny gizmo, and proved to be handy.

Unfortunately, changing chrome://flags is necessary sometimes. If not only PWA-apps are of interest, the system requires more tuning than what I would consider ideal.

Crostini

By default, the container is deployed with Debian 12. I thought to roll Fedora instead, there are ample guides available on Reddit’s wiki, but dropped the idea eventually - too many things are still experimental.

The promised support of Linux programs is not as perfect as one claims. Of course, shell tools and CLI programs do not trouble. With GUI applications, occasional hiccups pop now and then. Testing on ChromeOS Flex, I failed repeatedly to launch an app made with tkinter, reporting conflicting compositor variables. Meanwhile, Qt or GTK apps worked fine. Some initial troubleshooting did not help - however, the problem resolved itself after OS updates.

Puzzling problems were system shortcuts and keyboard input. To exemplify, VSCode or telegram-desktop had conflicts around layouts. These issues were discussed on the bug tracker, and are still there.

Overall, the GUI experience with Linux applications significantly surpasses that of WSL2 on Windows, whether with contemporary WSLg or alternative solutions. The window management feels genuinely seamless. Access from the Linux container to the ChromeOS file system is restricted by default, but easy to enable for the stateful partition (home directory) and, as expected, is in /mnt/chromeos/ (made symlinks for convenience). Similarly, other mounted volumes (e.g., thumb drives) or Google Drive are available. The latter works perfectly with the container; it’s unfortunate that on a normal Linux system, the only practical method to mount Google Drive is via rclone. Since ChromeOS is based on Gentoo, a good question for Google why there is no proper client for the Linux platform.

VSCode

As mentioned, I had some troubles initially. Also, VSCode felt notably slow when packed with plugins - a heavy electron app, rendered in the container’s XWayland and then translated onto ChromeOS’ Wayland flavor. But there is a fine solution, code-server. Essentially, it runs VSCode (or VSCodium, go figure. Microsoft extensions are off) as a server in the container, allowing to connect to the UI from a browser tab. For ChromeOS, this approach is as natural as it could be.

PyMol and Coot

Not without graphical glitches, but manageable. PyMol, comes as it is from the Debian repos (the open-source version), gave no headache initially. But without my .pymolrc (yes, PyMol has a dotfile), the cartoon representation was broken. The culprit hid in two-side lighting (set two_sided_lighting, off). An even bigger issue was running a Coot instance (release for Debian 11 works), the view window was pitch black. Both problems vanished by switching “Crostini GPU support” in chrome://flags to “Disabled”. Funny, but the default values for settings there are unclear.

Miscellaneous

Even with enabled “IME support for Qt applications”, telegram-desktop is not usable. The client in the web store simply does not go further than the login screen. I went with PWA of Telegram Web.

For a password manager, I like KeeWeb. One can launch a local server, or host it elsewhere. Or just launch KeeWeb as a desktop application. For the AppImage, a few packages (libfuse2 libnss3 libsecret-1-0 gnome-keyring) were required, and the program refused to start without enabled GPU acceleration. As between Coot and the password manager a decent person chooses Coot, KeeWeb could be started with a --in-process-gpu flag. To make AppImages accessible from the ChromeOS menu, if installation is not possible, .desktop file can be created. Crostini checks content of both system and user directories.

Other than that, Google Workspace covers my needs from a laptop. A grain of salt, Paperpile (blogged here) PDF viewer does not support the stylus. This is sad, the stylus support in the iOS app is decent.

A small concluding note

ChromeOS receives a lot of hate: whether for being webapps-centered (a unixporn argument I don’t buy), the Google botnet aspect (fair), or being (partially) closed-source and definitely not free. However, I want to iterate on its consumer grade. Is there another big tech OS with a public bugtracker and developers, engaged openly with the community?