If you do, send me a message about what you're considering, and I can help you choose. I'm much more knowledgeable about CBs that the average person -- especially about programming on them & using Linux on them.
Another nice thing about Chromebooks is that they're inexpensive. Meaning, you get a lot for the price. They used to all be fairly low-performance "budget" devices, but they've been catching on, and now pretty much all the manufacturers make a variety of models. What's really interesting are the "power user" models. Google started the trend by selling the "Pixel" model to attendees of their "Google I/O" conferences, starting in 2013. They did it again in 2015. Both have touchscreens -- they were the only ones at the time with T/S. The 2015 model was available as an i5/8GB/32GB (cpu/ram/ssd -- they don't have a lot of disk space because you're encouraged to save things in "the cloud"; you get a lot of free Google Drive space as part of buying a CB). Then there was the "LS" (Ludicrous Speed) model that's an i7/16GB/64GB. (The CPU is a dual-core Broadwell mobile with HT enabled -- it's no slouch.) The hardware, for the time, was second-to-none. It was Google's way of showing the world, "Look what you can do!" as well as a perk for power users. Now many of the mfgrs have high-end models, many of which are really nice systems. And for "content consumption", they're just as much an "appliance" as iPads. Turn them on & go... You can't break them. Perfect for "the parents" or anyone who's not tech-savvy. But unlike iPad devices, you can conveniently create content, such as emails, etc. So the 2015 Pixel was too much for me to pass up... I didn't go to Google I/O, but you can always count on a percentage of recipients to flip them on eBay. Which they did, so I bought one. It's been a good value, and the hardware really is top-notch. Of course I wasted no time in learning how to run Linux apps on them. First was "Crouton", a side project of a Google engineer. That gave way to "Crostini", an official Google project to add Linux, but in a container -- and a supported feature. (Like many things Google, it's "in beta", but it works well, so 'who cares?') My wife got the 2015 Pixel LS when I got the base model of the Pixelbook (i7/8GB/128GB) when it came out a couple of years ago -- Google gave them more SSD so you can add your Linux development environments. So I added all my Ubuntu tools, and Pharo Launcher, and my images... Everything works, including file & network access. (Linux containers share a directory with the ChromeOS file system that's visible from the Chrome environment.) The only thing I needed to do was write a bash script that will enlarge the cursor (because the Pixel/Pixelbook screens are hi-dpi, like my 7710) and set the font size in my images to "Large". That script is here: https://github.com/tbrunz/pharo-support -t -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html
