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Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

Chromeos is so strange. It's not at all light weight but manages to be one of the most useless OSes out there. At least with android you get a certain form factor but I really don't see the point in chromeos at all.

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Yup. Useless OS powers one of the best-selling notebooks on Amazon. It also used in a lot of schools.

I gave it to my mom and she loves it versus a complicated Windows machine she used to have.

But yeah, you don't use it so it's useless.

Its great for non-technical people and people supporting family. I haven't had to support a single Mac or Windows problem since getting my parents a Chromebook :D

Because you've had to support Chromebook problems instead?

It's a given that those with Chromebooks will not have Mac or Windows problems.

But beyond that, I'd agree that giving children or parents a Chromebook will cut down on tech support requests.

I also think as a parent, it might be relatively easy to monitor a (younger) child's use of the device through Chrome itself.

look at supervised account on chromeos. It's the best supervision I have seen - my teenager hasn't managed to escape it (yet?).

Would you know if she did?

I'd also add that it is great for technical people as a second device.

Typing this on a chromebook

Useless is a pretty relative term. If what I want is something I can send some emails on, watch a movie or do facebook; something light, cheap and instant on is pretty appealing. It's like a tablet with a keyboard.

And there's the management features that have made them so appealing to schools. Cheap to acquire and easy for someone without a great deal of IT experience to manage.

> Useless is a pretty relative term.

Definitely true. One member of my household has similar needs that you've outlined: somewhere to write, email, Netflix, web browsing, Youtube playing in the background.

I do all of those things sometimes, but also expect access to a few games, Amazon streaming, for anything that can work offline to work offline, and some kind of a development environment that supports whichever set of languages I'm tinkering with at the time.

It's easy for me to dismiss ChromeOS and similar systems because they don't do what I want, and easy to forget that other users honestly don't have the same requirements that I do.

I can do amazon streaming in the browser on chromeos. What devices have offline amazon streaming, I didn't know that was possible? Is it possible to do that using an android app? If so, run that app on the chromebook, problem solved.

> I can do amazon streaming in the browser on chromeos.

ChromeOS would cover a portion of my requirements, and that's part of it.

> What devices have offline amazon streaming

I know my Android devices support downloading Amazon video and have for a long while.

> problem solved

One problem of several, as far as I'm concerned.

So what is left is dev environment? crouton lets you run linux at the same time as chromeos.

Well, games. And Crouton isn't a viable solution, as long as dev mode on a Chromebook still requires you to do the ctrl+d thing at boot, or whatever.

Honestly, if it's not a machine with at least a TB of storage, user serviceable, and capable of running both Windows and a standard Linux distro, then it's not something I'm interested in as a primary computing device.

I'm not a big fan of cloud storage, using more of Google's services than I need to, browser-based technologies, being forced into choice of a specific OS, or jumping through hoops to use my computer.

From what I've seen, a ChromeOS machine is an appliance. Crouton is a kludge with a few unpolished edges, trying to turn it back into a computer. Why would I buy that?

especially true when your main interface to real work is a terminal or emacs. most everything else is browser based.

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