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Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

Can this put music on an MP3 player? Just how is the real filesystem abstracted away in Chrome OS? If you buy music from Amazon MP3, can you run their downloader? (If you buy music from iTunes, I am pretty sure you are SOL already. ;) )

There's a lot of uses that still require a real, local desktop, and I think once you give this to all of your non-techy family members you'll start to run into them.

I don't understand why those complaining about maintaining Windows don't just put on Ubuntu. LibreOffice is certainly more familiar to Office users and more compatible with existing Office documents than Google Docs.

If you haven't considered Ubuntu yet, why do you consider Chrome OS? It's not very hard to teach even the least technically literate person that they just need to click the big multi-colored circle to get to the internet, so it seems weird that abstracting that one step away makes everyone go wild about giving their mom a Chromebook.

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It's all the other nonsense that comes along with managing a typical PC that's the problem. System update every so often, upgrade the system every six months, driver problem with graphics, an endless stream of support requests. On the Windows side, its even worse. I shudder every time I see my Mom's Windows install after a gap of a few months - only half the screen is visible in Firefox because of all the malicious toolbars that got installed in the meantime. An iPad would actually be perfect, but its not as affordable(at least for some models). I'm getting the Acer model for my parents when this comes out.

Set up apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y && apt-get dist-upgrade -y to run as a cronjob, disable the notifications.

EDIT: Curious as to why this is getting downvoted. If you don't want to "bothered" with update dialogs, you have to run the updates behind the scenes without prior approval. This is what Chrome already does automatically -- Google pushes an update and you get it no questions asked, so what's wrong with setting up Ubuntu to do it automatically if that's how you want your computer to work? I don't get it.

I wasn't suggesting the parents set up the cronjob, just as I didn't suggest that they should install the OS. Competent guy should set that all up, parents can use it without knowing the difference in anything.

If you're going to do that at least use cron-apt which was made for that.

You also need apt-get clean and you are not handling things like conf files changing, and prompts.

And for the record, my 87-year-old grandmother has an iPad and I've had to perform maintenance on it (iOS upgrades that Apple emailed her about, and she was flipping out until she got them, and spent several hours trying to download it herself with her copy of iTunes which is apparently somehow borked because it won't let her update) on multiple occasions, and also show her how to do things on it. Upgrades are not automatic on the iPad.

I'm actually surprised to see anyone even compare Ubuntu to Chrome OS in terms of maintenance. The idea is that you don't want to teach how to maintain anything. You don't want to describe anything. Do you realize how easy it is to break something in Ubuntu? You can't trust user to not do something bad, you assume it to happen. This is what Chrome OS is for. Secondly, ChromeOS isn't meant to be a laptop replacement in the sense that it's a laptop in of itself, it's suppose to change how we use things. In other words, Amazon MP3 downloads will go to the Amazon Cloud Drive and played off the Amazon Cloud player. Everything is on-line. You maybe be seeing things in transition, but the idea is that Google is diving head first into getting there.

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