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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

> Ironically, despite the very agressive price points of sub-$200 Chromebooks, their current market is limited to the US and the wealthier Commonwealth nations.

Most likely, Chromebooks are too dependent on the "cloud" to be useful in middle-income countries with comparatively flimsy Internet connectivity. A general-purpose x86 laptop will simply go a lot further there. (And if you put a lightweight OS on it, you will almost never be limited by performance for basic workloads, even on old hardware.)

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This. I'm in the military, so keenly interested in how much you can do without network. I have two XO-1 laptops and I was a Cr-48 test pilot (their label for their beta testers). I took the Cr-48 with me to Japan for Fukushima in 2011. ChromeOS was not all that useful. Why run ChromeOS when Xubuntu is available? Lubuntu? Pick your favorite lightweight Linux distro. After about a week I cried uncle and installed Xubuntu. Depending on network for the ability to type a document is non-sensical. If I recall, Google Docs didn't have offline mode yet, but due to that experience I have keenly attended to offline mode. It improves things, but it's not a panacea.

I don't think a laptop without network is ever going to be as awesome as one with network, but there's a lot of room on a laptop to do more than run AJAX applications in a browser (do they still talk about AJAX?) that offload all the smarts to a server-side app.

The CR48 was over a decade ago wasn't it? I was also a cr48 beta user and I recall being a teenager, which I have not been for a while. Comparing chromebooks today to the cr48 feels like comparing... idk, anything from 12 years ago to anything from today?

ChromeOS can now run Android apps and a full linux environment.

It's not fundamentally different though. I had the cr48 too and it was just a toy compared to a normal Linux distribution. It didn't displace my similarly underpowered Asus netbook, since the later ran Debian (I think that's the distro I ran back then).

Chromebooks of today are more powerful, which they need to be because web developers of today waste more memory and CPU cycles than ever. But fundamentally the concept and limitations of these "online first" devices are similar. The ability to run Android apps is certainly a step forward, but these things are really designed to lock people into Google's cloud products first and foremost.

It is different. I can run a Debian VM with GUI applications on any recent x86 Chromebook. It's pre-installed and supported.

It is so, so fundamentally different. It has been over a decade. Chromebooks today run debian. I've got a debian shell right now where I'm working with intellij.

> anything from 12 years ago to anything from today

IDK, I have access to pretty much any hardware I want (cloud GPUs, rack-mounted DGX-type systems, actual supercomputers, yada yada) and in the evening I still sit down to use old ThinkPads. My oldest daily driver is an X201 which actually predates the Cr-48. I don't find my brain working any faster using a 16" macbook. I do find during the workday that the massive amount of screen real estate of 2 XDR monitors is handy to quickly refer across 2 or 3 applications (e.g. scribing for a document under discussion in a video call, while looking at the references under discussion, and checking my calendar with a glance)

What's different is that ChromeOS was an alpha OS 12 years ago and obviously is radically different today. One major difference is that you can run a full debian environment.

this debian environment is news to me. thanks for that.

> middle-income countries with comparatively flimsy Internet connectivity

Most middle-income countries I've been in had faster internet than the city I grew up in in Canada, and for about $10/mo.

Sure, internet goes down perhaps once or twice a month for half a day or so, but it often does in rural-adjacent parts of Canada too. And in middle-income countries unlimited or near-unlimited LTE phone data for tethering is also very cheap.

I never truly relied on wired internet in low-income countries, so I can't speak to those.

Unless you consider Thailand or Ukraine low income. Although my internet in Belarus and Albania was fast and reliable, and I guess those are low-income countries.

I don't think you'd find many Chromebook deployments in rural Canada, either. Having an IoT thin-client device as your main computing platform turns "internet is down/dog slow" from a mild nuisance into a total showstopper for the day.

> I've been in had faster internet than the city I grew up in in Canada, and for about $10/mo.

> Sure, internet goes down perhaps once or twice a month for half a day or so, but it often does in rural-adjacent parts of Canada too

With 90% of the population less than 100 miles from the US border, what's their excuse for being worse than Albania?

Even that relatively dense 100 miles has pretty low population density by European standards I think.

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/canadian-provinces-and-t...

Even if we assume their entire population is in that 100 mile range, it is 42 people/kmsq [37.7M/(8891*100)], which is like half that of Albania.

Of course the true answer is that it is our bad influence is seeping up across the boarder. Have you heard of Comcast?

A government-supported private telecommunications cartel. Also, in Nova Scotia, a government-supported private electricity monopoly.

> A government-supported private telecommunications cartel

What's the point? Why not simply have a fair market with competition?

> Also, in Nova Scotia, a government-supported private electricity monopoly.

I think Quebec has the same no? That's actually one instance where I was told the government was doing a good job. My colleague told me he pays something like 0.05$ per Kw/h. That's insanely cheap. I assume Nova Scotia does the same.

You would not believe how connected to the internet people from middle income and low income countries are. Everyone has internet.

No, it’s mostly that phones are more convenient/cheap than computers. Everyone just has a cheap smartphone, computer feels redundant and expensive for what it can do. And computers are too expensive for educational segment.

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