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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

I have computers in datacenters that I can effortlessly SSH into when I am feeling the (frequent and chronic) urge to Dick About With Computers And/Or Software.

However, the one that connects to my display(s) is simply a tool for running Chrome, Skype, FaceTime, Mail.app, TweetDeck, Spotify, and SSH, and, as such, should not ever break or otherwise hinder the incredibly simple tasks which ARE ITS ONLY JOB.

This is why the only computers I own that I touch on a regular basis all have fruit on the back. It's a very simple calculus.

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The same reasons [0] are why I have a Chromebook. CrOS is limited, sure, but the limits make the thing bloody near invincible (and amazingly productive).

[0] Hangouts are luckily the VoIP of choice for most I work with

I was thinking of buying one for exactly this reason, too.

The fruit-calculus? :-)

Think about what your laptop is doing that we would have had no hope of doing with desktop Linux just a few years ago (if ever, depending on the hardware).

Sharing access to video capture and audio hardware between software written (sort of) by Apple, Microsoft (Skype, so -ish), Spotify, etc. would have been unthinkable. You would have been restarting your primary machine if you made the mistake of starting any two apps that tried to grab your QuickCam at the same time.

<-- Down votes go here and by all means, please don't respond.

Interesting. My personal workstation runs Windows and I too effortlessly SSH and RDP into many headless or virtual machines to dick around and (occasionally) to do actual work. Hey, I also run Chrome, Skype, TweetDeck, Spotify, SSH and the like and I have been for years...on the same install of Windows. It's like your calculus doesn't work at all in my universe.

Actually...I don't think you're doing calculus at all.

Also, have you ever seen the source of Chrome? It's not that simple. Lay-people think it's simple, but software developers know better.

I laughed at the "incredibly simple" bit myself. I'm sure it must seem that way to people who live at the top of the stack doing javascript hackery and MongoDB maintenance. It's amusing how few people, even in this world of open source everywhere, have ever bothered to do something as simple (in an only-slightly-ironic sense of "simple") as build an OS distribution. Android might be the "simplest" of this kind of thing, and it's still a 10G+ tree.

I would have accepted "it's Unix". I think that's got to be the biggest reason techies run Macs.

kill -9 Word

Need I say more? :-)

no, because it's probably just an alias to less

"A browser" is simple from a "a process that talks to the network and draws things on screen" standpoint. I'm not suggesting that Chrome isn't a complex application - just that it's self-contained and very well tested and doesn't do anything special with the OS or hardware (drivers, USB, video modes, etc).

My workflow would work on Windows, too, aside from the fact that it'd suck. (Example: Unplug an external USB audio interface while a song is playing. OSX skips a beat and then plays via internal speakers, at the previous internal-speaker-volume-level.)

I could travel with luggage that isn't Pelican/Incase, too— but I don't.

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