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Comment by pervycreeper | Hacker News Reader

I recently bought a chromebook, and was surprised at how nice the user experience was. Tasks like opening tabs and loading pages seemed subjectively faster than doing the same on my 4GHz desktop. I also like how my attention was never consumed by irrelevant details like it always is in a desktop os.

In places where GNOME treats the user like an idiot by needlessly hiding useful functionality, Chrome makes specific tasks quick and painless. Surely, the fact that Chrome tries to do less, and benefits from a clean slate helps this, but there is still a very clear winner in this comparison.

I'd use it (chrome os) a lot if it had decent native text editing, and wasn't a botnet.

Hopefully a WM comparable in performance and UI design to Chrome's will be supported in GNU/Linux distros soon.

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"I'd use it (chrome os) a lot if it had decent native text editing"

I'd buy one or two for relatives if it had skype. Seems chrome is one feature/app away for a lot of people. Reminds me of this. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html

I think as long as google voice / hangouts is competing for that position, it's unlikely. Skype for linux has historically been kind of a disaster, so I don't expect a chrome app effort from them either.

Unfortunately the recipients I have in mind use skype to talk to their kids & friends. It's non negotiable. My guess is that there are a lot of use cases where 1 or 2 missing apps/features are non negotiable.

IMO the solution is to gradually eliminate barriers to switching from windows. This probably means treating the initial hypothesis that the web is all you need as a starting point and trying to keep chrome's complexity down to Android levels while gradually adding "bloat".

I still think ChromOS could take a big slice of Window's market share, maybe bigger than Apple mac.

> It's non negotiable.

That's silly, WebRTC sites are popping up every where. My personal favorite is appear.in, you can have your family chat with you just by them clicking a link. What is it about Skype that makes it the only solution they're willing to use?

Cases I know of are things like Smart TVs with Skype integration and no chance of supporting WebRTC.

Skype did a good job of getting embedded on lots of devices.

"It's non negotiable."

It may feel that way right now, but no, it's not.

That's like saying, "The recipients I have in mind use AOL Instant Messenger. They're never going to switch to Facebook."

Skype works perfectly fine on linux natively and has for a while.

Agreed ... well, mostly, I've got one of my machines with an older version that always hangs up when I try to answer a call. But that was an "upgrade", and if I'd tried to upgrade it again after noticing I'd probably be OK.

But the current version for Debian wheezy works great, and I just switched my 80 year old father to Debian with Gnome Classic (he has very few windows open at a time so it's OK) and that version of Skype, and he's quite happy with the result. Heck, he might even be using Chrome instead of his familiar Firefox if Chrome's tabs paid attention to how big fonts should be. Awful oversight for those who's eyesight isn't so good.

Well, it works, but not quite perfectly fine. I have two Linux machines (Fedora and Xubuntu), and both sometimes have Skype crashing when there's an incoming call. There are also random crashes and glitches when Skype is not the only application trying to play sound. I think "disaster" is quite fitting.

Last time I used it was a year ago, and it worked, but I consistently got pixelated, muddy and laggy video compared to both the Windows and OSX versions. And it wasn't driver issues, any other GPU accelerated graphics / video decoding work fine. And the UI was different, along with missing features. The slow release cycle didn't help their case.

Looks like 4.2 is out and might have fixed these, hooray! The UI sure looks nicer now.

Only if you are just interested in texting. The sound support is outdated, unmaintained (and therefore, buggy) and has been for a while now.

I've found that even text chat is so buggy in Skype for Linux as to be almost unusable.

Skype has also been a disaster on other platforms. Even the Windows one is full of weird UI layouts and adverts and the Android one is buggy as anything, as is the iOS one on my mum's iPad4. Loss of sync, audio, video, high CPU usage etc. all in there.

I notice that the Android text editor leaves much to be desired too. The wrapping algorithm appears to be really slow, particularly evident in GMail on a tablet if you happen to be writing a reply longer than 2 sentences long (particularly apparent on my Xoom).

If Web RTC video chat comes to outlook.com it will be interoperable with Skype. Whether that will work with ChromeOS I don't know.

> Tasks like opening tabs and loading pages seemed subjectively faster than doing the same on my 4GHz desktop.

That is because your desktop can also do a lot more (and likely is doing a lot in the background.) What is basically a bootable browser, not so much. If you disable unneeded services and drivers in your desktop OS, and have nothing more than a browser open, I think the speed would be comparable.

There's a lot of crazy that goes on in a desktop OS that must be cruft left over from legacy.

I use windows all the time. If you put a bad CD in it you can lock the whole window manager up while it's thrashing the CD to be head or tales of it. Sometimes crash it. As soon as you hit the hardware eject it will free back up.

Reading a CD shouldn't do that. There was the post on HN some months back about the tickrate in windows being set by random applications super low and not being put back up so it uses lots of extra power for no reason.

I just wanted to say the hand wavy "Yeah but X does a lot more Y" as some kind of excuse is all too common.

>There's a lot of crazy that goes on in a desktop OS that must be cruft left over from legacy.

I agree with you but it depends on what you mean by cruft. There aren't really any windows features that actively consume (noticeable) resources and are not useful to someone. Designing feature rich software for a billion different usecases is quite hard. Its reasonably easy to make one-off products that just do one thing well.

> If you put a bad CD in it you can lock the whole window manager up while it's thrashing the CD to be head or tales of it. Sometimes crash it. As soon as you hit the hardware eject it will free back up.

Wow.. are you running Windows 95 ? :) The CD thing was common back then. The only reason this can happen on NT is because of some really buggy driver/hardware combination but even that is highly unlikely. Whats far more likely is you have some kind of buggy explorer plugin that is attempting to generate helpful thumbnails or something while enumerating an unreadable medium. AFAIK Explorer is still single-threaded for the most part for backwards compatibility - which worsens the impact. (Unfortunately a lot of this crap is preinstalled by the OEM) IMO Microsoft made an enormous mistake by allowing third parties to extend their OS in ways that can seriously impact user experience like that. Learn from Apple, MS !

>There was the post on HN some months back about the tickrate in windows being set by random applications super low and not being put back up so it uses lots of extra power for no reason.

Are you talking about timer coalescing? I believe you cant change that setting without a reboot. Or perhaps you mean something else.

The CD thing was really common for me back in the XP era, which also happened to be the plethora of messed up CDs era.

It usually wasn't an OS level event, though, merely explorer.exe, so killing it sufficed if ejecting didn't. (Note: This was when ctrl-alt-del opened task manager directly, so you didn't have to right-click the explorer.exe managed task-bar, which would hang if you did)

Hmm, I don't particularly remember any CD ever crashing explorer, but I was and am very conscious of running a as-vanilla-as-possible install of windows when it comes to drivers, services and explorer plugins/BHOs/Shell Extensions/etc.

Windows Explorer reached its pinnacle in Windows XP when in classic mode and went downhill after that with the crippled search facility (showing two items for each search on Vista - one on the disk and one from the search index it generates painfully slowly), the tabbing to the listview headers (why would you want to tab to a header?), the auto viewing of folders (this MUST be a music directory as it has 1 MP3 file in it so I will show a rating system for ALL files), the giant blue bar that sits at the bottom telling you that you are using a computer with a processor in it (duplicating the System Information window accessible from Windows-Break), the giant useless ribbon on Windows 8, the non-following treeview on the left so that the right and left pane do not correlate to each other (made an option in 7 I think), the top organize bar on 7+ that is not usable using the keyboard, the daft favourite links area that by default occupies 40% of the space on the left, and the flicker-full navigation bar. And another thing: the "uninstall a program" from that silly bar on the top. Explorer is for exploring files and directories, surely not to do EVERYTHING with your computer...?

Don't get me started on Finder on the Mac.

I always thought the search functionality of windows was horrible till Windows 7 finally managed to deliver a decent implementation of it.

>And another thing: the "uninstall a program" from that silly bar on the top. Explorer is for exploring files and directories, surely not to do EVERYTHING with your computer...?

Well, for about 20 odd years explorer.exe is technically just a 'shell namespace browser' and one of those shell namespaces is the 'explore files and directory' part and the others are the control panel part , uninstall programs part, etc

I believe for windows 95 microsoft originally did not plan to allow third parties to extend the shell namespace because they felt a buggy shell extension could crash the entire OS - which was true for W95. There is an option now to launch these in seperate processes.

I think the issue with the search is that it makes it very difficult to search for text within files, for example. You have to do a search and then modify it afterwards. The same is true in Finder. It's backwards.

I'm not sure I could possibly disagree more with almost every point you just made, just goes to show how personal such things are

What purpose does that giant blue bar have at the bottom of Windows Explorer? It isn't resizable and you can't get rid of it. One bonus is that it has a gradient so isn't ugly, but I can't see the point of it???

> If you put a bad CD in it you can lock the whole window manager up

That's because the retry behaviour is quite aggressive - it will keep trying many times, waiting on the driver, until either a read error is returned or a timeout happens (which is somewhere in the region of minutes). The same thing happens with a hard drive that's dying, a slow USB drive, or anything else that takes a long time --- I'm guessing that this long wait is still better than frequent "An error occurred reading/writing. [Cancel] [Retry]" popups.

> If you put a bad CD in it you can lock the whole window manager up while it's thrashing the CD to be head or tales of it. Sometimes crash it.

I remember visiting a relative's house a few years ago and noticing that they were very fastidious about removing a game CD from the drive when they weren't using it to improve performance. I thought it was a bit silly, as surely no OS would slow down dramatically just because a CD was in the drive.

Of course, this was because I had been using Linux pretty much exclusively for quite a while. The Windows machine (running 7, if I recall) actually was really slow to open file dialogs and other basic things as long as the disc was in the drive. There was nothing wrong with the disc, its just that lots of things synchronously accessed it and weird times.

I made me realize just how much less unpleasant OSes had become since I left that platform.

I borrowed my father's chromebook a couple of months ago and was surprised to see it came with vim, so I found the native text editing not only decent but as good as on any other computer. :) (I think you might need to enable developer mode to use vim, though.)

"I also like how my attention was never consumed by irrelevant details like it always is in a desktop os."

It is odd but I do not find a desktop OS annoying if set up properly. In particular, I felt this wave of relief after reverting to GNOME2 on my Linux VM and particularly this wave of "the OS isn't interfering with me" when moving to Mac OSX. Perhaps it is coming from Windows with the incessant fade-in bubble-shaped popups bottom right near the dreaded notification area that does this? If Windows properly managed this, it wouldn't be so bad.

Such a small difference between the main system desktop layouts but a large difference in the feeling of being constantly flustered from an attention-seeking system. Weird.

(Of course, removal of "distracting" user-interface elements can go to the extreme, as shown in the release notes for Xcode 5 where the toolbar has been refined "to remove distracting elements" or the over-the-top UI culling that has taken hold of GNOME3, eg. the recent changes to gedit as highlighted on the Planet GNOME blog, apparently for the sake of "making it less distracting". Balance is needed!)

Notifications in Windows can be configured, and often come from third-party programs; I use Windows and rarely get any system tray notifications (that's what those popup balloons are called) - the most common one I see is when the state of the network connection changes, and that's definitely useful information for me. I've tried OS X and I can definitely see how some people like it, but I felt like it was too "opaque", like it was hiding a lot of info from me.

> Of course, removal of "distracting" user-interface elements can go to the extreme

IMHO UIs have already gone a bit too far in this direction. The funny thing is that I have a feeling a lot of the same people who think this often useful information is an "unnecessary distraction" are the ones who do not use adblockers and such when viewing webpages, and seemingly have no problem consuming the content with all manner of attention-getting adverts spewed at them.

Very true about being too opaque on Mac OSX sometimes. It forces you to run with an iTerm open all the time to keep your Unix skills sharp, which is a good thing, right?

I prefer falling system tray notifications "big balloons" :-)

Btw, I am not trying to dismiss Windows. I use it daily and love it. But sometimes the inundation of popup balloons is a bit overkill, but that's only when using infested computers...

I played with a c720p last week, I was impressed by the responsiveness of it, I assumed it was a good hardware basis and never thought the software architecture was different.

I use Secure Shell on my chromebook to SSH into vim. It's pretty nice.

what do you think is missing in text editing?

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