[TriLUG] More on Laptops

Fri May 16 09:24:03 EDT 2014

Great write up, thank you for sharing!
Sent via BlackBerry

-----Original Message-----
From: Ken MacKenzie <ken at mack-z.com>
Sender: trilug-bounces at trilug.orgDate: Thu, 15 May 2014 23:52:24 
To: Triangle Linux Users Group General Discussion<trilug at trilug.org>
Reply-To: Triangle Linux Users Group General Discussion <trilug at trilug.org>
Subject: Re: [TriLUG] More on Laptops

Certainly, not sure how easy this is to make as a short email but I will
try to be to concise.

For starters it really comes down to what is your workflow most of the time
and what is your buy in with google in products in general.  As in do you
already use gmail or google docs or calendar for example.

Now for me on the google products I have been "bought in" for years.  I use
all of them every day on every device.  I wouldn't know where I need to be
without my calendars, gmail is my prime email (although it is hidden behind
forwarding addresses it can send as) and google docs I use extensively. So
that part of the sale was already done for me.

Now as for my workflow I rarely have the need for my laptop to hold that
much locally.  It is rarely ever off a network no matter where I am.  And
incidentally I got the HP 14 so it came with t-mobile data for life for
free and 4gb of RAM.  Granted the t-mobile data is only 200 mb/month but in
a pinch it is nice it is there.

While we are talking about this specific device the local storage on the
device is 16gb.  The crouton chroot with my apps takes about 5 gb of that
away and I forget how much the chromeos takes but it is very little.  I
added a 32gb usb 3.0 low profile key to one of the 3 usb ports and it works
like a charm.  I store a backup of my crouton image on there as well as the
music library I need for DJ'ing with the computer.  It will also take SD
cards so expanding the local storage is quite simple in that regard.

However I am slowly moving more into using drive as my primary cloud
storage.  Before that I was using dropbox a lot.  Got some good free
storage on that over the years.  But with the purchase of a chrome book you
get a free 100gb of drive storage additional for your account for I think a
year or two.  On top of that google now offers 1tb of cloud storage for $10
a month.  Currently at home I have a 2tb external drive hooked to the
server.  The important files are backed up to that server from all
computers and then mirrored over to the external drive.  My wife knows that
if there is a fire and everyone is out safely and she can grab one more
thing that drive is the thing to grab.  It has all our pictures and videos,
tax records, etc.  Well I think $10 a month is worth having an off site for
that in my book.  Yeah I will still maintain a local copy on the server but
I don't need to worry about that external drive going kaput on me or not
being able to grab it.  Or worse a break in and someone grabs it.  Granted
I would have to externally encrypt things like say our tax records before
uploading them to the cloud to feel really safe about it but other than
that it would save me some headaches and it is worth the piece of mind.

I will mention something else in the vanilla chrome os setup.  Any recent
google docs you edit on the device, you have a local copy that you can work
on.  Not sure the max it will keep, but in general whatever I have needed
recent has been available for me and when I am back on a network connection
it automatically syncs right back up.

Now as for my workflow.   Almost everything I do work wise is about being
connected.  I am connecting to other machines constantly for what I am
doing.  Even without the crouton install ssh/vnc/rdp all work very well
from a chromebook.  I use the 2xclient for a mention though not the google
remote desktop app or whatever it is.  As for non, programmer technical
work.  Well the big thing I use the chromebook for I mentioned part of is
DJ'ing.  The actual application is I play in a couple bands, bass and keys.
 I have the chromebook on a stage laptop stand, I use crouton->debian with
the kxstudio repos and run claudia to store my synth and sound config for
ladish/jack.  Using a usb midi keyboard I play live stage keys on the
chrome book, real time latency levels, and between sets I dj.

I am pretty impressed with all I have been able to do with this device
without having to deal one little bit with MS or Apple on it.  I would say
if I had to do it all over again I still might opt for the HP14 but I will
say there is a chrome book coming out from Acer soon that will be i3 based
instead of haswell that could be really interesting. Actually the HP14
today is better as when I got it the local storage was only 16gb and now
they have a 32gb version so that would be nice, but not a deal breaker.

Anyway if you do want to run linux on a chromebook be it in crouton or as a
dual boot through chrubuntu (no personal experience with chrubuntu) then
definitely target devices with 4gb of ram and stay away from ARM unless you
know what you will run is compiled for ARM or you are just into working on
ARM linux.  A side note, distro wise the choices for canned solutions are
slim.  I mean I am sure you could sort out anything but Chrubuntu for the
dual boot option seems to do best with the hardware.  The crouton route
only supports ubuntu or debian, no big deal to me as I am already a debian
user so happy there.  Choices are growing and of course depending how dirty
you want to get your hands I am sure anything is possible.

Hope this kind of helped, sorry if I got into rambling a bit.

Ken

On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 6:35 PM, <matt at noway2.thruhere.net> wrote:

> Everyone, thank you, I appreciate the input.
>
> @Ken, Could I ask your impression of how you like / dislike the Google
> Cloud drive aspect of the machine?  The Chromebook was one that I looked
> at early on in my search but discounted it because of the lack of local
> storage.  If I recall, someone put it as using Google's Cloud as "being
> like free cigarettes, sounds great now but might regret it in the future"
>
> @Jeremy, I will contact you off list.  I would like to talk to you about
> this.  If I decide to go that route, we may be able to work something out.
>
> @Matt, thanks for the suggestion.  I will check the site out.
>
> While I don't like the prices, I keep coming back to getting things like
> the SSD and higher end processor.  My biggest complaint with my 7+ year
> old machine is waiting while it churns the HDD moving stuff between the
> memory and disk.
>
> > The time has come for me to purchase a new laptop.  After reading the
> > couple of very long threads on the subject, I am narrowing the decision
> to
> > the Asus Zenbook (e.g. UX301LA-DH71T) versus the Samsung Ultrabook (e.g.
> > NP940X3G-S01US).
> >
> > Does anyone have experience with these that you could share?  How well do
> > they run Linux and how good is the driver support for these newer types
> of
> > machines?
> >
> >
> > --
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