The new Plus category of Chromebooks is an assurance that you’ll get a higher level of performance and features but still at a reasonable starting price.
With Chromebook Plus, you’re guaranteed to get at least the following specs, with a starting price of $399:
- 12th-gen Intel Core i3 or AMD Ryzen 3 7000 processor or better
- 8GB or more of memory
- 128GB or more of storage
- 1080p-resolution IPS LCD or better
- 1080p webcam with temporal noise reduction
Unless you can easily upgrade the RAM, Storage, and replace the OS when it loses support, it’s still ewaste.
Yes, installing Linux is possible, but it isn’t easy. I put GalliumOS on my old high school Chromebook.
It is worth noting that they updated their support to be 10 years moving forward, so I disagree with the eWaste sentiment. I agree that Linux as a permanent alternative isn’t super easy, and I say that typing from a Chromebook running Debian 12.
You can upgrade the RAM and storage on some of them. Installing either Linux or windows is also possible.
Possible != easy. Putting Linux on any old Windows PC is dead easy, takes not even half an hour. Linux on a Chromebook? Easily hour+ long headache on your first time.
Easily hour+ long headache on your first time.
Whenever I read this kind of thing (and people seem to say it pretty often), it seems really weird to me. Same goes for complaining about distro installers. An hour of possible headache/irritation and then you use the machine for years. Obviously it would be better if stuff was easy, but an hour just seems insignificant in the scheme of things. I really just don’t understand seeing it as an actual roadblock.
(Of course, there are other situations where it could matter like if you had to install/maintain 20 machines, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.)
Oh yeah, its absolutely not a huge deal if you already have a chromebook and just want to keep using it. But if I’m buying a new laptop and I know that putting another OS on it will be unnecessarily difficult, I’m just going to pick a different laptop.
Good point when you frame it that way, but also worth acknowledging that relative to the alternatives, it is an uphill battle that most won’t be bothered with. My experience involved reading this site + joining their discord + digging into Github for troubleshooting, which is not a viable option for 80% of users
What makes it so difficult, even though they use similar hardware?
ChromeOS is Linux.
Well yes but actually no
I read this in Maurice Moss’ voice
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Apple laptops you can’t upgrade any of those things and they sell like hotcakes. It’s really not something most people do.
Chromebooks have their niche, beyond education they’re good as second laptops where you’re really only doing mostly browser stuff. Mine is getting on a bit now, a 2017 pixelbook… but it doesn’t go EOL until next year and I’ll probably keep it beyond that because it just works… only thing I’d like really would be a bigger screen.
Unless you can easily upgrade the RAM, Storage, and replace the OS when it loses support, it’s still ewaste.
Which consumer desktop Linux distros have more than 10 years of updates?
All of them!
Linux and Linux distros are generally designed to be hardware-agnostic, and generally works just fine on very old components. I’m currently running the current version of Ubuntu on a used U1 server from ~2013, no issues, no headaches. It just works. Grab any Windows PC from the last 20 years, you won’t have any compatibility issues running most Linux distros, though some distros might expect more performance. Linux Mint is fairly lightweight.
And you can install those distros on a Chromebook, no? You can probably use CloudReady after ChromeOS no longer supports it after 10 years.
Debian LTS for stable releases is 5 years
Ubuntu LTS is 5 years
https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle
Fedora is 13 months
LTS just means staying on the same release and guaranteed support for that time which is important for businesses. As a consumer you can always just do a release upgrade.
Since most businesses rely on Windows anyway, that’s pretty much irrelevant for this discussion. They cannot use Chromebooks either.
The original assertion was that a Chromebook becomes useless ewaste when the software updates stop. But as of today Chromeos gets software updates for longer than any Linux distro major release (10 years ChromeOS vs 5 years for Linux). You can install Linux on that Chromebook after Google stops supporting it just the same as the Windows laptop after Dell stops supporting it. And there’s CloudReady and Chromium. Theyre not ewaste without Google updates, you have options.
Linux receives updates forever. The point of LTS kernels is not to stay on them forever but to have to do less testing. It’s not very likely that upgrading kernels will break something but it can happen so businesses can stay on LTS kernels and continue to get critical security fixes and they’ll only have to update and test once a new LTS kernel comes out. The average person should use the regular kernel and that’s also the default on pretty much all distros
Comparing ChromeOS updates to LTS kernel updates makes no sense, especially since the LTS kernel can just be updated to a newer version if that specific version doesn’t get updated anymore.
But contrary to Linux or even Windows (unless they pull some hardware requirement shit again) you need to switch to another OS and not simply do a release upgrade.
You aren’t understanding.
That’s support for one specific software release.
It’d be like saying Apple supports iPhones for 1 year not 5+ years, because they’re only on iOS version X for one year.
Linux devices get updates literally forever.
Debian has been around for 30 years. And on my non-Chromebook I can always install the latest version.
Debian LTS for stable release is 5 years
And when that support period ends… I just install the next Debian release.
When the support period for ChromeOS ends, I’m “officially” out of luck.
I have a 13 year old laptop that runs current Linux distros without a problem.
You can install Linux on that old Chromebook, same as you can today. I think also CloudReady could be used. Or Chromium is open source so that custom buildsay be feasible just like with custom Android ROMs.
Or I could just… buy a laptop that doesn’t have an expiration date.
Yup. My point is simply that with the latest announced support cycle ChromeOS has a longer support cycle than any single Linux distro LTS release I know of, and even when out of support a Chromebook isn’t automatically an ewaste paperweight.
I just recently installed the latest version of Manjaro on a Dell XPS 15z from 2011. So Manjaro supports hardware from at least 12 years ago.
Nice. I believe I can put ChromeOS Flex (forgot about the name change from CloudReady in my other comments) on my old Surface Pro 3. Or Fedora. Or keep running Windows. And when my HP 14c stops getting updates from Google in 2030 or 2031, I’ll consider Linux or Flex on it. 😁
Slackware 1.0 isn’t still receiving updates though. There doesn’t seem to be a statement on how long major releases are supported, it just says “a number of years.”
Why do you compare patches for major software releases with updates for hardware? Those are completely different topics.
I’m comparing ChromeOS software updates to Linux distro major release support lifecycles. The original assertion was that a Chromebook becomes useless ewaste once the software updates stop.
Which consumer desktop Linux distros have more than 10 years of updates?
This is an apples to oranges (or OS to hardware) comparison.
Lots of GNU/Linux distros have been receiving updates for decades now, although major releases do sometimes drop support for some hardware (typically an entire CPU architecture).
I don’t think ChromeOS is saying they’ll provide security updates for a 10 year old OS release (though maybe they are? but that wouldn’t be very attractive to most people), rather they’re saying “ChromeOS devices receive 10 years of updates.**” (with the ** being “For devices prior to 2021 that will receive extended updates, some features and services might not be supported.”)
And of course, yes, many other distros current releases today do have excellent support for hardware that is a lot more than 10 years old.
I’m running Arch Linux in a 18 year old laptop. And I could and have run Debian in the very same laptop in the past.
I don’t get your point at all. If laptops were as repairable as desktops, we could continue using them for 15+ years. And software support, thanks to the GNU/Linux distro maintainers, is not a problem.
I have a CR48 from 2010 that is running arch linux, is slow but completely workable.
Brilliant! So you’re affirming it wasn’t automatically ewaste once Google stopped supporting it!
128GB eMMC storage
Man, I feel like there’s no excuse for not having at least a 256/512gb SSD these days. They’ve gotten pretty cheap, and you got laptops like HP Pavilion having a 1tb SSD in their laptops for $450. Chromebooks are known for being super cheap, but this doesn’t look like great value.
Google wants you to not store locally though, only in their servers at a cost once you pass the “free storage” amount.
Jesus Christ the comments here are super toxic. Literally any piece of news is gonna be complaining.
They’re being toxic to Google. Do you really care about that?
Negative comments on tech devices that aren’t up to par are warrented. I, for one, and glad that news of this new product is getting honest treatment.
People wouldn’t complain if there was nothing to complain about
impressive! the ultimate botnet machine!
Are Chromebooks more susceptible to that than a Windows machine?
Far less, since they’re quite locked down (hence their popularity in education).
I suspect it was just a reference to google spying on people.
Okay that was my thought. I didn’t know if something became public in the chromeOS security world that I missed
i was talking about the botnet that is google itself, with chromebooks being a literal physical part of it.
Are you referring to privacy concerns or something else. Because when I think of the word botnet I think of DDoS attacks. Do you think Google’s doing something like that?
google is a machine learning, data harvesting botnet most ppl opt in consensual.
I mean that’s what we want right? To be able to opt in consensually. What do you think pays for Gmail, Google maps, YouTube, etc all the “free” services that most of us use every day?
