I don't really get what the problem with MacOS is. It never gets in my way, so why would I switch? Yes, I found Liquid Glass ugly and two days later I completely forgot about it.
I actually tried this last year and the show stopper was Citrix. The version for Chromebooks is some abomination that hasn't been kept recent and so fails validation with my employer's Citrix infra.
I went the other way: from a Pixelbook to a Macbook Air. I mostly do SW development in the CLI, so the Linux subsystem on the chromebook was fine, as is macports/homebrew/etc. on the mac. I would still be using the Pixelbook if I could have replaced its battery. The low-end Air had good price-performance tradeoff, and the Neo would probably be today's choice.
> - If you rely on / heavily use AI tools, you can easily use Claude's Web App etc so that's super cool but also things like Jan also exist for Linux and I haven't tried, but you can use that as well for a more native experience.
Sure, Claude Web App is an adequate replacement to full-fledged Claude Code, and then there is also something that I didn't bother to try but maybe you can try it after you bought a new laptop. What the hell.
Going from complaining about Apple not having enough polish in the fine details of their UI to suggesting we all switch to Chromebooks is so completely inconsistent that there must be other motivations.
In one post they're complaining about things like Apple having the search bar in different locations in different apps, and in the next post they're seriously trying to tell us that a laptop that requires modifying the software and running shell commands copied from the internet so you can run a text editor to change settings and drivers is the solution? They dropped a note about how they haven't actually tried development on the chromebook at the end but say they assume it would be okay. For someone telling us to switch to Chromebooks, they haven't even finished doing their own homework
Linking to an SEO spam website called technical.city for performance comparisons is another clue that this choice was driven by something else first and the reasoning was backfilled. The new MediaTek part is fast, but there's more to laptop performance than a single bar chart from a site citing ancient benchmarks like PassMark.
I can't read this as anything other than an attempt to make a contrarian choice and then present it as the superior alternative.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 54.1 ms ] threadAs a Mac user I was pleasantly surprised when I switched to a arch Linux based distribution.
Might make sense if the Chromebook can be degoogled and set up with a clean Linux distro. Barring that, a regular laptop with Linux may be an option.
So, what's the point of the article?
Sure, Claude Web App is an adequate replacement to full-fledged Claude Code, and then there is also something that I didn't bother to try but maybe you can try it after you bought a new laptop. What the hell.
In one post they're complaining about things like Apple having the search bar in different locations in different apps, and in the next post they're seriously trying to tell us that a laptop that requires modifying the software and running shell commands copied from the internet so you can run a text editor to change settings and drivers is the solution? They dropped a note about how they haven't actually tried development on the chromebook at the end but say they assume it would be okay. For someone telling us to switch to Chromebooks, they haven't even finished doing their own homework
Linking to an SEO spam website called technical.city for performance comparisons is another clue that this choice was driven by something else first and the reasoning was backfilled. The new MediaTek part is fast, but there's more to laptop performance than a single bar chart from a site citing ancient benchmarks like PassMark.
I can't read this as anything other than an attempt to make a contrarian choice and then present it as the superior alternative.