Chrome OS? No, thank you. I'll stay with macOS and keep hoping for the Asahi Linux dream

I have to switch between an M4 macbook pro and a Lenovo Chromebook Plus multiple times a day and I will say, while it isn't terrible, the keyboard and trackpad on the Lenovo have nothing on the Macbook. The experience with using USB devices (yubikey in particular) through the android layer is also real shitty.

I recently had to turn in my work Macbook and started using personal Lenovo Thinkpad E14 -- last or second to last gen.

I have to say that everything, aside from keyboard and hardware (ie CPU, storage etc) on it is bad. Screen is bad, sound si horrible, webcam makes me look like I died a couple of days ago -- all gray and blurry, battery is obviously have nothing on Apple silicon laptops, fans are noisy, touchpad is bad, all is bad. But what impressed me the most are USB-C ports. They are somehow bad too. There's no grip, there's no feedback, you just kind of put a cable somewhere in them and hope it doesn't arc -- because sometimes it sounds like electrical arcing in there. Not quite pencil in a bucket, but not far off. And the thing is new, how do you manage that on a new business laptop? I'm very impressed, in the worst way possible.

I really enjoy ChromeOS, though I'm worried a lot of its simplicity will go away as Google transitions to Android-based laptops. My wife and I use an Asus Chromebook Flip as a kitchen/living room computer that we don't need to think about. No software updates, it just surfs the web and we can flip it into tablet mode if we want to.

Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

>> it seems that Signal's team is actively working on linking additional Android devices, and very soon we can simply solve this by using Signal for Android.

Wishful thinking, this has been a problem since tablets (android or ios) were a thing and trying to use one linked to your phone.

I'm interested in the hardware on this... does anyone know if this laptop can boot arm64 Linux natively? Perhaps with an alternate bootloader install?

I've read about plenty of other Chromebooks that can do that, but I can't find any info on booting Linux on this one.

ChromeOS would be so much more compelling if it could be degoogled... An Ungoogled-ChromiumOS would be amazing.

> no fucking way there's a Mediatek chip out there that's as good as M2?!? right!?

Actually Mediatek is pretty underrated. Isn't the upcoming Dimensity 9600 Pro on par with the M5 [0]? And they also designed the CPU part of the GB10 in the NVIDIA DGX Spark, which is roughly on par with the CPU of the AMD AI Max+ 395 and M3 Max 14 core [1] [2].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1so1wyv/dimensity...

[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/17762799?baseli...

[2] https://browser.geekbench.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=m3+max

I’m expecting delivery of a used Lenovo yoga thinkpad simply to run one piece of software that I previously ran on an older intel Mac using a virtual windows drive, sadly the security on that software (dongles!!) will not and possibly will never run on new Apple silicon, so I’m gonna be lugging a win machine around for any projects that call upon that security software. I worked with the developer and tried a a patched software key for the same security, but sadly it didn’t work either. I’ll still be sticking to Mac for most of my work as I just prefer the way things predictably operate, but I am now going to have a windows toy to play with too, even if it’s actually for work !

I investigated this path. In terms of comparable performance per watt komapnio laptops are competitive. But not on price. Then there's the aspect of how open/closed each ecosystem is. While iOS is an prison like ecosystem, macos still remains quite open, more open than many chromebooks.

Asahi linux exist and i was surprised to see that these arm chromebooks just lack bios/uefi that allows me to install anything other than chromeos.

So, yeah, you can virtualize other OS on chromeos but so can you on macos