Should I Buy a Chromebook? – Originally Published August 2016

August 7, 2016 Posted by Tiny

From the Dark Side
by Tiny Ruisch

You may find it difficult to believe, but I’ve been giving serious thought to completely abandoning Microsoft.  Over the last year, the Windows 10 upgrade fiasco has really disillusioned me.  I’ve got Windows 10 installed on two computers and except for a few minor complaints, I like it a lot.  I decided long ago that I was going to keep using Windows 7 on my main laptop and my desktop.  I’ve invested a lot of time installing and tweaking just the software I really use.  I don’t clutter my two “work” computers with unnecessary programs.  For a year, Microsoft update has made it pure “H‑E‑double hockey sticks” for me to keep these two computers free of Windows 10.

Although many people don’t realize it, Windows 7 mainstream support ended last year.  This simply means that there will be no product upgrades.  Extended support will continue until 2020.  This means that I will still get security updates.  Maybe now I can be a little less vigilant in watching the recommended updates list.  Now that the free upgrade has passed, maybe there will not be any more evil updates.

I use my two Windows 10 computers for playing games, web browsing, making article notes and testing new programs.  I recently retired my last XP computer.  Someday soon I plan to install Linux and turn it into a media server.

Now that you know the background I’ll tell you about the real purpose of this article.  I’ve been giving serious thought to saving my money and purchasing a Chromebook.  There are many advantageous reasons for doing so.  Because there are very few programs installed on the machine, you can get some pretty good hardware for a reasonable price.  Although Wi-Fi is a necessity, it will be available in nearly all the places I would be using it.  Maybe before too long Chromebooks will routinely come with mobile SIM card slots.  It would be awesome to use Google Project Fi on them.

One of the great lures of a Chromebook is a recent change that allows you to use native Android apps.  This leads me to believe that it won’t be too long before all Android apps will run.  I am sure that in the future, Android and Chrome will be combined into a single OS.  That could create some awesome possibilities.

Right now, I would have two major problems with using a Chromebook.  I use LibreOffice and Scribus nearly every day.  Neither of these have yet been ported to use with the Chrome OS cloud system.  Because the Chrome OS isn’t very popular, I don’t expect this to happen in the near future.  There are some hacks and other work arounds, but I’m getting old and don’t want to spend a lot of time messing with them.

As far as I know, no one in the club has a Chromebook.  If everyone would like to donate $30 or $40 dollars, I would be happy to buy one and make a presentation at a future meeting.  Since that likely won’t happen, I guess I’ll just have to be patient.

Thanks for reading.

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