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[MrRoboto75]

You tell me what the hell you can do with a Samsung Galaxy Chromebook.

As someone that actually owns a chromebook (some Acer model)... my telework job?  Probably most all of your college work too, outside of slacking at the back of statistics class, playing Spintires of all things.  Other than that,
I took it travelling to my relatives or the local coffee shop, I use it to surf the web and make shitposts just like this.

A chromebook's essentially a glorified tablet, it's not a gaming labtop outside of maybe fucking around in Hearthstone.  But that's okay as it makes no attempt to do so.

[methylatedspirit]

Chromebooks specifically are inteded as ultra-cheap machines with minimal power that are used almost exclusively for light web browsing and a minimal level of office suites. They're ideal for "occasionally working om tje go" scenarios, or "homework computer you cannot install games on" ones, and are more recently proving useful for mass deployment of videocomfrencing, bit that is the exrtent of intended use.

That Chromebook I mentioned? That thing costs a whole $500 minimum. Half a grand, and it's a fucking Chromebook. Granted, there's a 10th-gen i5 in there, so you could probably run Windows or Linux or something that isn't Chrome OS, but it's still a bit much, isn't it? I think you could buy a better laptop for that price. Something like that is hilariously overpriced for what it is, even if it is ludicrously thin and light.

A chromebook's essentially a glorified tablet, it's not a gaming labtop outside of maybe fucking around in Hearthstone.  But that's okay as it makes no attempt to do so.

And I'd respect it for that, if only for one thing. Google's been trying to advertise these things as "gaming" laptops (or in some misleading way that would imply that), trying to say it'll solve all your problems and this and that. I dunno why they don't play to the strengths of Chromebooks, but instead trying to force it to do something they can't. They're not for enthusiasts like me, who demand high performance, and are willing to go deep into the system to unlock that.

Yeah, Chromebooks are just glorified tablets. In that role, I get it. You don't want little Billy to install 40 viruses onto their laptop just because they want to get free Robux or something. But, just... marketing irks me sometimes.

[wierd]

I have a samsung chromebook 3. It is an older baytrail device, and is one of the most cranky. (There is even an asterisk next to it on the MrChromebox.tech website for the needed bios re-flash to make chromebooks have normal UEFI boot, advising to avoid that model, because of its crankiness!)  It is the older version, with 2gb of RAM, and a lacklustre Atom based CPU.

It has 16gb of eMMC storage, and a microSD slot.  No other provisions for internal storage.



I have it running Ubuntu Linux 20.04



I have a fat 256gb microSD card in the slot, mounted as /home, and formatted with appropriate "fake RAID" settings, so that block writes are perfectly aligned with the native flash topology inside the card.  In addition to that, I have a tmpfs mountpoint configured in /etc/fstab for the browser's cache location (so the browser cache does not destroy the microSD card)  Swap is on zram, using zstd compression algo.


It is by no means a powerhouse.  I will say that much-- However, it can do a surprising number of things, including run the latest WINE. A great many windows programs run just fine, and through that, a great many older windows games. (It is not a limitation with WINE, but rather with the weaksauce processor in that chromebook)  It acts like a laptop from circa 2000, in terms of its ability and power. (granted, that is VERY dated, but then again, this is a CHROMEBOOK, and those things are not really that beefy to begin with.  Some chromebooks sport an i3 or i5 inside them, and could probably do something significantly more modern, but considering this thing has an 8 HOUR battery life, IN ACTIVE USE, I can clearly see it having some good use cases, even today.  I consider it a "modern netbook")

It does DosBox like a champ.  I have been setting up launchers for various old DOS titles on it, like Master of Orion 2.


As for what I am using right NOW, I am using a second-hand (via Ebay) Samsung series 9 Ultrabook; last model in the series, before it was discontinued. It is a 15" model.

It has 8gb of RAM, upgradable mSATA SSD, and an i5 CPU.

It is able to do quite a lot in terms of modern light gaming, and is absurdly thin.  It does have a mag-alloy shell though, so deck-flex is minimal.

[Lord Shonus]

That Chromebook I mentioned? That thing costs a whole $500 minimum. Half a grand, and it's a fucking Chromebook.

Samsung Galaxy Tablets also cost around $500. You pay for the name.

[wierd]

I think the Series 3 chromebook only cost like, 160$, brand new...

(and this is the NEWER model, with the bigger eMMC and more RAM.  Still, it proudly proclaims it is made by Samsung.)


I would avoid it though, for the same reasons that MrChromebox.tech describes.  It really is VERY cranky for ANYTHING but chrome OS.

[methylatedspirit]

See, my cheapskate senses say, "Just get a used laptop and put an SSD and 8GB of RAM in it!". But then I checked my local online shopping places, and these things cost, like, $200 for just the laptop, nevermind the laptop RAM and SSD that you'll have to buy separately. Apparently they're out of date, or they're not as strong as I'd hoped.

[wierd]

See, my cheapskate senses say, "Just get a used laptop and put an SSD and 8GB of RAM in it!". But then I checked my local online shopping places, and these things cost, like, $200 for just the laptop, nevermind the laptop RAM and SSD that you'll have to buy separately. Apparently they're out of date, or they're not as strong as I'd hoped.

That is exactly what my Samsung series 9 Ultrabook is.

The caveat is that it uses mSATA M.2 style SSD, and it is the short, stubby kind. DO NOT expect blazing speeds. The UEFI firmware is really bitchy about what USB devices it can boot from also, for reasons that escape me.

Still, 95$ for that one, with RAM and an SSD inside, is pretty cheap.

[methylatedspirit]

In which case, my senses have been calibrated against US and UK expectations, and despite not being from either of those places, I still somehow expect my country to be like those. Still, used laptops and RAM + SSD upgrades are generally the cheapest way to get a decent laptop here, starting around $200 equivalent. Hell, you don't even need to be good with computers; some sellers have versions with SSDs and RAM already installed, but of course there's some markup associated with that.

[King Zultan]

I prefer my laptops have a DVD drive.

Also what is so great about a SSD.

[Mathel]

SSD are good at retrieving and storing data fast. But they have less read/write cycles than a HDD.

So it is good to have the OS or some large applications on them, and terrible to have the page file on them.

[methylatedspirit]

Ninja'd.

As Mathel stated, you get faster load times with an SSD as the boot drive. It's write cycles that are limited; not read cycles, BTW. Read all you want; writing is what degrades it. But even then, you'd have a really hard time trying to exhaust that limit, since the rated write cycles for an SSD is something in the petabyte range; thousands of terabytes. If you can write that much to an SSD in 7 years, you're not an average user. That's a damn server, because no sane person would continually write hundreds of gigabytes every single day for 7 years.

It also turns out that SSDs are more predictable when it comes to their reliability. They have no moving parts, so mechanical failures are impossible, so the only thing you need to keep track of is the total amount of writes (in gigabytes) done to the SSD throughout its lifetime. You can go into CrystalDiskInfo, and you can check the health of your SSD, right then and there. Unless you get real unlucky with the board on the SSD itself, that is an accurate measure of drive health, and it's possible to exactly predict when it's going to fail.

Also, Windows 10 has a nasty tendency to slow down to an absolute crawl with HDDs, because the CPU's basically stuck waiting for the HDD to load stuff in before it can do something. And these aren't sequential loads, either. They're these small reads that force the read/write head in the HDD to move back and forth, and that can introduce a lot of wait times as the drive desperately tries to fetch the things it's being told to. Windows 10 isn't optimized for HDDs anymore, I don't think. It assumes you have an SSD as your boot drive nowadays, and it does things that seem to confirm that hypothesis. Task Manager loads in the icons first before it lets you interact with the processes in your system, for instance.

[Frumple]

Really?

Laptops have been USB ONLY for the past 5 years, at least.

I mean, I guess? Last year was the first time I got (or interacted with, for that matter) a new-ish laptop in like a decade or somethin'. One I had before was still running Vista. Laptops at work are old HP rigs, too -- they still have dvd drives, I think. So it came as a surprise to me; I hadn't noticed it wasn't there and everything else I've been around had the things.

[wierd]

Ninja'd.

As Mathel stated, you get faster load times with an SSD as the boot drive. It's write cycles that are limited; not read cycles, BTW. Read all you want; writing is what degrades it. But even then, you'd have a really hard time trying to exhaust that limit, since the rated write cycles for an SSD is something in the petabyte range; thousands of terabytes. If you can write that much to an SSD in 7 years, you're not an average user. That's a damn server, because no sane person would continually write hundreds of gigabytes every single day for 7 years.

It also turns out that SSDs are more predictable when it comes to their reliability. They have no moving parts, so mechanical failures are impossible, so the only thing you need to keep track of is the total amount of writes (in gigabytes) done to the SSD throughout its lifetime. You can go into CrystalDiskInfo, and you can check the health of your SSD, right then and there. Unless you get real unlucky with the board on the SSD itself, that is an accurate measure of drive health, and it's possible to exactly predict when it's going to fail.

Also, Windows 10 has a nasty tendency to slow down to an absolute crawl with HDDs, because the CPU's basically stuck waiting for the HDD to load stuff in before it can do something. And these aren't sequential loads, either. They're these small reads that force the read/write head in the HDD to move back and forth, and that can introduce a lot of wait times as the drive desperately tries to fetch the things it's being told to. Windows 10 isn't optimized for HDDs anymore, I don't think. It assumes you have an SSD as your boot drive nowadays, and it does things that seem to confirm that hypothesis. Task Manager loads in the icons first before it lets you interact with the processes in your system, for instance.

The write life issue is much more pronounced on cheaper, less advanced flash media, like the microSD card I am (ab)using in that chromebook.  That is why I have anything that wants to make frequent writes to it writing on a small bit of RAM instead with a tmpfs mount.  It is also why I have the microSD formatted the way I do. (Determined the hard way through trial and error, to find what the erase block and page sizes are empirically)  These devices do not really do wear leveling internally, because their flash controller is in reality, a teeny tiny micro controller that is just barely good enough to buffer reads and writes, and manage the flash arrays.  As such, the dangers of write amplification from an incorrect cluster size or poorly planned disk writes, is very very real. (Long story; I burned up a microSD card in that very system the year before I put in the new one, because the allocation unit size was the default one for EXT4 (4kb), and the browser cache wanted to write ALL THE GODDAMN TIME. The combination burned out the card in 12 months. I then educated myself, and implemented the arrangement above. It has been in service now for 3 years. No problems.)

Windows does not have such tuneable options for maximum utility of a flash media device, so instead, just make sure your allocation unit size is some whole multiple of both the erase block and page size, and hope for the best.  For SDcards, a large cluster size with exFAT has the same utilitarian function as the stripe/stride voodoo on linux's EX4, but is significantly less efficient or useful.  The manufacturer *usually* has the device formatted with the exact correct size cluster for the erase block size of the card. (but not always.)  Finding the page size is another matter though.

[methylatedspirit]

Does that mean that people sometimes reformat their laptops that have eMMC in them, and then they complain that their laptop doesn't work anymore after a year of use because the stripe/stride stuff isn't correctly set? Or is the needed data usually set somewhere in the flash controller, and OSes just read off it?

Hmm... potential way to sabotage eMMC in the factory: set the page size and erasure block size to incorrect values?

[wierd]

Usually the eMMC based storage devices are "Smarter" than your run of the mill SDcard,  This is because they are intended to be soldered to motherboards.

Typically, eMMC has:

1) Smaller erase block size
2) Some limited form of wear leveling
3) Higher quality flash memory, that has a better write life number.


However, it is vulnerable as well, and idiots at the wheel can cause problems. Just not as bad as the "Garbage", "Bargain Bin" flash found inside an sdcard, that is intended to live inside a digital camera.


The microSD slot on that chromebook really is not intended to be (ab)used the way I am.