It’s all about purpose. This is the most important thing to keep in mind when you’re attempting to compare or judge something on how useful something is.
What do you look to accomplish with a coupe sports car? Surely you don’t buy one and claim it sucks because you can’t fit your family of four. That isn’t the intended purpose.
There are a lot of people trying to replace their day-to-day machine with Chromebooks and expecting a cheap 1-to-1 replacement. Whelp, good luck, you may end up frustrated. Let’s take a second and scope your expectations properly, so you know what you’re getting into.
Here’s an example of something I’ve witnessed:
ChromeOS sucks, it doesn’t have $application.
This is one of the most prominent types of comments or articles on the internet. This argument is invalid, however, in a proper scoping of intended purpose of the device.
Frankly, if you’re trying to get one of these for very cheap to replace every experience you have on a Windows, Mac, or Linux computer, you’re going to have a bad time. You’re just not going to get that out of a Chromebook, but that’s okay. Or may be for you, depending on what you’re looking to do.
Are you looking for a cheap Facebook or Pinterest machine? Awesome. Some editing using Google Drive of documents and spreadsheets? Yep. Email? Check. Netflix? Aye, it can do that too. Google Hangouts? Like a champ. Remote access to a VDI environment with VMware Horizon View? Yes! More on that later…
There are a ton of addons and ‘webapps’ you can install from the Chrome Web Store, and alternatives.
Check out what it can do before you jump in, however. Things like Java or ActiveX are no-go. It is built to be a web browser; it is a web browser, and that’s it. And if that’s what you want, it is perfect.
written and posted from a Chromebook.
