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Moving away from Macs

The last few releases of the Mac Book Pros and even the Mac Mini have not impressed me. I do software development at home and work with a preference for Unix based operating systems. Honestly I don't need a tremendous amount of compute power at home. A small light weight computer that runs a decent version of Unix is critical. The first thing I did was check out Chromebooks. I purchased a Samsung Chromebook 3 (model XE500C13-K04US) which has an 11.6" screen, 4 GB of RAM, and 16 GB eMMC for $189. This was a great way for me to get started with Chrome OS. I was able to install Crouton on it and get Ubuntu 16.04 with XFCE to run. My only complaint about the computer was that the 16 GB eMMC was small so I had to run Crouton from the Micro SD card which works but every time I put the computer to sleep and left Crouton running it would cause Ubuntu to crash. This is a known issue when running Crouton on the Micro SD card with no known fix. I ended up giving the computer to my Son then I purchased a Samsung Chromebook Pro (model XE510C24-K04US) which has a 12.3" touch screen, 4 GB of RAM, 64 GB eMMC, and Intel Core M3 for $479.99. You get a tremendous value out of a Chromebook, maybe not the fastest computer. Crouton works great on the Samsung Chromebook Pro I run Firefox, Libre Office, Anaconda Python, and other Linux applications without any trouble. Crouton sets up a "chroot" environment which requires root privileges so the Chromebook has to be placed into developer mode. Google has a new approach to running Linux applications called Crostini which the Samsung Chromebook Pro does not support. Crostini does not require the Chromebook be in developer mode which makes the Chromebook more secure. If I were going to buy a Chromebook today I would find one with Crostini support. A Chromebook with a Intel CPU is also recommended because of the large number of pre-compiled Linux software packages. The other huge advantage the Samsung Chromebook Pro has is the computer is a 2-in-1 which means the screen flips around and it can become a tablet. So this computer can be placed on my desktop hooked to a external display (via USB C) and keyboard and mouse then very quickly it can be disconnected and transformed into a tablet. If you are looking for a new computer to perform some software development on and don't want to pay a small fortune for the hardware check out Chromebooks with Crouton or Crostini.

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