well finally happened the thing every parent fears the most
my son needs a Chromebook for school
so if we're doing this I guess it's up
to me to find the best dang bang for the buck Chromebook but wait
this is gonna be a lot harder than I thought
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please if you or a loved one isn't currently in
grade school I wouldn't expect you to be aware of just how dominant Chromebooks
have become in that space in 2019 there were 30 million Chromebooks deployed in
schools primarily in the US and Canada and in January 2020 Google announced
that that number had ballooned 33 percent to a whopping 40 million
Chromebooks in classrooms around the globe and that is before the covid tech
explosion and now my son is going to be joining the ranks of Chromebook users
whether I like it or not but then maybe that's not so bad like
many of you I've been guilty of dismissing chromebooks's glorified web
browsing appliances because well that's what Google intended them to
be but in the past few years they have become far more capable with Google
adding the ability to run Android apps in 2016 introducing the Linux beta on
all new devices released since 2020 for developer types out there and even
allowing Enterprise users to run Windows through parallels
allowing okay yeah the whole point of the
school's Chromebook requirement is that the kids machines will be running Chrome
OS and the two main selling points of Chrome OS are how easy it is to play a
locked down Fleet of them that keeps the kids from doing anything too fun and how
lightweight it is which indirectly makes Chromebooks crazy cheap I mean look at
this thing a hundred and ninety dollars that's I mean new Windows laptops with
msrps under 200 do exist but the ones
that we've seen come from less than reputable manufacturers and I don't
think that reputation is changing anytime soon I mean even the options for
Windows machines around the 250 dollar Mark make no sense because they're
basically just Chromebooks that have been saddled with the additional cost of
a much heavier operating system so it's really in this low price tier that
Chromebooks shine is capable and cost effective machines but what kind of
sacrifices are being made to achieve these crazy low price points
let's go shopping disclosure I'm an investor in framework
a laptop company they don't make Chromebooks but I thought you should
know all right let's see what we got here too big for a little kid opposite
problem this one doesn't have any ports oh plastic
These suck well this is a good price wow
is that screen ever tiny not to mention those bezels
is this YouTube video running at 720p with the CPU at 100 percent
that's just embarrassing ooh look at
this tiny thing that's cute well it's a tablet with a detachable
keyboard cover oh uh
boys this keyboard ever going to be cramped though for a child Maybe
touch screen is nice to have for Android apps maybe some drawing it is a bit
small though oh okay it's got emmc
storage that's when they essentially embed an SD card into the motherboard
and then use that as your system storage so really not very fast compared to an
SSD and this is only 32 gigs but it'll
be more responsive than a hard drive and with tight integration with Google Drive
I might not need that much local storage and and since we're not doing any heavy
Computing it doesn't need to be that fast but oh the Best Buy demo doesn't
even fit on the screen properly I don't think this thing's going to cut it maybe
we should look online for some other options oh Samsung has a Chromebook look at that
Fiesta red built in S Pen nice a 4K
screen okay at this screen size this is what 13
inches kind of Overkill could hurt battery life a core i5 I don't think
we've seen anything with a poor tier CPU yet feels a little Overkill too eight
gigs of RAM is nice but while we love to joke about Chrome being a RAM hog and
you don't have Windows sucking back a bunch of your resources and there's
probably a reason that most Chromebooks only have four gigs 256 gigs of real SSD
servers how much is this thing a thousand dollars if I wanted to spend MacBook money I
would get a Macbook see you later Samsung okay how about this one Lenovo
Flex 5 got a core I3 that should be
adequate for watching an HD video and taking notes without being Overkill USB
a for connecting devices at school to
two in one that added flexibility could really come in handy screen looks pretty
good too this is checking a lot of boxes right now and it's in stock of course we
can't just buy the first thing that tickles our fancy this one says up to 12
hours of battery life and knowing that he's my son he'll probably forget his
charger so long lasting battery is good
then again these all claim to have great battery life I guess that's another
benefit of running low land Hardware in a lightweight OS
but this display seems pretty loud is this a TN panel you know we recommended
these types of displays in the past for gamers due to their super fast response
times but the colors look bad and the viewing angles are terrible it's not
something you want to put up with on a laptop and especially not in 2022 when
IPS panels have become so affordable
okay back to the Lenovo seems durable
not too big not too small keyboard didn't wow me but none of them really
did and the speakers are well they're speakers but at 370 US dollars I think
this is our best deal let's buy it the weight Shopper Linus you aren't ready to
make a decision yet you forgot to get hydrated
lttstore.com and you forgot another big
thing long-term support did you know that the support window of your Chrome
OS device is determined by when it was released I mean that makes sense newer
item it's going to have more life left in it but there is a big gotcha in there
because devices made in 2018 are going to get automatic update support until
2022. that's a period of four years meanwhile a device released in 2020 is
going to be supported until 2028 this is because in 2020 Google promised
that all new Chromebooks would receive eight years of automatic update support
but they didn't bother to extend that eight-year guarantee to devices that
were already released even if they were only a few months old so look closely
and double check on Google's Chromebook support site which we're going to have
linked down below it's really easy to make a mistake here like look at this
Acer Chromebook 14. it doesn't look all that different from this Acer Chromebook
514 but that first device is only going to be supported for seven more months
while the 514 will be supported for seven more years my Flex 5 here is
theoretically good until 2028 meaning that my son will be enjoying this
mediocre Computing experience until he is well into High School
will he darn it
this is Linus Tech tips we don't take kindly to computers merely doing what
they were designed to do which is why we're going to break out of Google's
sandbox and see what this Chromebook can do from a gaming standpoint there are
actually quite a few options these days we could use a game streaming service
like GeForce now or Google stadia and if
AAA games are your priority then this is going to be pretty much the only option
and it's actually a surprisingly solid experience though I would strongly
recommend a USB Ethernet dongle for a more stable connection if you're after
lighter games man Android has a lot going on these days
everything from SNES and Playstation emulators to Indie hits like stardew
Valley that's honestly all that most people will need or even want
but we can go deeper Chrome OS like
Android is based on Linux and some very
clever people have developed a Nifty way for us to install Linux on our machine
called Crouton it lets us put our own Linux install intrude a self-contained
directory that is separate from the rest of the system but this is essentially an
exploit whoa what are you doing didn't you know Google has added their own
implementation of Linux on Chrome OS through a project called crostini trust
me it is way simpler to set up and much more secure catch is that you need a
Chromebook from 2020 or later to use it so if you have a newer Chromebook we've
linked a simple tutorial down below for you but note that due to the
implementation crostini runs Debian in a VM the performance will take a hit so if
you want to be running your games on the bare metal then keep following along
because Crouton is your best option for
now that requires you to activate developer
mode on your Chromebook which will not only wipe all of your local files but it
also makes your device more vulnerable to attacks and if the unit was loaned to
you by your school or workplace this will for sure get you in trouble not to
mention that there are numerous other caveats that you can pause and read here
now I'ma just fast forward us following the instructions on the GitHub page
we're going to have that link down below as well as you can see then in Crouton while we
do have access to games via proton with
this low tier of Hardware is not a super
smooth experience like rocket league for example it's it's
some relatively lightweight game but it's modern and requires a modern system
and as you can see from just loading into the menu it's not going to go very
well the game's barely running so let's lower our expectations and try out
half-life 2. hitches but it's not half
bad how about broforce this is a 2d game
it's an action side scroller that is crazy fun especially to play with
friends and honestly it's a pretty good
experience which means that while Linux gaming can be a challenge I'm hopeful
that as that continues to improve this is going to be a viable way to unlock an
even greater library of games at least those that are light enough to run but
there's evidence showing that valve is working with Google on a Chrome OS
native version of steam that would allow games to run via proton on Chrome OS
itself with no workarounds or VMS required the project is under the code
name Borealis and some users recently
spotted flags for it in Chrome settings meaning we could potentially see an
optimized gaming platform for Chrome OS later on this year stay tuned but for
now I'll have to settle for running unoptimized software on the sub-optimal
hardware in the Lenovo Chromebook Flex 5. by I I mean my son
which raises a key question lioness
surely you could have afforded a premium Chromebook like the pixelbook go
why did you cheap out then on your only begotten son
I'm really glad you asked and it's because an expensive Chromebook is still
a Chromebook and the way that I see it no matter how much money you have to
throw around if you're spending more than about 500 US dollars on a laptop
you're gonna be getting Hardware that's not going to be dragged down by Windows
anyway so you might as well have something that can run Windows natively
without a whole bunch of hackery and hassle in order to get it run because
Windows is still a lot more flexible in
terms of what you can do what you can also do is hear about our sponsor
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video running Windows on a Chromebook it's a pretty fun adventure