1/22/2024 0 Comments Photoshop on chrome os![]() ![]() A system more associated with 1337 hackers than media work, IRC is nevertheless reliable, simple, and secure, making it a solid choice for The Verge’s day-to-day internal communications. The limitations of Chrome OS first started to show when I attempted to use IRC. I left the store, waited a few days, then dropped $600 on the Wi-Fi version.Īt my darkest point, I considered booting the chromebook into developer mode Having already convinced myself of the benefits of the software, a hands-on session with the Series 5 550’s hardware finally pushed me to pull the trigger. But it costs at least $999, and the step up in build quality was not quite remarkable enough to justify the expenditure. 30 seconds with the 11-inch MacBook Air is enough to realize that it’s a much higher-quality device than any Chromebook, with the chassis, display, keyboard, and trackpad all comfortably top-class. Here, as with the high-end ultrabooks, the determining factor was price. Arrayed in their own special section to the rear of the Chrome Zone, the ultrabooks were also tempting, but, again, I was struck by the lack of build quality - the display on the Acer Aspire S3 wobbled with every single tap on its distinctly mediocre chiclet keyboard, while higher-end and better-built models such as the Asus Zenbook were out of my price range.įinally, the corner of the store reserved for the MacBooks began to make its siren’s call. Still, they were unavoidably plasticy, and offered much less impressive specs. To its right, the previous generation of Chromebooks offered the same operating system for $120 less, a major issue when Google’s marketing is so relentlessly OS-centric (“the computer that gets better over time”). At PC World, the 550’s hardware helped it stand out against everything else in the store. Still, live demos are one of the biggest things that the latest generation of Chromebooks has going for it. When I headed to the “Chrome Zone” (seriously) at my local PC World retailer for a recon mission, the assistant on duty was realistic in his assessment of the products - he made an effort to wow me with the Series 5 550’s startup speed, but he also made clear some of the device’s limitations (a demo of Photoshop Express didn’t go quite to plan). Even Windows 8 Consumer Preview, which I ran on my work laptop, took a good 20 seconds to boot, then required four or five clicks to get to the browser. ![]() But as the idea of switching to Chrome OS matured in my mind, I became increasingly impatient with the extraneous features and restrictions full-blown operating systems forced on me. Of course, spending a lot of time in Chrome isn’t enough to justify buying a Chromebook - I could easily have continued running the browser in Windows or Ubuntu. I was a card-carrying member of the HTML5 club, and native apps were beginning to seem more and more anachronistic with each passing day. Between Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and our CMS, I had virtually no reason to leave Chrome - for Twitter, I’d use TweetDeck’s Chrome app for testing out code, I’d use the web-based IDE Cloud9 for transcribing interviews, I’d use Wreally Studios’ lightweight Transcribe app. ![]() Spending my days writing for a site covering web development and design, I liked to think of myself as an all-browser guy. And as both Mac OS X and Windows begin to migrate towards the brave new App Store model for software discovery and installation, people seem to forget that Linux distributions have been using package managers for decades. On top of the fiddly Linux kernel, much of which I’d managed to master as an obsessive teenager, the Unity UI - standard since April 2011 - offers an interface comparable with the best bits of Mac OS X or Windows. While some find it unpolished, Ubuntu is a glorious mix of beautiful simplicity and fist-shaking complexity. I’m probably something of an atypical computer user - when I acquired the uber-corporate, brushed-metal EliteBook second-hand, I immediately wiped Windows 7 and installed Ubuntu, aping the setup that I’d favored on an even older HP machine since about 2008. ![]()
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