Having already dipped my toe in the water of Chromebooks with my wife’s HP Chromebook 11, I knew that I liked Chrome OS. The very fast boot time, stable and full featured browser together with a real physical keyboard make these great devices for people who like to create content, rather than just consume it.
I managed to get a few Chromebooks to use with students at work too, and they’ve found the same thing. Switch on, log in, work. Simple. No hassle about updates, apps, or who was using the device before you and left it all messed up. Sadly, I’ve been told that we can’t roll out more Chromebooks for students to use because our government don’t want to support another platform. Yes. Really. Support. For a Chromebook(!)
It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.
Anyway, I digress. The whole point of this article was to tell you about my new toy! My wife hasn’t been able to get near her Chromebook, so I decided to get my own. I’ve gone for the Acer C720, which at £179 was cheaper. There are some compromises compared to the HP Chromebook 11 – most notably the screen, which while being perfectly adequate on the Acer is poor when compared to the screen on the HP. The keyboard isn’t quite so roomy either. Also the Acer C720 looks like a ‘functional’ laptop, and lacks the refined design touches of the HP. It’s not all doom and gloom though – the device runs a touch faster, and has a built in SD card reader and an standard sized HDMI output, which the HP doesn’t have.
One of my main reasons for choosing the Acer other than the price, was that it has an Intel processor. I knew that this would mean that I could find Linux kernels that would be more likely to run on it, without too much hassle. In fact, it has been very easy to tweak. It seems that Acer knew that ‘geeks’ would be drawn to a lower cost device with a screen and keyboard, so they’ve made it quite easy to work with. In developer mode, you can boot from USB devices, and the Acer also has a cut down ‘BIOS’ called SeaBIOS which can be booted from the Coreboot bootloader, effectively meaning anything written for a ‘standard’ x86 PC can be booted.
After just a few minutes of tweaking, I’ve now got my Acer C720 to be a Chromebook OR a fully-fledged Ubuntu laptop. I can choose the OS at boot time depending on what tasks I want to get done. It’s definitely the best of both worlds. Ubuntu runs well, and the battery life is pretty good.
If you’re in the market for a Chromebook, or a cheap Linux laptop, then I’d recommend the C720 at this price point. Very portable, and great for people who like to get things done when out and about.
