topic Re: New HP Chromebook x360 with AmEx $60 Offer. in SmorgasBoard

New HP Chromebook x360 with AmEx $60 Offer.

IsambardPrince — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 05:31:06 GMT

I noticed that AmEx Offers for me had $60 back at HP on $699+ and that's the one that I ended up using this morning.

The Offers almost always have something I can use and even with a catch all cashback rate of 1% I often find myself using this card because they're so good with the statement credit offers.

My 2020 Lenovo ThinkBook ITL Gen2 is starting to glitch out.

It often forgets that it's plugged in until I pull the power cable and plug it back in, sometimes it sleeps and goes into a coma, lately I've been seeing "self-healing BIOS progressing" messages frequently at boot, and I'm at the point where a key on the keyboard module seems to be failing about every week. It started with Left Control and progressed into the NumPad and then back over to the Delete button. :/

I asked uBreakiFix how much to fix this stupid keyboard, and they came back at me with some ridiculous figure like $270.

I could have bought an extended warranty from Lenovo that might have covered this. They had to fix this piece of crap once on the factory warranty, and it meant replacing an entire main board with the SSD (the "hard disk") which is soldered in, causing me to lose all my data (it was backed up) because one of the USB-C ports was broken and honestly probably could've been soldered. When the repair center in Texas sent it back, they took the liberty of cross threading the screws and driving them in with some sort of screw gun so even if I could cannibalize a failed laptop on ebay with a good keyboard, I'd never get this case apart.

I decided I've had it with Lenovo. I put Chrome OS Flex on my late 2016 Yoga 900ISK2 which is in many ways still a fast computer (especially with Linux, which is what Chrome OS is based on).

I decided to see if ChromeOS Flex ran well, so I made a boot stick with Balena Etcher from KDE Neon on the 2020 Lenovo and booted the 2016 Lenovo up and installed Flex. It's pretty intuitive. Chrome OS ran so fast that it was more responsive than most of the Chromebooks on the shelf today tend to be (this was a very high end laptop 8 years ago and they didn't use garbage in it to hit a very low price point).

Many cheap Chromebooks leave the user with an experience that is sad. If you try to open more than Chrome with 4 GB of RAM and a low end processor, the entire system takes a dump when it runs out of memory and the CPU can't keep up and the system chugs and the out of memory killer starts firing up and messing up everything from your Linux apps, to browser tabs, to your VPN app (which needs Android to be running).

This was the experience I had evaluating ChromeOS as a potential replacement for KDE Neon, using the 2020 Acer Chromebook I got at Walmart for $129 in 2020 when my spouse needed Google Meet to maintain his student visa during COVID and I had no choice but to get him _something_ despite my financial predicament at the time.

The experience with Chrome OS Flex was good, except that Google doesn't put Android or Google Play in it. Without Android (the ARCVM), you can't even install F-Droid and get Free and Open Source Android apps that way. Boo.

You can install the ARCVM and the Play Store into Chrome OS Flex, but it requires a lot of command-line fu, which I'm totally down for, except I don't want to run some random OS image I downloaded from Mediafire.

However, it was fast enough to let me properly evaluate the Linux environment.

Google pitches the Linux environment as a thing for "developers" who need Linux to run Integrated Development Environments and compile software and stuff, but it's really a hidden gem that turns the Chromebook (assuming a high end model with plenty of storage, RAM, and a fast CPU) into a full blown computer that can run anything Debian 12 "Bookworm" can.

Provided you have enough RAM. I'd really hate to think what would happen to the linking phase of the compiler on a 4 GB Chromebook. Maybe even an 8 GB. 16 GB should usually be enough for this.

Assuming you know how to use Apt (the Debian Advanced Packaging Tool), you'd be hard-pressed to know that it's not a native experience, except that you have to specifically whitelist folders and USB devices to be shared with "Linux" as the Linux kernel powering ChromeOS is paravirtualizing itself (starting a new instance in a lightweight virtual machine) and then connecting that instance to the Debian GNU userland and associated libraries, runtimes, and GUI toolkits for the applications, as well as support for running a nested X11 server and Wayland-native graphical applications.

I was able, with a little Reddit reading, to enable "VirGL" which is an OpenGL implementation for the Linux container.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cloudygamer/comments/qz08xx/chromebook_enabling_hardware_acceleration_for/

https://docs.mesa3d.org/drivers/virgl.html

Essentially, the physical GPU is passed through to the Linux container, however by default there's no "hardware accelerated" libraries for OpenGL or Vulkan. I'm not sure if I can enable hardware acceleration for Vulkan graphics API (newer replacement for OpenGL) but for now at least Firefox ESR doesn't chug in the Linux container. vulkaninfo is reporting the only "device" is lavapipe, which means it's running Vulkan on the CPU, which is not ideal. I'll need to research what's going on.

It seems that the Chromebook does use Vulkan extensively for Android applications and Borealis, which is the Steam Beta for Chromebooks.

When I have Steam installed on my HP Chromebook x360, steam will be one of the first on the list. I don't have a ton of modern games in it, but it should be funny to play Postal 2 and all of the Valve stuff again. Half Life 2 is good.

In my limited testing on the old Acer Chromebook, it offered to pass through my XBOX 360 Wired Controller to Linux, however it kept shorting out. Installing RetroArch Plus for Android and giving it access to the file system let me browse my video game ROMs.

Before the controller failed completely, I confirmed I could use it in Super Mario Bros NES through the Android version of Retroarch "Plus". Not sure about Linux. Will need more testing, but the Android version ran very well.

I have another XBOX 360 wired controller coming from ebay that looks like it's in good shape. I've been meaning to play the NES Final Fantasy ROM that's been patched to fix all those bugs. It needs to be an official Microsoft controller, because the off brand ones can do pretty much anything when you hook them up to Linux I found out. :/ As for newer controllers, some probably work OK but I don't like any of them this much. Since the driver is simple it'll probably be in Linux forever.

There's enough here to keep a veteran Linux user amused, if it is somewhat "different". I was able to add LibreWolf (a de-blobbed version of Firefox without all the ads and spam, and enhanced privacy) and I was able to set up a Wireguard tunnel through the ChromeOS settings. The Acer supports Android but doesn't run it well. I confirmed that the Mullvad VPN app sets up a wireguard tunnel for you and "Always On VPN" and the setting for not allowing Internet activity without the VPN seem to work OK.

Since the HP x360 is Play certified, it means that I can solve this problem through Android. Since it has a multitouch 14" screen and folds over into a tablet, you've basically got something where the Android app experience is going to go over better than a mouse and keyboard.

I'm not really a big fan of Chrome, but obviously I can just set up Firefox and "start Linux" to run it.

I set up Wine, a userspace reimplementation of Windows APIs for Linux systems, in the Linux Container. I installed foobar2000 and confirmed that this works. I have a lot of audio tools that need it and so it was important that it runs.

Also, I like saying I'm running a Windows simulator in a Linux virtual machine container in Chromebook where the kernel is paravirtualizing itself.

As complex as that sounded, there's obviously been a lot of good work by Google to make it work. If you had asked me to just walk up and use most of these applications when I was done I wouldn't have really been able to tell. The most aggravating part is also the most understandable.

SECURITY.

Now, the sandbox between Chrome OS and Linux is there to make sure that even if you did somehow encounter some "Linux malware", which really isn't a thing, it couldn't easily drop anything into Chrome OS. Chrome OS is resilient to malware anyway because unless you put it in Developer Mode (a jailbreak that lets you go off the grid and start sideloading Android APKs and F-Droid and stuff, or even nuking Chrome OS and putting Linux on the system as the actual OS), you're in what's called a "Trusted Environment" and a "Zero Trust Model".

Many of the frustrating limitations of a Chromebook are because unlike Windows where the user just runs random EXE files and other trash from "some Website, the system is aware of all the software components and whether they've been tampered with. It does this with a root of trust starting in the firmware, through the boot process, and into the OS. Before loading the system, the early boot environment detects if it's been tampered with, potentially by malware or possibly file corruption, and "self-heals", so even if you could get a virus, it would be gone soon, unlike Windows. Advanced users can disable this, however with Developer Mode. Many "normal" people don't take long to blow themselves up with the "Windows model".

Unlike Microsoft and the UEFI Forum, Google's been very proactive on security which is why the Chrome OS has such an exemplary record of no major incidents. Google eschews the UEFI firmware, because it's bloated, poorly written, and should never be trusted to run a computer, opting to make a custom system firmware out of Coreboot instead for its devices. If you want to go off the rails and run Linux, or God help you, Windows, you'd have to add a payload like SeaBIOS or TianoCore, and from what I've seen, Windows 11 has a lot of what I'd call fake security that's just there to make old computers incompatible (to sell new ones) without fixing any real problems,. Like the demand for a TPM 2.0 module. Which the user would need to disable with registry bits in the pre-install environment.

Incidentally, this is how I got Windows 11 onto my unsupported Yoga 900-ISK2. I had to change two registry settings. One because I leave "Secure Boot" off on all my PCs because it's worthless (a root of trust certificate was just leaked affecting millions of PCs, including mine, so leaving it on provides no security and a lot of headaches), and one because it does not have a TPM 2.0 module (which are unimportant and a buzzword...worse, they enable OEMs to turn Bitlocker on, which makes Windows even more fragile, as its default setting is to store your disk decryption key in your Microsoft account.)

Now, why would I be looking at a Chromebook given that I obviously know how to use Linux?

Linux isn't the problem. It's repurposing buggy poorly-built laptops that were meant to run Windows. And as part of being built to run Windows, all PCs since the early 2010s come with the UEFI firmware, which I've never found to work quite right. There are always bugs where if the OS does something that should work, it just ends up killing the laptop, so the only safe assumption is that nothing works and don't use it unless you have to, and even then it isn't safe.

If you run Linux, frequently PC OEMs also never bother to use the fwupd infrastructure to update your UEFI for you, which is probably just as well given that UEFI updates on a PC frequently go wrong and brick the PC or reset something like the TPM state, which means if you use TPM-backed disk encryption, you may lose all your files just because you updated the UEFI.

Lenovo shipped my THinkBook 15 ITL Gen2 (late 2020) with such a bad firmware that I had no choice but to update it. When it did, Bitlocker demanded my recovery key, only I couldn't type it because "Microsoft Fastboot" was turned on which disabled the UEFI driver for the keyboard.

Luckily I had my Debian Linux installer and just formatted the system and took it over with a proper OS at that point. Later making my way to KDE NEON.

But as I get older, I find myself wanting a computer that just takes care of itself, where someone is figuring out all the boring stuff so I can do fun things.

That just doesn't happen with the PC, and when you buy a Mac it's like Borg implants. They aggressively use the non-compliance with industry standards and competing products to try to sell you an iPhone and everything else, even when a company Apple's size could just fix it so they would work well with Android. Users like me just tend to pick whatever works best and sometimes this leads to a heterogenous computing environment. So while the Mac may be trouble free, it comes at a steeper cost than just paying for a $1400 laptop. I just don't need anyone's "ecosystem" taking over my life like this.

But I also realized that just walking into a store and picking up the Chromebooks they sell at Walmart and Best Buy and Amazon would be a disaster. I needed HP to Custom Build one with a lot of RAM (for a Chromebook, 16 GB is hard to find), a decent amount of storage (512 GB, since I need to run effectively three operating systems, Linux, Chrome OS, and Android), and a fast processor (because I do a lot of local computing and processors that bog down and assume that you'll be offloading your computing onto a web site are not enough).

All of this came in at the surprisingly affordable $640 after tax considering the HP $300 off sale, $60 AmEx offer, and the 1% cashback.

I was surprised that Google added back support for the Linux Ext4 file system on external drives, which means I don't have to immediately do anything involving ExFAT on my external storage.

I'm sure that it's not typical for AmEx customers out there trying to get a good deal on a computer under $700 with a lot of firepower and security thanks largely to the superior underpinnings of a Linux system.

Sure, Chromebooks are intended to be simple and out of the box they can't really do a lot. They are geared towards giving your tech-challenged grandmother a simple computer she can use for Google Meet and checking her email and looking up recipes. But with some elbow grease and the right hardware, they can reall turn into so much more. But it's important not to overwhelm users who may not be particularly hands-on enough to approach Linux, Apt, and bash. (You can totally use any shell you want. I frequently invoke fish myself.)

One of the reasons I chose a Chromebook was because I'm tired of seeing any of my money go to Microsoft for something so incompetent and terrible as Windows that I'm not even going to use, which is barely fit to do anything, and which comes with a lot of ads, spam, and viruses. Windows is always the first thing that gets wiped from my computers, and it added ~$50 to the price of the computer. Every OEM is looking to do something dirty to get that back so they pack Windows full of a lot of trialware and garbage.

A few times, they've even gone so far as installing adware and spyware, which further compromised the security of Windows by installing a root certificate into the store (Lenovo, Superfish) or even abused a BIOS anti-theft feature to keep trying to install the crapware on reboot if the user removed it (Lenovo again).

Lenovo has been sued several times over this behavior, and settled out of court without admitting wrongdoing. In the Superfish debacle, I got a check for like $100 or something I think, showing that although it didn't affect me much (I formatted over Windows, replacing it with Linux, and didn't notice Superfish was there), I was still covered in the class because it was there when I bought the computer.

Windows is an aggravation. Every time I see it, Microsoft has told the OEM partners to do something to make it even harder to get rid of this time. I'm sick of it and want a computer that just works.

Google's commitment to many years of support on each new Chromebook model also helped my decision. It's nice to know I will get updates for the OS until June 2032, when Apple won't even tell you when, you'll just know when you don't get them on a computer you paid as much as a couple grand for. Microsoft has a habit of dropping people off on LTSC rings and cutting them off 5 years later from even security updates after they miss new features for most of the life of the computer. Let's be real, their "partners" sell all sorts of underpowered PCs that can only just barely handle Windows itself.

I'm excited to get this computer in the mail so I can get cracking using the "Linux" environment to make it a real computer, one that takes care of itself in the background and where Chrome will probably rarely get touched.

I just don't like what ManifestV3 does to ad blockers and with the way Google has gotten very aggressive with YouTube ads lately I want to keep my options open.

For office software, I plan to use LibreOffice either from Debian or just grabbing the latest version from The Document Foundation. Depending on a "cloud" to edit your documents, where anyone can read them and the software can change in ways no user would want and force the new version on you is a bad idea.

Microsoft's antitrust case was partially because Netscape and Sun Microsystems wanted to make a Linux computer where the OS runtimes were effectively Java and it would be largely internet-facing. Today that's essentially what Chromebooks are. Netscape and Sun were over 25 years ahead of their time with the proposal. Microsoft was seriously freaked out at the idea of cost-effective reliable computing that simply bypassed them and cut them out of the loop, so they set to work on a whole spectrum of illegal bundling and rebate deals, including pouring unlimited cash into Internet Explorer and giving it away, creating yet more virus potential in the OS than ever before.

In the early 2000s, every Mac came with Internet Explorer. It was part of the deal for Microsoft to bail Apple out when Apple nearly went bankrupt for being a worthless company and Microsoft needed to tell the antitrust court that it had a competitor in the consumer hardware and OS space, even if that competitor was not great. Steve Jobs was booed loudly when he announced it. Eventually Microsoft stopped supporting IE, and Apple ported over a Linux web browser engine from KDE called "KHTML". It was the web engine from KDE's web browser, Konqueror.

Apple worked on it in secret for about a year, released it as "Webkit", and put it in Safari. Today every Mac and iOS user has Safari.

Re: New HP Chromebook x360 with AmEx $60 Offer.

IsambardPrince — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 07:51:19 GMT

Part II: Why I did not buy a Macbook Air.

Amazon had Macbook Airs on sale this week. I looked it over. Personally, I do think more computer makers should go to the ARM instruction set and design desktop class hardware. I see x86 and Windows as deeply intertwined, with many of the flaws of one exacerbating those of the other. Fortunately, by moving away from Windows, we're able to shed much of the baggage that comes with it.

Unfortunately, right now, Apple is the only one doing this. There are some ARM board with DIY mini-computer kits you can get for not much money and sort of build yourself a little ARM-based "Mac Mini"-like system that runs various editions of Linux, and I think that's terrific, but none of the Pi devices are competitive with the performance of the Apple Silicon chips.

Surprisingly, Apple hasn't been as hostile to the effort to port Linux over to the M series Macs as I had anticipated. They've done almost nothing to help, except getting out of the way and letting it run, which is more than what Microsoft has in store if they ever get their act together and port Windows to ARM devices and it doesn't result in a fire sale later because nobody wanted a Windows computer that didn't run any Windows apps.

Windows is only still in use due to aggressive bundling, government corruption, corporate corruption, and because of the ungodly amount of binary-only proprietary software that's been made for it. To an extent it loses compatibility with itself every time a version of it is released.

Windows 10/11 are essentially a "really crappy rolling release" that mess with the binaries, libraries, included programs, and where each segment of data is in code, and lately they've been aggressively removing the really important compatibility holdovers from the Windows XP era, like DirectX 9. Since so many people are using it, they've managed to often make it work in spite of itself with really terrible security software that is often wrong and "hacks" like porting over bits of Wine or even running virtual machines that emulate an older version of Windows (which can easily be done on most operating systems).

But the "really aggressive bundling" part includes what I call "fake security features" like "Secure Boot", which had a major debacle affecting almost all systems that have ever come with it recently, but Microsoft has been expanding the hostilities to the point where they disable the Third Party Certificate that they sign the "shim" bootloader stub for Linux distributions with (for $99 from each distribution and ongoing fees, apparently, they've been signing it with that certificate, probably to avoid being sued).

The problem is that when you turn the Certificate on, I've been told it can change the state of the TPM and cause the Bitlocker Drive Encryption to malfunction.

Apple has a security chip, as most systems do now, Google's is the Titan, and Macs have "T2", but Apple hasn't done anything to prevent people from easily installing Asahi-based Linux distributions, including a variant of Fedora. In fact, Linus Torvalds himself (who started the Linux kernel) now uses a Macbook.

Most of what's known about the Macbook hardware comes from a community reverse engineering things and writing drivers. The problem with that is the work is never done and you never get everything quite right. Apple hasn't really been documenting anything. But they haven't done anything truly awful like stop people from trying, so most of the hardware does work.

There's a few problems I see with Linux on an M series Mac that would concern me.

While Apple's Macbook hardware is reasonably well built and has excellent specifications, and if I was dictating hardware this is pretty much exactly what I would tell people to come back to me with, it is meant to run macOS.

This means, for instance, the graphics chipset, while impressive, is not quite Vulkan or OpenGL compatible (very important graphics APIs), instead being built to handle Apple Metal (their API), so obviously nobody developing for Linux is going to write a Metal driver for Linux and even if people did, no existing software uses it because it's not an open standard. It's just similar enough to Vulkan and OpenGL that so far there's OpenGL ES (Embedded Systems) support and I'm not sure how the rest is coming along. I've been told it's unlikely to ever support the entirety in hardware, and while that may not be blocking in itself (as lavapipe could probably stand in for the missing pieces and just run them on the M processor which are absolute performance beasts anyway and well suited to the task), it means work, work means time. I need something that works now.

You also have to leave macOS around in some capacity to manage firmware updates.

Unlike Windows PCs where you can just update the UEFI and pray to you don't brick your system one last time then hop over to Linux and destroy Windows, you have to leave the macOS alone even if it's just to shrink it to a small amount of space enough to boot into it once in a while for firmware management, but that does leave some of the SSD (expensive) wasted when I want nothing from macOS.

You could remove macOS from a Mac, and replace it with Linux, but most people wouldn't. For starters, you'd have to take it to an Apple Store to ask them to fix it for you if you ever wanted macOS back, and the more people who do this, the more likely Apple is to figure Linux is "costing them money" and they'd better lock us out of our own computers like Microsoft is inching towards each year. You'd also be unable to update the firmware, and on the Mac, the computer is largely defined by firmware in a way that x86 PCs are not defined by the (grotesquely incompetent) UEFI firmware. If you don't update the firmware on your Mac, it's likely that Asahi Linux will eventually need something from that update and won't work fully without it, so you'll just kick yourself.

Also, power management is one of the hardest parts of a computer to get right.

So many things are in play that it's not just a question of making it work, it's testing to make sure it does not corrupt the user's data when you turn that part of it on.

Power management on x86 PCs (Windows and the majority of Chromebooks) is not great, but in many cases it's really bad on Windows because they turn things off when they're too buggy and it sabotages the system's "deep sleep states" (pc1 through pc10, many Windows computers can't make it past the first 2-3 package states even though there's like 10, so the Windows computers could theoretically run for 12-14 hours on modern Intel hardware, but between hardware, firmware, Windows, and driver issues, it's usually more like 4-5 hours tops unless they've put the mother of all batteries in it. It's terrible. They're noisy, they're hot.

Even Linux won't turn all power management on in an average x86 (started life with Windows) laptop, because power management is hard. It's hard to even say how terribly terribly difficult it is. That said, if you want to try, most distributions ship powertop --autotune as a system service that sets everything to good and can get you a few more hours than Windows, and I haven't blown myself up yet.

But on an M series Macbook, power management under macOS is terrific. Many users see no more than 1-2 watts at idle, and the average Intel/AMD x86 PC with Windows idles at like 8-10 watts and Linux with powertop autotune idling at about 4-6.

So Apple has done power management and done it well, but they don't tell anyone else how they did it, so that 16-18 hour runtime off the charger turns into 8-9 on Linux. Still not horrible, but obviously it 's going through the battery twice as fast, and there's some other quirks.

If Apple documented the hardware, Linux would have better drivers, and I wouldn't even be talking about Chromebooks right now. It would be a shut up and take my money situation. And that's saying something given how cheap I can be, but when it comes to my computers, there's just a level of aggravation that I can't accept, which is why I haven't used Windows on anything I've owned other than a brief "can I make Windows 11 install on a 2016 laptop that flies with Linux?" and I did and Windows 11 was horrible. Even with all the latest drivers, not the "drivers that time forgot" that Windows still manages to "half install" it was noticeably janky and managed to heat up a laptop that idles quietly and cool to the touch in Linux with powertop autotune.

Windows is like some kind of Orwell novel where, like the government of Oceania taking the productive value out of its economy and throwing them to waste into the sea and perpetual warfare to keep people down, Microsoft has managed to take all the gains in computing and leave us with something even worse than Windows 98.

In closing, Apple manages to frustrate me more than Microsoft sometimes. Their hardware is nearly perfect, not the trash that breaks down on you from Microsoft's PC partners, or a Windows OS that none of the cool kids have ran in years because it's flatly embarrassing, but at the end of the day I want to do what I want to do with it and the Mac won't let me. Not fully.

While I get that you can kind of bling macOS out to be more UNIX-like, it's terribly clear that the audience is not a bunch of UNIX beards, it's hipsters and show offs. I get my food at Walmart and Aldi and often tear into my own car looking to fix something myself. I am not of them.

Impressively, the idea that all resources on the system are files carried over well from the 1970s into our time. That's why just having access to a POSIX shell like bash is nice all by itself, however the Chromebook lets you run most graphical applications acceptably well.

Apple hates the idea of Free Software so much and knows that its users are not UNIX users, so this has led to the system (as a UNIX system) suffering in major ways like being stuck on an old version of bash from 2007 for almost 15 years, and Mac users being exposed to the Shellshock vulnerability for twice as long due to Apple refusing to simply update to the bash 4 series due to its hatred of the GNU GPLv3.

For users who wanted to write or run shell scripts that were Linux-compatible this meant trying to get unofficial updates to bash from Homebrew to have features like associative arrays.

Many programmers have given up on the Mac as a UNIX variant, including Ken Thompson who was one of the creators of UNIX. He eventually moved from a Mac to Linux on a Raspberry Pi.

"I have, for most of my life — because I was sort of born into it — run Apple.

Now recently, meaning within the last five years, I've become more and more depressed, and what Apple is doing to something that should allow you to work is just atrocious. But they are taking a lot of space and time to do it, so it's okay.

And I have come, within the last month or two, to say, even though I've invested, you know, a zillion years in Apple — I'm throwing it away. And I'm going to Linux. To Raspbian in particular." -Ken Thompson

Another jab at Microsoft (I'll be quick, maybe.)

It's very obvious that Windows 11 is meant to superficially resemble ChromeOS.

They want you to stop and look at Windows laptops by mistake while you're looking for a Chromebook.

It would be hilarious if it weren't so annoying. They've tried using Windows on the Chromebook price points and every time they've done it they've ended up with something so awful that people took screen shots of the Windows Task Manager showing that there's no resources left for any of the programs on such a system and asking why on Earth anyone would sell such a system.

It is a good question. Amazon will take most things back though, so don't dilly dally.

Historically, Windows development has trended towards being a very slovenly and disorganized mess where there's no clear line of separation between anything, and it shows. The entire thing is "the platform" to the extent that even though Microsoft claims that Internet Explorer is gone, it really isn't. You can force it to pop up, and it was the subject of yet another critical security vulnerability just last month.

The rotting guts of the subject of Microsoft's 1997 antitrust trial is still in there festering. These things are not sleek and sophisticated modern operating systems. They're plasticware, huffing and puffing under the weight of Windows to the point where even loading Edge is painful and takes a while.

Amusingly, Microsoft paid for a TV commercial with the Pawn Stars when Chromebooks were new and didn't do very much. Rick Harrison says "with no network connection the thing is a brick".

Amusingly, Microsoft can't even compete in the thin client segment of the market anymore, and every copy of Windows requires a Microsoft account to log into the OS, and has all-or-nothing updates that come from the Internet and frequently change so much that they cause problems nearly every month they release one. The thing about festering garbage piles is they tend to fall over when you pluck an empty soda can that's at the bottom out.

Microsoft is desperately trying to play catch up in another market it missed the boat on a long time ago, and evidently misunderstands who is own customers are even supposed to be. They've historically been comically slow to adapt. Shrink wrapped Windows software that you were supposed to buy off a shelf in a store was a thing until very recently, when I was downloading software for my Linux computers 25 years ago out of package managers.

Not satisfied, Microsoft now insists that there are "Windows package managers" and of course instead of providing one, they have a "store" where many of the apps are fake or being pitched by obvious scam artists who are trying to make money off someone else's software. They've replaced the "red light district" of "random EXEs from Web sites" with a "Windows Store" ghetto where all sorts of horrible things from days gone by, like leaving it totally up to the vendor whether or not they'll address security issues in their bundled libraries manages to persist.

Re: New HP Chromebook x360 with AmEx $60 Offer.

ptatohed — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 06:52:40 GMT

I thought by the title, one could get a Chromebook for $60.

Re: New HP Chromebook x360 with AmEx $60 Offer.

IsambardPrince — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 07:06:36 GMT

@ptatohed wrote:
I thought by the title, one could get a Chromebook for $60.

That was unfortunate titling.

Anyway, no I don't think AmEx would associate itself with a $60 Chromebook if I wouldn't.

Re: New HP Chromebook x360 with AmEx $60 Offer.

coldfusion — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 12:15:42 GMT

@ptatohed wrote:
I thought by the title, one could get a Chromebook for $60.

There are a lot of better ways to work toward the monthly $50 credit on your SYW card ;-)

Re: New HP Chromebook x360 with AmEx $60 Offer.

IsambardPrince — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 00:48:42 GMT

I managed to keep setting up the Linux subsystem. I'm happy to report that as of this morning the Chrome OS Flex setup on my Late 2016 Lenovo is coming along nicely with full Digital Audio Workstation support provided by REAPER which has a Linux port. Also tested the Windows version in Wine and that worked, but prefer Linux version.

foobar2000 in Wine is all set up including my special plug-ins to deal with Direct Stream Digital audio from Super Audio CDs, in both Sony and Philips formats. I usually use Sony's because I prefer the byte order and the native id3 tag support, which survives being compressed and decompressed using the WavPack Native DSD compressor (although you can re-tag the .WV with APEv2, which is a superior tag format).

As DSD is huge, being Delta-Sigma Modulation with a 2.8224 Mhz sampling rate, therefore containing about 64 times the data of CDDA PCM, WavPack's specialized compressor can get most files back down by at least 50%, whereby it becomes easy to store them on external media of sufficient size. I have a box of Super Audio CDs. When the format failed (mostly, it still gets occasional releases), people dumped the discs for chump change, and I rooted an old 2009 Blu Ray player and used it to stream the data over into a Java-based application on my Linux workstation.

LibreOffice latest version works through the Flatpak. So that knocks out office software and even Microsoft compatibility without paying for Microsoft Office or having to depend on a remote server to edit my documents, where I also cannot know if that server is secure or not.

fish and zsh as optional shells.

Brave, Firefox ESR, Firefox stable channel, Firefox Developer Edition, LibreWolf, and Vivaldi browsers all installed in Linux from Debian packages and appear to work fine. LibreWolf seems to work best, but I had to delve into the about:config to force webrender on in several places and enable vaapi for hardware accelerated video decode. It also unfortunately has Firefox's "Widevine" DRM nag screen by default. Many sites don't even need video DRM but will demand it to be turned on anyway to be used as part of a fingerprinting vector. Mozilla says it's "safe" because it's sandboxed, but it can't really know this. Widevine is a part of Chrome anyway, so I could just jog over there if I actually need something that uses it.

LibreWolf (from the Apt repo) appears to perform better than Firefox ESR, because Firefox ESR is using xwayland and I haven't managed to figure out what would make it stop doing that, but LibreWolf is native Wayland, which removes an abstraction layer meant for legacy software and removes some slight glitches and jank. I strongly prefer Gecko browsers because Google is still planning to limit ad blocking functionality eventually, and Chrome already lacks support for some features that make ublock-origin work more efficiently, like CNAME uncloaking.

As the virtual machine adds a little bit of jank even with hardware acceleration working, I've found that applications using Wayland tend to stutter a lot less, so I'm trying to figure out how to use those the most.

Flatpak provides me the option to cherry pick other Linux applications and keep them up to date. So far I've grabbed Krita and Kolourpaint from KDE, Audacious, and of course VLC. To remove dependency on Chrome's PDF viewer, I installed Okular from KDE, and I've got Callibre for e-book reading.

I decided to continue exploring by installing GNOME Web, which uses a GTK port of Apple's Webkit engine. GNOME Web appears to run fine. It's a very simple web browser and doesn't seem to support Firefox Sync in the Flatpak anymore and also doesn't have CSV password import so you'd have to bring them over one by one, but it can import bookmarks.

Webkit browsing on a Chromebook will easily allow developers to use Apple's rendering engine and figure out if the site works without having to use an Apple device to get the same layout behavior. It has some enhancements, such as support for additional media codecs from the GStreamer framework, and it disables advertising and trackers out of the box using Webkit Content Blockers and Intelligent Tracking Prevention. Not a horrible browser.

Thunderbird for E-Mail. (Gets rid of the fake emails that show up in the bundled "GMail" web app and allows me to use GPG and non-Google E-Mail).

Most developments in Windows these days are pretty boring. Astoundingly, they recently announced that they will be removing Wordpad. It seems that being concerned about "bloat" and going after Wordpad is a bit much considering the terrible mess they made out of the rest of the operating system.

Recently, (can't find it) I was also pouring over the development notes. I seemed to remember Microsoft claims that they did "automatic testing" (via spyware, basically) to see if the programs their users ran depended on certain CLSIDs in the XAudio2 system and when they found no programs "in the wild" using those, they removed them. I guess anyone using Windows will find out. Probably when it throws one of its famous bizarre undecipherable error messages and goes "" with a QR code next to it.

Removing CLSIDs to make things look cleaner doesn't really provide any tangible benefits, in my opinion. It reminds me of when Microsoft shipped a Registry Cleaner Powertoy despite having said themselves that there's no benefits in trying to clean the Windows Registry and it will probably just lead to bizarre system issues if you did. Despite they themselves saying this, there are still "registry cleaners" to this day, including one owned by Avast the antivirus company, CCleaner. Avast has been noted for doing spyware-like things to the user's computer to the point that Mozilla had to reach in and throw out their Avast and AVG add-ons to Firefox after these issues came to light.

While XAudio2 no longer creates new CLSIDs because this was turning into another dump, like the Windows Registry, if you make a mistake in software development, and programs may rely on it, you should generally only remove it if it is adversely affecting the system or creating a huge security problem.

When I was hacking on Wine to get it to run a de-Steamed copy of Fallout 4 Game of the Year Edition on my Lenovo ThinkBook ITL Gen2 on KDE NEON, using the Wine-Staging AppImage as something went wrong along the way apparently causing a mismatch in packaging between KDE NEON and the underlying Ubuntu OS it runs on top of, rendering the Ubuntu Wine packages uninstallable, I managed to get the game to run fine, but a couple years ago I was having problems with those same binaries and ended up compiling Wine and creating a prefix myself by cherry picking some patches from Valve's Proton and applying them to the Wine Staging source code and just compiling that and making a new Prefix just for Fallout 4 and Skyrim. Microsoft occasionally bumps the compiler to a newer Visual Studio and makes these old games rely on new APIs in Windows. Gone are the "good old days" where the engines from Bethesda just told DirectShow "here's some MP3s" "play this MP3". Now the engines not only need Windows Media Audio, but they use this horrible new XAudio2 API for it which makes DirectShow in Windows XP look almost like heaven in comparison.

I unfortunately have a decent working knowledge of lower level Windows APIs from time spent in Wine. Probably causing some dead brain cells just from being exposed to the Windows API despite not having used Windows on my own systems in roughly 20 years.

I was on video calls with my dad because he had a fairly fast Windows 98 computer from years ago (fast for Windows 98). It was a Windows XP era machine where he put Windows 98 Second Edition on it instead. I walked him through running Revenge of Mozilla II SE to gut it of Internet Explorer and its rendering engine and associated programs, keeping it "modern enough" to run later software it wasn't designed for (via KernelEx and later DirectX runtimes and stuff). He's so cheap he never gets rid of anything, but I managed to make it a workable system to use daily throughout most of the 2010s. There's still a few of us out there with Windows 98 in some capacity. The real trick is patching into its memory manager to get it to work on systems with 2 GB of RAM. This involved removing one of the DIMMs to get it set up in the first place then modifying the memory manager via a monkey patch, and then turning it off and reinstalling the second DIMM. This yielded a Pentium 4 system with 2 GB of RAM running Windows 98. However the harder parts were getting it to do things it was never meant to do. For example, creating a FAT32 volume using Linux and then putting the drive back into the Windows 98 computer, even though Windows 98 couldn't create a volume that big (but it seems to use it okay). It also involved hacking into an Intel Chipset driver pack meant for Windows XP and getting the WDM drivers to install into Windows 98 so everything would come up and work. Windows 98 has no ability to address SMP, so if you have a processor with hyperthreading, it wouldn't be able to use hyperthreading, but this Pentium 4 didn't have that. The Nvidia driver bundle for XP worked unmodified.

When I get the new HP Chromebook, I'm going to get cracking on it and see what I can get away with as far as gaming in the Linux subsystem through Wine, and I may need to set up the VM to enable Vulkan APIs but I believe that I could probably run these games in a hacked up copy of Wine in the Linux VM on a Chromebook. But I don't know that.

Yes, I'm a weird person who disassembles things just to find out how they work. I haven't needed to fork the Linux kernel into my own git repo and bling it out and modify the graphics subsystem in ages. Back when AMD released their open source driver I used the opportunity to move over even when things were a little raw, and I kludged together my own Ubuntu LTS userland running atop a heavily modified kernel. Learning along the way as I went. At that point, I was dissatisfied with my initial results, noticing slower boot times until I realized that Ubuntu was patching the kernel to prefetch data at boot, and I also didn't have their AppArmor patches initially so the system log was complaining about that. Once I was able to build a kernel that worked fine (eventually starting to pull from linux-next and rebasing patches as I went), I pulled in updated copies of Mesa, X11, and other stuff. Of course most of the system was Ubuntu LTS, but the kernel and graphics stack was mine.

What's got my curiosity piqued about the Chromebook and the Linux subsystem is that it does slow things down a little, but not much. I think it's worth exploring due to the gains in overall system security and the fact that if I screw things up I can just press a button and that entire world disappears and I can start over. I never rebuild the antihill with the problems it had last time and I quickly learn almost everything I want to.

Still to do is exploring dosbox support in the Linux subsystem. I believe that it should be relatively straightforward to get older DOS games like Wing Commander, the old X-Wing series, and Daggerfall to work. Games like the DOOM series already work so well via GZDoom that looking into getting the DOS versions running would be a time waster. Flatpak has gzdoom so I'll just copy the DOOM wads into the relevant ~/.var/app path. Also, Chocolate Doom and the other Chocolate engines should get these old id software titles running with all their legacy quirks and original graphics on modern operating systems.

This leads to a nested virtualization setup which is usually too meta or "Inception" for my tastes, but DOS is so old and stupid that I doubt it could affect performance.

The only thing annoying me about Chrome OS Flex so far is that I use a random password for Google and while I set up fingerprint and PIN unlock it wants a password on the login screen from cold boot, so I wrote down my Google password and taped it to the bezel over by "Lenovo".

I'm not very worried about security issues since they'd still need to unlock my phone and tell Google it's me to get in. The password alone only solves half that problem for them.

Re: New HP Chromebook x360 with AmEx $60 Offer.

Anonymous — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 01:54:19 GMT

But is a Chromebook capable of viewing the Cook County GIS tax map website or Zillow for homes in Chicago Illinois?

https://maps.cookcountyil.gov/taxmapviewer/

https://www.zillow.com/chicago-il/

Re: New HP Chromebook x360 with AmEx $60 Offer.

IsambardPrince — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 02:28:41 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
But is a Chromebook capable of viewing the Cook County GIS tax map website or Zillow for homes in Chicago Illinois?

https://maps.cookcountyil.gov/taxmapviewer/
https://www.zillow.com/chicago-il/

I suppose that one of the dozens of browsers I have could do that.

Anyway, the TCO of home loanership is not really on topic here.

It's a bad economic decision, especially in the heightened interest rate environment. Local listings have started to dramatically slash their asking price and some of them are starting to do so by 5-10% in one go. So much for "houses always gain value always". Certainly many would still make a non-inflation adjusted profit, or even one accounting for the burst of inflation seen since 2020, but it's getting closer to the point where they should have just rented. This shows the reality that there are no guarantees in investing, and that investing in a home may mean a missed opportunity to gain on something you could sell quickly to take off the table without worrying about whether you even could or not.

Some of these listings have been on the market for months now. Fed policy and local taxation rates have obviously blunted demand for property in Illinois. This shows that building "wealth" through owning a home is very much an "in theory" proposition, because it could just sit and sit and maybe you need the money right now. Maybe you need to leave the state right now and here's your house stopping you from cutting ties and leaving and telling the people who chose to have this mess to enjoy cleaning it up themselves.

A cold and logical assessment of the situation is therefore needed, but many people who are pressured by others teetering near bankruptcy themselves feel that they simply must buy a home and that it is always a good idea.

Fear of missing out is a hallmark in any good marketing campaign. Every time I log into a bank website they say "Don't miss out!" and then proceed to tell me about some new product that they hope they'll make a lot of money on if I fall for it.

The truth is that everything is always "on sale" and in a marketplace of actors, it's always a test of the wills between buyer and seller to see how far up or down any deal can be taken and whose side of the equation it will land on as far as who got the better deal.

Re: New HP Chromebook x360 with AmEx $60 Offer.

IsambardPrince — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 22:29:16 GMT

I went back at it today on ChromeOS Flex on my Lenovo Yoga 900-ISK2.

It's just absolutely amazing how fast this thing runs. Linux was already basically Warp Factor 9 compared to the Windows 11 experiment.

I had been running Linux on this thing since 2016, and had to start out with Fedora back then because it was the only Linux system at the time that supported the then-new Skylake platform properly. However, with the 4K screen, which is unusual for PCs even now, I found that the only desktop environment that did proper scaling at this resolution/pixel density was GNOME. I hate GNOME. So you can imagine my dismay when I was stuck with it for several years due to the fact that everything else refused to scale correctly to the native resolution of the screen.

When it came with Windows 10, this was hardly just a Linux problem. Lenovo shipped what was basically an Apple Retina-quality display with an operating system meant for garbage PCs. So while Windows could make applications look "big" it led to what I call "Microsoft GlaucomaVision", not what you'd expect at all from a Mac with a Retina Display that you want to lick because it looks so delicious, more like Windows sitting there with its discombobulated mess of a graphics system with holdovers from GDI, GDI+, and the Vista-era semi-improvements that could never quite let go of the 1980s underpinnings. It led to a smudgy mess where Windows has no real UHD screen support so it fakes it. Stretching out and pixelating fonts, then smoothing them over with antialiasing after the fact. It's really quite disgusting to look at.

People have been complaining about X11 and its display managers since about the time I've been alive, but even then, at nearly 40 years old, and occasionally spazzing out and glitching part of the screen, it was better than Windows thanks to the modifications provided by XFIXES, XRENDER, and the XINPUT versions, as well as AIGLX, among other improvements.

That being said, X11 is old and Wayland is coming along rather well. Finally after 8 years of owning this Yoga 900 ISK2 where only GNOME worked right with the screen, KDE was ported to Wayland in version 6 and displays correctly in all the "I want to lick the screen." goodness.

With Windows, so many applications simply have no "real" HiDPI support even in 2024 that a lot of them end up stretched. They look so much worse than legacy X11 Linux applications being scaled by KDE's window manager running on Wayland. The XWayland applications being scaled by KWin look....different, but not nearly as bad as most Windows applications. It appears that there exists no real technical solution for application scaling on Windows and that Microsoft is also not going to force application developers to move on.

But so did ChromeOS Flex. Google didn't use X11 with Chromebooks, but they pushed them out before Wayland was much of a thing and about 12 years before Wayland was ready for "most users". So it uses Ozone. I like Ozone. It's very very fast and smooth on my Iris chipset from late 2016. I suspect it will be much faster on the Core i5 1235U in the Chromebook I just ordered.

I managed to get Mullvad VPN working in the built-in VPN setup screen on ChromeOS Flex.

I asked Mullvad over E-Mail how to set it up, seeing as how ChromeOS Flex does not have Android, which is necessary in order to go the "supported" route on a Chromebook. But the ChromeOS has built-in VPN support for Wireguard and OpenVPN which I was confident could be made to work if I could figure out the process. From the "Downloads" page and "I can't use the app." there were options for Windows (boo), Mac, Android, and Chrome OS, but Android and ChromeOS said to use the Android App from the Play Store I don't have.

Downloading the package for "Windows" I found everything that I needed to get things working.

Inside of it, there should be a .ovpn (OpenVPN configuration file) and a .crt file (an X.509 certificate).

You have to add their certificate to Chrome and tell it to trust it for signing websites. If that sounds less than ideal, it's because it is, but there's no way to add it as a user certificate without a private key that nobody gives you.

So you're sort of back to where you are if you want to use IKEv2 or something in Windows. Adding a certificate to the OS.

Except that ChromeOS internally supports OpenVPN and Wireguard. I haven't managed to set up Wireguard, I've only figured out OpenVPN for now. Wireguard is much simpler. It's under 4,000 source lines of code and is a Linux kernel module. It's simple, which means that it's easier to audit for attack surface, however that simplicity means that OpenVPN can do a lot of stuff that Wireguard can't, and VPNs meant to protect your privacy online will need to configure their internal network with more safeguards to make sure that your connections are actually private.

Here's the E-Mail I sent their support when I figured it out.

"I figured it out.

To add a server CA certificate, you'll need to open Chrome and go to chrome://settings/certificates and then to the Authorities tab and click Import. Find the mullvad_ca.crt file that you unpacked somewhere on the file system, and under the untrusted org-Amagicom AB, expand that and "Edit" Mullvad Root CA v2. Select "Trust this certificate for identifying websites." Click OK.

Now when you go to Settings/Network/Add Connection/Add built-in VPN, Mullvad Root CA v2 will show up.

For the "Server Hostname" line in the VPN configuration window, use an IP address from one of the lines beginning with "remote" in the openvpn ".conf" file. Each IP address is one of the VPN servers for that country and city.

You have to pick one for each VPN connection you wish to make.

For Service Name you can use "Mullvad" and the city and server if you really want to add more than one later. But each one will be a separate VPN as far as Chrome OS is concerned.

Provider type is OpenVPN.

Username is your account number.

password is m

Use the Mullvad Root CA v2 entry for Server CA certificate.

No User Certificate.

OTP should be blank.

Select "Save Identity and Password" and click Save.

Turn on "Mullvad" or whatever you called it.

Under VPN/Built-in VPN, select "Always-on VPN" and "Mullvad" and "Block traffic without VPN".

Click the right-arrow next to the Mullvad entry/entries you made, and select "automatically connect to this network" for the server you want to connect to automatically.

I've performed a quick check using "what is my IP address" and an "extended DNS leak test". Both ipv4 and ipv6 are using the VPN server and the DNS shows it uses the VPN's DNS server with no leaks.

This is the basic process to add a VPN to ChromeOS Flex, which is a variant of ChromeOS aimed at people who have a Windows or Mac computer laying around that they would like to use ChromeOS on.

As stated previously, it has no Android compatibility as it is not a Play Certified system. The instructions for adding the Play Store that one can find online essentially tells the user how to swap out ChromeOS Flex for Chrome OS, which is not allowed under the Google terms of service, and the firmware that provides Chrome OS seems sketchy (could easily be harboring malware..."someone" is hosting it on Mediafire....lol) so I am not going to risk it just to get Android.

I hope this was helpful and that you can do something with it."

I later found out that if you add additional VPN servers, you'll need to temporarily disable Always On VPN and "Automatically connect to this network." and then turn those on again with the new VPN server you want to use. This is a hassle, but it seems there's no other way without the Android system included. Which I stated in the email, I'm not going to install the actual ChromeOS because it's unofficial and from a random server and could be infected with a rootkit virus.

Some quick testing finds that the VPN propagates to the Linux container applications as well, and I was unable to find any leaks, including in the Distributed Hash Table support in KDE's file sharing program, for when one wishes to share the Free Software Song in private with others. Or even, the Heavy Metal Free Software Song. The Metal one is for some reason preferable to Richard Stallman singing it while banging his hands on the table.

Also, since Chromebooks set the time based on your IP address, your clock will be wrong if the VPN isn't in your time zone, to fix it you'll need to go into Settings and search for Time and change the time zone manually.

Images:

LibreWolf browser on ChromeOS.

(From the Apt repository on their website.)

LibreOffice Writer on ChromeOS.

(From Flatpak/Flathub.)

Of course it runs Doom.

If you can run Doom on an IKEA lamp (at least before their lawyers threatened the project for telling people how to BUY the lamp and take the processor out of it....sigh) I figured I'd be able to run it in Linux on a Chromebook. I emailed IKEA letting them know this is why I no longer shop there.

Without Vulkan, but with hardware acceleration on via the Chrome Flags, you can get OpenGL programs to run with full acceleration. This simply required changing the GZDoom renderer to OpenGL and restarting the program GZDoom is in Flatpak/Flathub.

Scooping out Debian from the container and putting Arch Linux in and reinitializing the VM with a Vulkan support switch apparently works, but I don't know Arch Linux very well, whereas Debian I've dealt with in one way or another since 1999.

You can run pretty much anything Linux can run in the ChromeOS Linux container. I suspect that between the container, Android, and the Steam port to the HP x360 (which I bling blinged with all the specs you could get), my gaming needs should be fulfilled. If not, I can always use Cloud gaming and let it stream to the Chromebook from someone's server. This is more cost effective anyway as trying to game on a laptop gets expensive when there's no way to upgrade them except buy a very expensive gaming laptop and keep doing that every couple years when the tech changes. But I suspect that it should be able to run a reasonable amount of things locally.

I had no idea at the time, of course, but when I was using Game Genie on the Nintendo NES when I was 5 years old, all those "codes" were actually patches to the game code using hex editing.

In the updates you could subscribe to, they'd mail you new codes that other people had found. The reason Game Genie didn't know all of them even for the games that were in the book it came with, is that it's a very tedious process of going through program code looking at where to edit and testing to see what it will do if you do that.

By the time I was about 14, I was not only running Linux, but I was stripping down Windows 98 to the nuts and bolts, removing IE and trash, and using the Windows 95 B shell, to save drive space and make my programs run faster. Eventually I was modifying parts of the operating system files themselves to correct bugs that Microsoft never fixed. The funny thing about Windows 98 was, and this was why I loved it. It was so crude that it couldn't even stop you.

I used "Revenge of Mozilla II SE" by Bruce Jensen, because 98lite cost money and I was 14.

98lite allowed you to put all the garbage back, but that was the only real difference. I didn't want to run stock Windows 98 because it was unstable. Without IE and the rendering engine, and with the older shell without Active Desktop, the system used much less memory while also benefiting from Windows 98's introduction of Windows Driver Model, the new memory manager, FAT32, and USB support. And could run all the latest DirectX runtimes through 9.0c. Unfortunately, Windows 98 had a bug where if it ran for like 45 days or something it crashed. Somehow, someone actually ran it long enough to find that with IE installed but I'll be darned if I know how. Anyway, I hotfixed that and it never came up again.

In 1992, Nintendo sued Lewis Galoob Toys over the Game Genie, and since our courts definitely had better people on them back then, the judges ruled in favor of Galoob. Finding that personal modifications to Nintendo's software were protected fair use and non-commercial in nature, and since Nintendo couldn't prove it actually lost any money, they just had to pretty much sit back and deal with it that users could make the program do what they wanted. Today, that's not really how that works. Everyone from IKEA (the DOOM lamp incident) to Nintendo's various lawsuits against emulator projects and their own customers, shows that big business eventually gets whatever it wants once things hit the court docket.

I am fascinated by ChromeOS because Google obviously has people that sit and use the Chromebooks themselves and are not satisfied with there only being a web browser. The early units were laughable, a joke. Just Chrome. A bad screen with Chrome. If you plugged in a printer, "Google Cloud Print" would tell you to buy a new printer.

The modern ChromeOS is....beyond a joke.

I'm finding that the Linux environment makes up for most of the deficiencies of the ChromeOS system itself. Pretty much every "AGGGH! Why did I even pay for this stupid thing!?" experience with the old Chromebook I had is gone.

While I like Linux, unfortunately you have to be nearly at my level to set it up under ideal operating conditions. With IBM and Red Hat (a subsidiary) taking control of more and more of it, and modifying it in ways that defy documentation, it's nice to have Linux off to the side and not really in control of the system too much, where I don't have to worry about how to make systemd do something, and wonder why the way to do that has pointlessly changed since it was documented, often just months or a year or two ago.

I feel that IBM Red Hat is making a lot of changes so they can sell "support". If there's no bugs, and everything is documented for free somewhere (usually by Arch Linux), you can't just hide everything behind a paywall and demand money for the "howto" and things will stabilize to the point where all your customers escape the fenced-in area to go use a free clone.

Red Hat has been at war with RHEL clones since before IBM, but under IBM it's only getting nastier. They took control of CentOS and basically ended it. I was very happy with Scientific Linux, but that ended, then they told you to use CentOS then that was taken over and ended, and now there's Rocky Linux, and Oracle and some other vendors are getting together and keeping it going, while IBM is figuring out ways to minimally comply with the GNU GPL, and threaten its customers if they tell you how IBM has patched their kernel. I mean, their customers have every right to do so under the GPL, but then Red Hat will cancel their paid subscription, so the whole thing is just nasty, and it creates a chilling effect where it undermines and sabotages the idea of Free and Open Source Software.

If Linux wasn't being so polluted like this, I'd probably just keep using it on metal as a daily driver, but unfortunately money talks and so you end up with people that don't have your interests in mind defining what the OS is. It's not as bad as Windows, yet... But it's moving in that direction. And Microsoft even hired the guy who created PulseAudio and systemd, so that's obviously going well.

Since I'm always tinkering with something, I still want a Raspberry Pi 5. What would have gotten one in my hands faster is if they actually stocked them when I was initially interested. However, Windows compatibility is still important enough that the platform being x86 is "nice" in that I can run Windows PC software when I want. Can't do it with ARM.

I don't really have "roots" in Microsoft DOS or Windows like many people my age.

I started out with some hand me down Commodore systems when I was about 4. So we're talking about running programs on data tapes, and 5 1/4" floppy disks. I came home from school one day and my mom sold it to a pawn shop to get the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons gold box games out of the house because she's always been weird and someone at church told her they were evil or something.

Quickly in the 90s, I found Wolfenstein 3d, DOOM, Quake, Heretic, and others, for DOS, and she didn't notice. I learned not to play those while she was around, and she just figured I was in there playing Chip's Challenge or something, of course sometimes I was.

Recently I found a disk image of the Windows Entertainment Pack for Windows 3.x, and loaded it into Wine. So I know it works there still. Eventually I'll have to install that on Wine in the Chromebook so I can run Chip's Challenge again that way. 64-bit Windows dropped compatibility with the NTVDM for 16-bit DOS/Windows applications so they're pretty much just gone now without a copy of dosbox.

Honestly these computers are so fast now that you need dosbox anyway so you can slow down the CPU cycles on the environment and make many older programs slow down to about the speed of hardware from that era.

Gold Box D&D is still pretty good. Gog.com sells it in pre-configured dosbox setups, but for Windows. It took me a while to figure out how to strip them out and put them in native Linux dosbox, but I managed.

Later today, I plan to roll out OpenRA on ChromeOS in the Linux environment and install the classic Westwood Studios games. I managed to get Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun working in an emulated desktop, along with the Firestorm expansion. Unfortunately, the original engine is showing its age. OpenRA says they plan a replacement engine with new networking capabilities for this eventually. I'll try the AppImages and see how that turns out.

Also, setting up VICE to emulate old Commodore systems.