I decided to write a review about this device¹ mainly because it pleasantly surprised me. My 5-year-old linux laptop took a hard fall, the casing broke, and I felt that to be on the safe side, I needed a ready-to-go backup device for this semester's teaching classes. I basically needed a device with a useable unix shell, an editor, gcc, a pdf viewer, and to be able to connect to the departmental projectors without issues. I stumbled across this chromebook by chance (actually, by sorting on the laptops' prices), and it caught my eye. I was always curious about what google is doing with chromeos and chromebooks, but my expectations from a 189€ chromebook with a weak CPU, 4G of physical memory, and only 32G disk space, were low. Extremely low. And I was wrong. This is a fully useable laptop for normal everyday academic applications. Having 4 workspaces ("desks") with dedicated email, unix shell, browser, a video call, and with all apps running simultaneously and being responsive and useable is the norm and not the exception. Add the ~10 hours of battery life on a single charge, the immediate availability of a proper linux (debian) distribution, the appealingly minimal, functional and stable chromeos environment, and it doesn't take long before you start thinking about taking it with you every time you leave home. And with a weight of 1.1 kgr, you might as well take it.
Don't get me wrong : you won't load this device with your brand new 10 Gbytes data set, and you will certainly not analyze the data with its AMD A6 processor. And you almost certainly won't do any short of serious photo/video editing or gaming on this chromebook either. But you can easily do all teaching presentations, all emailing, all everyday administrative tasks, right from this device.
However, do bear in mind that I'm an old guy. So old, that the following caveats apply :
▶ All my important/needed files fit in 3 Gbytes. If you need 64 Gbytes just for your 'must have' files, you need a bigger machine.
▶ I do not mind working with google docs, and storing files on google drive. Having said that, I also have my dropbox files on the device using the 10 Gbytes linux partition (which is shared with chromeos). If you avoid the cloud and want everything stored locally, or if you definitely need the microsoft office environment, chromeos may not be for you. Note, however, that you can have libreoffice via linux if you prefer local storage.
▶ I do most of my stuff through the unix shell : email with mutt, editing with vim, reading/annotating PDFs with llpp and evince, image viewing/editing with eog and gimp, keeping my lab book with rednotebook, etc. I do use google docs for the occasional docx and xlsx, but normally I prefer typing in the unix shell. The implication is that neither unix, nor me, are heavy on the resources required. If your applications or files are heavy, you may need a bigger machine.
▶ I liked chromeos within hours of using it : it is minimal, functional, non-intrusive, and very pleasant to the eye. But if you prefer the more heavy and rich (in distractions ?) environment of windows and macos, then you will soon be bored to death with chromeos.
▶ One thing I definitely didn't like was the end-of-updates date for this device. If you buy a model made after 2021, you are getting 10 years of support for chromeos. But this device was made in 2020, and its support ends in 2026, which is too soon for a device bought in 2023.
Allow me to close this review with the things I liked most about this device. The first was that with no effort from my side, I got a 'user-friendly/GUI-based' operating system (chromeos) together with a proper linux distribution (complete with all debian packages, including those with a GUI). No more fighting with bootable USB sticks, or with the window's WSL2. One click to enable the linux environment, and you are good to go. The second thing that I liked a lot is that chromeos appears to be bloat-less and minimal by design (if not by force). You start the device, and not much is happening. No by default pop-ups, no notifications, no beeps, no nothing. An invitation to open your apps and do whatever you wanted to do in the first place. Last -but not least- is, of course, the price : a brand new laptop for 189€ is probably something worth writing home about.
All in all, these were 189€ well spent.
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¹ The device : Lenovo IdeaPad 3 CB 11AST5 11.6", A6-Series-9220C/4GB/32GB. Full specifications from
here.
² Note added in proof : chromeos is indeed very light. I installed the ChromeOS FLEX edition on an ancient PC dated back to 2008 (Acer Veriton X270 SFF Intel® Pentium® E5300 4 GB DDR2), and the bloody thing is responsive. Impressive given that this is 15 years old hardware (which was running ubuntu 10.04).
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