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Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
... your own first impressions -- I hope you'll post them anyway!
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I agree with the article; I think it hits the nail firmly on the head.
The joy of Chromebooks isn't what they can do, it's what they relieve you from doing.
We now have three ChromeOS devices in my household. I bought my Samsung ARM Chromebook on a whim last February, just to get an idea what they were capable of, and it very quickly became my main device.
I've now switched from using my Windows i7 desktop to a Samsung Chromebox, and I can do most of what I need in blissful peace, driving a 1900 x 1200 monitor very effectively.
My wife has had her own Samsung ARM Chromebook for over a month now, and is using it in preference to her Windows laptop whenever she can.
They are hassle free, silent, delightful machines to use. They're not yet ready to completely replace the Windows or Mac desktop, where you have specific software that you still need to run, but non-ChromeOS users would be surprised at just how capable they are already.
A couple of examples:
I manage a number of websites. The ones written in Drupal are obviously just as easy to manage from a Chromebook, but I also have a traditional site which until now I've been maintaining in Microsoft Expression Web, manipulating graphics using Paint.Net. It has actually proved to be quicker and easier for me to maintain this directly using the web app
ShiftEdit with graphic editing in
Pixlr Editor. I'll repeat that: one of the applications that I was sure would be a compromise on the Chromebook actually turned out to be easier.
I'm a project manager. Microsoft Project is very powerful, very useful and very expensive. I've run my latest project using
Gantter, which is free for the web app and a paltry $10 or so for the offline desktop version which runs in its own window just like desktop software on other operating systems. It lacks some of the features of MS Project, it's not so good when checking for resource that's over-utilised (though it does flag this), but more than just the basics are there, and it's improving all the time. Again, I would not have believed that this was a function that would be available for ChromeOS, and certainly not at such an extraordinarily low price.
Graham