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I've only glanced at the article, but CP's Daily News this morning pointed out that Google had purchased a company that "turns your old Windows 7 PC into a Chrome OS machine".
How old are we talking about? Chrome, the browser, is a pig, no matter what the underlying OS might be. The most resource-hungry thing you can ask an old box to do is to run a web browser--even the simplest pages nowadays download a few MBs worth of crap, and the scripting built into them to manipulate the content on the fly makes the poorly-performing apps of yesteryear look snappy in comparison.
The moment Edge switched to being Chrome-based, it became as much of a hog. I'm not blaming MS for that - something about pigs and lipstick.
I'm all about repurposing old systems and giving them new life. I'm getting to like Linux a lot for that. But where things start to fall apart is when you load a resource-hungry browser. I've witnessed this first-hand more times than I care to count: A clean Windows 7 system with IE performs better than a lean Linux distribution with Chrome. Of course, IE is no longer a contender, but we're quickly running out of viable alternatives.
Bottom line - if you want to give an old system a new lease on life, browsers will get you right back onto square one, again, no matter what the underlying OS is. And I don't know of a good solution for that. And that kinda sucks, because you can no longer just give grandma an old system "just for email and Facebook".
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Maybe far in the future webassembly will run in hardware, and then we'll just have webassembly machines with basically a minimal OS behind it.
But maybe that would be worse than the current state of things.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I did just that with an old Windows 7 laptop over a year ago. It worked fine.
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"That"?
Linux, or ChromeOS?
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Now I'm curious. I thought Google went out of its way to prevent the average guy from just downloading an ISO and installing on random hardware. Has this changed?
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Not sure what that has to do with the question.
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Consider it its own question then. Has Google started making ISO files available for anyone to download and install on random hardware?
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Sorry, I still do not know what you mean.
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Do you not know what an ISO file is?
Here's one, but I'd rather download from a site owned by Google than..."this".
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Yes, of course I do, and I have used them often over the years to make CD images of both Windows and Linux distributions. But I still do not know what point you are trying to make.
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Really? I spell it out rather clearly a number of times throughout this thread.
I was under the impression that there was a point in time, at least initially, when Google apparently didn't want people to just download an ISO of the OS and install it on their own hardware; they'd rather have people buy Chromebooks with the OS preloaded (kinda like Apple goes it out its way to prevent people from downloading their x86-based OS and run it on non-Apple hardware).
I did not realize that this had changed (or was ever a thing to begin with). As per my last message, it does seem like they've relaxed the rules somewhat and you can download an ISO easily enough (I had never tried very hard), if you can find/trust the repositories for it.
I was just asking about that; I wasn't trying to "make a point".
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Well possibly there was such a point in time. Either way I got the download, but I'm not sure whether it was direct from Google or elsewhere.
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That'd be good to find out. A quick search yesterday brought up the page I had linked to, but it looks to me like they have no affiliation whatsoever with Google themselves. Not sure I wanna run an OS if I can't trust where it originates from.
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Which was exactly why I loaded it onto an old laptop which contained no personal information. It was a proof of concept project that I was involved in, prior to the rollout of real Chrome boxes.
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Well, of course I'd only install an OS on a system that starts life with nothing of value on it (I quit doing in-place upgrades and multi-booting the moment I started using VMs). But once you start connecting to other things, all bets are off again. Especially with an OS like ChromeOS that you can't do much with if you don't link it with an online profile.
So I just tried the experiment. Went to Google, searched for "chromeos iso download". The top links are:
- A reddit page (WHY???)
- getchrome.eu, which describes itself as "a lightweight Linux distribution similar to Google Chrome OS" (so clearly, it's NOT ChromeOS, but some clone)--and the ISOs are hosted on dubious sites that try to get you to "upgrade to Pro for faster downloads" or misdirect you into downloading unrelated stuff. The bottom of the page even confirms, "Cr OS Linux is not related to Google".
- sites.google.com, which links to the site above (if they're not related, then WHY??)
- a superuser.com discussion on where to get an ISO (pretty much my own question)
- neverware.com, which seems to push for a commercial, pay-for version (which again, sounds like something that was forked)
- more dubious sites like cnet and softonic, which are known to wrap their own installers around whatever you're trying to download
The most promising of these is the superuser.com answer (aka "the StackOverflow for IT admins"), and the discussion is closed and marked off-topic. The responses all point to pre-made VMware and VirtualBox images and the like, and not something that runs natively on bare metal.
If Google is okay with letting people download ChromeOS and run it on non-Chromebooks, they sure are taking exceptional steps to remove it from the top of the search list. This, from a company that is currently facing lawsuits for promoting their own products and services over its competitors. So WTH is going on?
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I have several machines that used to run Win7, and that are all now using Ubuntu, one of them is a 14-year-old laptop). I saw no tangible performance hit using a browser.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010 ----- You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010 ----- When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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#realJSOP wrote: I saw no tangible performance hit using a browser.
Meaning, it neither performed better or worse?
Which is kinda my point. You can have a better OS running the browser, but it's still the browser that's going to bring the system to its knees.
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it certainly wasn't any worse than Windows, and Ubuntu ain't exactly a light-weight system, graphically speaking. It's hardware requirements are similar to Windows. Of course, I don't use chrome/chromium, and prefer Firefox instead.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010 ----- You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010 ----- When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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So would you say FF is more lightweight in terms of resource usage? If so, that might be the solution I'm really after...seems like every other browser now is Chrome-based...
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I have no real idea. I just "use firefox". Performance isn't an issue for me. My advice is to try it and see. There's also Brave, which is chromium without the tracking stuff.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010 ----- You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010 ----- When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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I use Firefox on Windows, you could try that.
Or even Opera, but I mainly use that on my cell.
Cheers,
विक्रम
"We have already been through this, I am not going to repeat myself." - fat_boy, in a global warming thread
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Posted in QA:
Quote: Please help since I am new to wpf and not able to create radio buttons dynamically from the View Model's collection by MVVM.
It's not that he can't, but MVVM won't "let him".
(Actually, it's the curse of the "pattern" .... same difference. Big pattern. Small pattern. The pattern of patterns. After a while, the word even sounds like nonsense).
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it.
― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
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When I was getting started, we were taught to think, not reproduce by rote: we had to code on punched cards, and the tutor got a summary of each students run count: your score dropped with each increased run above two, and was zero if you got to five.
It taught you to learn the language, and proofread your cards: it taught you to think hard before committing to code.
Now, they expect to find the code they need on CP / SO and just throw it in, compile and hand it in - just like history homework: read the page in the book, type it up in Word, hand it in.
Dev isn't like that, and frameworks and patterns don't really help them to learn what the heck they are doing. IMHO, that is!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Your 'think hard' comment reminds me of my Assembly language course experience. That professor was old school, one of those who also started via cards. In his course, if you failed a weekly quiz or homework, you failed the course, period. It was an intimidating course that broke a lot of students.
Fun times, fun times.
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