Chrome OS Day# 3
It is really a short period of time within which to be starting a secondary review. But then, I can't say that this is the most normal of situations. In short, one of the things I had hoped for (and one of the few failings) was to use this laptop to stream games from my PC.
First up, I tried the Steam Link (Beta) app in the Play Store. I doesn't seem to like Chrome OS. Doesn't pick up my PC on the network and barfs. Not really the end of the world. I have another laptop I could use for this purpose. That one just happens to be serving a different purpose at the moment.
Crostini isn't supported yet on my machine. And it may never be. But Crouton is.
The crux. It requires booting the device into developer mode which wipes the local storage.
The device is still fairly new and I didn't have a ton of stuff on it, so I decided earlier was better than later to start testing this out. So, I bit the bullet today and did it. Now, the less important thing here is that it didn't work in the end. Not sure why. Maybe some virtual network the chroot is hosted in is stopping it from seeing my desktop on the network. I don't know.
There were a lot of people concerned about using dev mode because it was "easy" upon reboot to screw up and revert things back to normal mode. There was also a vocal majority who said they didn't store much if anything locally and didn't care.
What I will say is; I don't quite get the dissenters. I don't really anticipate my Chromebook being either fully powered down or rebooted often. While I can understand that some people might do this more often than others, I have to think that the common denominator is people who put the device to sleep and rarely let it run dead.
Also, reverting back to normal isn't really THAT easy to do. In my case at least, it required both hitting space during boot, and then enter. If I booted up the device and walked away 30 seconds later it would boot into dev mode. If I hit ctrl-d it would boot automatically. The odds that I would accidentally not realize what is happening and then press both space and then enter by mistake seem... non-existent. In fact, I would peg the biggest concern as being the annoyingly loud beeps it does before booting into dev mode. If I regularly experienced clean boots, I might switch back to normal mode out of rage.
Anyway, since the Crouton experiment failed as Steam was the primary motivator on this device for Crouton I logged out of Xfce and then I noticed something... all of my apps were back. Everything had been restored. My keyboard settings including my setup to support Japanese. My shelf configuration. My app folders. Everything.
There are some minor caveats, like apps which do additional authentication/syncing within the app. Those pretty much all need me to redo that piece. But, I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised. I had genuinely expected to need redo everything I had done locally.
It was hands down, the best restore process I have ever seen. As best as I can tell, all I really needed to do was go through the normal welcome screens after logging in the first time. More than likely, the setting for keeping things synced was the trigger. So, I could probably have had it NOT restore if I didn't want it to.
The only beef would be that there was no real indication that it was doing anything more than setting up a new device. Had I been raring to reinstall my apps I might have hit some funny behavior when trying to manually load what it was already automatically loading. Can't verify that though. Oddly, the one thing it didn't sync... was my background image. It was just an alternate stock one. Not something from my local drive.
Another thing to note is getting used to the "right way" to do things in ChromeOS when it supports Android apps. I think that they make it too difficult to create new web short cuts and they do nothing to recommend web apps over Android apps. I don't want an annoying prompt every time. But, the first time I try loading something like Facebook or Twitter, a genltle notification saying... "Hey! You can save space by using the web site rather than the app, and you can even pin that site and treat it a lot like an app by doing this".
I have an app shelf and an app drawer. But, in a pre-Android world, what I would really want there are my favorite sites. My favorite web apps. It should be front and center in the UI to put a web site into one, the other or both. And like I said, it is an adjustment of sorts as well.
And there is my super rapid update on my experience.
First up, I tried the Steam Link (Beta) app in the Play Store. I doesn't seem to like Chrome OS. Doesn't pick up my PC on the network and barfs. Not really the end of the world. I have another laptop I could use for this purpose. That one just happens to be serving a different purpose at the moment.
Crostini isn't supported yet on my machine. And it may never be. But Crouton is.
The crux. It requires booting the device into developer mode which wipes the local storage.
The device is still fairly new and I didn't have a ton of stuff on it, so I decided earlier was better than later to start testing this out. So, I bit the bullet today and did it. Now, the less important thing here is that it didn't work in the end. Not sure why. Maybe some virtual network the chroot is hosted in is stopping it from seeing my desktop on the network. I don't know.
There were a lot of people concerned about using dev mode because it was "easy" upon reboot to screw up and revert things back to normal mode. There was also a vocal majority who said they didn't store much if anything locally and didn't care.
What I will say is; I don't quite get the dissenters. I don't really anticipate my Chromebook being either fully powered down or rebooted often. While I can understand that some people might do this more often than others, I have to think that the common denominator is people who put the device to sleep and rarely let it run dead.
Also, reverting back to normal isn't really THAT easy to do. In my case at least, it required both hitting space during boot, and then enter. If I booted up the device and walked away 30 seconds later it would boot into dev mode. If I hit ctrl-d it would boot automatically. The odds that I would accidentally not realize what is happening and then press both space and then enter by mistake seem... non-existent. In fact, I would peg the biggest concern as being the annoyingly loud beeps it does before booting into dev mode. If I regularly experienced clean boots, I might switch back to normal mode out of rage.
Anyway, since the Crouton experiment failed as Steam was the primary motivator on this device for Crouton I logged out of Xfce and then I noticed something... all of my apps were back. Everything had been restored. My keyboard settings including my setup to support Japanese. My shelf configuration. My app folders. Everything.
There are some minor caveats, like apps which do additional authentication/syncing within the app. Those pretty much all need me to redo that piece. But, I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised. I had genuinely expected to need redo everything I had done locally.
It was hands down, the best restore process I have ever seen. As best as I can tell, all I really needed to do was go through the normal welcome screens after logging in the first time. More than likely, the setting for keeping things synced was the trigger. So, I could probably have had it NOT restore if I didn't want it to.
The only beef would be that there was no real indication that it was doing anything more than setting up a new device. Had I been raring to reinstall my apps I might have hit some funny behavior when trying to manually load what it was already automatically loading. Can't verify that though. Oddly, the one thing it didn't sync... was my background image. It was just an alternate stock one. Not something from my local drive.
Another thing to note is getting used to the "right way" to do things in ChromeOS when it supports Android apps. I think that they make it too difficult to create new web short cuts and they do nothing to recommend web apps over Android apps. I don't want an annoying prompt every time. But, the first time I try loading something like Facebook or Twitter, a genltle notification saying... "Hey! You can save space by using the web site rather than the app, and you can even pin that site and treat it a lot like an app by doing this".
I have an app shelf and an app drawer. But, in a pre-Android world, what I would really want there are my favorite sites. My favorite web apps. It should be front and center in the UI to put a web site into one, the other or both. And like I said, it is an adjustment of sorts as well.
And there is my super rapid update on my experience.
Comments
Post a Comment