> When things get completely borked (which in two weeks of heavy use only happened a couple of times for me)
how are people willing to live with this? I would be furious if I had to lose all my state and (for all intents and purposes) restart my machine multiple times in two weeks.
And if this "borking" happens right before or during a presentation (the author was writing about using this setup for giving talks on), this would be very embarassing for me and extremely annoying for the audience.
A work/presentaion machine has to be rock solid for me. No compromises, no workarounds and most certainly no "completely borked". Just pure solid.
(author here) I think this was misunderstood. I don't mean the _entire_ Chromebook or OS was unstable -- just the opposite actually. I was referring to having to restart Termux twice in two weeks. Two weeks of constant wake/sleep cycles on and off battery, and plugging/unplugging from an external monitor.
In one case it was a hard kill and I lost one ssh window that had been open for a week. In the other, the Termux gui came up and I never dropped my session (the ssh process never died). I'm not yet familiar enough with the Termux internals to understand that. As far as the Chrome OS stability, it's been one of the most stable machines I own, and I say that as a long-time MBP & Librem owner. 99% of the reboots were intentional as I reinstalled the whole build from Powerwash to Erlang hello world, to make sure I got the details right for the post (and to help troubleshoot some minor install roadbumps a couple of my reviewers experienced).
On the presentations, I joined multiple Hangouts & BlueJeans (WebRTC) video client calls with zero trouble. Signal and Wire voice worked like a champ too.
So while I certainly understand some of the comments here, for _my_ use case — a reliable $160 multi-week travel/burner dev notebook with strong security, I'm more than satisfied. And of course it's not in the same league as my $2K++ MBP. I would never try to run a big JDK app, but for offline Go and Python work, it fits my bill.
Yeah, that's pretty terrible. My GNU/Linux machines have months long X11 sessions with firefox, libre office, hundreds (I've hit the window limit) of xterm windows, and lots of other stuff open while waking up and sleeping (s2ram) multiple times every day.
I've them crash once every few years after I'm done setting them up, usually it goes down because I run out of power or want to update the kernel. There's no good reason some GUI should die because of waking up from sleep.
I reboot my laptop every day. I shut it down at night. It's all in what you're used to doing. There's no particular inconvenience, though it can seem that way if you're disorganized and don't ever close anything for fear of losing your place.
1) Mid-2010 MacBook Pro, with RAM and SSD upgrades. This is my main machine at home. It has never had to be wiped and reinstalled, and it gets rebooted about once a month.
2) Late-2013 MacBook Pro. This is my work machine and the story is similar to my home machine. It's never needed a reinstall and gets rebooted about once a month as well.
3) Lenovo ThinkPad x131e (Intel). This is my travel computer, serving a similar purpose as the Chromebook mentioned in this article (minus presenting stuff). I'm running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on this - frequent updates lead to frequent reboots. There's also all the associated weirdness that comes with running a rolling release Linux on a machine that requires proprietary WiFi drivers (they tend to lag by a couple of days). When I ran OpenSUSE Leap it was almost as solid as the Macs.
I'd call the Macs "pure solid" machines, or as close as I can reasonably get. The ThinkPad is decent and the weirdness with it is really my fault.
Despite using Arch Linux, and weekly "upgrade everything".
I know it isn't everyone's experience, but I was exceedingly choosey about the hardware that went into my machine, so that I could do this.
The only problem I've had in the last two years, was an incompatibility between ocaml and fish shell, which eliminated my PATH. Unfortunate, but an issue on the ocaml side of things. A big problem, for certain, but two years of bleeding edge updates, and that's it.
Mostly the same experience, running Debian Unstable on my X201. Keeping a simple environment (AwesomeWM and urxvt, rather than Gnome or KDE; dhcpcd, rather than NetworkManager) probably helps. I put it to sleep every day, often multiple times, and it never fails to come up, connect to Wifi, etc.
Oh, excellent; thank you. I mentioned it because this has bitten me, so I'll want to use that fix.
Fun story: for $REASONS, I have an Arch system with root on btrfs and /boot on ext4, and it doesn't usually have the boot partition mounted (it's a poorly done mutiboot issue). I recently discovered that this means if I forget to mount boot before updating I get stuck with no loaded drivers to mount /boot :) Thankfully kexec worked, but I'd like to not need to do that:)
My Macs have an uptime in months. Sometimes I have to restart a process, but needing to restart the machine is exceedingly rare outside of the normal security update related reboots.
Over the years I have given quite a few presentations to customers and at public talks. None of my machines ever let me down.
how are people willing to live with this? I would be furious if I had to lose all my state and (for all intents and purposes) restart my machine multiple times in two weeks.
And if this "borking" happens right before or during a presentation (the author was writing about using this setup for giving talks on), this would be very embarassing for me and extremely annoying for the audience.
A work/presentaion machine has to be rock solid for me. No compromises, no workarounds and most certainly no "completely borked". Just pure solid.