Three weeks ago I bought a Google PixelBook. Bit of a gamble but I’d been really impressed with them and had been increasingly using Google Docs / Slides / Sheets as sharing is soooo lovely compared to Microsoft’s legacy apps.
This blog will be my experiences of it.
First up the hardware
Totally lovely light laptop and the first convertible tablet I have used that’s actually think enough to be comfortable sitting back in tablet reading mode. Screen is super and the Google Pen a bit chunky but actually really nice to hold and write with. I use Android Xodo PDF reader which separates finger and pen – so I change pages with my finger and scribble notes with the pen. Lovely!
It has a fairly good battery life – making it through a day of work at a conference fine, but not without a bit of range anxiety towards the end of the working day. Charging is pretty heavy weight with a 3A USBC needed – my old powerbank could keep it from deflating but not good enough to charge.
USBC is great – finally not worrying about which way up is – why did USB take sooooo long! Pile of legacy connectors a pest though. Need to go shopping for adaptors….
A journey into the future – Android then Linux
ChomeOS is great and there are some good apps in the Chrome Web Store but it’s a bit limited. But you can turn on “Play Store Apps” which allows installation of Android apps (and then you can sort of go further, more later…). Nicely done ChromeOS this – you turn on “Play Store Apps” and the “Play Store” then appears in your app list, that’s it – no bells and whistles or trouble. When you install and app from the play store, it goes in your app list too and you can pin it to the shelf (taskbar) just like ChromeOS. You quickly forget what’s what, nice OS integration!
Google Docs: super and offlineable for Google Docs docs – so my Google docs, slides and sheets are available with and without network and with full editing (the browser is desktop equivalent so fully fledged with extensions etc). Alas non-google-doc docs were not synched. So I downloaded my trusted GDrive Sync and Solid Explorer for Android. Now I can choose: stay on line or flick over to Android and edit locally and have all files – bit uglier but perfectly manageable.
Email: GMail is super and my gmail account works great – choice again of the standard web interface or the Offline Gmail Chrome app – both great, fast, light and brilliant as only Gmail is…. Strathclyde requires me to use Exchange though for student related mail and that was a problem. The Android gmail app works well as an Exchange client on phones but needs a security check that the phone is encrypted. That failed for Android GMail on ChromeOS – because, erm, there is no setting – it’s always encrypted! So I read reviews and have ended up with Nine – not quite my style but good. BUT… no spell checking – a long term problem with ChromeOS Android – they haven’t got the spell checker working. So my lousy spelling shows through hey ho…
Then I got naughty. I’d read about Linux on ChromeOS and though… what they heck…. At the moment ChromeOS main (stable) release is on 68, beta on 69 and beta-beta (developer) is on 70. 70 includes Linux! So off the ChromeOS settings I headed and flicked a switch to say “Developer channel”. This is not the same as developer mode – on Android that gives you a wee bit more power, on ChromeOS I think it’s a bad place to go as it’s much more serious. But developer channel is just getting pre-pre-release versions. So?
Linux on ChromeOS
Once on the developer program. Back to settings and turn on Linux – a single flag. ChromeOS does some work and after a while, much like turning on Android, the process finishes with little bells and whistles. Except now I have a terminal app!! Run terminal and there’s a linux prompt.
Linux, Android and ChromeOS have separated file spaces and there is still no non-command way of installing Linux apps. But off to IntelliJ I went and downloaded the Linux .tar.gz file. Copied it from ChromeOS downloads into the Linux file space. Looked up what on earth all those parameters are and then unziptared it. Command line ran the executable and up pops IntelliJ!
Once running and setup IntelliJ appears on the list of apps and on the shelf – shock horror, just like a ChromeOS or Android app. Close it and the icon stays in the apps list. Tap again and it runs directly – no command line needed.
So at that point I had Chrome-Web-Apps, Android apps and Linux apps all happily sitting together and running as if all the same – total magic. Then it all went wrong, as beta-beta-releases tend to…..
Now I’m back on stable release and eagerly waiting for 70 to go stable