I’ve been using a Mac for the past few years a work. It was an opportunity to learn and use a Mac at no cost to myself and, well, honestly, the corporate addons for the Mac were considerably fewer than those for a Windows machine. At home I was a die hard Windows and Linux user. Linux couldn’t do everything I wanted easily – too many distros, too many packages, too difficult to upgrade to a new version – and Windows did pretty much everything I needed (especially with the new Windows Terminal and WSL/WSL2) for my use here at home. When it came time to replace my work Macbook, I was offered my old Macbook at a very reasonable price so I took it and began using it for my stuff here at home. What made me move to it as my primary machine? Windows updates! I use a Windows laptop and every time I picked it up the battery was dead because Microsoft had decided it needed to wake it up and install the latest updates! So I eventually moved all my home stuff over to the Mac.
I’ve had chromebooks for a few years and they’ve been OK as an occasional use platform. The best part is you have a real desktop browser in Chrome on them. So, with a small-ish chromebook (10-12″ screen) I could easily and quickly pull up a desktop site on a fully capable browser. Over the years Google has added the ability to run Android apps and even host a full Linux (Debian) distro, complete with full GUI access…and support for Windows is just around the corner (it’s already available for Enterprise customers). So I’ve been on the lookout for a new chromebook, which I found in the Acer Spin 713 with an 11th generation Intel i5 on sale at Best Buy for a tad over $500. That’s what I’m writing this on. It’s still on the small side – 13″ screen – but plenty powerful. And, honestly, I can already do 95% of everything I need on it now AND I can run the Android apps that I use every day as well as Progressive Web Apps. This is now my go-to machine. The one I keep nearby and reach for whenever I need to do something…pretty much anything that requires a decent keyboard and/or a larger screen and/or a desktop browser and/or multiple windows.
Feel free to reach out to me with questions or comments. Honestly, I can’t recommend this enough and I may consider getting a chromebox to replace my little Linux server.