Chromehooked: 5 Years Since My First Chromebook

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Five years ago these days I bought my first Chromebook, an Acer C720. It was an impulse buy I planned for months.

Acer C720 Chromebook
My first Chromebook, an Acer C720.

Chrome OS had always intrigued me.

Back then, I felt the need for a secondary computer besides my primary desktop PC running Ubuntu Linux. I was living in Chrome and the Google ecosystem anyway most of the time, so getting a Chromebook was an easy decision.

Chrome OS immediately felt natural. That humble device, the Acer C720, had enough performance for my typical needs.

There’s another reason I wanted to give Chrome OS a go: I had had enough with maintaining Linux.

When I got the Chromebook, I had been using Linux only for the previous decade and a half. After trying several distributions, I settled on Ubuntu.

I dreaded the Russian roulette of system updates. All went well most of the time but, once every few weeks, a version mismatch between the kernel and some device drivers or kernel modules would dump me into a text console, forcing me to unwanted and long troubleshooting sessions.

This made the seamless system update model of Chrome OS very appealing.

I loved the Acer C720 so much, in September 2015 I switched to using only Chrome OS on the desktop and bought an i3 ASUS Chromebox 2 as my daily driver. I haven’t looked back at traditional desktop operating systems since then.

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