Google’s Chromebook Pixel has recently gotten a surprise endorsement—and it’s not from any of the top brass at Apple or Microsoft. The surprise endorsement has come from Linux creator Linus Torvalds.
“The display is so nice that I suspect I’ll make this my primary laptop. I tend to like my laptops slightly smaller, but I think I can lug around this 1.5 kg monster despite feeling fairly strongly that a laptop should weigh 1 kg or less,” Torvalds said. He is also a big fan of its OS, preferring the Chrome OS over his open-source creation, which is used in a small but steadily growing number of devices. “I’m going to be running Chrome OS on this thing, which is good enough for testing out some of my normal work habits, such as reading and writing email,” he said.
Torvalds, however, didn’t rule out using Linux on his Google Chromebook Pixel. “I want to install a real [Linux] distro on this…for a laptop to be useful to me, I need to not just read and write email, I need to be able to do compiles, have my own git repositories,” he said. It has already been possible to install Linux in place of Chrome OS or to dual boot Linux alongside Chrome OS for over a year now.
Torvalds also took the time to criticize the PC industry, especially how manufacturers stress full HD (1080p) as its zenith. “One thing that the Chromebook Pixel really brings home is how crap normal laptops have become. Why do PC manufacturers even bother any more? No wonder the PC business isn’t doing well, when they stick to just churning out more crappy stuff and think that ‘full HD’ (aka 1080p) is somehow the epitome of greatness.” Torvalds may also be a big fan of Google Chromebooks because they come with 1 TB of free cloud storage, despite its $1,299 price tag.
Source: ZDNet