Google's been making steady progress in advancing its Chromebook operating system over the past several months, particularly around its efforts to further align Android and Chrome OS and turn Chromebooks into all-purpose productivity machines and Android tablet replacements. Practically every week, in fact, there's some new and noteworthy feature being added into the platform (something we've talked about a great deal in my weekly newsletter as of late).
Google Chrome OS: big deal or no deal
Storage. When I plugged in a USB thumb drive (the Pixelbooks only have USB C ports, but luckily I have one USB-C storage key), the OS correctly identified the storage and opened a file-browsing window. Note that the OS mimics Apple's macOS in that it annoyingly displays a notification whenever you unplug the USB key without first telling the OS you want to eject it. Windows just deals with the inevitable, without scolding you.
When it comes to integration between mobile and desktop, Apple is the act to beat, but Chromebooks have gotten closer. Apple's Continuity features let you move work and play seamlessly between iOS and macOS, and you can even text and launch FaceTime calls from multiple devices using the same account. Even though Windows no longer has a thriving mobile version, the OS offers a good deal of continuity between Microsoft's Android and iOS apps and its desktop version through the Your Phone, Edge, Cortana, Skype, and Bing mobile apps.
The Lenovo Tab P12 Pro is a pretty exciting alternative to the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8+. It will not get software updates for quite as long, but it is often a good deal cheaper and the keyboard cover makes it more exciting. This can be used separately from the tablet via Bluetooth. Apart from that, it is a normal premium tablet with Android that has a productivity mode and can thus also be operated comfortably via mouse and keyboard.
The Lenovo Tab P11 is the cheapest Android tablet with a keyboard cover that I can currently recommend. It is smaller and a bit weaker than the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE, but it is also a good deal cheaper. The keyboard has to be purchased separately and works similarly well as in the Lenovo Duet Chromebook. A productivity mode is also available here.
The 10.2-inch display is nice and bright with 500 nits and also has a decent resolution of 2160 x 1620 pixels. However, it is regrettable that the screen is not laminated. Thus, an air gap is visible between the IPS panel and the touchscreen. Many do not notice this and it is often not a big deal. However, it is annoying when writing or drawing with the Apple Pencil 1. The air gap makes it look as if you do not touch the screen directly.
The Lenovo Duet Chromebook (aka Chromebook Duet 3) is an awesome little 11-inch ChromeOS tablet with a detachable keyboard and touchpad. Its small size and performance aren't ideal for full-time use. But the Chromebook Duet 3 is a good pick if you're looking for an affordable ultraportable device to get some work done on the go, sketch or jot down notes in class, or do simple stuff like email, web browsing, gaming, reading and streaming video.
Use deals in HubSpot to track potential revenue through your sales process. You can associate deals with other records, such as contacts and companies involved in the deal. Once records are associated to a deal, HubSpot can associate the relevant activities to the deal record.
Depending on your account's HubSpot subscription, you can use the Create a deal action in the workflows tool to automatically trigger a deal creation when a record meets certain conditions. For example, if a contact meets a certain value in a score property, a deal could automatically be created and assigned to your sales team. Learn how to create deals via workflow.
By default, a deal's close date is set to the last day of the month it was created, but you can set a default close date for newly created deals. Custom default close date settings only apply to deals created in the desktop app, and do not apply to deals created in the mobile app.
Except that doesn't really work well for real applications. Static linking GTK means that your application doesn't use the same theme as the rest of the desktop that's running a newer GTK. Static linking sound libraries means that codec plugins don't work, and you need to statically link those too, which can be a legal nightmare. And static linking libc is a horrifically bad idea.Linux compatibility at the ABI level is an absolute joke. Source compatibility can even be an issue now and then, because so many projects just change the damn API with every release, and distributions generally only ship the latest version of most projects (few distributions ship every 2.x release of Python for example, even though each release has a minor API and ABI breakages).That's all fairly irrelevant though, since Linux distributions go out of their way to impose entirely artificial barriers to compatibility. Even if you make a solid portable Linux binary, there's no way to make that binary installable in a cross-platform way that doesn't rely on the user opening a shell and having wasted weeks/months/years of their life learning how to use a shell instead of spending their time doing something more important (like spending time with real people, instead of enslaving themselves to babysitting and hand-holding their "time saving" computational apparatus).Until Linux distributions either agree on a common package manager (and standardize package names, virtual provides, etc.) or agree on shipping a second cross-platform installation tool (there are a ton of these, some of which I believe can even integrate with RPM/DPKG, but if these tools are not installed on the system then installing packages still requires shell magic to install the damn installation tool).The various framework developers don't put a lot of effort into testing binary compatibility I believe, and that's largely because few people ask for binary compatibility, because binary compatibility is useless on an OS where getting the binaries installed is a nightmare. In turn, companies don't bother trying to make universal binaries because they know it's entirely pointless, and companies that flat out _can't_ release source just don't bother with Linux... which is why a great deal of us still have Windows installations around. The only thing stopping a great deal of those applications being ported to Linux is the fact that they'd be absolutely impossible to install on Linux.Take a modern game for example. Even assuming the game source was released, you can't package those things in an RPM. They come on DVDs packed to the brim with textures, sounds, musics, meshes, maps, scripts, videos, and so on. Are we supposed to install a single 4.4GB RPM? And then every time there's a minor update to a few models, we're supposed to download a new 4.4GB RPM because there's no standard delta-RPM mechanism shared by all the RPM distros? That doesn't even include Debian/Ubuntu of course.There needs to be a cross-platform way of installing software -- and I don't even care if it's a graphical frontend to a compilation script to make the GPL fans happy, so long as it can figure out how to install dependencies on its own -- including a way of updating that software in a realistic fashion given all of today's applications' needs, binary compatibility isn't worth testing and developing for on Linux. It's there mostly to make a nice bullet point for a few enterprise distros that don't really need it, and that's it.In turn, Linux is still just an "appliance" OS and anybody who needs to do more than run a web browser and email client and word processor (which is a far, far greater percentage of users than the Linux desktop advocates continually claim -- I can't name a single person, even my 80+ year old grandparents, who limit themselves to just those three things) simply can't use Linux because the repositories don't include the software they want (be it Bejeweled 2 or their local geneaology club's favorite software package) and there's no possible way they could ever figure out how to install that software even if there was a Linux version.Linux's future in the mass consumer market, assuming these things don't change (and I'm 100% convinced that they never will), is going to be handhelds and other appliance-like devices... assuming Linux developers can ever manage to beat the popularity of Apple's competing devices, anyway. Which, as of yet and for the forseeable future, they can't. Android and Pre have nothing on the iPhone's sales. And if you care about Linux from an Open Source/Free Software perspective, those Linux devices don't even matter to you because they rely on proprietary software to get full functionality!I can't stress it enough though. Software installation is Linux's Achilles Heel. Until that's fixed, Linux is a just niche nerd OS in the desktop space. (Log in to post comments) Small problem for Linux ? Sure. Big problem for Linux user? Of course. Posted Jul 9, 2009 15:48 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] 2ff7e9595c
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