Achilles' Heel: Chromebooks

Alright, I have nothing else to do. So I'm making this. You got that? Okay. 

Chromebooks. They're the laptops. Basically not laptops. They're the successor to netbooks. Remember those? And how underpowered they were? Well that's Chromebook. Wow this introduction makes no sense. On paper, it sounds like a good idea, an Android laptop. Unfortunately that means they have Android specs. There's Chromebooks of all kinds. On one hand, you have the cheap, 8 gigs of RAM and 30 gigs of hard drive storage. On the other hand, you have the luxury Samsung Chromebooks with their fancy touchscreens and 13" OLED displays. For the sake of this blog post, we are not going to acknowledge the existence of the oh so great Chromebooks which for some reason cost 649.99 dollars. 

Setup

Okay. So first off you need the internet. That sounds normal, except you need it for everything on the computer. And your user account is linked to your Google account. So once you finally log in, you can choose from a bunch of wallpapers. You have the 'Launcher', which just has Chrome pinned to it. Clicking that circle thing in the corner (or pressing the search key which Google likes to call 'the everything button') lets you look at all* the apps you have installed. *Some apps you have to press random letters and hope you'll find something. There's the basics, like Google Docs, Sheets (I forgot that existed until I wrote this), Slides, Drive, and of course YouTube. Now, they also have the Play Store and the Web Store. More on that later. There's also some other basic apps, like a calculator. (Fun fact, THESE need internet too. If you open them, they show a URL (for Calculator it's calculator.apps.chrome.) for a few seconds. And you can manage extensions on them. Same thing with the Chrome Canvas (MS Paint but worse. Also canvas.apps.chrome.) Well we aren't off to a great start. 5/10 on this one.

Web browsing

Now, let's do what this thing was meant to do: browse the internet. It loads pages under 30 seconds, so it's okay at that. at that. You can do basic things on this, basically. (That was not intentional.) Something basic like the old Homestar Runner website loads pretty much instantly, although they haven't changed the website's layout until Flash died. And things like Discord, well, you have to wait 10 seconds for a message to go through. 6/10. 

Games

Alright, this is boring so far. I know. So now we're gonna talk about gaming. Now, there's 4 ways to play games on this e-waste product line. The first one is the Google Play Store. It works for some games, but they're mobile games, so they think you're playing on a phone and they have the game in the middle of the screen (and that's mainly because you are.) The second one is Linux compatibility. You could probably install WINE, but I haven't tried that out yet. And I won't.

The third one is the Chrome Web Store. There's mostly Chrome themes and little things to ease the pain you experience when you use a Chromebook, although you can get those on any Chrome/Chromium-based browser. You can only get games on Chrome OS though. You have things like Cut the Rope, 2048, and Little Alchemy. But those are the only games on the Web Store that you actually know what they are. The fourth and final one is cloud gaming. This is basically the standard way to play games on Chromebook, because Google has official gaming Chromebooks with RGB keyboards and GeForce Now preinstalled on them. You can obviously just install it on a standard Chromebook, but you have to own some games to play them. And you just start playing. 6/10.

Total rating: 4.5/10

Alright. Now here's the Image of the Whenever. This thing took me more than an hour. Man.