This Is Not The Computer For You

Some people write software and when it's slow, they think they need a faster computer. Other people optimize the software to run faster. I think the former is how we got Electron.

I like using slow computers because if the thing I'm making runs ok here, it's going to run really fast for most other people.

"The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook doesn’t learn that his machine can’t handle it. He learns that Google decided he’s not allowed to."

You can run blender on a Chromebook using the Linux environment.

I really enjoyed reading this, thank you. One little personal story. The author mentioned:

The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook doesn’t learn that his machine can’t handle it. He learns that Google decided he’s not allowed to. Those are completely different lessons.

I was that kid... when I was ~10, my school got Chromebooks. I had started programming a year earlier and a lot of my friends were into like Linux and Python and Flash games. At home, my family had a mac, and I had started to learn Inkscape and Blender on it.

The school blocked a lot of fun websites (like coolmathgames.com) at the chrome-browser level (not the network level). My friends and I worked together and figured out how to root our Chromebooks and install Ubuntu with chroot + crouton. (So we could play flash games! Later we hosted a web server full of flash games on the school's internal network, but that's a story for another time.)

What was very cool was that the Chromebook would boot both ChromeOS and Ubuntu side-by-side, simultaneously. You could instantly switch between them with a little keyboard shortcut. (Which was a great feature, as you can imagine!)

I installed Blender on Ubuntu on my Chromebook and would mess around with fluid and physics simulations during lunch or in the library. (I would bring a USB mouse to school in my backpack.) I learned a lot. Surprisingly, either because I was very patient or because I didn't know any better, I thought Blender worked quite well on my Chromebook. I think I still might have some old renders or screenshots from that time on an old hard drive, I'll see if I can find them later.

Thanks for reminding me of these memories!

I had a related feeling after reading The Hardware Hacker by Andrew Huang, although it was more on the technical side. I realized that I could spend the rest of my life exploring the capabilities & architecture of the dumpiest computer I own and barely glimpse its horizons. Everything I needed was already sitting under my desk, moldering.

Great read to be honest, I kinda felt like a target audience for this machine, but then also ran into a need of a new MacBook (to retire Intel one) for outdoors programming and photo/video editing. Neo is an amazing choice for hobby/beginner photographers and programmers (on iPadOS, you can’t easily write code and commit changes) Considered the Air model as well, but then it doesn’t include HDR, and display is limited to 60Hz. Next obvious choice is, of course the Pro model, as you start adding stuff like nanostructured display, final cost quickly builds up.

The author of this article does a little Chromebook bashing from a place of ignorance.

On ChromeOS, you can enable something called Crostini. It's a Linux container. In there, you can run any Linux software — including Blender. I've also run irssi, WeeChat, Krita, gVim, VS Code, gcc, clang, Go... even Luanti (formerly Minetest). It all works fine.

So, no: Google is NOT deciding the user can't run Blender on their Chromebook, because they CAN.