Why Every Student Should Have A Chromebook
You don’t need a Macbook for a Politics degree. How I used a £99 Chromebook in my Computer Science degree.
Before embarking on my University journey, my parents gave me some money to spend on a computer. Being a video-game lover, I decided to splash out on the desktop rig that I’d always wanted. This decision did cause a couple of problems at University, however. It made working outside of my room very difficult, and I didn’t have a laptop to rapidly take notes in lectures. I couldn’t justify spending a lot of money, and so I bought the cheapest thing that resembled a laptop on Amazon.
This small, 11.6 inch device would go on to change the way I think about laptops. The concept of a Chromebook is simple, you allow all the intensive processing to be done on the cloud, leaving your device lightweight in every way. Chromebooks don’t need powerful specs because all the heavy lifting is being done by servers that have powerful specs. As a result, you have yourself a cheap laptop, with an extremely long battery life.
Why not Macbook?
The average student uses their laptop for not much more than Netflix, Facebook and Microsoft Office. None of these softwares are particularly resource intensive. They don’t utilize any of the things that make MacOS so great. As a general rule, Macs are the best for creative work. This includes photo editing, video editing, music production, and often programming. If you’re not doing any of these things, then it is simply money down the drain. It is true that Macbooks are reliable and last a long time, partially because it is difficult catch a virus on them. However, Chromebooks are probably even more difficult to get a virus on. And since you’re storing everything on the internet rather than a device, they too last a long time.
Google Docs
One of the reasons that people are skeptical about purchasing Chromebooks is that they would have to part ways with their beloved Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office has been around for a long time, and for most students it would have been part of their early IT education. This doesn’t mean however, that it would be difficult to make the switch.
The softwares are similar in their functionality, and Google Docs has the edge when it comes to convenience. We’ve all heard horror stories of people who didn’t save their work and lost hours of effort. This isn’t a problem with Docs, everything is saved automatically on the cloud. You can start writing a report at home on your laptop, and then edit it on your phone during your bus journey. Do you remember when people used to forget their USB’s and their work along with it? Yeah, that shouldn’t happen anymore.
Which Chromebook to get?
There are a lot of Chromebooks out there. My first piece of advice is to find one you like the look of, that also has good reviews. I personally like the look of the Acer Chromebooks.
You can find Chromebooks at the $100 mark. If you’re broke, this is the way to go. However if you choose this option then don’t expect it to be fast. For this reason I recommend getting one with 4GB of RAM. The Chromebook I usually recommend to students is the Acer Chromebook 14, which hovers around the $250 mark. With this you get a 14 inch, full-HD screen. This is significantly cheaper than a Macbook, and there is no reason why it shouldn’t last just as long.
Want to code? No biggie!
There are two options if you want to code on a Chromebook.
Option 1: Work off of a Server
As a student, I received a year’s worth of free DigitalOcean credits. This allowed me to have my own Linux server I could use for most of my courseworks. You can then use SSH to connect to the server. There are a lot of services out their that are designed to make this experience easier and more enjoyable. One of note is the Cloud9 editor, recently bought by Amazon Web Services.
This method sufficed for most of my courseworks. You can use this method to make websites, or code in pretty much any language. The only drawback of such method is when you’re working with offline Graphical user interfaces. This includes app-development and a fair chunk of game development. If you’re interested in these things, you’ll have to get your hands dirty with option 2.
Option 2: Hack-on Linux
This isn’t necessarily straight forward. It varies depending your Chromebook model, and so I’m not going to offer a tutorial. There is a good amount of community support behind this. It is useful being able to dual boot ChromeOS as well as Linux. I’ve been using a version of Linux called GalliumOS. This OS is optimised for Chromebooks, and so it runs very well.
In Summary
Laptops are in an interesting place right now. The main strength of Windows is its ability to run games well. However, gaming laptops are hella expensive, and not always practical for a student. Macbooks are more flexible, but also expensive. If you are a student, or know a student looking to buy a laptop, consider joining the cloud revolution. It really is convenience at a lower cost.
