Thanks - has this changed in the past few years?

A few years back (when I last looked in depth), it was very easy at every boot (not only first boot) to accidentally wipe everything - e.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/Crouton/comments/3be2su/reducing_ri...

I also remember that it made a loud beep on every boot!

I used a Chromebook as my main laptop for a year in college, and I always had to apologize to nearby strangers for the beep.

(CS major, coding happened mostly over SSH to the school servers, but I did run RStudio locally)

How often does one reboot their laptop around nearby strangers? I gotta be honest that some of these criticisms seem a little strained. I mean, it's true, they beep at boot when dev mode is enabled!

It’s been awhile and I don’t remember why I had to reboot, but it did happen. I guess past me did a lot of work in cafes, office hours, and common areas.

I do remember that running a certain R program consistently caused the Chromebook to turn off, which was quite an issue for one particular office hours session!

I shut all of my computers all the way off when I’m finished using them, which means I have to turn them on when I start using them.

Is this an adaptation to some past trauma? I can't imagine a good reason to do this today, certainly not with ChromeOS.

I don't think it's trauma, although I've been burned with suspend/wake cycles before. Suspend works great. It is usually that wake part if it's going to go wrong.

If I close the lid, when I get back _I_ need a clean slate. I'll never remember what I was doing anyway.

Modern machines boot and launch apps so fast I'm not really saving any time sleeping an empty desktop either.

Interesting. It certainly costs several seconds to start and login to ChromeOS, while I have always enjoyed the fact that unlike other operating systems it is up and running before I even get the screen unfolded, from sleep.

> while I have always enjoyed the fact that unlike other operating systems it is up and running before I even get the screen unfolded, from sleep.

Other devices, maybe; it's at least as much firmware as OS. To this day the fastest wake from sleep I've seen was a random midrange Lenovo laptop that I got used, which is slightly maddening.

When talking about other OS, you might want to turn it off if you have your disk encrypted. So it serves its purpose.

Good point. I do indeed encrypt devices that leave the house.

I used a Samsung Chromebook sometime 5 years ago, and it couldn’t handle suspend/sleep well. I could leave it overnight with 80% and find it with 0% in the morning. So I learned to turn it off each time I stop using it. It booted within seconds anyways, so the only issue was to enter my gigantic generated password.

For me ChromeOS’s top UX fault is the password. You either do it with pin, or with a Bluetooth device to unlock. Otherwise it’s pain to enter the password.

Question out of curiosity: did you happen to have some sort of USB device plugged in when you put it into suspend?

Both pin and phone unlock are supported, as of today.

No USB device was ever plugged into the device.

There were days that you need to enter developer mode to turn on pin unlock, and Bluetooth devices came later on. I remember that pain of needing to enter my very long password in each boot. Horrible UX.

I interacted with a recent (a couple of months) Chrome OS Flex device (a regular old PC laptop of a senior that I know and helped to establish a basic computer for him), and it didn’t work on the first boot. It was a huge problem for him to enter the password, especially a strong one. I set up a pin with his birthday, which never worked. It worked only if you logged off the account (but didn’t turned off the computer). But if you start fresh, then you won’t be able to use the pin. I ended up setting his Google password to his birthday with dots and some letters, e.g. Qw25.12.1935, which Google allowed and which worked for him. He enters his password letter by letter and for him it’s a worse UX than before, when he had Windows XP that just boots and has Chrome (outdated with no option to upgrade) installed. But I convinced him this new way of things is better. At least it loads momentarily, which he likes.

And on top of that, built in Bluetooth adapter doesn’t work on that very laptop to connect his Android smartphone. The Bluetooth module works, but it doesn’t with the software for some reason. Brief googling showed me it’s easier to buy usb Bluetooth module and try with it. Which I did, but haven’t checked that yet, as he lives quite far away from me. As of now he uses the laptop somehow.

Isnt suspending an adaptation to trauma? The trauma of slow drives/startup or being interrupted constantly?

When I put my machine e away I am usually 'done', and when I open it, it isn't to see where I left off.

Being interrupted isn’t something that can be solved with technology, it’s more a lifestyle thing

(also sometimes you might just want to take a break or move somewhere different without starting from scratch)

The key combo you use to get into dev mode, ctrl+D, will exit the warning screen before it beeps.

I managed to mute the beep, so it's possible. As for pressing Ctrl-D on each reboot it's less of a burden, IMHO, than pressing keys to get to a BIOS menu, which is something I often do on older computers when booting from USB. Unless things have changed, /usr/local does not get wiped. If using an opinionated chroot written by someone else, e.g., Crouton, maybe the risk goes up, not sure. But setting up own chroot in /usr/local will protect anything intended to be permanent. If only pressing Ctrl-D on reboot, it's not easy to wipe anything accidentally. Replacing the bootloader with an open source one that's easier to control is the best solution, e.g., coreboot from https://github.com/MrChromebox