>but i'm not sure how many would choose a Pixel over some other highend brands for a Linux machine.

I'm curious to know what other ultrabooks make great hardware for a linux laptop. Do you know a few?

I'm a huge fan of the Lenovo X1 Carbon. Despite their stupid moves regarding preloaded software, it's tough to beat a Thinkpad for Linux support.

Even better than the Linux support though is their warranty support. For under $100 you can get a year of accidental damage protection with onsite service -- Not long ago I knocked my X230 off a desk, cracking the LCD. Lenovo sent an IBM tech out the next day with an LCD, who then installed it in my home office.

Earlier today, I died a little when I discovered that they no longer sell the Thinkpad t430u. Wonderful machine.

Yea, i'm heavily debating a highend Thinkpad as a replacement for my Macbook Pro.

Mostly, i want Macbook Pro "quality", in a system that has good Linux support - mainly for containers, i'm sick of running a Linux VM on my OSX machine.

Surely a majority of people buying this won't be running the actual Chromebook system on it? What application can you even run on that system that would use 8GiB of RAM and an i5? And last I checked, you couldn't even run Skype on it, so I mean I just come up pretty much empty for the set of people willing to run Chromebook the OS and buy a 1k machine to do it.

Since Chromebook is Linux under the hood, they'll presumably have the driver situation down. So this makes for a very nice Linux system.

> Surely a majority of people buying this won't be running the actual Chromebook system on it?

"Chromebook" is the hardware device. ChromeOS is the operating system.

> What application can you even run on that system that would use 8GiB of RAM and an i5?

Is there an upper limit to the RAM or CPU a browser-based application can use?

Sure, many of the people buying this won't be running ChromeOS.. but then they shouldn't really be complaining that it doesn't fit their needs. A Chromebook is not a general purpose device, it was specifically designed for a narrow use case, ChromeOS. The fact that you can do something else with it, does not mean it was designed for that.

I'm not going to buy a vehicle designed for hauling freight, and complain that it isn't sporty enough. Which, in my opinion, is what complaining about the lack of storage in a "Webbook" is like. You're buying a device, specifically tailored and designed for people who are using a web based operating system. It doesn't even let you install things by default, outside of web apps.

I just bought more RAM for my PC because the 4GB I had wasn't enough for all the tabs I keep open in Chrome. Every time I switch to a tab that wasn't open for a while it would swap like mad and become unresponsive.

> couldn't even run Skype on it

Hangouts?

... would be fine until I want to talk to my mother, who uses Skype. And then it would feel strangely limiting to not be able to do that on my $999 computer.

Whoops, I misread the post above and thought they were using Skype/video chat as an example of a computationally intensive application. My bad!