The Experiment Is Over

It was exciting while it lasted but after a few days, the flaws began to outweigh the attractions. I'm taking about the installation of Chrome OS Flex to replace the Mac OS on my 2013 Mac Book Pro. In summary, the defects of the installation included:

• a frustrating time lag between opening the lid of my laptop and seeing an active screen: I never timed this precisely but it started to get under my skin because I would stare at a blank screen for what seemed like a minute or more and no amount of key presses would make a difference.
  
  
• unresponsiveness of the track pad: having long abandoned a mouse when using my laptop, it was frustrating to have to rely on a mouse again but it was necessary as the pointer would become unresponsive every few seconds. This rendered it virtually unusable. Worse still, once I connected the laptop to an external monitor, even the mouse became "twitchy".
  
  
• total lack of support for Linux: even though I'd apparently installed Linux, there was no way to open to get a functioning terminal window. I was always confronted with an error message and so no installation of Linux apps was possible.

So Chrome OS Flex is gone, replaced by Ubuntu 20.04. I've had long experience with this operating system and there is widespread community support for it. Problems have arisen of course but all of the previously mentioned problems are gone. What remain are a non-functioning webcam and an apparent incompatibility between Calibre and the latest version of Ubuntu. I'll address these in the coming days.

The problem with Flex is that it was just too "beta". I'm sure once this OS evolves, it may well be a viable alternative to Ubuntu but for now that's not the case. As mentioned in an earlier post, I've installed Ubuntu on my granddaughter's HP Pavilion x360 as well. 

While the HP laptop desperately needed a replacement for the sluggish and unresponsive Windows OS, the Mac Book was still operating well enough under Mojave. I hadn't installed Catalina because it didn't support 32-bit applications and I wanted my astrolog.exe to continue running under Wine. I thought a lighter weight operating system like Chrome OS Flex would reinvigorate my ageing Mac which I guess it did if the problems created were ignored.

Right now, with Ubuntu running, the fan on my laptop is whirring even though I only have the Chrome browser open with 13 tabs. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the system monitor.

Figure 1

I'm thinking that things are not all that different, performance-wise, from when I had the Mac OS installed. Anyway for now I'm happy to have far fewer problems than I had with Flex.

I've now installed WhatsApp and connected that app to my iPhone so that's a positive. There is no way that this could have happened on Flex, in its current state. Similarly my Express VPN is now up and running.

The Price of Mainstream Divergence

Having replaced the Mac OS on my Mac Book with OS Chrome Flex and Windows 10 on my granddaughter's HP Pavilion x360 with Ubuntu 20.04, the consequences are now being felt but it's OK, I'm retired and have plenty of time to deal with these problems. For a working person, who needs his or her laptop to be fully functional so as to maintain productivity, I wouldn't recommend my course of action.

On Ubuntu, I decided to install Calibre that I use to organise my collection of ebooks. However, once installed it wouldn't launch. Apparently, there are problems getting Calibre to run on the latest version of Ubuntu.

To add to my frustrations, I wrote in my Astrology blog about a similar problem:

... the Astrolog website links to openastro.org that has an Ubuntu repository that I'm keen to test out. Figure 1 shows a screenshot.

Figure 1

Unfortunately, I get the following error message:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:

openastro.org : Depends :  imagemagick

E: unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Given that Ubuntu is a far more mature OS than the beta Chrome OS Flex, these failures are disappointing. 

Meanwhile the problems with the latter OS are many. The webcam doesn't work on my Mac Book and the touchpad is all but useless. I had to resort to using a mouse again, a practice that I abandoned over a decade ago. Fortunately the mouse works fine unless I connect an external monitor in which case the mouse becomes unstable.

While I seem to have successfully installed the Linux development environment in Chrome OS Flex, I get the following error message when opening the terminal:

Starting the virtual machine Error starting penguin container: 5

Launching vmshell failed: Error starting crostini for terminal: 5

This of course means that no installations of Linux applications are possible. None of these things are game changers but there's also the temptation to go out and buy the M2 Mac Book Air when it comes out later this year and have all these frustrations disappear.

On the positive side, it's interesting with Chrome OS Flex to be actively involved in the ongoing development and testing of the operating system.

Trials and Tribulations

No sooner did I get Chrome OS Flex installed on my Mac Book than the charger gave out. It had been playing up for a couple of days beforehand, alternating between charging and not charging, until it finally died. This now dead charger I bought online about a year or so ago (to replace the original) so it's had a relatively short lifespan. I've ordered a new one and it should arrive today. I'm hoping it's the charger that is the problem and not the battery itself. If the latter, then that may be the end of my laptop. In the meantime, I'll remain optimistic.

In the absence of a functioning computer, I turned to my granddaughter's HP Pavilion x360 that I bought for her about four years ago and which she seldom uses, preferring instead her 2020 iPad Pro. The computer ran Windows 10 and she said that she sometimes plays games on it. When I first used it, it took forever to start up and ran maddeningly slowly when it did. She agreed to my replacing the operating system and so I tested out Chrome OS Flex on it by booting from a USB thumb drive.

The WiFi refused to work and so I installed Lubuntu instead but encountered the same problem. I then tried full-blown Ubuntu and that's what I'm currently using to create this post. I still have no WiFi but managed to access the Internet via a USB C hub into which I've run an Ethernet cable. There is no sound whatever. The keyboard of this laptop has long ceased to be functional because of several dead keys. I'm using a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse that work off a USB dongle.

The laptop was originally purchased because it can be converted into a (very heavy) tablet and has a touch screen. My granddaughter wanted to use it for digital artwork. From the beginning it was a dog of a machine and then the keyboard gave out. This abomination from HP is certainly the worst device I'm come across and it remains to be seen whether I can ever get it functioning properly again using some other operating system. 

While creating this post, I came across an intriguing workaround for my Mac Book charging problems. It's a USB C to MagSafe 2 converter. See Figure 1.

 

This particular one is rated at 90W whereas my charger is 60W. I haven't been able to find a 60W version of this adapter and I may not need to if my new charger works properly. However, if this charger fails again after a year or so, I may consider this USB C option. Of course, the latest Mac Books all have USB C charging which does away with all this proprietary nonsense.

Update: the charger arrived and it works fine so I'm up and running on my old Mac Book with Chrome OS Flex installed.