Samsung Chromebook 3

★☆☆☆☆

I bought this laptop in the late 2010s, mainly for travel, or to have as a spare I could use when someone else was using the good laptop.

It was terrible.

A lot of computers start out great, or at least good, and then decay over time as hardware breaks down, connectors and batteries wear out, and software requirements balloon to exceed what they can handle. This was not one of those devices.

Some devices aren’t that great, but there’s some redeeming feature about them and you love them anyway, until entropy comes knocking and you reluctantly put them out to pasture. This was not one of those devices either.

Substandard Hardware

The display was the kind of LCD where you can see the grid between pixels. The backlight was too bright, and inconsistent across the surface of the screen. The keyboard was uncomfortable and unreliable, the trackpad was clunky (and also unreliable), and the chassis always felt like it was about to fall apart. And it was slow, even by the standards of its time.

System Capabilities

Even worse, it ran ChromeOS.

I mean, I’m sort of kidding there, but I’m also not. It was usable for web apps like Gmail and Google Docs, and there were Chrome apps for things like SSHing into another system. And there was some local file storage that synced with Google Drive for offline use. ChromeOS had some Android app support by then, and I was kind of surprised that Dropbox and a VPN worked, but for the most part, Android apps ran better on my phone anyway. I was briefly amused that I could get Instagram to run on the Chromebook, but why bother?

None of us really wanted to use it, even when it reached EOL and I installed a real Linux distribution. PeppermintOS was minimal enough that the environment ran okay, but that couldn’t solve the physical problems.

It was almost always better to just use an Android tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard.

Fate

I think I eventually just took it to an e-waste collection. Though I can’t remember for sure.

If it turns up in the garage or the back of a closet, I might see if it still powers up and put PostmarketOS on it just for kicks. I don’t see it in their compatibility list, either by name or board codename (celes), but if I could install a general-purpose distro a few years ago, I should be able to install PM or upstream Alpine Linux.

It might make a decent Writer Deck, especially if set up with a UI that doesn’t use the trackpad. Then again, the keyboard might be frustrating enough to counteract the lack of distractions.