Hey welcome back to the channel! So if you're anything like me you've read
about Chromebooks and wondered why people are buying these things. I mean
just running Chrome OS they seem like they can only be used online and they're
totally limited what you can do with it right?
Well I thought the same thing
until I got this Dell Inspiron Chromebook 14 the other day I've been
using this for like two weeks now and have totally changed my tune, so I hope
to provide some information and help answer that question when people ask
why use a Chromebook.
So the things I show you in this video are not going to be
specific to this Chromebook but they are going to be specific to certain
capabilities of a Chromebook, so the Chromebook that you're looking at make
sure that it can run Linux applications and Android applications. If it can do
those two things you'll be able to use just about everything I show you in this
video just out of the box without any tweaking.
Now if you're somebody that
likes to tweak a little bit more and don't mind doing a little more
configuration there's another method ,that I'm going to show you at the end of
this video, that's a little more advanced that gives you a lot more capabilities
as far as application availability.
If you have any suggestions on things I
didn't cover here or have any questions leave those down in the comment section
below and with all that out of the way let's
get into some of the reasons why you would want to get a Chromebook.
So some of the things that finally made me decide to get a Chromebook are the
simplicity of the operating system it's super fast it starts up super fast the
updates are completely painless and everything just launches really really
quickly it runs great even on really modest hardware the battery life on most
Chromebooks are amazing I haven't had the charge this in about three days now
it's a very very battery efficient and again it's because the operating system
is so efficient it can run on really battery efficient hardware as well now
on the hardware side you can get something for a hundred and fifty bucks
that's made out of plastic that runs Chrome OS fantastically well but it's
super cheap if you just need something to get stuff done all the way up to the
pixel book that's over $1000 with some great hardware a touchscreen stylus all
that good stuff and everything in between so the nice thing is that there
is a broad range of devices and it's really easy to find one that meets the
capabilities you're looking for at the price point you're looking for alright
so let's talk about the elephant in the room and in my mind that is this limited
storage on Chromebooks now most of them come with
32 or 64 gigs of storage this one that I got has a 20 128 gigs of storage and
some of the higher-end ones also have 128 I shied away from the 32 or 64
gigabytes of storage because I like to tweak my devices and push into their
limits and see what I could do and I knew I would need that extra storage for
some of the stuff I wanted to do that's not going to be the case for everybody
some people are going to be fine with either 32 or 64 gigs of storage if
they're using it at the basic level because most of the storage they
strongly encourage you to store that in Google Drive there is a way to store
stuff locally depending on your needs don't necessarily shy away from that 32
or 64 gigs of storage because if you're just gonna be storing everything in the
cloud anyway it doesn't really matter so one thing I love about these devices and
something that's going away in a lot of other devices is the availability of the
ports for instance this one has two USB see a USB a SD card reader and a
headphone jack now those USB C ports are for charging or USB C devices they're
not Thunderbolt devices but you can use you know your hubs to expand the ports
little USB C adapters whatever you want to use I've used an adapter that
provides two more USB 3.0 ports and an HDMI port put it out to a HDMI monitor
it just recognizes that everything I've hooked up to this device it's just
recognized that it's just worked I haven't had to load any drivers or
anything that has been fantastic I've had to mess with this machine so much
less than any Mac Linux based computer or windows-based computer that I've ever
used so they did they use on these machines even on the lower end is
completely smooth I mean it was built for that kind of stuff for browsing the
web checking your email you know doing some word processing and things like
that everything just flies the machine starts
up super quick applications launched really fast and even on the devices with
like two gigs of RAM multitasking is not really an issue because these are really
small efficient apps that run on these now if you're going to be doing some of
the more advanced enough that I'm going to show you later you're going to want
something with a little bit more than those two gigs this one has 4 gigs and
everything runs well on it I have not had any problem
with responsiveness and talking about responsiveness the touchscreen on these
things is great this one is phenomenal but even the lower end ones I've not had
an issue with touchscreen responsiveness or input you know missing my swipe
gestures or tapping or anything like that like I said even on the lower end
devices that support a touchscreen so that has been a fantastic experience now
one common misconception I hear is that you have to be connected to the Internet
to use a Chromebook and that is just not the case there are many many chrome
applications that work in an offline mode especially the Google ones the
Google office suite and Google Drive allows you to set some files to be
available offline so if you're going on a trip you can just set those files to
be available offline edit them while you're on the plane or in the car or
whatever and then when you connect to the internet again it'll just sync
everything up and then with the Linux apps and the Android apps that's
especially true because a lot of those were built to be used in kind of an
offline mode so your options are open up there and I'll get to that in just a
minute all right so in talking about
applications what are some of the options for applications well the first
one is any web-based app of course is going to work any website because this
thing is built on Chrome OS likewise any web application from the Chrome Web
Store is gonna work and a lot of those will just install in the OS and then
when you go to the app drawer they'll show up just like any other application
now the next two things this is kind of where I mentioned before that you're
gonna have to check the capabilities of your Chromebook because the next two
options are native Android apps and native Linux apps now with the Android
apps you can install the Google Play Store or actually it installs it for you
and then you can go out to the Play Store and install apps and games til
your heart's content everything that I have tried installed through the Play
Store works great and you can use it in just kind of a windowed mode that
simulates a phone screen or a lot of them you can go fullscreen and use them
as full screen apps as well now the last thing is native Linux apps and this has
been integrated into Chrome OS as well on a lot of machines it's basically just
toggling another option in the settings and then you can through a command line
install Linux application I have installed GIMP the image editor I
use that all the time I needed it on this machine and installed no problem
and works really well have no issue using it on this Chromebook the only
limitations to that method are there is no GPU so no graphics cards acceleration
and no audio so things like video editors audio editors things like that
are not going to work because that's not available yet but that capability is
coming soon so keep a lookout for that so another thing this thing excels is
with media consumption so of course you can get to all the websites YouTube Hulu
Netflix but there are some dedicated chrome app for those things and also
there's options of installing the Android app for those services and many
many other services too and the screen on a lot of these machines is great the
screen on this Inspiron is beautiful media looks fantastic on this if media
consumption is a primary use for you you may want to consider that when you're
buying a device some of those lower end machines have not very good screens so
just keep that in mind if that's something that you're looking for and
another great thing about these machines is it's really easy to share that media
up to a larger screen you can either hook up a monitor develop directly to
the device or you can chromecast directly from Chrome OS to any
chromecast device I've tried it to a physical you know standalone chromecast
device and an Nvidia shield TV box and in both cases it worked great no real
setup or anything I just chose the device from my list and streamed it over
and it worked just no problem at all alright so you know whenever I review a
device I got to have a gaming section and today is no different and there
actually are some options for gaming on these devices now the first one is
installing games from the Chrome Web Store these are built specifically for
Chrome web browser or Chrome OS so of course they work right now a lot of
those games are pretty limited so you know just keep the head in mind but a
lot of them are very fun as well now the better option probably is installing
from the Android Play Store and those Android apps and games work great like I
mentioned before I've installed a bunch of game
and they work really really well the only caveat is that most of those games
are not designed for either a controller or keyboard and mouse so you're gonna
need to make sure that you have a device with a touchscreen if gaming with those
Android apps is going to be important to you now the next two options I want to
talk about are both streaming options the first one is streaming within your
local network with the steam link app that's available in the Android Play
Store that uses the steam in-home streaming where you connect to a gaming
machine that's on your network and stream all your games to the Chromebook
now the benefit of that is that you're on your local network if you have a fast
connection there's very low latency and in most cases you can use the keyboard
and mouse and a controller I've hooked to xbox360 controller a wired one up to
this and I didn't have to load any drivers or anything it just detected it
it just worked again out of the box didn't have to mess with it and it was a
great experience now this next streaming thing is cloud
streaming services and everybody and their mother is making these now so I'm
not going to go into any specifics caveat to that is that you're going to
need a very very fast reliable internet connection so you're really only going
to be able to use that at home if you're at you know an airport or at a hotel
Wi-Fi it's probably not going to be good enough to play those games so the last
thing I wanted to talk about before I get into that advanced stuff is with
media creation now you may not think of a Chromebook as a media creation tool
but there actually are some options if you're an artist and you have a
Chromebook with a stylus art flow and Autodesk SketchBook are two great
options there's a bunch of other great options are out there most of the
Chromebooks with the stylus are pressure-sensitive so you get that
pressure sensitivity you get really good response with the stylus and those are
great options if you want to edit audio there's some audio editors and there's
actually some DAWs out there some digital audio workstations three great
ones are stage light audio evolution mobile and FL Studio Mobile those all
work really well and give you some really good dog capabilities on your
Chromebook which I was a little bit surprised by for image editing there's a
lot of great options available in the Google Play Store there's Pixlr there's
Photoshop Express a whole bunch of options available and
then there's also with the integrated Linux capabilities
there's the capability of loading any Linux based image editors and that's why
I installed GIMP I've been using it for years that's my image editor of choice
and it works great on this installing it through Linux so last thing is video
editing and there are some video editing capabilities of a Chromebook now there
are some options for online video editing there's a real popular one
called Wii video you can edit up the 4k video what you do is you upload your
media to there and then edit it basically in a browser-based editor that
editor is actually really feature-rich it's actually a pretty good experience
if you don't mind using that online connection for your editing for offline
editing there's some options available in the Android Play Store and two big
ones are kind master and PowerDirector those both work very very well with this
inspiron I was only able to add a 1080p video in both of those applications so
4k was not an option and they're both pretty decent basic editors you can do a
you know a basic video as long as you're not doing anything too advanced and just
get the job done with these in a pinch they actually work really well if you're
only working with 1080p video and you're just splicing clips and maybe doing
transition between them these are really viable options now there is another much
more powerful option for video editing that I'm going to talk about in the next
section when I get into some of those advanced configurations that I mentioned
earlier in the video so here we are at that Advanced section that I mentioned
earlier in the video now this section requires a little more tweaking and
you're gonna have to put your device into the developer mode but it's going
to open up options to more gaming more media creation video editing audio
editing development all kinds of stuff it's gonna vastly just blow the roof off
the capabilities of your Chromebook so if you don't mind tweaking and you don't
mind putting your machine into developer mode you can install something called
crouton now crouton is basically a full-on Linux
distribution right now it's based on ubuntu 16.04 and it's a little bit
different than the integrated linux that's built in
to Chrome OS now with that one you can use it within Chrome OS and it puts a
shortcut just like any other application but again the limitations are GPU
acceleration and sound now with crouton it's basically doing a full Linux
installation that after it's set up you can just launch it from a command prompt
and you're launched into a full Linux desktop from there you can install steam
and install Steam games you can install basically anything that runs on Linux
that going to run well on the hardware that you have you can install inside of
this distribution of Linux now I've tried a bunch of games in steam and
obviously the ones that are GPU intensive are not going to work well
because at least my machine doesn't have a dedicated graphics card in it but
things like rimworld or oxygen not included things along that that nature
run great on this machine I've tried other editing tools and the thing that I
wanted to mention that I wanted to really focus on is the video editor now
there is a linux-based video editor called kdenlive
and you can install this inside this installation of crouton on and then you
can edit your 1080p videos 4k videos it has way way more capabilities than the
options that I mentioned that are available in their Android Play Store
kind master or power director you can do much more advanced edits in here
color correction everything you would expect in a video editor kdenlive is
free I've used this on my Linux systems for years and it runs really well on my
machine in this Linux distribution now with all those other capabilities there
are some trade-offs you're going to need to put your machine into developer mode
you're going to need to do the setup for crouton you need to learn how to install
Linux apps all that is actually really easy and I'm happy to do a tutorial on
it just let me know down below and I can make that one on my tutorial Tuesday
videos.The other thing is there's probably going to be a little more hit
on that battery life because Linux is not quite as battery efficient as Chrome
OS is so that'll burn through that a little bit faster if you're going to be
using Linux a lot but for me those trade-offs are well worth the additional
capabilities that I got by setting this up and I'll leave that up to you to
decide like I said everything that I talked about in the video up to this
point is available without having to do this additional tweaking this is just if
you want those additional capabilities hopefully that was enough information to
help answer that question why use a Chromebook I know for me in about the
space of about a week I went from not even understanding why these things even
exist to absolutely loving it and this being the machine that I take with me
when I'm going on the road I leave the much more powerful but much heavier and
bulkier gaming machine that I used to take with me that has stayed home and
this is the machine that I take on the road with me now hopefully you found
this useful and informative please hit that thumbs up if you did if you really
liked it hit that subscribe button again if you want me to do that tutorial on
how to install Chrome let me know down below and I will see you in the next
video thanks for stopping by