It's always hard to believe that events that happened ten years ago happened ten years ago, but knowing that doesn't make it feel any less strange that it is now the tenth birthday of the Chromebook I got from Santa when I was 12. That's what I'm doing for the Holiday Season™, by the way. You're getting a post about my first computer, because it's the tenth anniversary of when I got it. Perhaps I'll also make a post about my second computer next September, on its tenth birthday. Foreshadowing? What's that?
The first computer I ever owned was this thing:
Image courtesy of PCMag, from their review of this machine.
This is the Toshiba Chromebook 2. The high-trim model that I had sports a 13-inch 1080p screen, Skullcandy-branded speakers, a whopping 4GB of RAM, the world's most sopping wet and pathetic dual-core Intel Celeron CPU, and 16GB of EMMC storage. It also comes with 100GB of free Google Drive storage for two full years, which sounds like some nasty ploy to sell you a subscription, but with how long you'll be using the thing for may as well be a second internal SSD.
I was a little bit surprised to learn, upon looking up reviews for this unit, that these speeds and feeds made it one of the nicer Chromebooks available at the time — reviewers seemed to think that the 1080p screen, Skullcandy logo next to the speakers, and 4 entire gigs of RAM (as opposed to the 2GB of most Chromebooks at the time) were the height of luxury.
Not especially impressive specs by modern standards, or contemporary standards for that matter, but what you've got to keep in mind is that this is a $300 machine, which means the inclusion of a Celeron only constitutes a mere rip-off, and not an outright scam. Although, to be fair, it did work fine for the light web browsing and Youtube watching that constituted this thing's entire intended use case, and depending on how you look at it, the dinky little CPU was a good thing, since it could actually keep cool under those loads inside of Chekov's plastic shell with absolutely no active cooling.
As you might know if you graduated high school after 2013 or so, this laptop, like all Chromebooks, ran Chrome OS, which was less of a fully-fledged desktop operating system and more of a copy of Chrome with half a desktop environment bolted on. I've heard that it can run Android apps and Steam games now (?) but this was not the case in 2014. You had Chrome, and you had Chrome Apps, which were Web Apps™ that you could add to your Chromebook's system menu by installing them from the Chrome Web Store, which you might recognize as the official distribution platform for Chrome extensions and themes if you recently switched to Firefox to keep using your adblocker.
This explicitly intended lack of support for even writing software for the platform, let alone your favourite programs, was the Chromebook's biggest weakness, but it was completely compensated for by the fact that all Chromebooks took about 3 seconds to reach the login screen from a cold boot. In what has since become my typical fashion, it didn't take me long to remedy both of these.
Being 12 years old and a little bit stupid, I held Google and their products in pretty high regard at the time that I got this machine. To me, the Google ecosystem represented an escape from both Apple products, which I (correctly) viewed as underpowered, overpriced, and overly childproofed in their design; and Windows PCs, with which my primary recent experience had been mostly cheap, slow school computers that took fully two minutes to launch a web browser (This is also why I don't share the apparent nostalgia for Windows 7 that many of my fellow computer touchers express). I apparently pushed pretty hard to get a Chromebook instead of an iPad or whatever else I thought my parents were going to buy for me.
Once I had it, it took me maybe a couple months to decide I wanted more functionality out of this thing than the preloaded software was capable of offering. Specifically, I wanted to play Minecraft, which at the time didn't have anything even resembling feature parity between platforms — if you thought the Java Edition was better than Bedrock Edition now, you should have been there for early Pocket Edition. Shit was dire, man. Of course, Minecraft very much did not run on Chrome OS, and this was the inciting circumstance that probably altered the course of my entire life.
You see, there was one way to run Minecraft on a Chromebook, and that was by installing Linux on it. Now, Chrome OS is already based on Linux, but that's not what I mean here. I'm talking full-fat Ubuntu. I'm fuzzy on the details, but if you put your Chromebook into developer mode and ran an installation script called crouton, you could1 boot into a more-or-less totally normal Linux install with support for real ass actual software and everything. This required performing a complex ritual every boot where you would hold down a keyboard shortcut on the boot screen to enter dev mode, bring up a terminal under Chrome OS, and then run a command I have since forgotten to boot Linux, but minor UX issues like that were no concern of mine. I found a guide online to do this and was, from that day forward, irreversibly corrupted into a Linux user.
And I really got into it, too. I remember setting up a custom shortcut in the XFCE environment crouton set me up with that ran java -jar ~/minecraft.jar to boot Minecraft. I remember learning, like, a surprising amount about the inner workings of Linux and getting comfortable with the terminal. I got really into theming for a bit and I distinctly remember using Pinta to create an XFCE theme that resembled the latest Mac OS redesign but with square corners and posting it to the now-defunct2 xfce-look.org. I reinstalled Linux to try out different desktop environments like half a dozen times. I first learned Python on this computer, and my understanding of things like pip and venvs has not progressed since.
It was a very fun and educational nine months. You read that right, this machine lasted me all of nine months until I tried to boot it up one day and it just made an unsettling pop noise and a mysterious odor and refused to ever turn on again.
As astute readers will know already, this computer had absolutely no cooling whatsoever. No fans, and an all-plastic chassis to further kneecap the already meager passive cooling it was getting. This probably would have been fine for upwards of a year if I used the thing as intended, but I was pushing that pathetic little 7.5-watt Celeron to its absolute limit by running Minecraft 1.8 at 15 FPS, which proved too hot to handle for the glue holding the bottom panel on, followed by... something critical to the machine's operation. I'm not sure.
And that was that. By some miracle the thing decided to blow up on my birthday, so my parents saw fit to get me an upgraded Windows machine as a birthday present. I mostly stuck with Windows for the next few years, mostly because it could run more games, but I never really stopped preferring Linux, and I would occasionally attempt switching back over the intervening years until I made the jump for good in 2021 when I upgraded the storage in my third laptop, the second of two slightly dodgy HP units and the same one from this post, and wisely decided that I wouldn't be sticking around to have Windows 11 inflicted on me.
The Toshiba Chromebook 2 was e-waste from the moment it rolled off the assembly line. It sucked3, and I hate everything about it4, but I'll never ever forget what owning it did for me. I was already pretty into computers, but dealing with such utterly useless software forced me to get comfortable getting into the weeds to get what I wanted out of it. This thing taught me to program computers, and it taught me to beat computers into submission to impose my will upon them. Obviously it was the first computer I ever owned, but it was also the first computer I learned to make mine, and I don't know quite where I'd be today without that. Honestly, probably still working retail, but a lot more of my data would be going to Microsoft.
1. As a matter of fact, you still can! The Github repo is seemingly still being maintained, although there's slightly less reason to actually do it nowadays.
2. There's still a website at that domain, but it's a Pling site now, so it might as well be dead.
3. I would be remiss not to mention that the HDMI output was also completely borked. There was a giant green triangle type structure in the bottom left of the display and I'm pretty sure the picture was shifted about 1/3 the width of the screen to one side. Whether that was caused by heat damage or an unrelated defect will forever remain a mystery. The built-in display was completely fine.
4. I'm not kidding about that glue, by the way. By the time it died, the bottom panel was hanging probably a centimeter below the top side of the shell whenever I picked it up. Talk about build quality.
Comments
woooooop
2025-01-20 12:51AM
I can relate since I used to have an Acer C771 Chromebook wise that was originally given to me in middle school or so that surprisingly also (somewhat) introduced me to Linux, at least in terms of laggy XFCE with the included browser crashing when opened kind of way. Wasn't the most fond of it of course, there was a Late 2013 iMac we had back then that was quite better for the time asides from running on a HDD and no SSD.
USB sticks were also "scary" for me back then, so I didn't install Linux on that which later led to getting rid of it and spending around $2,000 on a setup meant for "gaming" only to end up selling that too (at a depreciated amount), realizing that said stuff stopped after two months in of simply seeing what was possible... yeah, that could have all been avoided, but going back to the Chromebook.
Actually still had it around somehow and found it last year or so, then bricked the thing trying to install Lubuntu (somehow, it turns on no more), surprisingly wanting to revive it for modern day uses but all that did was redirect me to other laptops.
Differences between the Chromebook I've mentioned and something like the ThinkPad P53s for example have... certainly changed my mind on things. No longer much of a PC person regardless of specs, I didn't know that I liked laptops that much but apparently if they are somewhat decent I do.
drew (crmsnbleyd)
2024-12-29 01:43PM
My first computer of my very own came in 2017 but I had been monopolizing the family PC/Laptop for ages before that. The one I spent the most time with was a 2011 i5 with like 4 GB of RAM. For some reason I remember it being 32-bit windows 7, perhaps that was for energy-saving reasons?
