@patrick I would have loved to work on Chrome OS! In fact, that's the project I had chosen when I was hired in Cambridge. I saw it as our only hope to finally celebrate "the year of Linux on the desktop".

Then, the week before my start date, the CAM site director called to share the news: my team was being defragged and they wanted to see if I'd be interested in joining Search Infra instead 😭

I actually don't regret working on Search: it was an amazing codebase ran in production by some of the top SREs in the company. The lead of the GWS SREs was Red Hat's employee number one, who ported sysVinit to Linux.

And among my neighbors in Cambridge was Robert Love, author of one of the first books on Linux kernel development.

All my coworkers were superstars, and for the first time in my career, I didn't feel qualified for the job.

@patrick #google

@codewiz I totally believe that it's an interesting place to be but I prefer not processing user data (I guess I'd run into conundrums rather quickly), so I guess I'll stick with firmware and tooling and it seems that Search needs rather little of that ;-)

@patrick By the way, which Chromebook should I get these days?

For personal use, I want a fast mobile cpu and plenty of ram and ssd for Crostini.

@codewiz phew, good question. For my own personal use I'm limited by the poor selection available in Germany, so...

Given the CPU + RAM requirements, you're stuck with Intel/AMD, no ARM. https://www.newegg.com/lenovo-20ux001tus/p/2WC-000J-00YC2 perhaps?

@patrick Looks very reasonable! Except for the small SSD... but perhaps it's replaceable.

@codewiz Don't think stuff is replaceable these days, hardware is designed under the assumption that people want "thin" and "stylish", not flexible.

I guess you could add a 1TB Micro SD card but I'm not sure if it can be used for crostini storage yet without jumping through lots of hoops (tracking bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=827705), and it won't be as fast as the internal storage.