Linux founder Linus Torvalds loves his new Google Chromebook Pixel, which he believes puts most other laptops to shame.
“One thing that the Chromebook Pixel really brings home is how crap normal laptops have become. Why do PC manufacturers even bother any more?” the outspoken developer asked in a Google+ blog post.
“No wonder the PC business isn’t doing well, when they stick to just churning out more crappy stuff and think that ‘full HD’ (aka 1080p) is somehow the epitome of greatness.”
According to to Torvalds, the Pixel boasts a “beautiful” screen, to the point where he will be making the device his primary laptop.
“I really appreciate not just the pixels, but the form factor. I despise widescreen displays, but I had gotten resigned to them. Until now. 3:2, baby. I don’t understand why people complain about ‘black bars,’ when I can’t see why it would be any different to have ‘no pixels at all,’ which is what the silly widescreen displays do,” he said.
“I also have the Nexus 10, which also has tons of pixels, but on that one I didn’t get the feeling that I could use the pixels very well… Sure, I could run a web browser and make the text smaller, but without a keyboard I can’t reasonably write anything, and without the option of installing a full Linux distro I couldn’t see it replacing my laptop anyway, so getting a BT keyboard didn’t seem all that relevant either.”
Torvalds also confirmed that he was still running ChromeOS on the machine, which is “good enough” for testing out normal work habits like reading and writing e-mails.
“[Still], I expect to install a real distro on this soon enough. For a laptop to be useful to me, I need to not just read and write email, I need to be able to do compiles, have my own git repositories etc,” he added.
