> But every time I see people who obsess over "the best" it always strikes me as so sad, like these chasers just have to have the external validation of being "in the club".
In my opinion, I think that looking for "the best" is perfectly fine for things you care about or use frequently.
It's when people try to find "the best" for everything that it becomes unhealthy.
> The software is 100% compatible with hardware, and in many cases, the Play Store is included to address the lack of software
The problem is that the Play store and Linux environments on ChromeOS are both run in VMs.
On a machine with good specs, this is perfectly fine. But when cheaper ChromeOS devices ship with 4GB of RAM, older mediatek APUs, and emmc instead of SSDs, it's just an outright bad experience.
If Google starts pushing Android Desktop as a replacement for ChromeOS, I think that could be interesting. Being able to run the Play store without the overhead of a VM will make Android potentially a much better experience than ChromeOS.
> On a machine with good specs, this is perfectly fine.
I think the VMs are fine on the type of machines most people would buy for Windows/macOS. Chromebooks go exceptionally low-spec on the low-end to the point that I'd say their lowest-spec machines probably aren't direct competition for Windows laptops, wouldn't you agree?
I wonder how viable Mac + Asahi Linux is right now. While I personally prefer AMD + Linux, for Macbook users perhaps Asahi can help break the dependency on MacOS.
As for smartphones, ironically the best option for to break dependency on Google services is to get a Google Pixel + install GrapheneOS + F-Droid. Google Pixels are some of the very few devices with a fully unlocked bootloader, so it's viable to install alternative operating systems.
Very solid on M2. I've been out of the "try 10 distros" game for a long while and out of the box gnome fedora won me over. I like the GUI to install and update software, I never have to touch a terminal unless I want to. Only setback is no HDMI over USBC, and it didn't like my particular Bluetooth audio device, but a USB DAC does just fine.
In my opinion, I think that looking for "the best" is perfectly fine for things you care about or use frequently.
It's when people try to find "the best" for everything that it becomes unhealthy.
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