I write blog posts primarily for myself, and the post I wrote about running Linux on my Google PixelBook back in 2022, came in handy as I set up the replacement for that Google PixelBook today. I bought an open-box Galaxy Chromebook Plus for under $600. Thanks to that old blog post, I was able to install the Debian version of Slack and Chromium and run it just like I do on my other devices (since there hasn’t been a version of Slack that runs on ChromeOS for years). I’ve also installed Visual Studio Code on the Debian Linux available on this Chromebook Plus. We’ll see if I can get a useful application written using this new device this year.

Compared to my old PixelBook (which now gets used very occasionally for my twins therapy appointments when they happen virtually instead of in-person), this Chromebook Plus is just as light (if not lighter), very thin, has more ports, and a bigger screen. This translates to a keyboard that has enough room for a number pad on the side. This device is my only personal laptop, having replaced my 16" MacBook Pro with a Mac mini M4 in late 2024 since I rarely took that laptop on personal travel.

This Chromebook Plus came with a free year of pro access to Gemini. I’ll do some prompt comparisons with Claude, which I used to experiment a bit with Model Context Protocol (MCP) to try their weather server and MCP client demos last year. I’ve been paying for the $20/month Pro plan for a bit and it’s been an improvement over my experience with Perplexity for the most part–but it’s had some hallucination issues. Other Google-specific stuff I will play with primarily on this machine includes NotebookLM, Whisk, and Flow (AI tools for generating audio, images, and videos from a variety of sources).