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A Sad Day, and a New Discovery

2019.11.11
  • Louis Lafleur
  • Others
  • 2019
Last year a very expensive accident happened at my home. My youngest daughter accidentally spilled “mugicha” all over the Apple laptop computer I used for work...and I wasn’t quick enough to save it. Nor was I successful in trying to repair it afterward. Although it was a sad time, I put on a brave face and told my daughter not to worry as I knew I would be able to find a good laptop to replace it.

I didn’t want to spend too much money as I only needed a laptop for basic office work. My challenge was to find one that was cheap yet good enough to accomplish all my work tasks: prepare for my classes, write academic papers etc... I first looked at Apple and Windows laptops but I quickly found them to be too expensive.

Then, by chance, I found laptops similar in power to the Windows and Apple ones but these were much cheaper. These laptops were Chromebooks, laptops supported by Google, and they were much cheaper in part because they have a very simple OS (Operating System). Moreover, I was happy to find that the Chromebook I wanted was only 60000 yen with shipping on amazon.com (USA) versus 80000 yen with shipping on amazon.co.jp (Japan), which meant 20000 yen in savings for me.

When I received it after two weeks or so, I was happy… but I couldn’t do everything I wanted because of google’s simple OS. I couldn’t install software to do professional sound/video recording/editing. 

After reading online, I found the answer to my problem. The answer was to include Linux OS on my Chromebook. Linux OS is a completely free OS made by volunteer programmers that can be installed on any computer, even Chromebooks. Now I have two operating systems on my work laptop. If I only want to do simple tasks like email and web browsing, I use Chrome. If I want to do video/sound editing or install new software, I use Linux. 

One of the greatest advantages of Linux is that it’s very lightweight. In comparison to bigger operating systems like Windows 10 and MacOS, it doesn’t use much of your computer’s resources. I was surprised to see that my cheaper Chromebook with Linux could operate at the same speed as laptops which are much more expensive. All in all, although losing my old laptop to “mugicha” was a sad day, I wouldn’t change that day as it made me discover another good yet cheap product in Chromebooks, and a free yet very good operating system in Linux.


(Photo: pexels.com@burst)

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