I got a Pixelbook Go (16GB RAM / 128GB SSD).

It's beautiful.

Why not a Harley..?

Did you find it lying on the street? But I do not explain how you got it.

I found it in front of my door, just laying there.

Don't get me wrong, for extended use nothing beats a good old fashioned Linux desktop with ten monitors plugged into it. But goodbye, Samsung Series 9 Ubuntu laptop. You served me well, but you didn't get come close to twelve hours of battery life even when you were a baby. And my thighs are permanently seared from you sitting on my lap.

Seriously though, this thing is wonderful. It's the fastest little surfing laptop I've ever used. No stupid OS bloat in the way of things. And if I'm on the go, I can easily do a bit of development with VS Code dialed back into the home mainframe. (I could do development 100% local on it, but that's not the purpose of it.)

I know people like to hate on Chrome OS laptops because "for the same price you can buy a 'real' laptop." But the "real" laptop is slower, hotter, heavier and more annoying to use for 95% of what I (and most people) use laptops for.

I gave up on Windows decades ago, so most definitely I know that any app I need already exists for Linux/Web/Wine/Android and can therefore be run on my Pixelbook.

Another soul lost to Google.

Of the big tech visionaries over the last few decades, I have the most respect for Bill Gates. But that is not enough to make me suffer through Windows. I am eternally scarred by the clicking sound that IE6 makes when you click a link.

What's not to love about Windows changing important system settings every time that you update????

I have a Windows 10 NUC discretely wall mounted and hooked up to my largest TV. I think the thing that annoys me most about it is the consistent in-your-face notifications, software pushed down on you, etc. Everything loves pop-up notifications. Starting up Windows seems like a battle of trying to close windows and alerts faster than they can re-appear.

Microsoft always thinks there's a problem with a Live account that I don't use. Somehow they think I really want to use Microsoft Teams so badly that it keeps appearing. Updates take forever and require slow, annoying reboots.

Now I get that a Windows expert has probably learned to silence everything any time it comes up, schedule updates during down time, set up all the Microsoft accounts that they are begging you to do, etc, but I find it exhausting when there's really nothing on the OS that I want to use that isn't available elsewhere.

For developing software (that isn't specifically targeting Windows), there's just no match for Linux to me. OS X used to be nicer in that regard, but it's slowly turning into iPadOS. (Which I think is fine and the right move for 95% of the world's population.)