ChromeOS Will Finally, Mercifully, Let You Change Its Keyboard Shortcuts (arstechnica.com) 18
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As spotted in Kevin Tofel's About Chromebooks blog, an updated version of the shortcut viewer in the Settings app -- first seen in October 2022 -- has the early makings of a shortcut changing and adding mechanism.
Clicking on a shortcut brings up a dialogue that allows you to, at the moment, add alternative shortcuts to common shortcuts for manipulating tabs, windows and desktops, system settings, accessibility, and other utilities. A small "lock" icon next to each suggests that you might also be able to unlock these shortcuts to remove or alter their defaults. A "Reset all shortcuts" button offers another hint. Sadly, none of the shortcuts you add seem to work for the moment, though the promise is there.
Clicking on a shortcut brings up a dialogue that allows you to, at the moment, add alternative shortcuts to common shortcuts for manipulating tabs, windows and desktops, system settings, accessibility, and other utilities. A small "lock" icon next to each suggests that you might also be able to unlock these shortcuts to remove or alter their defaults. A "Reset all shortcuts" button offers another hint. Sadly, none of the shortcuts you add seem to work for the moment, though the promise is there.
broken? (Score:2)
Why would they put the feature there, with the checkboxes and everything, but it's non-functional?
I've never used a Chromebook; is this typical software quality? Including non-functional mock-ups in the product?
Unrelated question: Can a Chromebook run Emacs? Can it run Linux and ditch the Chrome OS? Can you write arbitrary apps for it and install them?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
It's typical in that they suck, but IME there's not a lot of that kind of thing going on. Mostly it just doesn't have features.
Almost all Chromebooks since 2019 can run Linux on/beside ChromeOS. Here's a pre-2019 list [chromium.org]. chrx is a tool to install Linux directly on intel-based Chromebooks [chrx.org]. Chrubuntu was an installer for Ubuntu on ARM Chromebooks [blogspot.com].
Re: (Score:2)
It's in a beta channel.
And some chromebooks can. Fedora on my Pixelbook is still the best laptop I've ever owned. But it's not trivial to setup, stuff breaks.
There are also many ways to access a shell in Chrome OS itself, but I've never bothered, was never a fan.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
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Can it run Linux and ditch the Chrome OS?
It can, but my experience wasn't great. First you have to disable write protect on the bios. That involves opening up the case, disconnecting the battery, powering it from the charger, and finally running the flash command. Put it all back together and now you can install Linux. Hardware support is pretty buggy even though it's all cheap x86 hardware inside. Sleep and suspend drained the battery fast. About 1/3 of the time it would wake up from sleep but the screen would be black. Sound support was the wors
Re: (Score:2)
Can it run Linux and ditch the Chrome OS?
It can, but my experience wasn't great. First you have to disable write protect on the bios. That involves opening up the case, disconnecting the battery, powering it from the charger, and finally running the flash command. Put it all back together and now you can install Linux.
I wonder if something has changed recently. When I was setting up Chromebooks to run Linux, it was somewhat like setting up a dual boot Windows/Linux laptop. A bit of futzing about, but nowhere near that intense a project.
Hardware support is pretty buggy even though it's all cheap x86 hardware inside. Sleep and suspend drained the battery fast. About 1/3 of the time it would wake up from sleep but the screen would be black. Sound support was the worst as it had just gotten working weeks before I tried i
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why would they put the feature there, with the checkboxes and everything, but it's non-functional?
I've never used a Chromebook; is this typical software quality? Including non-functional mock-ups in the product?
Unrelated question: Can a Chromebook run Emacs? Can it run Linux and ditch the Chrome OS? Can you write arbitrary apps for it and install them?
I have set up Chromebooks to run Linux in the past. They did so rather nicely.
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I've got a couple Chromebooks running full-fledged Linux distros. I don't know about today, as it's been a couple years since I bought the last one, but there was a time you could pop them open, put in a bigger SSD, and spin up a nice Linux distro pretty quickly. It takes a bit of fuckery with the boot process, but once it's up it's like any other laptop with Linux.
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I have two chromebooks that I bought for my kids. After a few years, Google EOL'ed them and there were no more updates. I just removed the "restraining bolt" inside (literally...no joke), flashed new firmware, and installed Ubuntu on them. The kids still use them to this day. They would have ended up as e-waste otherwise...even though the hardware is perfectly fine.
Best,
Speaking of Shortcuts - FireFox (Score:3)
Ctrl Shift P is for incognito mode
Ctrl P is for printing
That is just asking for an embarrassing mistake.
I think Google Chrome's makes more sense. Ctrl N is for new window. Throw a shift in there, and you get a new window but it has shifted into incognito. What is FireFox's shortcut reasoning? I guess private or shift to public view.
Re: (Score:1)
Embarrassing, maybe, but obvious since the outcomes are nothing alike.
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Firefox's reasoning is that control shift t restores the last closed tab, so control shift n should restore the last closed window.
I don't have any trouble differentiating control p (which I have been using to print for years) from control shift p (which I haven't)
Chrome (Score:2)
Finally. (Score:2)
Good.
Ctrl-N is a new tab, not a new window.
Fight me.