My daily use of Google’s Chromebook Pixel is working out like a charm for what I do, nearly all of which is web-based. Yet, there are still times when a native app is better, or even required, to get the job done. My weekly podcast and videos are perfect examples, although I have found a number of web app options to test out for content creation.
As I noted last week, the Pixel has more flexibility than you might think because there are a number of ways to run Linux on the laptop. I opted to install and use crouton, a set of scripts that set up the Pixel to run Chrome OS and Linux at the same time. Here’s how it looks and works after the setup; you can get the crouton setup steps at this link so I don’t show those on camera:
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The one-time setup was simple and now all I need to get Linux up and running is a quick set of commands in a terminal. Then it’s just a matter of switching between Chrome OS and Linux as needed. You can see in the video that the same app I use on a Mac for my weekly podcast, Audacity, runs just fine so I’ve got the podcast issue licked. And I’m going to test some video apps for occasional use as well.
Oh, and if you want to run Skype on the Pixel, you can do that to with this method: Check out how I stay on a video call while switching back to Chrome OS to check something on the web!
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