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by walteweiss 988 days ago
I used a Samsung Chromebook sometime 5 years ago, and it couldn’t handle suspend/sleep well. I could leave it overnight with 80% and find it with 0% in the morning. So I learned to turn it off each time I stop using it. It booted within seconds anyways, so the only issue was to enter my gigantic generated password.

For me ChromeOS’s top UX fault is the password. You either do it with pin, or with a Bluetooth device to unlock. Otherwise it’s pain to enter the password.
1 comments
swhan 987 days ago
Question out of curiosity: did you happen to have some sort of USB device plugged in when you put it into suspend?

Both pin and phone unlock are supported, as of today.

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walteweiss 985 days ago
No USB device was ever plugged into the device.

There were days that you need to enter developer mode to turn on pin unlock, and Bluetooth devices came later on. I remember that pain of needing to enter my very long password in each boot. Horrible UX.

I interacted with a recent (a couple of months) Chrome OS Flex device (a regular old PC laptop of a senior that I know and helped to establish a basic computer for him), and it didn’t work on the first boot. It was a huge problem for him to enter the password, especially a strong one. I set up a pin with his birthday, which never worked. It worked only if you logged off the account (but didn’t turned off the computer). But if you start fresh, then you won’t be able to use the pin. I ended up setting his Google password to his birthday with dots and some letters, e.g. Qw25.12.1935, which Google allowed and which worked for him. He enters his password letter by letter and for him it’s a worse UX than before, when he had Windows XP that just boots and has Chrome (outdated with no option to upgrade) installed. But I convinced him this new way of things is better. At least it loads momentarily, which he likes.

And on top of that, built in Bluetooth adapter doesn’t work on that very laptop to connect his Android smartphone. The Bluetooth module works, but it doesn’t with the software for some reason. Brief googling showed me it’s easier to buy usb Bluetooth module and try with it. Which I did, but haven’t checked that yet, as he lives quite far away from me. As of now he uses the laptop somehow.

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