Asus Chromebox - M004U - CN60

A Chromebox is basically a small PC that runs Chrome OS. This is actually pretty decent if you do mostly everything on the web. It is basically like a computer that just runs Chrome. It does support working offline.

It is also possible to run Linux on a Chromebox. In my experience this wasn’t quite the same thing as running Linux on a a normal PC. It had to be run in a chroot environment that would be launched from Chrome OS. Once you launched Linux it would basically behave as it normally would. This allows you to do real work and run anything that you could on a normal Linux system.

Here is a quick review of the Asus Chromebox I bought a while back:

Here is the model that I have on Amazon HERE.

Here is a newer model on Amazon HERE.

Personally, I would say that you are probably better off having a small PC running Linux. You can still just run Chrome if you want but it will allow you to run other things too. Not all users want or know how to work with Linux. For those people, they may be better off with just a plain Chromebox that doesn’t require any management.

This is a neat little box. While there is nothing wrong with it, I would personally like to get more out of it. I do spend a lot of time just doing things on the web and I do use Chrome most of the time but I still need other applications. If were to buy something similar today I would probably either get a Mac Mini or a mini PC running Linux. I think you might actually get more value out of an 8GB Raspberry Pi.

Small Print

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