My wife uses zoom for web-meetings with clients, friends, and family. There's no native zoom app for the CentOS- derivative Linux I use.
Zoom did work with CentOS and the Chrome browser plus a plugin, which changed unpredictably and frequently, along with the dependencies required to make it work. That took hours. Worse, Zoom plugins are closed source, which I try to avoid on my otherwise open-source machines. Worst, combined with Chrome but NOT with protocol speedups, Zoom was a bandwidth hog. The most recent attempt at a plugin upgrade took hours of fruitless work, but failed - it just hung, no diagnostics. We missed Thanksgiving with my wife's east-coast family. So - I did the dirty, and bought an bottom-of-the-line HP Chromebook. $181, plus a $15 USB/C-to-ethernet dongle. It arrived Monday morning; I had it configured in less than an hour. Licence and EULA reading, mostly, a bit of tweaking, like increasing font sizes for old eyes. Zoom was a 10 second install. My wife used it that afternoon for a web-meeting. We won't store data on the Chromebook, nor passwords for anything besides Google and Chrome apps. Certainly no banking, or passwords for other machines. We connect it directly to the cable modem, outside our firewall; it cannot connect to other machines inside the firewall, unless we move data on a microSD card. Although the Chromebook resembles a laptop, we will treat it more like a zero-monthly-fee telephone. I don't have source code for my phones, either. If the Chromebook does get compromised, we restore to original factory configuration, retweek, and change passwords. Chromebook includes automatic updates for the next 5 1/2 years. So, /if/ the beast keeps working (a measly 1 year warranty), we are paying $3 a month for Zoom, and OverDrive books from the library. While I would much prefer to use open source, community- managed tools to connect to Zoom and Overdrive, an appliance designed for those services is an inferior but tolerable substitute. If by some miracle this one-year- warranty "laptop" survives past the end of updates in 2026, I hope our creative hacker community will develop something much better to install in place of ChromeOS. After all, the old x86 hardware I am using now was designed and marketed for Windoze. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] _______________________________________________ PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
