Moving to a Chromebook - Tips?

[Koren_nRhys]

Happy Monday BFers!

I've finally had to ditch my poor old Windows laptop, and decided that for the most part, I don't really need one anymore, based on the type of work/play I normally use it for. I do still have a desktop PC with Adobe CS2, MS Office 2007 and OpenOffice loaded if I need to do any heavier lifting.

For my light work, I've decided to pick up a Chromebook. Almost everything I need to access is already stored in the cloud, between Google Drive, Dropbox and Mediafire. My question is more one of access/convenience as I plan to do some work based on BFRPG.

Obviously this community is heavily invested in the open nature of OpenOffice/Libre Office and all the files hosted here are in that format, the fonts are available, etc. One thing I have seen in my playing around is that while I can upload .odt files to Drive and open them in Google Docs, the conversion is atrocious - mostly owing to the fact that Docs doesn't do columns.

Does anyone here us a Chromebook for their BFRPG work? Google Docs? Curious how you get around those issues. Seems like I can do all my writing online, but will need to import it into OpenOffice on my PC to format it in the BFRPG standard. Any other ways out there? I found both Open and LibreOffice Writer on RollApp.com, and I can open a odt file, see the proper formatting, columns, etc, but I can't edit them for some reason.

Thoughts? Ideas? Tips?

[Qualitymix]

Rather than ditching the old winblows laptop, try slapping a flavor of Gnu/Linux on there. Depend ing on the age of the laptop, you might be able to run some pretty nice looking distributions. I've been using Linux exclusively for years.

[SmootRK]

Rather than ditching the old winblows laptop, try slapping a flavor of Gnu/Linux on there. Depend ing on the age of the laptop, you might be able to run some pretty nice looking distributions. I've been using Linux exclusively for years.

Yes to this. You could even have some variety of linux installed upon a usb thumbdrive and run it only when you want to do such work. LibreOffice is integral part of many distributions. I would suggest LinuxMint as a good distro to try out.

[Koren_nRhys]

Thanks for the comments. Actually, I did try to play with Linux a bit, some time back. I installed it on the laptop (dual boot) to try out. Was a bear to configure, as a newbie at least, and didn't want to connect to my networked Windows PC, or see the shared printer. In all honesty, the laptop is in rough shape, on it's third battery and on the way out. I might throw a Linux distro on a USB drive though and play around some more on the Chromebook itself.

[chiisu81]

Yeah Google Docs won't offer much (which is a bonus to most users), and most other Chrome apps are text editors rather than word processors. I would just use those and use the laptop and for just getting the writing done, and then switch over to your desktop and Open-/LibreOffice when you need to do formatting, etc. You can also use the laptop to remote into your desktop if/when needed.

[artikid]

Another vote for Linux, Puppy is a great USB based distro that runs on almost every kind of computer.
Slax is another good alternative.

[Koren_nRhys]

Thanks for the additional tips guys. I wil, look at the USB Linux options. Lots of versions out there though, so I appreciate the suggestions. Finding conflicting info on the ease of running Linux on a Chromebook but will continue to research.

I do intend to leverage the light nature of Docs while writing. I do see that as a plus. I get eadily distracted by fonts and layout. The fun stuff, you know?