Woah, this is the kind of developing book I'd like:
6 hrs battery life
IPS viewing display (without 1080p!)
Mirousb universal charging cable
11 inch portability, weighing only 2lbs.
I have the acer c7 chromebook, and am really fustrated I can't simply trade it in for this chromebook. It really is one of the most appealing deals.
HN has also recently been talking about crouton, which I found very usable.
The biggest issues I see in this is 2.0 usb and that non-celeron processor.
For anybody considering developing on a chromebook, this looks like one of the most efficient chromebooks for you. A shame it doens't have a celeron though...
(Side note. I await installation for that IPS onto the acer. I may not be able to turn in the acer c7 for the hp, but if I can get ahold of that 11 inch IPS, I'm game for that :)
Acer c720 owner here - people tend to mock chromebooks all the time as glorified web browsers.
To some extend, that's true. Most things I do that aren't development related are done on a web browser. It's absolutely perfect for that. Starts up extremely quickly, very light, long battery, lovely.
For very occasional dev purposes, I simply used crouton, which works insanely well. I can even use sshfs and go back to ChromeOS and have the drive still mounted. Highly recommend the c720, or whatever is the more recent equivalent.
I don't know about modern chromebooks, but I have an Acer C7 that I spent $199 on and then added another $240 for it to have a 128GB SSD, 16GB RAM, a working bluetooth module, and an upgraded battery. $440 total and it's been a solid dev machine running first chrubuntu and now crouton. I've mentioned before that the only issue I've had with it is lack of CPU horsepower for clojure-based work to get into the REPL, which as I understand, is slightly fixed on later iterations (or other models). All of my hardware (AFAICT) works under Linux, and I use Google Hangouts, Skype, Steam (for TFC), and vim/tmux on it routinely.
I use a Chromebook for development as well. It's $100 computer and it is just fantastic. I throw it around with such peace of mind, and the battery life is just incredible!
It has only one issue for me, it does not have enough power to run MS Teams on the brownser, and the Android app does not work well.
My only dev computer anymore is an HP Chromebook 14 with 4GB ram. I run linux on it only(antergos at the moment, but ubuntu installs fine too), no dual booting or traces of ChromeOS left behind. This is not just a proof of concept, it is my daily driver and I can answer any questions about it.
Pros -
Lightweight
~8 hours battery life
Great keyboard
Boots and shuts down very fast
Extremely durable for what it is. My 90 lb bloodhound steps on it constantly, and has never harmed it despite my freaking out.
Cons -
Suspend/hibernate is flaky - I disable them
The touchpad was hard to get used to
Hard drive space can be limited (16 GB in my case).
Overall, I much prefer it to a fullsize laptop. If you have any questions, let me know.
I dunno, I got a C202SA Chromebook specifically for software development. It was designed for schools, so it has a spillproof keyboard, shock-resistant case, 1.5-2 days of battery life with my usage, it only costs like $250, and it's smaller than 12".
I installed GalliumOS, and I love it. It is a complete Linux environment (Ubuntu), and it easily meets my needs even if Firefox sometimes slows down a bit with Javascript-heavy web apps (I haven't installed Chrome.) My only complaint is the limited storage space.
Google may not ship Chromebooks with a customizable OS, but they and the OEMs don't interfere with end users' ability to install one (yet), and I really appreciate that the education market has created so much demand for machines with this sort of form factor.
I just bought an Acer C720 chromebook as a second machine and am absolutely blown away by how nice it is for $200. You can run Ubuntu (with your choice of window manager) side by side ChromeOS with crouton, or completely replace ChromeOS with chrubuntu. There are some quirks if you try to replace ChromeOS, so IMHO stick with crouton and either xfce or unity.
The screen is low end, and the track pad nothing to write home about, but the battery life and portability are unbelievable--a true 8 hours of usage in a machine about 2.5 lbs. heavy. ChromeOS itself isn't bad for just using as a browser and then crouton to fill in the gaps of missing stuff like a good text editor, development tools, etc. Even with just the basic 2GB memory and 16gb SSD version I have no issues with memory or disk space (about 8gb free once a basic ubuntu + unity install is added).
I really can't say enough good things about this setup. I wouldn't use it exclusively as my only machine since 11" is kind of small, but as a second machine for portability or browsing the web it is fantastic.
I'm doing all my development on a HP Chromebook 13 G1. While the CPU is low-powered, and I since ditched the ChromeOS for a custom Linux, it's a fairly capable machine, and very cheap for what it offers.
I have a $300 (plus SSD price) Dell Chromebook 13 from a few years ago which I use https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton on to run Ubuntu with i3. It's a wonderful machine for light web dev (I've never tried any really stressful development, I use my fuller spec'ed laptop for that). Great battery life, light, best keyboard I've used. I don't know how well it would work for 'serious' development depending on your field, but it's probably the best starter laptop for programming I could possibly imagine.
Nice write up, this will definitely come in handy if I ever decide to go the Chromebook route.
However, as much as I like the thought of trying something new, I'm still having trouble justifying the purchase. In other words - why develop on a Chromebook as opposed to a lightweight notebook?
I guess it's a question of typical use case, but I don't find myself too often developing in areas without wi-fi. A 100mb /mo plan also felt like fairly sparse offerings, but it sounds like that's NBD in practice.
As far as the price point is concerned, I'm pretty sure there are refurbished lenovo x220's / 230's available for the same as a Samsung Chromebook (~$500).
Especially with regards to the latter, I guess I'd feel a little weird spending close to the same about on $ on a 3g browser with a terminal.
I'd love to hear thoughts from anyone who's moved to a Chromebook for on-the-go development.
For developers, installing Crouton turns the Chromebook into a fantastic portable machine. My Acer c720 has been able to handle everything I've thrown at it, and generally lasts a full day (10-12 hours) between charges.
My kid now has a Chromebook for school, I'm pretty impressed, lightweight, amazing battery life, good Lenovo keyboard, screen could be better. It isn't powerful enough to do dev work, but with something like this terminal-like laptops could be perfect for dev work.
Honestly, the $250 ARM Chromebook is among the very best things you could do for development (in my opinion). I can use ChromeOS for when I'm not doing anything hardcore and then just open a chroot jail (via crouton https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton) with a full xubuntu/xmonad install when I really want to get cracking. Both open so quickly it's almost disorienting, either from start or from sleep. It's the same size and weight as a Macbook Air and the battery life is outstanding (I've come quite close to the 9 hr mark when I'm not listening to music on speakers). The only downside, at least for the purposes of this question, is that it isn't fully HD, or rather isn't 1080p which is what I assume the OP meant. Still, I'd say that this is by far the best computing investment I've ever made, and I'm happier with this than I am with the $1000 laptop I got 6 months ago.
I felt (and still feel) the same way. A 13" Chromebook would be the sweet spot for most on-the-go developers. I've seen the HP 14" Chromebooks but couldn't get myself to pay the price difference.
I've done a lot of development on my Chromebook and I absolutely loved it, but it was with a ssh connection to a machine in the cloud and a browser based editor. But yeah for that, you don't need insane specs like the Pixelbook.
I have the acer c7 chromebook, and am really fustrated I can't simply trade it in for this chromebook. It really is one of the most appealing deals.
HN has also recently been talking about crouton, which I found very usable.
The biggest issues I see in this is 2.0 usb and that non-celeron processor.
For anybody considering developing on a chromebook, this looks like one of the most efficient chromebooks for you. A shame it doens't have a celeron though...
(Side note. I await installation for that IPS onto the acer. I may not be able to turn in the acer c7 for the hp, but if I can get ahold of that 11 inch IPS, I'm game for that :)
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