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I have a 150$ chrome book and it fucking rocks. Does everything I need to do on the web, and I can do javascript/webgl dev on the road.. battery lasts FORever..

I have a 150$ chrome book and it fucking rocks. Does everything I need to do on the web, and I can do javascript/webgl dev on the road.. battery lasts FORever... really amazing machines. I made a computer illiterate friend get one because I was sick of doing tech support for his windows Lappie and he loves it, and has had zero probs with it.. the only time he's called me with a problem with it was when he was trying to some fucking exe to win a free ipod. CHROME os rocks.

ohitsdom 11y ago
What application(s) do you use for development on the Chromebook?
- jessaustin 11y ago
  This is all you need: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton
- geofft 11y ago
  For me? SSH and a VPS. I don't need whatever random crap I decide to `wget && tar x && ./configure` to have any risk of infecting my browser session. And I can keep my VPS up-to-date just by getting a new one from The Cloud every so often, and it comes out way cheaper than buying a beefy developer laptop periodically. I've had the same, low-end Chromebook for almost two years now and barely feel any need to upgrade it.
  - voltagex_ 11y ago
    I did this for a while, except my thin client was an X1 Carbon (!) Have you calculated how much it's costing you? I ended up scripting up a way to find the cheapest Spot Instance price from Amazon for whatever workload I needed - if I was doing builds I wanted the 8 core machines (c4.2xlarge?). They're ~11c an hour as a Spot Instance, although it's 3x the amount for a Windows instance, and I'd be pushed out of the market if everyone started doing this. I think I was averaging a couple of dollars a day, so I suppose it comes out in favour of using AWS all the time.
    - geofft 11y ago
      So my current VPS is a non-virtual Kimsufi box for which I'm paying $28 (USD)/month, i.e., $336/year. I'm also paying about $10/month more for a cell phone plan with enough mobile data, which brings that to $456/year. An equivalently-specced laptop that is comfortable enough to use (lightweight, cool, not going to break on me, etc.) would cost me about 2-3 times that amount, and I'd want to replace it at least that often. (Also if I had a powerful local laptop, I couldn't tell it to do a build, close the lid, and get on the subway without my backpack catching fire. Nor could I have it provide IPv6 to my apartment, host websites behind CloudFlare, provide shells to my friends, etc.) If I wanted to put some more effort into it, I could certainly do a good fraction of my work (git clone, vi, IRC and email, etc.) on a micro instance. But even a couple of dollars a day would require me to be pretty careful to come out cheaper.
      - voltagex_ 11y ago
        Sweet! Thanks for that information. Until my net connection becomes more reliable it's not really an option for me 24/7. I think my costs would be a bit higher because Kimsufi/OVH/Hetzner are 300-400ms away from me, so the latency is a bit uncomfortable. When I was in Canada, a Hetzner box was 200ms away and usable, but for ~$30 a month I only had a dual core box - a bit restrictive when doing large builds. I might have a go at automating setting up a dev environment on AWS which can be torn down when not in use.
  - 0xFFC 11y ago
    You are not going to sell in third world if your product completely depend on market.and thired world is where you can beat windows with being CHEAPER.and second fact nobody has internet like this in third world.Chromebooks are excellent product with Google fiber.but outside of that,not really(for me as someone lives in thired world country).because even with spending 90$/mounth for internet.my internet is nowhere near to run everything on the web.
    - creshal 11y ago
      Third world? Hell, we're having enough connectivity problems in the first world. Costs aside, a VPS is useless if your ISP connects your entire state with only one fibre link which can be felled by a once-every-few-years storm (UPC Austria and Carinthia, btw.).
      - e12e 11y ago
        I'm not much of an Amazon cloud user, but for compiling stuff like new Linux kernels, or big c++ projects (firefox, chrome) - having instant speed for almost nothing sounds good. Could you share a couple of lines on how you would set that up? Spin up an upstream-provided basic AMI (eg: RedHat/Ubunut/Debian) - and run a few commands under screen via ssh - and then shut it down?
  - 72deluxe 11y ago
    How can you seriously answer "SSH and VPS" as apps for development ON the Chrombook? They run on there, but you are not doing development on the machine. It's like driving a little remote control car to the shops and claiming that you went. You didn't. I could walk into a library and use a terminal there to type code in, but I'm not doing development on that machine - it's just a dumb terminal. Now I understand the fact that you can remotely connect somewhere else to do work, but the advent of the microcomputer has meant that you shouldn't need to do that. Power usage for the earth will not be great if everyone runs a device that needs power locally, over a network system that needs powered routers, to a computer remotely that needs power just so you can type code in. That really doesn't make sense.
    - e12e 11y ago
      I don't think the math works out the way you think it does. If 10 people share a 1000 watt server, that's better than each of them running a 300 watt pc. I agree that in the context of this (sub)thread, it's a bit odd to claim that chromebooks are decent developer workstations, when what's meant is that they're decent dumb terminals. I'd still like to run my code on my dumb terminal - but I think it makes perfect sense to work like that - have something dumb and wireless for human interaction, and data/processing on a dedicated piece of kit. Be that a low power intel cpu and ssd in a small box behind the tv, or something in a rack somewhere.
    - pconner 11y ago
      You could install crouton without a DE and use the built-in shell to do whatever you wanted if you had a need to do development work and wanted to use ChromeOS without a full graphical Ubuntu install. You would have access to apt and vim.
    - geofft 11y ago
      > Now I understand the fact that you can remotely connect somewhere else to do work, but the advent of the microcomputer has meant that you shouldn't need to do that. And the advent of dynamic libraries has meant we shouldn't need Docker, but, well, that's how it is. It's true that in an ideal world we shouldn't need such a mechanism, but in practice this system works very well for me, and the other ones have been frustrating. I need a working internet connection anyway to do work: I need everything from software updates to GitHub to IM with coworkers to Google and StackOverflow. And the remote machine shouldn't need any more power than my local one. So my added power consumption is just that of my Chromebook, which is about 10 W. I admit freely that I am not fulfilling the definition of "development on the Chromebook" in a strict sense, but it is certainly a serious answer for how I develop on my Chromebook.
bphogan 11y ago
Got my mother-in-law one for the same reasons. She loves it.
hellbanner 11y ago
I can't reply to ohitsdom (below), but Chromebooks have a hardware switch for "developer mode" which let you run a command line. There's also in-browser VPNing.

ohitsdom 11y ago

What application(s) do you use for development on the Chromebook?

jessaustin 11y ago
This is all you need: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton
geofft 11y ago
For me? SSH and a VPS. I don't need whatever random crap I decide to `wget && tar x && ./configure` to have any risk of infecting my browser session. And I can keep my VPS up-to-date just by getting a new one from The Cloud every so often, and it comes out way cheaper than buying a beefy developer laptop periodically. I've had the same, low-end Chromebook for almost two years now and barely feel any need to upgrade it.
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  I did this for a while, except my thin client was an X1 Carbon (!) Have you calculated how much it's costing you? I ended up scripting up a way to find the cheapest Spot Instance price from Amazon for whatever workload I needed - if I was doing builds I wanted the 8 core machines (c4.2xlarge?). They're ~11c an hour as a Spot Instance, although it's 3x the amount for a Windows instance, and I'd be pushed out of the market if everyone started doing this. I think I was averaging a couple of dollars a day, so I suppose it comes out in favour of using AWS all the time.
  - geofft 11y ago
    So my current VPS is a non-virtual Kimsufi box for which I'm paying $28 (USD)/month, i.e., $336/year. I'm also paying about $10/month more for a cell phone plan with enough mobile data, which brings that to $456/year. An equivalently-specced laptop that is comfortable enough to use (lightweight, cool, not going to break on me, etc.) would cost me about 2-3 times that amount, and I'd want to replace it at least that often. (Also if I had a powerful local laptop, I couldn't tell it to do a build, close the lid, and get on the subway without my backpack catching fire. Nor could I have it provide IPv6 to my apartment, host websites behind CloudFlare, provide shells to my friends, etc.) If I wanted to put some more effort into it, I could certainly do a good fraction of my work (git clone, vi, IRC and email, etc.) on a micro instance. But even a couple of dollars a day would require me to be pretty careful to come out cheaper.
    - voltagex_ 11y ago
      Sweet! Thanks for that information. Until my net connection becomes more reliable it's not really an option for me 24/7. I think my costs would be a bit higher because Kimsufi/OVH/Hetzner are 300-400ms away from me, so the latency is a bit uncomfortable. When I was in Canada, a Hetzner box was 200ms away and usable, but for ~$30 a month I only had a dual core box - a bit restrictive when doing large builds. I might have a go at automating setting up a dev environment on AWS which can be torn down when not in use.
- 0xFFC 11y ago
  You are not going to sell in third world if your product completely depend on market.and thired world is where you can beat windows with being CHEAPER.and second fact nobody has internet like this in third world.Chromebooks are excellent product with Google fiber.but outside of that,not really(for me as someone lives in thired world country).because even with spending 90$/mounth for internet.my internet is nowhere near to run everything on the web.
  - creshal 11y ago
    Third world? Hell, we're having enough connectivity problems in the first world. Costs aside, a VPS is useless if your ISP connects your entire state with only one fibre link which can be felled by a once-every-few-years storm (UPC Austria and Carinthia, btw.).
    - e12e 11y ago
      I'm not much of an Amazon cloud user, but for compiling stuff like new Linux kernels, or big c++ projects (firefox, chrome) - having instant speed for almost nothing sounds good. Could you share a couple of lines on how you would set that up? Spin up an upstream-provided basic AMI (eg: RedHat/Ubunut/Debian) - and run a few commands under screen via ssh - and then shut it down?
- 72deluxe 11y ago
  How can you seriously answer "SSH and VPS" as apps for development ON the Chrombook? They run on there, but you are not doing development on the machine. It's like driving a little remote control car to the shops and claiming that you went. You didn't. I could walk into a library and use a terminal there to type code in, but I'm not doing development on that machine - it's just a dumb terminal. Now I understand the fact that you can remotely connect somewhere else to do work, but the advent of the microcomputer has meant that you shouldn't need to do that. Power usage for the earth will not be great if everyone runs a device that needs power locally, over a network system that needs powered routers, to a computer remotely that needs power just so you can type code in. That really doesn't make sense.
  - e12e 11y ago
    I don't think the math works out the way you think it does. If 10 people share a 1000 watt server, that's better than each of them running a 300 watt pc. I agree that in the context of this (sub)thread, it's a bit odd to claim that chromebooks are decent developer workstations, when what's meant is that they're decent dumb terminals. I'd still like to run my code on my dumb terminal - but I think it makes perfect sense to work like that - have something dumb and wireless for human interaction, and data/processing on a dedicated piece of kit. Be that a low power intel cpu and ssd in a small box behind the tv, or something in a rack somewhere.
  - pconner 11y ago
    You could install crouton without a DE and use the built-in shell to do whatever you wanted if you had a need to do development work and wanted to use ChromeOS without a full graphical Ubuntu install. You would have access to apt and vim.
  - geofft 11y ago
    > Now I understand the fact that you can remotely connect somewhere else to do work, but the advent of the microcomputer has meant that you shouldn't need to do that. And the advent of dynamic libraries has meant we shouldn't need Docker, but, well, that's how it is. It's true that in an ideal world we shouldn't need such a mechanism, but in practice this system works very well for me, and the other ones have been frustrating. I need a working internet connection anyway to do work: I need everything from software updates to GitHub to IM with coworkers to Google and StackOverflow. And the remote machine shouldn't need any more power than my local one. So my added power consumption is just that of my Chromebook, which is about 10 W. I admit freely that I am not fulfilling the definition of "development on the Chromebook" in a strict sense, but it is certainly a serious answer for how I develop on my Chromebook.

bphogan 11y ago

Got my mother-in-law one for the same reasons. She loves it.

hellbanner 11y ago

I can't reply to ohitsdom (below), but Chromebooks have a hardware switch for "developer mode" which let you run a command line. There's also in-browser VPNing.