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It would be nice if Google adopted crouton as a official dev environment and offered a way to backup a crouton environment to Google Drive - just settings and i

by 77ko 10y ago

It would be nice if Google adopted crouton as a official dev environment and offered a way to backup a crouton environment to Google Drive - just settings and installed packages and user files, making it easy to sign into a chromebook and get started on a complete dev environment (after downloading some files). Of course it defeats the purpose of chromebooks - simple cloud managed machines - but hey, why not?

boxy310 10y ago
I feel like there's a strong enough of a case use for it, especially since they built the Pixel specifically for the developer demographic. On the other hand, the demographic most interested in using it would also be able to do it themselves without Google lifting a finger.
satysin 10y ago
Yeah it would be nice if they officially supported Linux on their Chromebooks for Android Studio if nothing else. With the Play Store coming to Chrome OS I hope it is only a matter of time before we see some kind of official developer setup. The Pixel would make a really nice machine IMHO.
- StevePerkins 10y ago
  I have an Acer C720 Chromebook on which I tinkered with crouton, before re-purposing the device as a YouTube player for my toddler. It was a cheap little novelty that I enjoyed playing with for awhile, but I just don't fully understand the impulse to turn these things into Linux development workstations. You have to more or less root the device... press a Ctrl key combo during every boot in order to keep it rooted... and then open a shell and type a sequence of commands to enter a crouton Linux session. Look, I have fond memories of using Slackwhare back in the 90's, and feeling like a wizard every time I figured out how to make my PC do something it wasn't "supposed to do". So I assume that hacker ethos is much of the appeal. However, today Acer sells the Aspire One Cloudbook for the same price as the Acer Chromebook I bought two years ago. It's 14" instead of 11", has the same battery life, and is a full unlocked Windows PC (easily replaceable with Linux). So if you just want a cheap Linux PC with good battery life, why in the world wouldn't you go that route rather than buying a locked Chromebook and jumping through all the hoops? Using a Pixel would be even more bizarre, because at that point you're in the Macbook Pro price range. Chromebooks are well-suited for school students, and non-technical business people at companies that revolve around Google Apps. You CAN squeeze those square pegs into round holes as a programmer, but it really doesn't make any practical sense to do so today.
  - enoch_r 10y ago
    Coming from the other side: I run Linux on a Chromebook Pixel 2015, but I don't use Crouton, I just replaced ChromeOS entirely. Except for "ctrl-L" on every boot (which, really, I don't reboot my machine enough for it to be anything but an extremely minor annoyance) it works perfectly. It's vastly higher-quality (i7 processor, 16GB RAM, fantastic screen, great battery life, fast-charging with USB-C, the build quality of a MBP) and more linux-compatible than anything else I could have purchased for a similar price ($1300). The only real downside is the 64GB SSD, but I can augment that with an SD card. I'm pretty deeply in love with this laptop as a development machine.

by 77ko 10y ago

boxy310 10y ago

I feel like there's a strong enough of a case use for it, especially since they built the Pixel specifically for the developer demographic. On the other hand, the demographic most interested in using it would also be able to do it themselves without Google lifting a finger.

satysin 10y ago

Yeah it would be nice if they officially supported Linux on their Chromebooks for Android Studio if nothing else. With the Play Store coming to Chrome OS I hope it is only a matter of time before we see some kind of official developer setup. The Pixel would make a really nice machine IMHO.

StevePerkins 10y ago
I have an Acer C720 Chromebook on which I tinkered with crouton, before re-purposing the device as a YouTube player for my toddler. It was a cheap little novelty that I enjoyed playing with for awhile, but I just don't fully understand the impulse to turn these things into Linux development workstations. You have to more or less root the device... press a Ctrl key combo during every boot in order to keep it rooted... and then open a shell and type a sequence of commands to enter a crouton Linux session. Look, I have fond memories of using Slackwhare back in the 90's, and feeling like a wizard every time I figured out how to make my PC do something it wasn't "supposed to do". So I assume that hacker ethos is much of the appeal. However, today Acer sells the Aspire One Cloudbook for the same price as the Acer Chromebook I bought two years ago. It's 14" instead of 11", has the same battery life, and is a full unlocked Windows PC (easily replaceable with Linux). So if you just want a cheap Linux PC with good battery life, why in the world wouldn't you go that route rather than buying a locked Chromebook and jumping through all the hoops? Using a Pixel would be even more bizarre, because at that point you're in the Macbook Pro price range. Chromebooks are well-suited for school students, and non-technical business people at companies that revolve around Google Apps. You CAN squeeze those square pegs into round holes as a programmer, but it really doesn't make any practical sense to do so today.
- enoch_r 10y ago
  Coming from the other side: I run Linux on a Chromebook Pixel 2015, but I don't use Crouton, I just replaced ChromeOS entirely. Except for "ctrl-L" on every boot (which, really, I don't reboot my machine enough for it to be anything but an extremely minor annoyance) it works perfectly. It's vastly higher-quality (i7 processor, 16GB RAM, fantastic screen, great battery life, fast-charging with USB-C, the build quality of a MBP) and more linux-compatible than anything else I could have purchased for a similar price ($1300). The only real downside is the 64GB SSD, but I can augment that with an SD card. I'm pretty deeply in love with this laptop as a development machine.