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Chromebooks are good products for people who need to be on a budget. With Linux container support, a Chromebook can do anything, but not the best for software d

Chromebooks are good products for people who need to be on a budget. With Linux container support, a Chromebook can do anything, but not the best for software development.

mattzito 3y ago
I got my wife a chromebook a few years ago to replace her mbp that died unexpectedly right when she needed a laptop. I figured she would use it for a while and then we would get her a new Mac and hand-down the chromebook to one of the kids. Almost five years later, though, she's still using it and loves it. She uses it for everything, doesn't play games or need to run heavy compute locally, and now that Docs and Sheets can open Office documents natively (as opposed to conversion, which it used to do), there's really nothing she needs beyond that. Recently I mentioned that the new Macs that had come out had a great battery life/performance profile and did she want to switch back - and she had little interest in it. They're pretty capable machines for general purpose use. That's anecdata, of course, but if I think back to setting my grandmother up with a mac mini many years ago, if I were doing that today I would absolutely get her a chromebook for the security and data reliability alone.
- paxys 3y ago
  A $300 Chromebook is more than enough for 90%+ of the population, but it's really the marketing that gets them to spend 5-10x as much on fancier hardware. No one needs an M2 Max chip to browse Facebook/Reddit and write Google docs.
- mattzito 3y ago
  Self-replying because I did think of something that is an annoyance, which is the lack of iMessage/Messages support on the chromebook. We have iphones, so we can still communicate with each other, but I get my messages on my mac laptop, which helps me see high priority stuff while working, and she doesn't. Annoyance, not a deal-breaker.
  - seabrookmx 3y ago
    Chromebooks do have that integration with the Google Messages app on Android though, unsurprisingly. +1 on it being a really nice quality of life feature.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  Careful with giving Chromebooks to the elderly. As someone used to macs, I found my dad’s Chromebook (given to him by one of my siblings) to have astonishingly limited and poorly-functioning accessibility settings. IDK maybe they’ve gotten better, but at least 2-3 years ago they were unimpressive on that front, certainly.
hospitalJail 3y ago
Hows the stability/userability? After running Fedora, I've noticed ~100% of my bugs come from using Nividia. I imagine going directly to CPU makes running linux easy? My Raspi4 had basically no problems once I installed it on the final TV I'd be using main.
- creshal 3y ago
  Stability is solid, but so is Linux's usually. Even the unholy trinity of AMD iGPU + Nvidia Optimus dGPU + X¹¹ hasn't caused any driver issues yet for me. Usability, YMMV. Out of the box it's okay-ish, but it's hard to improve it. Screenshotting/desktop recording, e.g.: The included tool only does the bare minimum (can't even draw arrows on screenshots), and there's almost no ChromeOS native third-party software to pick up the slack. In many other cases, Android apps or Linux desktop applications can be substituted, but screen sharing is just too borked for screenshotting/recording to work reliably. Meanwhile, Chrome browser addons are limited to Chrome tabs.
creshal 3y ago
It runs git, vim (or emacs, if you're feeling frisky) and docker, that covers a lot of software dev use cases.
- sowbug 3y ago
  VSCode, too.
olddustytrail 3y ago
And for people who just want to use email and web. My father-in-law is not computer literate at all and had continual issues with his Windows laptop, so I ended up being his regular IT support. For his birthday we got him a Chromebook and I haven't had a single support call from him since.
eli 3y ago
They make great corporate devices, depending on the needs of your users. Great security with very minimal configuration, which is really not the case for most of the competition.
- Affric 3y ago
  Introduction failed at one of my workplaces for a three big reasons (in the order they arose during the small scale trial): 1. Incompatibility with our stack for our front line staff. 2. No Excel which was preferred internally and externally 3. No Word which to this day is used by many customers and external vendors Now the first one may well not be an issue if one were setting up a new company today but the third is not an issue now with Google Docs being able to parse docx well but at the time it caused shenanigans. We ended up migrating all staff to google docs while on windows and giving Microsoft office licences to particular users who could justify it from a technical perspective (rather than an “i don’t want to learn new tech” perspective). Excel, though, is still untouchable at a certain level. Demonstrations of macros that took moments in excel taking eternities in sheets. Poor data wrangling capabilities. Obviously some features simply not existing at all. I guess the company saved millions over some period by switching to mostly being a google shop but native Excel would be worth its weight in gold to Microsoft.
  - eli 3y ago
    O365 Excel and Word both work pretty darn well in a browser and there are native Android versions as well. Fully capable of opening/editing random documents. But yeah if you're doing Hardcore Excel Stuff you are pretty much required to run it in Windows. Even the Mac version isn't close enough. In addition to employees sometimes needing a native app like Photoshop, we also ran into some issues with build quality of some of the devices. Solvable by buying higher end chromebooks, but then you undercut some of the cost savings. Provisioning, backup, device replacement, security were all a breeze though.
nolist_policy 3y ago
Chromebooks can absolutely be used for serious coding, see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37396727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37396727
- pphysch 3y ago
  Yeah, it took me five minutes to set up a dev environment with Postgres and other containerized services. No performance issues. Full stack web development is a big chunk of the market... Sure, maybe AAA gamedev isn't gonna work on a Chromebook.
  - pkaye 3y ago
    How does this work? Is there a bash shell and containers available within a Chromebook or did you install it yourself?
    - danans 3y ago
      https://chromeos.dev/en/linux https://chromeos.dev/en/linux

Chromebooks are good products for people who need to be on a budget. With Linux container support, a Chromebook can do anything, but not the best for software development.

mattzito 3y ago

I got my wife a chromebook a few years ago to replace her mbp that died unexpectedly right when she needed a laptop. I figured she would use it for a while and then we would get her a new Mac and hand-down the chromebook to one of the kids. Almost five years later, though, she's still using it and loves it. She uses it for everything, doesn't play games or need to run heavy compute locally, and now that Docs and Sheets can open Office documents natively (as opposed to conversion, which it used to do), there's really nothing she needs beyond that. Recently I mentioned that the new Macs that had come out had a great battery life/performance profile and did she want to switch back - and she had little interest in it. They're pretty capable machines for general purpose use. That's anecdata, of course, but if I think back to setting my grandmother up with a mac mini many years ago, if I were doing that today I would absolutely get her a chromebook for the security and data reliability alone.

paxys 3y ago
A $300 Chromebook is more than enough for 90%+ of the population, but it's really the marketing that gets them to spend 5-10x as much on fancier hardware. No one needs an M2 Max chip to browse Facebook/Reddit and write Google docs.
mattzito 3y ago
Self-replying because I did think of something that is an annoyance, which is the lack of iMessage/Messages support on the chromebook. We have iphones, so we can still communicate with each other, but I get my messages on my mac laptop, which helps me see high priority stuff while working, and she doesn't. Annoyance, not a deal-breaker.
- seabrookmx 3y ago
  Chromebooks do have that integration with the Google Messages app on Android though, unsurprisingly. +1 on it being a really nice quality of life feature.
hotnfresh 3y ago
Careful with giving Chromebooks to the elderly. As someone used to macs, I found my dad’s Chromebook (given to him by one of my siblings) to have astonishingly limited and poorly-functioning accessibility settings. IDK maybe they’ve gotten better, but at least 2-3 years ago they were unimpressive on that front, certainly.

hospitalJail 3y ago

Hows the stability/userability? After running Fedora, I've noticed ~100% of my bugs come from using Nividia. I imagine going directly to CPU makes running linux easy? My Raspi4 had basically no problems once I installed it on the final TV I'd be using main.

creshal 3y ago
Stability is solid, but so is Linux's usually. Even the unholy trinity of AMD iGPU + Nvidia Optimus dGPU + X¹¹ hasn't caused any driver issues yet for me. Usability, YMMV. Out of the box it's okay-ish, but it's hard to improve it. Screenshotting/desktop recording, e.g.: The included tool only does the bare minimum (can't even draw arrows on screenshots), and there's almost no ChromeOS native third-party software to pick up the slack. In many other cases, Android apps or Linux desktop applications can be substituted, but screen sharing is just too borked for screenshotting/recording to work reliably. Meanwhile, Chrome browser addons are limited to Chrome tabs.

creshal 3y ago

It runs git, vim (or emacs, if you're feeling frisky) and docker, that covers a lot of software dev use cases.

sowbug 3y ago
VSCode, too.

olddustytrail 3y ago

And for people who just want to use email and web. My father-in-law is not computer literate at all and had continual issues with his Windows laptop, so I ended up being his regular IT support. For his birthday we got him a Chromebook and I haven't had a single support call from him since.

eli 3y ago

They make great corporate devices, depending on the needs of your users. Great security with very minimal configuration, which is really not the case for most of the competition.

Affric 3y ago
Introduction failed at one of my workplaces for a three big reasons (in the order they arose during the small scale trial): 1. Incompatibility with our stack for our front line staff. 2. No Excel which was preferred internally and externally 3. No Word which to this day is used by many customers and external vendors Now the first one may well not be an issue if one were setting up a new company today but the third is not an issue now with Google Docs being able to parse docx well but at the time it caused shenanigans. We ended up migrating all staff to google docs while on windows and giving Microsoft office licences to particular users who could justify it from a technical perspective (rather than an “i don’t want to learn new tech” perspective). Excel, though, is still untouchable at a certain level. Demonstrations of macros that took moments in excel taking eternities in sheets. Poor data wrangling capabilities. Obviously some features simply not existing at all. I guess the company saved millions over some period by switching to mostly being a google shop but native Excel would be worth its weight in gold to Microsoft.
- eli 3y ago
  O365 Excel and Word both work pretty darn well in a browser and there are native Android versions as well. Fully capable of opening/editing random documents. But yeah if you're doing Hardcore Excel Stuff you are pretty much required to run it in Windows. Even the Mac version isn't close enough. In addition to employees sometimes needing a native app like Photoshop, we also ran into some issues with build quality of some of the devices. Solvable by buying higher end chromebooks, but then you undercut some of the cost savings. Provisioning, backup, device replacement, security were all a breeze though.

nolist_policy 3y ago

Chromebooks can absolutely be used for serious coding, see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37396727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37396727

pphysch 3y ago
Yeah, it took me five minutes to set up a dev environment with Postgres and other containerized services. No performance issues. Full stack web development is a big chunk of the market... Sure, maybe AAA gamedev isn't gonna work on a Chromebook.
- pkaye 3y ago
  How does this work? Is there a bash shell and containers available within a Chromebook or did you install it yourself?
  - danans 3y ago
    https://chromeos.dev/en/linux https://chromeos.dev/en/linux