14 ms·

>And yet ChromeOS can't do any of these things. Am I just imagining all the posts I've seen on HN from people talking about being extremely happy using Chromeb

>And yet ChromeOS can't do any of these things. Am I just imagining all the posts I've seen on HN from people talking about being extremely happy using Chromebooks as development platforms?

theoretick 14y ago
I'll assume that's sarcasm but I haven't personally noticed that trend. The only way I made my cr-48 useful was by flashing the BIOS, adding a bigger SD, and running ubuntu on it.
taeric 14y ago
Aren't most of those folks replacing the os on their machines?
criley 14y ago
How do you develop on this? I'm used to using Linux, command line, text editors, local installs of the product I'm developing for, virtual machines, etc... Are you simply forced into using ALL websites to actually develop and unable to use anything else? Seems strange to pay $1250+ to develop on a machine that cannot even run or test the code you write.
- raingrove 14y ago
  Action.IO... Cloud9... Koding...
  - untothebreach 14y ago
    None of which use the $1250+ machine to actually "run or test the code you write." If you are just using a browser for coding, why pay that much money for a machine to run a browser?
    - aalbertson 14y ago
      One could argue that if a browser is your only environment, that you'll be spending the most time in, then why wouldn't you want the best option for running said browser? The way I see it, if you're going to be working in a completely remote/cloud capable environment, then a powerful, fast, beautiful screened machine to work from makes the most sense. My current job gave me a Dell Latitude E series machine for work. I work exclusively in AWS. The screen on this laptop is so horrifically bad that I practically get sick looking at it. Compared to my personal (2010 era) macbook pro, or the Retina MBP's I've used at my last two jobs, there is no comparison. I'd much rather have a lightweight powerful little machine that I can ssh from and have some sort of IDE or text editor to work on my AWS projects then worry about a big bulky crappy laptop that is overkill for my work. Obviously I realize this is MY current use case, however I'd be willing to be that the majority of dev/devops type folks on HN have a similar type of use case. AWS, Heroku, just about any PaaS, Saas, or Iaas, etc... would take advantage of a machine like this beautifully. Oh and the last time I had an Air (right before upgrading to the rMBP), My use case? Chrome, Chrome, Terminal, RDP, Chrome. That was at a PC Game dev/publisher company where I administrated all windows based desktops, mac laptops as well as all servers of misc variety... Sooo.....Is this machine useful? I think it is, and I am excited to check it out and may look to getting one. One more thing, I too am one of the lucky Cr-48 owners and LOVED the concept. Biggest reason I hacked it to load ubuntu? SSH. Had the plugin existed back then? ChromeOS ALL THE WAY BABY!!! /rant.
  - javajosh 14y ago
    Totally dig hosted IDEs. I think it's the way of the future. But why do you need a powerful computer to use them? How does it help? I'm genuinely asking.
    - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
      The display...and your hosted IDEs don't do all their processing on a remote host. I believe a lot of the compilation/interpretation/services are provided locally via JavaScript.
  - colin_jack 14y ago
    I spent some time with cloud9 convincing myself it was usable and bought a chromebook only to find that aswell as chromeos being a massive let down c9 ran like a dog on it. Main thing is it was ridiculously slow, the same actions taking noticably long on the chromebook compare to my laptop.
    - stanleydrew 14y ago
      It's interesting to see all the people on here saying that there's no point to having a beefier machine to "just browse the web" and then see your comment which would appear to indicate that there is a need for more performant web-browsing devices. How much did you pay for your laptop?
      - colin_jack 14y ago
        Its ancient and these days massively underpowered but i could sit and do sid by side operations in cloud 9 and the laptop would always complete noticably faster. For example i would be debuggin and i would ask to go to hte next step and in the laptop it was immediate, on the chromebook i might wait a second. Very very odd and very unexpected but it made cloud9 totally unusable for me. Chromeos is also horrible for nearly everything else i do, even reading pdfs, so i cannot think of any reason to shell out for another machine with it installed.
  - taligent 14y ago
    What about them ? I honestly don't think of them as IDEs more as text editors with syntax highlighting.
    - mayanksinghal 14y ago
      There is https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-remote-desktop/gbchcmhmhahfdphkhkmpfmihenigjmpp?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-remote-desk... as well. That might be useful in some cases.
- Kerrick 14y ago
  Chrome has a wonderful SSH client [0], and with a $5/mo Digital Ocean [1] (or other [2]) VPS for all your UNIX work, it's a perfectly capable dev machine. [0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhechapfaindjhompbnflcldabbghjo?utm_source=chrome-ntp-launcher https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec... [1]: https://www.digitalocean.com/ https://www.digitalocean.com/ [2]: http://www.lowendbox.com/ http://www.lowendbox.com/
  - rayiner 14y ago
    So you pay $1,300 to log into a $5/month remote box with 20GB of storage and 512MB of RAM?
    - elarkin 14y ago
      Well, you probably would not get this chromebook if you were only going to use SSH. You'd buy the $250 one.
      - jonknee 14y ago
        Unless you wanted the gorgeous 2560x1700 display... Many people have paid close to the whole computer's price just for the screen (I'm typing this on a 2560x1440 screen that I paid $999 for).
        Gormo 14y ago
        Is your 2560x1440 screen only 13" though? I don't see the point of having a pixel density that high; almost no one has sharp enough eyesight to distinguish individual pixels at even lower densities than that, and enough people have poor enough eyesight that they won't be able to read text on software that doesn't scale its fonts properly. That resolution is appropriate for a monitor with twice the diagonal size. Also, what's up with the 3:2 aspect ratio? That seems awfully odd.
        Zak 14y ago
- stuartmemo 14y ago
  I use the Secure Shell extension to ssh onto a dev environment and use vim from there. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhechapfaindjhompbnflcldabbghjo?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec...
  - criley 14y ago
    So I have to buy another machine to develop and test my stuff on? What's the point of a powerful laptop if it's just a dumb terminal to connect to my actual development machine? Why not just buy a $300 super cheap laptop and do the exact same thing? Sure I'll have less resolution on the machine, but seeing as the developing is happening on another machine all together, it seems like the performance would be similar.
    - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
      Well, if you're a developer, presumably this isn't the first computer you have owned. I'm using a 5 year old cheapy HP laptop as my dev server and it works wonderfully. There are other alternatives, of course, Cloud9 premium account gives you full shell access, Action.IO gives you full shell access as well.
      - mfn 14y ago
        Regarding the idea of using an old laptop as a dev server, have you run into any issues as a result of having the laptop on all the time (such as overheating)? Also, how would you set it up so that you can log in to your laptop from outside your LAN? I have a few old machines lying around and it would be great if I could put them to use as servers.
        MatthewPhillips 14y ago
        Shouldn't have overheating issues as long as you sit it so that the vents can breath. I leave mine in the basement where it's a little bit cooler. My current uptime is 45 days, I only restart for kernel upgrades and never shut it down. I purchased dynamic DNS, which IIRC is around $35/year, well worth it for the convenience of logging into my home server whereever I am.
- evv 14y ago
  I bet serious developers will buy these things for linux development
- emidln 14y ago
  I paid $200 for an Acer C7, $80 for 16GB of RAM, $100 for a 128GB SSD, and $50 for larger capacity battery to end up with a portable linux box (running ubuntu 13.04 now) for under $450 that is light, fast to boot, and has reasonable connectivity (wifi, gige, 3x usb ports). This took me about an hour of reading, 45 minutes to go from sealed boxes to linux, and a small phillips screwdriver (one screw on the back to get to ram+hard drive).
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  You could put the original Chromebooks in Dev mode and have a terminal with a build environment, or just install your own Linux build on it. Or even Windows. Not the fastest machine in the world, but not the slowest either. I quite liked it. This feels wildly overpriced to me though.
ConstantineXVI 14y ago
Either after flipping the dev-mode switch and running a chroot or such (thus being outside CrOS's use case), or using it entirely as a thin client (which doesn't need this kind of horsepower).
- micro_cam 14y ago
  I really hope that running a chroot or vm becomes a fully supported part of chrome os along with an x server. Working with a crouton ubuntu chroot on my (free) chromebox feels a lot like using OS X circa 10.3 or so and I would consider using it as my full time dev box if autoupdate worked in dev mode. I think i would actually prefer it to modern os x if I could tweak some keyboard shortcuts and run an x sever (even an annoying one like apples) mixed in with aura instead of having to switch back and forth.
rayiner 14y ago
People are happy using Chromebooks as development platforms because they're $250 for an ARM laptop with long battery life, and you can hack them to run Ubuntu, not because Chrome OS has any merit on its own. Things that are cute on a $250 machine are not so cute on a $1,300 machine...
- rbanffy 14y ago
  I believe it's much easier to hack this one to run Linux than any ARM-based Chromebook. It certainly has enough memory, storage and processing power to be a decent development machine (provided you avoid heavy IDEs). It's likely possible to even run Windows on this machine.
  - neverm0re 14y ago
    It's already braindead easy to put Linux on the ARM Samsung Chromebook. One of the first things I did was to assemble my own personal Linux distro and besides having to copy some blob files out of the original ChromeOS image, it's all very straight-forward stuff and I pulled up about a hundred packages I wanted including an X.org stack without fuss. The compile speeds are adequate if you aren't cross-compiling, I've certainly put up with worse. I personally have little interest in the Pixel based on the specs. I think X86 is excessively 'big iron' now for a majority of needs and I find the lack of USB3 is mystifying. The screen looks interesting, but it's nothing I actually /need/ and certainly not worth another thousand bucks. I've personally taken to just using X86 for storage/cross-compile servers for the rest of my cheap ARM/MIPS/etc. crap and I've made it a point to stop buying expensive hardware. What $250 buys you now is actually pretty ridiculously awesome.
    - pax 14y ago
      'brain-dead easy ... assemble my own personal distro' :))
      - roc 14y ago
        You're talking about developers, no?

>And yet ChromeOS can't do any of these things. Am I just imagining all the posts I've seen on HN from people talking about being extremely happy using Chromebooks as development platforms?

theoretick 14y ago

I'll assume that's sarcasm but I haven't personally noticed that trend. The only way I made my cr-48 useful was by flashing the BIOS, adding a bigger SD, and running ubuntu on it.

taeric 14y ago

Aren't most of those folks replacing the os on their machines?

criley 14y ago

How do you develop on this? I'm used to using Linux, command line, text editors, local installs of the product I'm developing for, virtual machines, etc... Are you simply forced into using ALL websites to actually develop and unable to use anything else? Seems strange to pay $1250+ to develop on a machine that cannot even run or test the code you write.

raingrove 14y ago
Action.IO... Cloud9... Koding...
- untothebreach 14y ago
  None of which use the $1250+ machine to actually "run or test the code you write." If you are just using a browser for coding, why pay that much money for a machine to run a browser?
  - aalbertson 14y ago
    One could argue that if a browser is your only environment, that you'll be spending the most time in, then why wouldn't you want the best option for running said browser? The way I see it, if you're going to be working in a completely remote/cloud capable environment, then a powerful, fast, beautiful screened machine to work from makes the most sense. My current job gave me a Dell Latitude E series machine for work. I work exclusively in AWS. The screen on this laptop is so horrifically bad that I practically get sick looking at it. Compared to my personal (2010 era) macbook pro, or the Retina MBP's I've used at my last two jobs, there is no comparison. I'd much rather have a lightweight powerful little machine that I can ssh from and have some sort of IDE or text editor to work on my AWS projects then worry about a big bulky crappy laptop that is overkill for my work. Obviously I realize this is MY current use case, however I'd be willing to be that the majority of dev/devops type folks on HN have a similar type of use case. AWS, Heroku, just about any PaaS, Saas, or Iaas, etc... would take advantage of a machine like this beautifully. Oh and the last time I had an Air (right before upgrading to the rMBP), My use case? Chrome, Chrome, Terminal, RDP, Chrome. That was at a PC Game dev/publisher company where I administrated all windows based desktops, mac laptops as well as all servers of misc variety... Sooo.....Is this machine useful? I think it is, and I am excited to check it out and may look to getting one. One more thing, I too am one of the lucky Cr-48 owners and LOVED the concept. Biggest reason I hacked it to load ubuntu? SSH. Had the plugin existed back then? ChromeOS ALL THE WAY BABY!!! /rant.
- javajosh 14y ago
  Totally dig hosted IDEs. I think it's the way of the future. But why do you need a powerful computer to use them? How does it help? I'm genuinely asking.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    The display...and your hosted IDEs don't do all their processing on a remote host. I believe a lot of the compilation/interpretation/services are provided locally via JavaScript.
- colin_jack 14y ago
  I spent some time with cloud9 convincing myself it was usable and bought a chromebook only to find that aswell as chromeos being a massive let down c9 ran like a dog on it. Main thing is it was ridiculously slow, the same actions taking noticably long on the chromebook compare to my laptop.
  - stanleydrew 14y ago
    It's interesting to see all the people on here saying that there's no point to having a beefier machine to "just browse the web" and then see your comment which would appear to indicate that there is a need for more performant web-browsing devices. How much did you pay for your laptop?
    - colin_jack 14y ago
      Its ancient and these days massively underpowered but i could sit and do sid by side operations in cloud 9 and the laptop would always complete noticably faster. For example i would be debuggin and i would ask to go to hte next step and in the laptop it was immediate, on the chromebook i might wait a second. Very very odd and very unexpected but it made cloud9 totally unusable for me. Chromeos is also horrible for nearly everything else i do, even reading pdfs, so i cannot think of any reason to shell out for another machine with it installed.
- taligent 14y ago
  What about them ? I honestly don't think of them as IDEs more as text editors with syntax highlighting.
  - mayanksinghal 14y ago
    There is https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-remote-desktop/gbchcmhmhahfdphkhkmpfmihenigjmpp?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-remote-desk... as well. That might be useful in some cases.
Kerrick 14y ago
Chrome has a wonderful SSH client [0], and with a $5/mo Digital Ocean [1] (or other [2]) VPS for all your UNIX work, it's a perfectly capable dev machine. [0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhechapfaindjhompbnflcldabbghjo?utm_source=chrome-ntp-launcher https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec... [1]: https://www.digitalocean.com/ https://www.digitalocean.com/ [2]: http://www.lowendbox.com/ http://www.lowendbox.com/
- rayiner 14y ago
  So you pay $1,300 to log into a $5/month remote box with 20GB of storage and 512MB of RAM?
  - elarkin 14y ago
    Well, you probably would not get this chromebook if you were only going to use SSH. You'd buy the $250 one.
    - jonknee 14y ago
      Unless you wanted the gorgeous 2560x1700 display... Many people have paid close to the whole computer's price just for the screen (I'm typing this on a 2560x1440 screen that I paid $999 for).
      - Gormo 14y ago
        Is your 2560x1440 screen only 13" though? I don't see the point of having a pixel density that high; almost no one has sharp enough eyesight to distinguish individual pixels at even lower densities than that, and enough people have poor enough eyesight that they won't be able to read text on software that doesn't scale its fonts properly. That resolution is appropriate for a monitor with twice the diagonal size. Also, what's up with the 3:2 aspect ratio? That seems awfully odd.
        Zak 14y ago
stuartmemo 14y ago
I use the Secure Shell extension to ssh onto a dev environment and use vim from there. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhechapfaindjhompbnflcldabbghjo?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec...
- criley 14y ago
  So I have to buy another machine to develop and test my stuff on? What's the point of a powerful laptop if it's just a dumb terminal to connect to my actual development machine? Why not just buy a $300 super cheap laptop and do the exact same thing? Sure I'll have less resolution on the machine, but seeing as the developing is happening on another machine all together, it seems like the performance would be similar.
  - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    Well, if you're a developer, presumably this isn't the first computer you have owned. I'm using a 5 year old cheapy HP laptop as my dev server and it works wonderfully. There are other alternatives, of course, Cloud9 premium account gives you full shell access, Action.IO gives you full shell access as well.
    - mfn 14y ago
      Regarding the idea of using an old laptop as a dev server, have you run into any issues as a result of having the laptop on all the time (such as overheating)? Also, how would you set it up so that you can log in to your laptop from outside your LAN? I have a few old machines lying around and it would be great if I could put them to use as servers.
      - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
        Shouldn't have overheating issues as long as you sit it so that the vents can breath. I leave mine in the basement where it's a little bit cooler. My current uptime is 45 days, I only restart for kernel upgrades and never shut it down. I purchased dynamic DNS, which IIRC is around $35/year, well worth it for the convenience of logging into my home server whereever I am.
evv 14y ago
I bet serious developers will buy these things for linux development
emidln 14y ago
I paid $200 for an Acer C7, $80 for 16GB of RAM, $100 for a 128GB SSD, and $50 for larger capacity battery to end up with a portable linux box (running ubuntu 13.04 now) for under $450 that is light, fast to boot, and has reasonable connectivity (wifi, gige, 3x usb ports). This took me about an hour of reading, 45 minutes to go from sealed boxes to linux, and a small phillips screwdriver (one screw on the back to get to ram+hard drive).
anigbrowl 14y ago
You could put the original Chromebooks in Dev mode and have a terminal with a build environment, or just install your own Linux build on it. Or even Windows. Not the fastest machine in the world, but not the slowest either. I quite liked it. This feels wildly overpriced to me though.

ConstantineXVI 14y ago

Either after flipping the dev-mode switch and running a chroot or such (thus being outside CrOS's use case), or using it entirely as a thin client (which doesn't need this kind of horsepower).

micro_cam 14y ago
I really hope that running a chroot or vm becomes a fully supported part of chrome os along with an x server. Working with a crouton ubuntu chroot on my (free) chromebox feels a lot like using OS X circa 10.3 or so and I would consider using it as my full time dev box if autoupdate worked in dev mode. I think i would actually prefer it to modern os x if I could tweak some keyboard shortcuts and run an x sever (even an annoying one like apples) mixed in with aura instead of having to switch back and forth.

rayiner 14y ago

People are happy using Chromebooks as development platforms because they're $250 for an ARM laptop with long battery life, and you can hack them to run Ubuntu, not because Chrome OS has any merit on its own. Things that are cute on a $250 machine are not so cute on a $1,300 machine...

rbanffy 14y ago
I believe it's much easier to hack this one to run Linux than any ARM-based Chromebook. It certainly has enough memory, storage and processing power to be a decent development machine (provided you avoid heavy IDEs). It's likely possible to even run Windows on this machine.
- neverm0re 14y ago
  It's already braindead easy to put Linux on the ARM Samsung Chromebook. One of the first things I did was to assemble my own personal Linux distro and besides having to copy some blob files out of the original ChromeOS image, it's all very straight-forward stuff and I pulled up about a hundred packages I wanted including an X.org stack without fuss. The compile speeds are adequate if you aren't cross-compiling, I've certainly put up with worse. I personally have little interest in the Pixel based on the specs. I think X86 is excessively 'big iron' now for a majority of needs and I find the lack of USB3 is mystifying. The screen looks interesting, but it's nothing I actually /need/ and certainly not worth another thousand bucks. I've personally taken to just using X86 for storage/cross-compile servers for the rest of my cheap ARM/MIPS/etc. crap and I've made it a point to stop buying expensive hardware. What $250 buys you now is actually pretty ridiculously awesome.
  - pax 14y ago
    'brain-dead easy ... assemble my own personal distro' :))
    - roc 14y ago
      You're talking about developers, no?