Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?

It's a challenge to understand what information is leaking to Google when using ChromeOS and its cloud-first, always-logged-in design. As developers, we have a responsibility to our clients to keep their secrets.

Many clients may not care -- imagine how much sensitive business data Slack has! But I'd want to make sure that my usage of ChromeOS was compatible with the client's policies, compared with a laptop running one of the more traditional self-contained operating systems.

I use a 12” MacBook and find it almost fully suitable for all development. Even with VMs and Docker containers, it’s great, but if anything misbehaves and gets it running too hot it can get sluggish. It’s unable to recover on its own because it has no fan.

MacBook Pros can keep going even with CPU-abusive software. I don’t want to carry the extra weight so I choose the trade-off.

But a Chromebook? I don’t understand the fascination with trying to develop on a more challenging dev platform that offers seemingly no advantage in terms of performance, mobility, price, or ergonomics.

If you don't want to buy a MacBook (nor, I presume, a laptop with Windows preinstalled), do yourself a favor and get an Ubuntu machine from Dell or System76.

I do 'serious' development on a Chromebook, and a very low-spec one at that (Acer Chromebook 11, with an 11" screen and 2GB of ram). What's more, I do development in user mode rather than developer mode, without using Crostini. The thing is, very little of what I'm doing actually runs on the Chromebook itself. I use Codepen.io (which is awesome) for a lot of front-end dev work, which does SASS, Babel, etc on a remote server for me. I use Codenvy to do more complex things, again on a remote server. I do some Node and Python on the machine itself (using Termux), but that's very light-weight in terms of resources. It's still proper development though. The things I make end up on servers being used by thousands of people.

I'd do frontend things on the machine itself if Chrome let me access localhost, but it doesn't. (Weirdly, Firefox for Android does, but that doesn't have any dev tools).

The problem with asking whether Chromebooks are ready for 'serious' development is that development is a huge topic that covers everything from editing a config file in VIM to building a UI in XCode. You can't answer a yes or no to a question like that.

tl;dr It's great but I wouldn't want to run Android Studio on it? My iMac struggles with that...

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.

My recent 1-year review is on https://llogiq.github.io/2018/03/02/chromebook.html