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ASK HN: Has anyone adopted Chrome OS as their primary OS?

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Re: ASK HN: Has anyone adopted Chrome OS as their primary OS?

#21

Post by cyberpip »

taude wrote: post #18

I'm interested in responses here. I'd like to get a lightwight laptop, similar to my 11" Mac Book Air. I don't feel like I want to pay Apple prices for a second "travel" machine. I would like to be able to run Emacs on it. It doesn't have to be full blown dev machine, but I'd like some of my simple tooling, and backup to cloud storage to share with my main work machines. I currently using an iPad with a Brydge keyboa…

With Android app support, I use termux and just SSH into a server I keep my command line environment set up on. Termux has the emacs package too though (https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/tree/master/packag...).

Re: ASK HN: Has anyone adopted Chrome OS as their primary OS?

#22

Post by laken »

taude wrote: post #18

I'm interested in responses here. I'd like to get a lightwight laptop, similar to my 11" Mac Book Air. I don't feel like I want to pay Apple prices for a second "travel" machine. I would like to be able to run Emacs on it. It doesn't have to be full blown dev machine, but I'd like some of my simple tooling, and backup to cloud storage to share with my main work machines. I currently using an iPad with a Brydge keyboa…

The Inspiron 11 from Dell might be what you're looking for -- you can get it with either Windows or Chrome OS, and it often has models that are under $200. It's not a bad machine for the price, and it's a really nice mini form factor for travel.

Re: ASK HN: Has anyone adopted Chrome OS as their primary OS?

#23

Post by jrockway »

I used Chrome OS as my primary OS when I worked at Google. I didn't really like screwing around with the Linux desktop, so I just used a Chrome OS desktop as an interface onto a more powerful Linux box. All I really use are a terminal and a browser, so it worked fine. It never did anything that annoyed me; it just stayed out of my way and I could get my work done without annoyance. It also solved the problem I've always had with laptops; they are never configured the same as my desktop so it's jarring to switch to one (for travel, meetings, etc.) With Chrome OS, that was never a problem, all my settings sync'd perfectly between my two desktops (home/work) and laptop.

These days I use an iPad Pro as my laptop and it's not as good, mostly because even when iOS is connected to a 4k monitor, Safari tells the remote website "hey, send me your shittiest mobile site please". Apple should really make the iPad Pro browser tell things it's a desktop.

Re: ASK HN: Has anyone adopted Chrome OS as their primary OS?

#24

Post by swixmix »

I use ChromeOS with a chromebook. It works fine but it's not a convenient swiss army knife.

For example: To use 'adb' to connect to my phone I know of three options. 1 Use Chrome but that is extremely limited to web. 2 Activate developer mode and upgrade adb to current. Or 3 Connect to another device like rpi.

I chose to activate developer mode for convenience. I run OpenBSD via qemu for a decent CLI. I keep a loopback ethernet cable and proxy settings to fool ChromeOS into letting me use alternate network set ups.

Re: ASK HN: Has anyone adopted Chrome OS as their primary OS?

#25

Post by antoineMoPa »

My quite old Chromebook is my main laptop for university. I have Python + Latex + Gcc on it and live with ~ 500 spare megabytes...

When I code, I generally do it with Emacs in crouton, not with a remote IDE like Cloud9.

New Chromebooks are even better for development because they support docker, but I can't test it with my "too old" Chromebook.

Re: ASK HN: Has anyone adopted Chrome OS as their primary OS?

#26

Post by maccio92 »

jrockway wrote: post #23

I used Chrome OS as my primary OS when I worked at Google. I didn't really like screwing around with the Linux desktop, so I just used a Chrome OS desktop as an interface onto a more powerful Linux box. All I really use are a terminal and a browser, so it worked fine. It never did anything that annoyed me; it just stayed out of my way and I could get my work done without annoyance. It also solved the problem I've alw…

> With Chrome OS, that was never a problem, all my settings sync'd perfectly between my two desktops (home/work) and laptop

did these two desktops also use Chrome OS? This sounds pretty nice

Re: ASK HN: Has anyone adopted Chrome OS as their primary OS?

#27

Post by kitsunesoba »

jrockway wrote: post #23

I used Chrome OS as my primary OS when I worked at Google. I didn't really like screwing around with the Linux desktop, so I just used a Chrome OS desktop as an interface onto a more powerful Linux box. All I really use are a terminal and a browser, so it worked fine. It never did anything that annoyed me; it just stayed out of my way and I could get my work done without annoyance. It also solved the problem I've alw…

A lot of the time it isn’t Safari that’s asking for the crappy mobile version of a site. Quite a few sites will return the mobile version even if you request the desktop version because they identify that you’re using an iOS device through avenues other than the user agent. The only way to force a desktop version to load in these instances is to inject Javascript and/or spoof a bunch of stuff.

Re: ASK HN: Has anyone adopted Chrome OS as their primary OS?

#29

Post by turtlebits »

I bought a Pixelbook when it was $300 off last year and was pleasantly surprised at how great of a laptop it is. It's now my primary personal use laptop. For consumption/light dev work, I greatly prefer it over Mac/Windows

With crostini, I can do local dev (python, js, golang) 90% as well as I can on a full fledged OS, without having to rely on cloud IDEs, etc.

Re: ASK HN: Has anyone adopted Chrome OS as their primary OS?

#30

Post by taude »

cyberpip wrote: post #21
taude wrote: post #18

I'm interested in responses here. I'd like to get a lightwight laptop, similar to my 11" Mac Book Air. I don't feel like I want to pay Apple prices for a second "travel" machine. I would like to be able to run Emacs on it. It doesn't have to be full blown dev machine, but I'd like some of my simple tooling, and backup to cloud storage to share with my main work machines. I currently using an iPad with a Brydge keyboa…

With Android app support, I use termux and just SSH into a server I keep my command line environment set up on. Termux has the emacs package too though ( https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/tree/master/packag... ).

I've done that as an option (I can do that from my iPad). But I'd really like to be able to be disconnected, do all my writing, have it synced to the cloud.

I can't rely on available internet connection (with this portable setup).

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