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

I really wish there was an official build of chromeos for virtualbox, it's ideal for a virtual appliance. There is one company that has a build for vmware but I don't use VMWare and it only has a 30day trial IIRC.

I recently picked up a Yoga C630 out of curiosity. I figured that if the chromeos thing didn't work out, then I could probably install linux. It turns out that the C630 is a pretty capable machine - I'd initially toy'd with developer mode but gave up pretty quickly once I found crostini.

The chrome crostini project [0] basically gives you a little container in which you can run a terminal (probably more, but a terminal is good enough for me). Docker is supported so I can run additional containers within the crostini.

I've pulled all of my dotfiles into the crostini terminal, and have encountered very few issues experimenting with docker, python/flask, ruby, and C/C++ locally. I can't speak to emacs, but vim/tmux run as expected.

The C630 in particular has worked out remarkably well: the hardware is much better than I'd expected, the battery is very good, the touchpad is second only to my macbook (this is what piqued my curiosity initially), and the display, while not matte, is big and bright enough to split a browser and terminal side-by-side.

The C630 would probably fit the bill for a nice travel box. It's not as pricey as a macbook, but at $600-700 it's a little more than most chromebooks.

The only real concern I have is the reliance on Google and the G-ecosystem.

[0] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/c...

It may or may not be important to you, but Chrome OS is a 'cloud-based' operating system (OS) which means everything you do in the OS is tracked and recorded by Google. This has important privacy implications. Although you can use Chrome OS with a guest account, to take full advantage of the OS reqires you login with your Google account.

Your Google account (containing your personal details such as your location and date of birth) is now tied to all your activity in the OS. Even if that data is 'anonymised' (a pretty meaningless term) or aggregated with other user data, this is a colossus sweep of user data on an industrial scale.

I presume all the people who are happy to use Chrome OS would also be happy to sign-in to Windows/Ubuntu/Mac OS with a personally-identifying account and have everything they do recorded and tracked by those operating systems?

I have adopted Chrome OS as my primary OS. I started doing so with a Chromebook Pixel in 2013, which I used when writing the first version of https://CoCalc.com. I ended up switching to running full Linux on it, since Chrome OS was too limiting then. After a year I switched to using various Mac laptops. However, ALL of my Mac laptops broke due to keyboard failures, and modern mac keyboards have a feel that sucks for me personally. I switched to an iPad pro 10.5" for a few months, as an experiment in pain (but also freedom, since it is so small and light). Over a year ago, I bought a Google Pixelbook, and switch to it as my primary OS. Since I'm the lead developer of https://cocalc.com, what I do under Chrome OS is web development (literally, of cocalc.com, which is all done within cocalc.com), data science (which is what cocalc.com is for), and email (via gmail). I use crouton so I can easily get a local root shell and use encrypted USB drives (for offsite backups), and I Crostini so I can run Docker containers, e.g., so I can do offline work with the CoCalc codebase and use local X11 applications like Inkscape.

The biggest surprise for me was that I bought a $450 14" HP x360 chromebook for a booth at a tradeshow, and I've been using that chromebook as my main laptop for the last few months, instead of my 16GB top-end Pixelbook. Why? The larger 16:9 screen is way better for coding (for me), and the keyboard is amazingly for me (I consider it much better than the pixelbook keyboard). This HP chromebook weighs a pound more than the pixelbook, but I'm not carrying it around that much so it doesn't matter. Also, it's nice when I do carry it around knowing that it cost $450 instead of $1599, so if it is stolen or damaged, it is much less of a loss.

Conclusion: I've been using ChromeOS as my primary OS off and on since 2013, and I'm impressed with how ChromeOS (and the Chromebook ecosystem) have improved over the years. And I'm very surprised, because today I choose a $450 Chromebook over a $2000 Apple laptop, whereas from 2007 to 20017, I would choose the Apple laptop. Also, for me, everything is a company (or university purchase), so even though "money is no object", I still prefer the relatively cheap Chromebook.

Another, thing -- my old Chromebook Pixel had LTE data, since it always had internet. My iPad pro also did. However, with modern tethering (I have a Pixel 2 XL), a phone provides perfectly good tethering --there's no need to have it built into your laptop.

Are there any disadvantages to choosing developer mode?