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.
Love System76, my favorite laptop is light little Lemur.
Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?
31–40 of 190 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?
#32Judging by your questions it sounds like you want an adventure and excitement in your life. You will get it all with the chromebook. You will be able to do everything with it. At the same time you will encounter issues that others havent yet. You will be on your own to solve them due to the low popularity of Chromebooks.
Re: Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?
#33If 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.
The XPS 13 with the i7 and Max ram is a great machine. I liked it so much I made it the standard equipment for my ops team.
Re: Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?
#34A few months ago my Macbook Pro screen cracked while I was on a road trip. I thought I was screwed, but decided to try development on a Chromebook I had lying around.
That was when I discovered AWS Cloud 9. After getting back my repaired fully maxed out latest model Macbook Pro, I have not even bothered to restore the hard drive. Developing on Cloud 9 has been wonderful. Having everything already in the cloud in a production-like environment has enormous advantages. Sure there are things I occasionally may miss or be unable to do on a Chromebook, though this has surprisingly not been an issue yet. The only Mac app I've wanted to use is Sketch.
I have since upgraded to a Pixelbook, which has a gorgeous screen and a superior keyboard to a Macbook Pro. Touch screens with tablet mode make a computer enormously more versatile, serving as a tablet and media platform. If I lose or damage my Chromebook, I can continue development seemlessly on any computer, and log in to any Chromebook to recover my environment. Not having a $3000 laptop that I need to protect with my life, knowing that if I lose everything nothing is lost, is very liberating.
I'm now transitioning off of iOS because of the lack of iMessage and the general pointlessness of using an iPhone with a Chromebook. Perhaps the biggest annoyance with iOS devices now is the disastrous Lightning connector, which adds so much complication to my cable environment. With a Pixel 2, I basically just need a few similar wall chargers and USB-C cables rather than a tangle of converters and cables.
Surprising myself, I am now basically committed to a future on Chrome OS and Google's ecosystem. My only regret is not supporting Apple's respect for privacy, which is a substantial regret. I can only hope our Google and perhaps government some day will adopt Apple's ethical standards around privacy.
Anyone want to buy a Macbook Pro? It really is a beautiful machine. I just don't seem to need it anymore.
Re: Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?
#35I 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…
Escape key, siri button, densed keyboard keys, and unreasonably huge trackpad are the things that made me switch. I am in a meeting or listen to a youtube video... I press backspace ... Oh my bad I pressed siri button - everything goes silent for 30 seconds. I disabled siri button... a few weeks later apple released an update and siri is back ... just before my important call. My anxienty level is to the roof.
How about you just disable Siri like everyone else? :-) I work with my macbook 12+ hours a day and this never, ever, happened to me.
Re: Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?
#36There's no general answer for this question.
I cannot develop on web IDEs or on a box with only 16G RAM. Some others can. I need to be able to run many containerised service locally, others might only need a node.js instance.
Depends on what you do. It's like asking whether a motorbike is suitable for your daily work. If you're a pizza delivery boy then yes. If you are transporting heavy machinery, then no.
Re: Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?
#37"if we can comfortably do development without a MacBook"? What kind of premise is that for a question? You think this forum consists only of devs using Macbooks?
I'm so deeply confused right now that I thought this thread was a joke but now I'm thinking its not. I'm in the state that shall not be named on the other side of the world from California but when I go to tech meet ups, 90% of the room is running Ubuntu/Linux Mint or some other variety with a sprinkling of Macbooks. Is it seriously that different? What do the Starbucks around that area look like? edit I should point…
Based on my business trips to the SF Bay area, it's seriously Apple land over there.
Re: Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?
#38If 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 second this recommendation. I have been dual booting Ubuntu for many years on my gaming PC's and recently bought a pre made Ubuntu machine from Dell. The least fun I ever have when installing a new machine is trying to get my fucking three monitors working the way they should.
The Dell laptop plug and played into my (not thunderbolt, wd15 or something dock) and all three monitors were literally plug and play. It felt like Windows again and blew me away.
Re: Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?
#39"if we can comfortably do development without a MacBook"? What kind of premise is that for a question? You think this forum consists only of devs using Macbooks?
Windows is out of the question for a lot of devs that live in the Unix shell. Sure, I could run a Linux VM or dual boot, but those aren't very pleasant experience.
WSL + Git Bash on Windows works wonderfully.
Re: Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Escape key, siri button, densed keyboard keys, and unreasonably huge trackpad are the things that made me switch. I am in a meeting or listen to a youtube video... I press backspace ... Oh my bad I pressed siri button - everything goes silent for 30 seconds. I disabled siri button... a few weeks later apple released an update and siri is back ... just before my important call. My anxienty level is to the roof.
How about you just disable Siri like everyone else? :-) I work with my macbook 12+ hours a day and this never, ever, happened to me.
Yes, read the last sentence of my comment. Updates might re enable it. If your battery runs out, the same happens.