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Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?

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Re: Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?

#111
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use MacBook at work and Windows at home. > Unix Shell Cmder[0] is what I use, it supports all commands that I use on my work MacBook. If I need something Linux-specific like imagemagick, I just use WSL[1]. Some say it's slow but it runs fine. Maybe it's the fact that my PC is like 10x more powerful than my MacBook Pro because it's standard desktop computer with water cooling. Bottom line, as someone who is using bo…

In my experience it's fine if you're using the stock terminal app on macOS and then go back to windows, but if you use anything like iTerm then cmder will drive you mad.

Re: Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?

#112

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 also recommend Thinkpads T series or X1. Mine works great with Fedora (and formerly Ubuntu). Awesome keyboards

Re: Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?

#114
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad an XPS owner (9350), I will never own a dell again.

Could you provide more information why?

The experience I had with its touchpad and screen. The screen is mitigated by buying the FHD version. But the touchpad never works right. Basically two finger scrolling has never worked right. It’s almost like lag in that it’ll keep scrolling after I lift my fingers. Only the actual experience is worse than that. Issue persists past firmware and driver updates/changes.

Re: Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?

#115
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XPS 13 user here, big fan

Counterpoint here, XPS 13 user, hate it. Worst coil whine I've heard on anything, fan sounds like it's catching, WiFi on Ubuntu very unreliable. Trackpad is atrocious. I think it varies a lot between models.

Do you get coil whine when you plug in a wired mouse and move it around? My office just got a few Latitude ultrabooks and they all make weird sounds when we use an external mouse.

Re: Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?

#116
post #25
post #13

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…

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.

If you don't use capslock you can set the keyboard to map that to escape.

Re: Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?

#117

I don't understand the authors choice to limit himself to Apple or Google. You've been able to do development on Linux notebooks (and Windows notebooks, of course) since decades. I can absolutely recommend Dell (and ThinkPad, though not from personal experience) notebooks with Ubuntu preinstalled/officially supported. Or is the question if a Chromebook is en vogue to use this season at Starbucks?

There's one Dell model that all of the hardcore Linux devs in the office use that I've heard called the rough equivalent of the MacBook Pro. XPS 15, I believe.

Look up Dell Developer Edition to see the lineup options. I went with a beefed up Precision 7710 that can handle 3 hard drives (2 NVMe and 1 2.5) and 64 GB of RAM personally. Started with just 16gb and 1 drive but I like the room to upgrade over time. :)

Re: Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?

#118

I don't understand the authors choice to limit himself to Apple or Google. You've been able to do development on Linux notebooks (and Windows notebooks, of course) since decades. I can absolutely recommend Dell (and ThinkPad, though not from personal experience) notebooks with Ubuntu preinstalled/officially supported. Or is the question if a Chromebook is en vogue to use this season at Starbucks?

Dell XPS series looks fantastic from the outside, but there are a few things that stop me from wanting one, that I've mostly observed from other owners of XPS laptops, having not owned one myself.

1. The keyboard. It's apparently not so bad once you get used to it, but compared to typing on my Thinkpad I find myself unhappy with it; it feels spongier in comparison, and the key travel is pretty short (though not nearly as bad as the Apple butterfly switches.)

2. The docking situation. Thunderbolt 3 docks are not really that appealing to me because it becomes difficult to drive many displays at 60 FPS with them. In all fairness, the Thinkpad workstation dock can also only drive 2 displays 60hz 1080p OR 30hz 4k, but at least it's reliable, and my Thunderbolt port is still free if I want more displays at the cost of convenience.

3. Linux support is actually really awful. The XPS 13 developer edition is supposedly an exception, but I have heard that it's really only well supported with the exact version of Ubuntu it ships with, and that updates have occasionally broke the system. Admittedly, the same can be said for some Lenovo laptops. My P51 is pretty bad under Linux (though it's gotten to the point of being usable, thankfully.)

4. Reliability. A coworker has replaced his XPS like 2 or 3 times now, and one of the chargers also died. I hope that's the exception. Obviously even Thinkpads are not as rock solid as they used to be, but even though I found this level of failure to be pretty extreme, it lines up with what I've witnessed with other Dell laptops and is one of the primary reasons I've never owned one.

Honestly, the choice of laptop comes down a lot to priority, but I feel like XPS exceeds mostly in the categories of portability and style, two things that I do not value nearly as much as robustness and performance.

More than anything, the most important thing you can do is research the crap out of any option you're considering buying. I've found that Arch Linux wiki pages about laptops are quite useful, with the caveat that you have to be careful to not assume two similar models will perform similarly since that is often not the case.

Re: Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?

#119
post #25

Earlier 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.

If you don't use capslock you can set the keyboard to map that to escape.

I think that's the de facto control key on Macbooks since they aren't in the bottom left corner. It'd be cool if we could configure a single caps lock keypress to Esc and holding it down to Control.

Re: Ask HN: Are Chromebooks ready for serious development?

#120
post #64

I couldn't stand anymore the stream of mistakes that macOS had become so I had installed ChromeOS as main OS on MacBook Pro. This is excellent combination. Mac is still superior hardware wise and ChromeOS is really nice graphical environment for web browsing, HBO Go, Spotify, YouTube, Google Play Music, Google Photos, Google Drive, Inbox etc. Anyway most of the time I spent inside terminal - crouton - Debian stretch…

How'd you do this? Couldn't you just use Chrome on OS X as a ChromeOS of sorts?
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