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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?

#121

Post by zrobotics »

pahool wrote: post #86
lettergram wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use my Arch Linux T450 Lenovo laptopand it's a beast. $500 on eBay + $180 for SSD + $150 for RAM. My laptop has 20Gb of RAM, 2x 1Tb SSDs, and 10 hours battery life, with 1 hot swap batteries pushing me to 18 hours battery life if I want it. Total cost: ~$900 with tax and shipping IMO best track pad outside of Apple + best laptop keyboard

this looks like my dream machine. Two questions: how is the fan noise, and where did you find 1tb ssd drives so cheap?

I'm also running a t450, albeit w/ only 16gb ram and a 500gb ssd. Fan noise is not bad, certainly not loud enough to be distracting. I purchased mine refurb through Amazon for the 6 month warranty, but didn't need to use it. Wifi works great under Debian, but I could not get the Bluetooth card to work reliably. I replaced it with a card designed for the t430, but it wasn't all that easy. I would advise just using a USB Bluetooth adapter.

The only other complaint I have is that palm rejection for the track pad is poor, I eventually disabled the track pad entirely. I prefer the track point anyway, but I know a lot of people hate using them. Keyboard is excellent, IMO better than a MacBook. I would be curious, perhaps the OP used 2 500gb SSDs, you can get drive caddys to replace the DVD drive (I kept it, as I still need to read disks relatively often).

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

#122

Post by jimmies »

llogiq wrote: post #19

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

>The downside is that I still have to press Ctrl + L at bootup and avoid pressing SPACE before the machine boots, otherwise the machine might try to overwrite my system with a clean ChromeOS install

You can use flashrom to flash the UEFI firmware from MrChromebox. It will get rid of the ChromeOS recovery stuff and makes it a proper laptop. Remember to backup your data, as always.

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

#124

Post by copperx »

bengale wrote: post #116
yani wrote: 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.

Anyone sane has already remapped it to control.

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

#125

Post by jasonvorhe »

shiado wrote: post #113

Chromebooks have been ready for serious development for a while now, provided the limited hardware can suffice. The last release of this was a year ago, so perhaps there are better options now? https://galliumos.org/

That's still just another Linux distribution with a few improvements to Chromebook-compatibility. I'm still hoping for a team to form around Chromium OS to better integrate open source into it, so that people can run something like Chrome OS without having to have a Google account. I'm disappointed that there isn't something like a new approach to Firefox OS using Chromium OS from Mozilla. In a couple of years, Google will move everything to Fuchsia and away from Linux and then everyone who doesn't want to run Windows/macOS/Fuchsia for privacy or "openness" reasons will still be stuck with the classic desktop Linux without the improvements of storing userdata in some kind of personal cloud per default.

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

#126

Post by Can_Not »

dmihal wrote: post #27
aerovistae wrote: post #4

"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.

Just full-screening a VMware or Virtual box with your favorite Linux distro is a much better experience than what else has been mentioned so far, and I still hate it. I wish stable Linux laptops were a thing. Currently I have to use a bash script to detect headphones, turn brightness up/down, and my suspend/lock has inconsistent and strange behavior. On the other hand, it's still a whole world better than the shitware and random unannounced update restarts windows 10 forces you though.

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

#127

Post by brazzledazzle »

_asummers wrote: post #102
magoon wrote: 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…

Counter-anecdote to OSX Docker: My OSX Docker experience was nothing short of painful. Anything CPU intensive brought the entire laptop to a crawl. When I went down to metal noticed at least a 10-15x performance improvement, due to the way XHyve does things with the disk (I think?). This may have changed recently, but I won't run Docker on OSX anymore unless I have to.

I’m not sure how long ago that was but there has been at least one update over the last few months that change how they use storage. It had to wipe the VM (subsequently deleting containers) so warned me about it first.

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

#128

Post by brazzledazzle »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #119
bengale wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use mine for escape and hadn’t considered using it for control. Is it more comfortable?

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

#129

Post by wilsonnb »

vuln wrote: post #89
lettergram wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use my Arch Linux T450 Lenovo laptopand it's a beast. $500 on eBay + $180 for SSD + $150 for RAM. My laptop has 20Gb of RAM, 2x 1Tb SSDs, and 10 hours battery life, with 1 hot swap batteries pushing me to 18 hours battery life if I want it. Total cost: ~$900 with tax and shipping IMO best track pad outside of Apple + best laptop keyboard

I love my x220 came with an i7 upgraded the RAM to 16GB, slapped in a 256GB SSD. The last modification I have to complete is the Full HD screen conversion, I am really excited about this. I have a few of the extended and regular batteries. I tend to just use the extended battery. I daily carry my x220 and I am not sure what I'll replace it with. I also have a mid 2014 MacBook air but the specs are mediocre. The only…

The x220 is too heavy for daily carry in my opinion, plus the screen can be pretty bad if you don't get the IPS one.

I'd have trouble recommending it to anyone these days unless they were looking for something really cheap.

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

#130

Post by yhylord »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #57
namanyayg wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How has your experience been with battery and portability? I'm leaning towards buying a new laptop that I can carry around comfortably. I'm comfortable with remotely working on a more powerful PC if needed. Any models you'd recommend? I much rather would pick anything else over a MacBook.

I've got a Dell XPS 13", and I'm absoluting loving it; especially the keyboard works great for me as a touch typist/vi user, which I didn't expect since the keyboard is what ThinkPads are acclaimed for. That said, battery mileage is no match to Apple notebooks in my experience. I can get 3 to 4 hours max, though I'm occasionally doing CPU-intense stuff which will reduce this to 1-2 hours. If Apple actually would prod…

Maybe try to replace the battery with a new one. My previous one's capacity dropped to ~40%, which would be ~4 hours max under light use, but after I installed a new battery it bounced back to 8~9 hours.
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