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You can now run Linux apps on Chrome OS

techcrunch.com

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Re: You can now run Linux apps on Chrome OS

#11

Post by ansible »

fareesh wrote: post #2

Are there any good reasons why a developer would buy a Chromebook over some other laptop, unless they are developing for the Chromebook itself?

I have been using a Chromebook as my daily driver for nearly 2 years now.

Most of the time, I'm either at home or at work, so I just remote log into my development systems. I, personally, don't really need to lug around my entire development environment, though I used to be in that school of thought.

So, given that I really just need SSH, a decent Chromebook is cheap (as others mentioned), and can have a decent keyboard with long battery life. The one I have is around 1kg, so it is very "handy", and I carry it everywhere, as I would have a notepad in earlier days.

Re: You can now run Linux apps on Chrome OS

#13

Post by pavanky »

fareesh wrote: post #12
romanovcode wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chromebooks are cheap.

I wouldn't call $999 cheap

I needed a machine to ssh from and have a browser. $250 acer chromebook with crouton mostly works.

This is not my primary machine however. I only use it at home to ssh into my desktop once in a while.

Re: You can now run Linux apps on Chrome OS

#14

Post by hawski »

fareesh wrote: post #2

Are there any good reasons why a developer would buy a Chromebook over some other laptop, unless they are developing for the Chromebook itself?

Cheap and lightweight, but of reasonable quality. You'll get Linux out of the box. Effortless updates. Lots of battery life - my Chromebook came with 13 hours of battery and it is a few years old machine at this point.

Re: You can now run Linux apps on Chrome OS

#16

Post by fareesh »

ansible wrote: post #11
fareesh wrote: post #2

Are there any good reasons why a developer would buy a Chromebook over some other laptop, unless they are developing for the Chromebook itself?

I have been using a Chromebook as my daily driver for nearly 2 years now. Most of the time, I'm either at home or at work, so I just remote log into my development systems. I, personally, don't really need to lug around my entire development environment, though I used to be in that school of thought. So, given that I really just need SSH, a decent Chromebook is cheap (as others mentioned), and can have a decent keybo…

I'm trying to setup something similar - do you use Wake on LAN to turn the computer on? Or do you leave it on? Do you have a static IP or do you use some kind of dynamic DNS service?

Re: You can now run Linux apps on Chrome OS

#17

Post by hutzlibu »

fareesh wrote: post #2

Are there any good reasons why a developer would buy a Chromebook over some other laptop, unless they are developing for the Chromebook itself?

Sadly ... driver Support. The main reason for me - standby and resume allways work and not only mostly ...

Re: You can now run Linux apps on Chrome OS

#18

Post by iodiniemetra »

jphalimi wrote: post #7

"Google’s PM director for Chrome OS Kan Liu told me the company was obviously aware that people were using Crouton to do this before. But doing this also meant doing away with all of the security features that come with Google’s operating system." I don't know if I am the only one, but this one made me laugh.

Yes, disabling signed boot and allowing untrusted, unsandboxed code is what sets chromebooks apart from the competition.

Of course, you can do away with these checks by entering developer mode.

Re: You can now run Linux apps on Chrome OS

#19

Post by greghendershott »

fareesh wrote: post #2

Are there any good reasons why a developer would buy a Chromebook over some other laptop, unless they are developing for the Chromebook itself?

It can make sense if you're developing for Linux -- for instance web apps that will run on Linux in production.

It can also make sense if you like physical function keys and/or a touch screen larger than a function key row. :)

I used a Chromebook Pixel with Crouton very happily for a year. Granted I spend 95% of my time in Emacs and a web browser.

Re: You can now run Linux apps on Chrome OS

#20

Post by derefr »

rukittenme wrote: post #10
timvisee wrote: post #4

I wonder why they are using a VM running Debian for Linux applications, as Chrome OS is already Linux (Gentoo) based itself.

If I had to guess its because they want to move to their own proprietary systems and don't want to support backwards compatibility with "native" linux applications.

Exactly–ChromeOS being Linux-based is, at this point, an implementation detail. No ChromeOS "apps" depend on that fact, because they all run under their own VMs or ABI sandboxes. This means that Google could make a Fuchsia-based ChromeOS and nothing in userland (save for the code of those VMs and sandboxes) would have to change.
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