441–450 of 507 posts
I'm confused. People said the Surface Pro was overpriced. This thing does much, much less than a Surface Pro but costs $300 more. And it's being praised? Wow.
It's a laptop with a good screen. Pretty much what people have been wanting for years.
Pathetic is what it is.
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People are happy using Chromebooks as development platforms because they're $250 for an ARM laptop with long battery life, and you can hack them to run Ubuntu, not because Chrome OS has any merit on its own. Things that are cute on a $250 machine are not so cute on a $1,300 machine...
I believe it's much easier to hack this one to run Linux than any ARM-based Chromebook. It certainly has enough memory, storage and processing power to be a decent development machine (provided you avoid heavy IDEs). It's likely possible to even run Windows on this machine.
There are only three meaningful things you can do with a computer with specs like this: development, design, or gaming. And yet ChromeOS can't do any of these things. Perhaps this is a vanity product for the wealthy. But wealthy people are going to just surf the web on an iPad. I really don't get this product.
For an extra $200, you can get twice the RAM, four times the storage, a better battery, and the ability to install whatever OS suits your fancy.
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>And yet ChromeOS can't do any of these things. Am I just imagining all the posts I've seen on HN from people talking about being extremely happy using Chromebooks as development platforms?
People are happy using Chromebooks as development platforms because they're $250 for an ARM laptop with long battery life, and you can hack them to run Ubuntu, not because Chrome OS has any merit on its own. Things that are cute on a $250 machine are not so cute on a $1,300 machine...
I'll probably buy the Pixel as well. The more I use ChromeOS, the more I realize how much time I waste on other crap that doesn't really help me get done what I want to do. And using ChromiumOS, there is the "dev_install" command which will set up a Gentoo chroot in /usr/local, that points to the machine that you built it on, and if you're running the devserver, you can run emerge pkgname, it will shoot it off to the server to build it, and once it's done compiling, installs in the chroot. There is also gmerge which will install ChromiumOS packages for you (e.g. A new version of the browser or maybe a newer kernel, without rebuilding everything) OR you can build a new image, hit up the Help page in settings and it will generate a diff on the server and update the entire install to the latest image. It's really an interesting setup, and I really like it.
Everything goes through gerrit, so you can even help out with version bumps and or patches fairly easily. The documentation is really good, and if you happen to hang out on IRC, the ChromiumOS developers are extremely helpful when something isn't clear, and even update the documentation for clarity.
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I'd argue that Unity looks much, much better on high DPI. I run it on an old crappy 1024x768 and a newer 1920x1080 of around the same size, and the icons/launcher actually look sane at almost double the DPI of the older screen. Unity makes the low-DPI computer look (and feel) like a toy, but I like it a lot on my new computer. I'd agree with you if you're running Gnome 2, or KDE, though.
Well the thing is that most people don't prefer Unity and neither do I. I don't really think that there are so many devs using Unity either.
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If you're logging on to a remote server to do development,you're not taking advantage of the dual core i5 or 4GB of RAM. You're logged into an image that's giving you maybe 1 GHz of CPU and 512MB of RAM. You're buying a $1,300 machine to do development on a $300 machine, over a shitty internet connection.
It depends what you're working on. If you're doing heavy client-side work (e.g. WebGL) then a beefy client is preferable to a beefy server. I agree though that I probably wouldn't buy this for development work. But I do think that browser's are still better on beefy hardware than on gimped hardware.
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Action.IO... Cloud9... Koding...
What about them ? I honestly don't think of them as IDEs more as text editors with syntax highlighting.