Ask HN: Is ChromeOS a viable platform for serious development?

7 points by oropolo 6y ago ↗ HN

I'm mainly a web developer (React on the front, PHP and Node on the back, some hybrid mobile with Ionic). I would like to buy a Chromebook but am not sure if that's enough of a machine for development work. The price for a machine with enough hardware seems to be at the point where I might as well just buy a Windows machine (and erase the SSD, install Linux and build out my dev environment there, of course).

Is there any reason for a developer to seriously consider a Chromebook as their main machine?

2 comments

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thesuperbigfrog 6y ago ↗

It depends on your tooling needs and preferences.

I have used a Samsung Chromebook Plus and found that it worked well for web programming and scripting language development (Python and Perl).

Crostini makes it rather easy to use a surprising amount of Linux software with minimal effort. The biggest gotchas are:

1) the machine's processor which could limit software that only works on x86

2) some of the security restrictions of running in a container. Crostini might not be ideal if you are doing development that requires I/O to external devices (e.g. Android development over adb)

karmakaze 6y ago ↗

I don't know if it's still true of current Chromebooks but they used to have a way to going into 'dev mode' that behaves like a normal OS.