Ask HN: Anyone using a chromebook?
As per the title - anyone using a chromebook with chrubuntu or crouton for dev? What are your impressions? I'm looking for a new machine that will be predominantly an "on the road" laptop - I want something light and quick and I'm trying to decide if a chromebook would fit the bill or if I should just stump up and get a macbook air?
3 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 16.6 ms ] threadI mainly use only two languages for my projects: Python and Scala.
Python works pretty well and performs pretty fast. Also ipython becomes really handy in operating system that has only web browser. No issues here.
But with Scala there are a few significant issues. Main issue is compilation speed. My small pet project (5-6 KLOC) takes 9 minutes to make full rebuild. 9 fucking minutes. This is clearly embarrassing. Another issue is about installing Scala and all that JRE-stuff, which doesn't work out of the box, so i have to tweak and setup it by myself.
So chromebook works pretty well as "on-the-go" laptop for some cases (reading, surfing web, writing a bits of code in scripting languages). I really do enjoy its battery life and simplicity of ChromeOS combined with power of fully-featured linux. But for me chromebook in not the best choice and i have to use mostly my old heavy laptop for development.
P.S. Also i really miss my Emacs in ChromeOS.
Another thing that I have been looking at is online IDEs. I have tried codenvy.com and devtable.com. These both look promising, but I have used my quota of Google Appengine Apps trying them out. I have to wait a few more days to really give them a good try.
The real reason I bought another computer was to replace my original laptop. It was perfectly fine except the screen broke. I would have fixed the screen, but I wasn't sure exactly what the problem was and it would cost as much as a Chromebook.
I ended up getting the Acer C7 model with 2GB of RAM and a 16GB ssd. Overall, I am satisfied, but I am figuring somethings out. If nothing works, I can remote desktop into my old laptop.
I would recommend the Acer over the Samsung because the Acer is much more fixable and upgradeable. I plan on adding either 4 or 8GB of ram to this. I might also swap out for a plain 250GB laptop hard drive. The battery is also swappable, but the 4-5 hours I get is enough for me.