I agree that Chromebooks are not the ideal learning device for coding. I was thinking general schooling and glossed over your earlier comment about teaching coding. I think they can probably work there, but you're right that a "real" computer is a better choice for that.
There is a HUGE divide between production and consumer devices that keeps increasing every year. People don't have multi-use devices. Many of my peers use their iPad for everything or even just their phone.
Other than coding and video editing Chromebooks are pretty just as capable as a laptop in terms of production.
Example: I needed to re-image my laptop at work (I have 3 desktops, 2 iPads and one laptop) and I realized that my use of the laptop is the same as a Chromebook. I had absolutely no files on the computer that I needed to get off before re-imaging. Everything was Bit Torrent Sync and Git and the rest were just a few programs that were easily installed or on the "cloud" aka Google and Amazon's computers.
My own use of computers has always been desktop for video, image editing and coding (I need that screen space and a reference screen). I find laptops to always be very limiting for my production and that a Chromebook becomes a thin client with ssh and remote desktop. My $1,000 laptop is used like a $300 Chromebook.
No fancy IDE, but lots of actual learning to code.
> "With JupyterHub you can create a multi-user Hub which spawns, manages, and proxies multiple instances of the single-user Jupyter notebook server. Due to its flexibility and customization options, JupyterHub can be used to serve notebooks to a class of students, a corporate data science group, or a scientific research group."
I have grown less and less fond of Python but I still use Jupyter with other languages and I have it running on my personal server.
It's slightly more expensive than its Pi contemporary, but that's expected when everyone keeps flocking to the Pi and the alternative can't make use of the same volume discounts and self-fund engineering to put new board revisions out every year. And even for all that, it's a popular alternative—you're not left hanging out in no-man's land with some exotic hardware. Check the hackerboards.com surveys from over the years that show it trailing the Pi(s).
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec...
(It's pretty easy to enable developer mode in order to allow unsigned code to run, and then Ubuntu/other Linux can run it in a chroot, though education/corporate deployments can/should prohibit that by policy, so isn't relevant to the larger discussion, though it means personal ChromeOS laptops can be quite functional.)
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec...
crosh> ssh
The 'ssh' command has been removed. Please install the official SSH extension:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pnhechapfaindjhompbnflcldabbghjo
crosh>https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForChromeBooks
I might pick one up at Fry's today just for giggles.
Update: Tried to run the NaCl Development Environment on my macbook to get a taste and it just crashes on launch. Seems like a lot of people have the same problem on chromebooks too: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nacl-development-e...
So maybe I'm not so excited to run out and buy a chromebook for development just yet.
Absolutely. Most 12 year old kids don't know about file size units. Relative file sizes, converting between units etc. There's so much incidental learning that occurs too. The other day i was discussing file sizes with a student and we observed that there was a difference between a file's reported size vs size on disk. This led to a great little segue about physical disk structure, tracks, sectors and clusters. The boy was fascinated with some lower level detail. All that learning would have been lost if we were using a gimped cloud based FS.
These days, those are abstractions as well. That's basically the API that the mass storage controller presents to the OS. I'm not sure you could explain a hard drive to a lay person anymore. Most of the time, I'm kind of surprised that they work at all.
Only if you are using them wrong; while I think iPads are poor tools forany purposes, including that one, from a UI perspective (or, at least, inefficient by the time you address the interface issues), iPads and Chromebooks don't restrict the ability to teach full-spectrum computing, as, they are perfectly capable tools for accessing and interacting with general purpose computers.
Now, clearly, the exact details of how you use them in that teaching and th supporting infrastructure might be slightly different than if you were giving students PCs, but then, you need a network environment with educational infrastructure if you are teaching full-spectrum computing with modern relevance anyway, and the detail are going to vary by what you use on the front end. That doesn't rule out any front end choice, it just means that the front end choice impacts other choices.
I understand that you're (probably) not on the VSCode team, but if you have any influence to get somebody who can reach out there, that'd be swell. Anyone using VSCode on Linux seems to be relying on MS's freely-downloadable-but-technically-not-OSS builds, and just building wrapper installers around that. I might be wrong. Something like diverse builds that aren't dependent on Microsoft would be the first step to getting VSCode into various distros' system images so you can do "sudo apt-get install vscode" on Debian or possibly find it in the default install on Ubuntu.
1. https://headmelted.com/why-we-need-the-best-tools-on-chromeb...
crouton unlocked a bit more functionality giving you the possibility of a Linux base layer, albeit likely not a great idea to have kids put the machines into dev mode. But that might be workable if staff did it.
I've dogfooded a bunch of the Web Development content we make at Udacity using either a pure Chromebook or Chromebook + Crouton.
Correct me if I'm wrong but is this not the hack where every time you boot your system it tells you to press a key to reset it and if you press that key it instantly blanks the partition.
This seem absurd even for an expert user to use full time let alone school kids.
It's true, though, that the whole process needs to be made more straightforward and easily circumventable. It's just not a part of crouton.
Just finding it ridiculous that HN users suggest this with a straight face every time we have this discussion.
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/os-veri...
Also is there a PURE Chromebook (or Chromebook+Android apps) setup to take an Udacity Android course?
Never got the point of a browser based OS.