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Comment by frankensteins | Hacker News Reader

Here's my experience. If you develop everything locally, get a decent laptop with Ubuntu or Windows 10 Pro.

Windows 10 Pro Edition comes with WSL, a Linux subsystem which is pretty decent for my deep learning implementation and small scale test. With Xming, I can do some visualization as well. There will be downsides. If you get a laptop that just comes with Ubuntu or any Linux distro, you are good to go.

If your development is cloud based, Google is push Chrome OS into a Linux friendly direction. Chromebooks are pretty good choices, price-wise, functionality-wise and portability-wise, you name it. At the time of writing (July 20s, 2018), Pixelbook and a few more Chromebooks receive the support of Linux container. More will be supported.

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Am also evaluating migrating to chrome for all development. Currently using a re-purposed core-i5 work laptop, that boots lubuntu into ram. Runs vs code quite spiffily. As well as standard lxterm. And a complementary ubuntu micro instance that has been on forever on gcloud ;)

ChromeOS supports Linux via a custom container or VM. So you have access to all ChromeOS APIs. I assume virtualized graphics hardware will be accessible as well. Android Studio with device debugging bridge should also be available shortly. As will the ability to run most apk binaries.

Main concern is probably in choosing a 64-bit ARM based laptop. Such as the hexacore Samsung model. Eventually I can foresee running into a portability issue. Perhaps with a library dependency. Or digital content creation tools such as Blender or Adobe. Will always have a cloud instance or backup gaming laptop running Win10 to fall back on. But for mobile development and meetings in cafes, I think it will prove ideal.

In addition to some newer models supporting Linux containers, many older Intel-based chromebooks run smoothly using GalliumOS. It's a spin of Xubuntu designed specifically for chromebooks, and I've been using it for about 8 months now with zero issues.

If he owns an older compatible Macbook and want to get a taste for Chrome OS, He could try Cloudready from Neverware (Chromium OS), basically Chrome OS for other laptops.

https://www.neverware.com/#introtext-3

https://guide.neverware.com/supported-devices/

I haven't used it enough to know what its limits are but there's a lot to like with Windows Subsystem for Linux running either Ubuntu or Debian. Compared with macOS, it's current (apt-get to your heart's content), as opposed to macOS' terminal environment, which is hopelessly out of date. I really like what Microsoft is doing here.

What do you mean by macOS' terminal environment is hopelessly out of date?

Not OP, but guessing it's things like having Python 2 instead of Python 3 installed out of the box. It took them forever to update to Git version > 2.0.0 too.

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