I'm thinking of getting a Chromebook for dev work, with the view of just using it as a dumb client for terminals and browser to cloud servers. I'm worried I'll buy then wish I bought a proper machine. Anyone thought the same then regretted it?
Crostini, the linux VM layer, is very much still a work in progress. If you are doing your development in hosted VMs, then this isn't so much an issue. There are some minor nits around key mapping issues, but I'm looking to evaluate Android-based terminal apps to get around those (since they are mostly related to Chrome taking priority for certain key combinations when using an embedded shell).
I love certain things about the keyboard, but absolutely miss little things from MacOS, like their support for easily entering accented characters by holding down a letter for a moment and then selecting the desired accent.
Being able to powerwash your laptop, and then login to see everything basically the way you left it, is pretty powerful. As someone who has to also support the IT needs of a small team, the potential peace of mind this offers is huge.
But it's not 100% just yet, so I haven't rolled it out to the rest of the team.
Do you know what those reasons in fact are? Or is it just a gut feel?
Things in my situation that I think make this work well are: I have a "real" machine in a desktop (or a work laptop, if that's what an employer gives me), I don't consider any laptop my primary personal machine in any case. I'm happy running what I want in a linux CLI-only environment. (You _can_ do gui, but you start pushing the hardware limits of the lower end machines pretty hard.) I want a light, cheap, reasonably secure, and ultimately disposable machine that I'm not concerned about tossing around, throwing in my backpack, leaving out on a coffee shop table while i use the restroom, etc...
Issues I've hit: Poor/no docker support. I've just remoted back to home for things that need it and that works, but isn't ideal if you want to work disconnected. Occasional linux apps that require an X server -- either don't offer a CLI or do something stupid where even the CLI tries to connect to X. Internal storage tends to be limited and non-upgradable, SD cards are the portable option, but slow, and lugging around an external HD is a pain.
(Also, I haven't actually played with the new crostini stuff at all yet. I'm still on an older machine with crouton.)
Docker now working https://www.reddit.com/r/Crostini/comments/9jabhq/docker_now...
My stable channel just got Crostini support, but I found that it takes up 25% of my storage space and it's been flaky to install. Instead, I use Termux.
I still have to visit my Mac/Linux boxen often for graphics editing, a proper editor/IDE like Atom, and certain other apps like pandoc. But as a daily browser and command-line runner, it's great. (Okay, some web sites are still really slow due to the underpowered CPU on this cheap model.)
MS Security have the right to dip into you machine anytime they fancy it too.
Those are the developers creating macOS, iOS and watchOS applications in Objective-C and Swift, not the ones using macOS as pretty UNIX.
Once they add this and fix the lack of GPU support, I'll finally be down to one travel laptop.
I purchased my Chromebook Pixel (2015, codename Samus) with the same idea, and it was great for the first few months: I slowly started using Google products for everything, so my development work usually meant using the SSH extension[0] and connecting to a Google Cloud machine I rented. It appealed to my "digital nomad" tendencies, and really made me feel like I could work from anywhere.
Unfortunately, the "digital nomad" tendency is often expensive and unsustainable, and I found myself spending $50/mo for a VPS with sufficient resources and storage that I didn't even own. I was excited that Chrome OS and Android are open source, but when I looked into making changes I quickly realized that the core was open source while most of the actual applications were proprietary (from the clock to the calculator to the SMS app, everything).
I started down the road to Chrome OS because I thought it would be a liberating exercise in minimalism, but it turns out that I was overpaying to rent a server so that I could use an often-proprietary OS from a gigantic corporation funded by adtech. Bad.
It took some time, but I eventually figured out how to install another OS on my machine (Arch Linux) and I've seen a boost to both my productivity and my computer knowledge. A VPS is a great place to learn the basics of Linux, but I've learned a ton just managing my own device and understanding how all of the various pieces work together.
Plus, now I can run applications on my computer (!) without the requirement that they're Android apps (!!) or Chrome extensions (!!!). Sure, the UX isn't quite as polished as Chrome OS, but who cares?
Chrome OS aside, the Chromebook is fine. Sure, it was a massive pain in the ass to realize that Google doesn't run mainline Linux, so it took about a year or two to get Google's patches merged into mainline so I didn't have to use a fork[1], but for the most part the device itself is fine. I've had some weird impossible-to-debug issues (e.g. half of the screen going dim) and a handful of annoyances (e.g. you can never remove Google's "WARNING: THIS IS NOT CHROME OS" warning on boot), but I can live with them.
In the future I'll never buy another Chromebook, and I'll likely never buy another Google product, but at the time it was what I wanted and I learned a lot from my experience.
Good luck!
[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell-exten... [1]: https://github.com/raphael/linux-samus
But yes, as the other commenter said, your experience might be different if you tried Crostini. I use a Pixelbook at work (I'm one of the speakers) daily and have abandoned the MBP.
ThinkPad quality isn't what it used to be, but if you just want a solid, no-frills, easily upgraded Linux laptop, the thinkpad t-series and x-series laptops are still the best option out there, in my opinion.