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Comment by septic-liqueur | Hacker News Reader

Couldn't agree more. I recently bought a cheap $200 Chromebook and I have to say that it outperforms my high end Windows + WSL2 machine from work for programming related tasks.

Linux just works without all the WSL issues, I can run Visual Studio Code, Docker and anything that I tried so far.

It's actually a delight to work on. I can only imagine how much better yet it will be with a top tier Chromebook

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It’s fine if what you like about Linux is running Linux apps. But for me, it’s the privacy, the control, the choice of desktop environments etc. I can run VS Code on anything. And Firefox runs like garbage on a Chromebook, so, what’s really the benefit of using the only OS that won’t even run my preferred browser?

I find this very hard to believe. There is no "$200 Chromebook" that will ever out-perform a "high-end" machine no matter if it's running Windows + WSL2 or not. So what are the specs of this "high-end" machine?

they did say "for programming related tasks" which could just be running vim.

I agree though, this claim seems unlikely to me.

I meant to say that it "outperforms" less in terms of speed (although it's not bad relative to the price of the laptop) but more in terms of developer experience. Everything just works in Linux and it's fast compared to WSL which I get constant issues.

The issue I see with WSL all the time is long waits as things start up. I have no idea what it's doing, but it is painfully slow starting nearly anything up. It's like drive reads are one character at a time or something! Once it gets going, things are fine.

WSL still has a lot of problems. You can find lots of issues on github that are common problems but yet open for years without a solution. Examples:

* Slower IO -- not sure if this can ever be fixed, but quite a bummer * cpu utilization at 100% due to an issue with WSLg #6982 * no access to Internet when host is connected to VPN #5068 * very slow network in some situations #4901

These are not some edge cases -- they affect things that I use every day. Some of them have workarounds but overall this is still not very usable. I decided that it was easier to just get a separate machine and install Linux on it.

This sounds like it is more about GUI latency due to a more agile desktop environment.

Sort of like how a Pentium 3 feels snappy on Windows XP and yet, this 13th Gen Intel Core i5 on Windows 11 feels sluggish. There is WAY more processing power on my newer machine but it doesn't translate to a snappy interface.

Nope, WSL(2) is just slow in weird ways. Launching a GUI-less Python interpreter takes several seconds for me on a powerful workstation.

I have a small amd 7840 (win 4) coming. I originally think as my win max 2 work quite well … then max 2 all goes down hill. The Ubuntu lts no longer work. As I use it just for wsl2 development and use got to sync I erase it. But then never be able to install again. Only Ubuntu non lts installed.

For Gui. Too hard. Done it once when win 11 coming up.

It is now a dreadful wait for win4 to come. Wsl2 …

For those suggest dual boot I have a whole thinkpad X now only in windows and only if it’s do a bit action in the boot loader.

May be I should try Chromebook.

This is generally true if you include time spent rebooting and applying updates, and dismissing "knock, knock, it's Valentine's Day" notifications from windows, etc.

Depends on programming language. Not every compiler benefits linearly from 16 cores.

a $200 chromebook blows away a $1000 ipad for develompent. It's got nothing to do with raw horsepower but rather software support. for example chromeOS has developer tools. the ipad doesn't.

Do you have VSCode and Docker installed on the Chromebook?

I have been interested in buying a Chromebook for dev purposes.

Yep, just launch the built-in Linux VM (i.e. search "linux" in settings and click one or two buttons).

Then install VSCode and Docker as you would on any Linux system.

You can then launch them from the ChromeOS desktop environment as if they were native ChromeOS apps. It's really quite seamless, much more so than WSL (and better performance IME).

Don't. Install code-server on a remote server. Your chromeOS device is a just a front-end, you don't need to actually run anything on it besides a chrome browser pointed at your code-server instance and an ssh connection.

Yeah we’re going to need specs of both machines to begin to believe that lol

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