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Comment by Brian_K_White | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I've ever seen a single chromebook in the wild being used by a real person for real. I am sure they exist of course. I must have even seen one and forgotten it. But in all the years since they have existed, and all the varied people I've come in contact with in all those years, if I can't think of any, then the percentage is low.

I think a relative's kid had one issued in high school a few years ago. There you go. One out of who knows how many hundreds, and that one was not even a voluntary purchase. In fact that same kid built himself a budget desktop gaming & streaming rig when deciding what to do with his own money. So I wouldn't even call him a chromebook user. The chromebook was just school equipment he had to operate like a copier or projector.

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Yea Chromebooks are wildly popular in American education. They've replaced the school desktop PC.

The problem is, we have no way of knowing if our personal experiences are actually representative of everyone else's experience. I have 2 Chromebooks but I'm a computer nerd so I know I'm not your average user, but going off 2025 shipment data, it's something like 223 million Windows laptops to 25 million Mac's and 22 million Chromebooks.

My wife has one. Been rock solid for years. I recommend them to relatives who just do email and browsing etc.

I used one in the wild, but I was working for Google at the time.

It would be hell being forced to use these things for your job. What departments were? Because I can't imagine a software developer using one.

Vscode can run in a browser, your code is often in git, and it normally is going through CI/CD (being compiled/packaged/deployed elsewhere).

All you need for that is a dumb terminal.

Boy I hope VSCode runs better in the browser than all of Microsoft's other terrible web apps.

https://vscode.dev/

I wasn't forced to use anything. This was in the mid-2010s when the first ARM Chromebook came out; I bought one out of curiosity. But I learned about it at work.

Independent of that: some of the modern higher end Chromebooks can be quite nice, and you can (A) run general Linux on them, and (B) VS Code dev tunnel in the browser runs on them just as well as on any other laptop.

yeah i forgot about their linux capabilities they got. In my mind they didn't seem a lot different than simple android tablets with a keyboard but indeed if the hardware isn't bad it could be valid option now I think about it.

> In my mind they didn't seem a lot different than simple android tablets with a keyboard [...]

Well, that's also what a MacBook Air is. And a MacBook Neo is the same but with a phone's processor, instead of a tablet.

But that first tiny ARM Chromebook I tried in mid 2010s actually sucked a lot. It was cheap, though. It was the time of the netbook craze.

Yeah but these MacBooks run MacOS, which is a fully fledged desktop OS compared to ChromeOS which looks and feels a lot more like Android and lacks features in some areas.

ChromeOS is a Linux, and you can run anything Linux in them, including all the command line apps you like.

Beyond what was provided natively in ChromeOS, you could often get something like GalliumOS working on them. My old Chromebook was fairly painful to use as a Chromebook, but GalliumOS made it pretty snappy and fun. Unfortunately that project seems unmaintained now

I have seen several because family members have owned them. They are nondescript black rectangles that are owned by cheap people and kids. There is no reason for you to notice them in particular and it's useful to remember our perception isn't a representative sample of anything.

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