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Comment by alpaca9 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

> 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.

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