Hacker News Reader

Comment by doktrin | Hacker News Reader

Nice write up, this will definitely come in handy if I ever decide to go the Chromebook route.

However, as much as I like the thought of trying something new, I'm still having trouble justifying the purchase. In other words - why develop on a Chromebook as opposed to a lightweight notebook?

I guess it's a question of typical use case, but I don't find myself too often developing in areas without wi-fi. A 100mb /mo plan also felt like fairly sparse offerings, but it sounds like that's NBD in practice.

As far as the price point is concerned, I'm pretty sure there are refurbished lenovo x220's / 230's available for the same as a Samsung Chromebook (~$500).

Especially with regards to the latter, I guess I'd feel a little weird spending close to the same about on $ on a 3g browser with a terminal.

I'd love to hear thoughts from anyone who's moved to a Chromebook for on-the-go development.

View on HN

> In other words - why develop on a Chromebook as opposed to a lightweight notebook?

It's half the price of the Lenovo you mentioned. It has fairly long battery life, it's small yet has a full-size keyboard. It's slick hardware compared to a $299 Best Buy laptop or a netbook. But it has a whole list of disadvantages.

You can't fire up a VM. You can't browse using the actual desktop versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, or IE. You can't use software package X. You need to be connected to the internet to do development. It's just a fancy ssh/rdp terminal in this case.

I understand the romanticism about developing on a Chromebook. I love the 11" Air, and despite the low-resolution screen and low specs (ULV CPU, 2GB or 4GB RAM and 64GB/128GB SSD) you can actually get stuff done. Is it the 'Ultimate Developer PC'? No, but a great machine.

The Chromebook is far more limited, but maybe the next revision along with a regular Linux distribution will be a workable solution for the rest of us.

> It's half the price of the Lenovo you mentioned.

To clarify, I did mention the price was close to refurbished models. This isn't a like-for-like comparison, of course, but it reflects my choices as a consumer. I'm more likely to pick up a refurbished Lenovo X-series than a refurbished Chromebook, for instance.

For reference, there's a x230 on sale from the Lenovo outlet for $546 [1]. Price and availability vary, of course, but this isn't super uncommon.

[1] http://outlet.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/outlet_us/...

You get what you pay for when it comes to the Lenovo - the slightly bigger screen is available in IPS and blows the Chromebook screen away. The i5 (and available i7) is very powerful CPU, you can have 8GB of RAM and your choice of SSD/HD...

You actually get a choice of having both SSD and HD at the same time (not sure if this is what you were implying) -- since the X230 (and 220 I believe) has an mSATA slot under the palm rest. I've got mine booting off the mSATA (128 GB running Fedora), and have the spinning disk left with the factory installed Windows 7 (plus a large partition formatted ext4 for my VMs).

crouton eliminates the need for an internet connection, as well as letting you run whatever you want.

I can't say I've tried running a vm inside my chrooted OS, but I don't think there'd be anything preventing it.

I switched to the 550 from a eeepc (running debian). CrOS is the real added value, if you ask me: it's the closest thing to the "linux that just works" dream.

I'd be curious to see how the cheaper ARM Chromebook performs with these tools (especially crouton). Anyone have experience with that?

I'm happily using crouton with Ubuntu and xfce4 on ARM Chromebook. The machine is on the cheap side, especially for someone spoiled with Retina MacBook Pros like me, but the best thing about it is that it lacks a fan. The machine is completely silent (except for the noise from its capacitors), it never gets hot, and the battery life is better than advertised, and the keyboard is surprisingly good for a machine this cheap. I am not a big fan of x86 Chromebooks (to be fair, I haven't seen the Pixel yet), but the ARM one is close to a MacBook Air that's four times the price.

I don't quite understand how you can say the ARM chromebook is close to the macbook air as the dualcore A15 in that thing is nowhere near the MBA performance wise. I don't doubt that it's a nice machine but ARM still has a very long way to go until they can match even low-end intel IVB CPUs. Right now these A15s are just a little better than a 2011 budget aton core from intel.

> Right now these A15s are just a little better than a 2011 budget aton core from intel.

Which is conveniently an improvement over my current 1st gen atom

I am not talking about its raw computational performance. I am thinking about the usage scenarios of this machine as an average developer and how this machine could replace my Air. Most development tasks do not require the computational power of a MacBook Air and the ARM Chromebook actually feels quite smooth. The main thing is, unlike budget netbooks, this one has an okay display resolution, a very good keyboard, better than 11" Air battery life, less heat, flash storage (though small), and less weight and thickness. I personally did never even consider buying a netbook (Atom or otherwise). If for any reason you care about sheer performance locally on your laptop, I totally agree that this machine is not for you. This Chromebook easily has the most bang for the buck than anything I bought. If I did not have the money, I could conceivably live my entire life off of it (yes, it's that good) and a Nexus 4 (again, the best bang for the buck in smartphone area.)

I should point out that by no means I meant that the MacBook Air is not worth its price. Even at four times the price of the Samsung Series 3 Chromebook, it is worth every penny in my opinion. It's a much better, faster, classier, sturdier, more beautiful, and higher quality machine in general.

Same here -- loving crouton, and development in general, on the ARM. I was already doing just about everything in the browser and terminal before I got the Chromebook, so I was happy to get a machine with, as simon_weber said, "Linux that just works." I assumed I would just ssh into my servers for development work, but crouton has given me a full local dev environment as well, so I have everything I need at this point.

Thanks for the article, Simon. My setup is pretty much the same, except that I haven't tried out mosh yet: https://gist.github.com/gsf/5377654.

Not the tools, but for ARM performance: first, how does your 550 compare with the Acer C7 Chromebook? http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/acer-c7-chromeb... Both are listed as having a dual-core Celeron. EDIT google says your 550 is 867, 1.3 GHz; Acer C7 is B847 1.1 GHz, so yours is about 20% faster...?

I ask, because I did an informal comparison between the Acer C7 and the samsung ARM chromebook (with dual-core cortex-A15), using a computationally intensive JS demo. The Acer C7 was far more performant - by a factor of about x2-x3. Which disappointed me... I'd hoped the A15 was getting there.

There's chromebooks for $199 and $250 now: http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebooks.htm... http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebooks.htm...

I'm wary of any system that doesn't list the RAM in the specifications.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com