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Comment by simon_weber | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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