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Comment by bobbydavid | Hacker News Reader

As stated in the article, the "point" is to have the same functionality for a fraction of the cost. You can still run image editing software or whatever you'd run on your workstation using NX. That's somewhat inconvenient, but then it boots faster with no malware, and you are guaranteed nothing important is only stored locally. So it's a trade-off, not a "crippling" as you've put it. Some folks, like the author, barely notice a difference in quality yet save $1000, and that feels good.

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I can get the same functionality in terms of hardware at the more or less same cost, certainly not $1000 more as you claim. A 1.7gighz ARM or the other versions aren't more powerful than a 1.6gighz or higher Atom processor at the same price point.

And I can run a real operating system on that hardware with no problems. My laptop boots in less than 10 seconds and I trust Ubuntu just as much as a Chromebook for security. If you are worried about the security of local files you can encrypt your drive, very simply in the last few versions of Ubuntu but I don't bother, if needs be.

None of the points you make in favour of the Chromebook are exclusive to it, what's exclusive to it though is you can't get access to the vast flexibility of a local system and have to go through NX.

That's all fine for people who only do back-end stuff, or Google if they want their employees to "dog food" living in the cloud, but for someone who wants to be able to do normal everyday things like edit images, test locally or any of the many other advantages of a flexible system it doesn't really cut it. If there were locally running JavaScript equivalents for image editing and everything else we'd be a bit closer to feature parity but I still wouldn't see the major attraction.

>> None of the points you make in favour of the Chromebook are exclusive to it, what's exclusive to it though is you can't get access to the vast flexibility of a local system and have to go through NX.

Adding to that working with remote GUI apps simply sucks compared to running them locally, for all kinds of reasons. It's less responsive, applications don't always integrate well with the rest of the OS (think keyboard/language settings, terminal capabilities, reliable copy/paste), you lose things like local search, some applications you rarely use will not be available on the remote, and if your network connection goes down you lose your session. And who's going to set up and maintain the NX service? If having your work in the cloud matters a lot, I would much rather just mount some remote filesystem for storing it, and run all my dev tools locally.

I tend to agree I don't see the point here, since when is a cheap machine to SSH to some other box anything special, let alone a viable replacement for a dev system? I did stuff like this (SSH-ing to a remote host, editing webpages there, viewing the result locally) literally 10 years ago on a Pentium-233 laptop you couldn't even give away for free today because no-one would want to have it. For $250 there's a lot of decent notebooks that would do everything a Chromebook does, and adequately run a modern linux distro to boot.

$1000 is an exaggeration, but chromebooks really are significantly cheaper than netbooks/laptops: $250 ARM and $199 Celeron.

But you know, just now considering the restrictions that Apple, Google and Microsoft put on their mobile machines, because they can, creates a real opportunity for Firefox OS (and yes ubuntu). Though niche, as most consumers won't care... unless the restrictions go too far.

Can you link to this notebook you're talking about? I'd love a $200 notebook that's better than a Chromebook.

It's called a Chromebook with Ubuntu on it.

    you are guaranteed nothing important is only stored locally.

That's what scares me the most. Unless I have the option of not using Google's infrastructure, and can run my own "ChromeOS Storage/Auth Server" on a computer of my choice, then I'd never trust the OS. Google is expecting a surreal amount of trust that no single corporation should be given.

Went to Best Buy, typed "laptop", first result

Toshiba - Satellite 15.6" Laptop - 4GB Memory - 320GB Hard Drive - Satin Black Model: C855D/S5103 • SKU: 8119044 62 Ratings $279.99

That's 2x the ram and I get 320 HD which even if you don't want to use it for storage it's pretty awesome when running any OS that supports virtual memory. Have you looked at how much virtual memory your average Linux distro ends up using?

That was just the first hit. There's plenty of machines in the same price range as a chromebook that have better specs, more power and therefore more freedom.

To be fair, that one is more than twice the weight of a chromebook (5.5 lbs vs 2.5).

and a much worse battery life and significantly larger.

That's not a laptop that's a luggable

And arguably more than twice as powerful. You can run nearly every Windows app including games like Call of Duty, Portal, Farcry etc. You can run Photoshop, Lightroom, Office etc.. You can run VC++, gcc and even have room to store your project. All things you can't do on the same priced Chromebook.

Only 1 year ago before the Retina MBP every MBP being carried by the majority of geeks around Silicon Valley weighed 5.6lbs yet that did not stopped them from carrying them as laptops

Why would you want to use virtual memory? I bet that laptop has a 5400 rpm hard drive - there is no way I want it to be swapping on and off of it at every opportunity. The OS would grind to a halt.

For most developers' usage, you'd be better off with a 32gb SSD than with the 320gb slow-as-hell spinner drive.

Not to mention a cheap 15.6" laptop gets terrible battery life. My $250 Chromebook gets 6.5-7hours, even when running Ubuntu via crouton.

just a quick question.

With crouton you still get the large developer mode warning right?

and it requires either a keystroke or a 30 second to pass correct?

and do you have the arm one or another?

Yeah you have to have your chromebook in dev mode, so you'll see the warning. You can press ctrl+d to skip it.

I have the original Series 5 which has a dual core Atom.

All the standard macbooks that have HDs come with 5400rpm HDs. Apparently the majority of Silicon Valley has no problems getting work done on a 5400rpm HD.

As for battery life I'd personally rather have a machine I can get real work done with shitty battery life than one with great battery life on which I can't get real work done. There's a huge list of things I can do on the machine with an HD, virtual memory, and a real OS that I can't do on the Chromebook. In fact Chrome will even run better on the machine with the HD as it won't kill off tabs when it gets low on memory. It also won't get low on memory as quick as it has twice the memory.

save $1000, and that feels good

If price/value is the main concern a used 4-5 year old x86 laptop is a way better deal. I have an old HP nc8430 for this purpose. Sells on eBay for about $100-$150 these days. Blows away a low end ARM ChromeBook on performance, price and flexibility.

But not on weight/battery life. It all depends on your priorities.

Maybe not battery life/weight… but on being an actual computer with storage you can rely on and a properly supported operating system.

Actual computer as compared to what? A modern Atom processor with an SSD and a few gigs of RAM isn't a powerhouse, but it's plenty for dev work on the go unless you're a graphics programmer or you need a local copy of a large database etc.

The file storage is the one that made me leery. I solved the issue by using owncloud, which so far seems to be working pretty well. The performance could be better but I'm pretty sure that's due to my slow upload connection.

I don't get your last point though. Chrome OS has a pretty rapid pace of development and is getting new features every day. They also have tech support for those who need it.

Chromebooks are not that much cheaper. They don't give you that much extra battery life. They are extremely limited in functionality and I feel a proper "developer machine" should have more than just ssh.

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