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What about casual programming? Still kind of a sore spot for tablets - if I'm wrong, please tell me why! If I could just do simple emacs/bash stuff with perl/python/javascript/html and maybe even C/C++ I'd be a lot happier buying a tablet. Not really sure if you can do this with a chromebook either, though. Can it run a modern linux distro?

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I run Crouton with Ubuntu Raring. Javascript/HTML/CSS dev you can even do under Chrome with some web IDE; the rest works fine under Crouton. There are just a few 'exotic' things you won't get working; for instance GHCi is broken on Raring ARM.

It's probably not quite what you're looking for, but I've been experimenting recently with using the Prompt app from Panic on my iPad Mini to SSH to a Debian virtual machine on Joyent (I have some spare credit with them I wanted to put to use up). For me, using VIM this way works pretty well, especially when paired with a bluetooth keyboard.

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