Ask HN: Is a Chromebook suitable for web development? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is a Chromebook suitable for web development?

8 pointswelly14 comments

I'm a LAMP/Drupal/Symfony developer - I also do some front end development using Sass/Compass and slowly getting into using tools such as Gulp, Bower etc.

My main workstation is a Macbook Pro but I'm looking at picking up a Chromebook that I can stick in my bag and have with my at all times. I'd be keen to use it for some development time and wondering what the options are there for it? What tools are available - can I compile Sass files on a Chromebook? Can I run PHP and MySQL on it?

Any advice would be greatly welcomed!

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Here is a recent blog post by codestarter, where they describe the process and list some resources for making a dev machine out of a Chromebook: http://blog.codestarter.org/post/93985346780/how-we-turn-199... . It was featured on HN not long ago, some comments might be useful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8143844 .

That would certainly be an idea and would give me the platform I need. Thanks for the link! My only concern is the performance but then it wouldn't be used for the majority of my development so I'm sure I can get by with it! Particularly at the price of these things.

The speed of the Samsung Chromebook is "adequate". Feels faster than any "older" notebook with a 5400 rpm disk drive. But it feels a bit slower than the current Mac Book Airs.

I am a Ruby on Rails developer and I have been developing on my Chromebook (and any place with a browser) using Nitrous.io (https://www.nitrous.io/). There are also other comparable services as well. I mainly use it on days when I am working from home. It give me terminal access in the browser, (but not quite full sudo) as well as a decent IDE.

I have yet to use Crouton on my Chromebook because I have another laptop running Ubuntu and I just haven't found the need yet (though to be honest I haven't picked up my old laptop since I got the Chromebook).

Browserstack lets me check out what the web pages look like in other browsers.

If you do use Crouton, then you should basically have a Ubuntu box. Most Chromebooks have an SD Card slot and USB slots as well if you need extra storage.

Thanks very much for the comments, I've pulled the trigger on an Acer C720 (32Gb edition) which I should get tomorrow. I'll certainly checkout Nitrous and running Crouton/Ubuntu sounds like it might be the way forward. I shall be doing some reading tonight on this!

Thanks again!

Try out https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton and with that you can get Linux support on your Chromebook. Rest will fall in place.

Though, with crouton, you can expect to take a battery life hit

tldr; The CB is cheap, but you get what you pay for.

Basically you can do anything you can do with Linux if you install Crouton, i.e. it implements Debian like distro in a chroot jail.

I used a Samsung Chromebook for about six weeks and then went out and bought a 13" MacBook Air (used a MacBook Pro before the Chromebook adventure).

The MBA has a bigger screen, better keyboard, way better touch pad. I still throw the CB into the bag when I travel. But most of the time the MBA is the preferred system.

There are different screen sizes available (14" is common).

Yes, there are now.

I wish I hadn't rushed in so quickly to buyt the Samsung. I rather like the HP ChromeBooks - much nicer screen.

Yeah, I've got a Macbook Pro (13" retina) - I wouldn't get a Macbook Air to go with it. It would be too much money to spend on something that will only get about 30% use. I've ordered an Acer C720 which came in at less than £200 and even if I only use it 20% of the time, it's hardly any money spent on it.

If I were in your position I would have done likewise.

But my MBP is 2009 model and the battery doesn't hold much charge. The new 13" MBA has fantastic battery life. Those cheap notebooks just can't keep up in terms of battery life. I'm lazy and prefer to not lug around the AC adaptor.

I use an Acer C720P as a backup dev machine for a Django project.

With crouton you have access to traditional Unix tools so if most of what you need is command-line tools and a text editor, you can manage. It's not amazingly fast and the screen resolution is a bit limiting. But it's still a great machine : cheap, light and powerful enough for web dev. I don't regret buying one.

I actually just took the leap and bought an Acer C720 as my dev machine for when I'm on the move.

Things I was concerned about before buying: - Would it be powerful enough? - Would the screen be too small? - Is the keyboard 'full-size'? - Will I suffer from countless issues by putting Ubuntu on? - Would Ubuntu ruin the battery life?

After about a week, I'm pleased to report that I'm extremely impressed. I went for the non-touch (C720, not C720P - don't see the point for a dev machine) 32GB version at £199 from Amazon.

At first glance, I was a little uncertain about the build quality - when peeling the protective plastic wrapping away from the screen surround, the surround bent outward a fair bit. The lid was a bit stiff and a couple of the edges felt a little rough. That's where my complaints end though.

I installed Ubuntu using ChrUbuntu, so I can still boot into ChromeOS when I just want to do a bit of web browsing (whilst I could do that in Ubuntu, I do [now] also quite like ChromeOS, so I decided to keep it). The installation was straightforward enough.

Here's a quick summary of what I'm using on the machine: - NodeJS - Yeoman (Grunt + Bower) - Jetbrains Webstorm - Git - Mongo

Webstorm is snappy. Even with a fairly large project, I honestly have never found myself thinking "come on, ffs...". It's surreal having something so much smaller yet more powerful than my [granted, 3 year old] 15.6" laptop. The performance is decent, but I guess that's the SSD for you!

Again, I haven't had any issues with the screen. Whilst most people will be more productive with multiple monitors (wouldn't everyone...), the chances are you'll be on the move if you're using this - and for that it's just fine. The screen actually looks pretty good to be honest. Oh, and it has a matte finish, so there's no glare.

The keyboard seems full-size to me. I'm not usually a fan of laptop keyboards, but this one has grown on me. Others have described the keys as being quite mac-esque, which I'd agree with. The keyboard layout is almost standard, bar the caps lock key and function keys (from memory). The top row of keys are still mapped to the usual function keys in Ubuntu, but due to the size of the keys, you lose F9-12 (I think.. from memory). There is also obviously no numpad.

The only bugs I've encountered with ChrUbuntu is it will crash if you suspend, then attempt to resume - could get a bit annoying if you are on the move and frequently starting up/shutting down, since the boot into Ubuntu does take probably 30-40 seconds compared to 5 seconds for ChromeOS. I've not really had time to troubleshoot this yet, there may be a fix. The only other problem was my mongo service getting borked, presumably as an effect of suspending/resuming at a critical stage. shrug.

And lastly, the battery life has proven to be only slightly worse in Ubuntu than ChromeOS, which I'm pleased about. I've had 7 hours remaining whilst working in Webstorm with Node/Mongo/Firefox.

...that turned into a bit of an C720 review, but I say for £200 you can't go wrong! :-) I haven't done any Symfony2 work with it yet, but imagine it would be fine.

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