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Comment by pducks32 | Hacker News Reader

You asked about Silicon Valley startups and I work at one. I genuinely don’t think that today I could use a Chromebook to do any level of my work. I have used one in the past (though not for programming) and even that was miserable.

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Just this weekend I retired my old Macbook and switched my dev environment to an Asus flipbook and preemptible VM's on google cloud. For offline work I boot linux from a usb-c flashdrive. Getting my VPNs working and eliminating Ctrl+w from my workflow was the hardest part.

Google has created the full ecosystem (phone, laptop, apps) to compete against the MS and Apple stacks. It's still a rougher experience, but for me, it has crossed the good enough threshold.

I don't know what your perception is, or how you were using it... and I don't actually do this on a daily basis, but I think if what you did was using crosh in a browser tab, there is a much better experience on ChromeOS to be had. I used crouton with X11 and it was IMHO decidedly serviceable.

I could not get used to using a shell in a browser tab; it was just too easy to accidentally lose my work by pressing ctrl+W.

But I have been a desktop linux user for ~20 years until switching to MacOS last year, when I got a new job and inherited my predecessor's Macbook Pro. So, getting E17 started, even with no GL acceleration, was really quite OK for me. (But as a desktop linux user, I'm sure I'm probably on a short list who would be ok with that... you might be too, I don't know how you were using it or what your background is.)

If I had something better than a 2012-model Samsung XE303C12 (anything but an ARM-based chromebook, I guess) something with an intel CPU that has Haswell chipset or Bay Trail, or i915 video, or the Chromebook Pixel line, or... I think it would be even better (with supported graphics acceleration, I mean.)

What were your issues/how far did you get, if you don't mind my asking?

good luck getting a 'locked down OS' on crouton. if you're going to do that you might as well install Ubuntu on the bare metal and do away with the middle man. Can't run Docker on a crouton machine either because the kernel they used for ChromeOS doesn't support containerization (yet).

Is that still the case? Bummer... yeah I forgot entirely this was a thread about making Chrome a more locked-down OS.

I was running Docker just fine on the ARM hardware until they upped the kernel requirements (so, probably v1.11? Something something, unsupported now...) I almost wound up compiling my own kernel, but it was too complicated,

I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it at all without switching to Chromium OS, and at that point I might as well set up a server doing nightly builds and run my own Omega protocol OS Update infrastructure.

Yeah, I would definitely not ask programmers to work on a locked-down ChromeOS machine without crouton.

I used a Toshiba Chromebook 2 (2015) for a development machine for a while. used crouton for some of that time, but eventually just reformatted it over to Ubuntu installed on the bare metal exactly because I could not use Docker on the ChromeOS kernel. I also thought about building the kernel myself, but said screw it, reformatting was easier. :)

Man what happened, we used to compile kernels all the time right...

/nostalgia

theres an option on how to open the window where control-w doesn't kill your window, you can use it as you want. it was obscure and hard to find.

I suspected there might be as I was writing this! But didn't think to check when I was still using it. You can also probably save yourself losing work this way by using screen or tmux, of course...

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