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Comment by ff_ | Hacker News Reader

When I bought it this Acer C720 was like an experiment, at first I was skeptical.

Now it's my main dev machine: its very little weight enables me to carry it wherever I go, the battery lasts 18h (18 HOURS, CRAZY!) if I read only PDFs, the 2gb of ram and the dual core are just perfect (but not tempting about running virtual machines on it), and with the SSD it performs better than more powerful machines with HDs. Oh, and I just love the 12" format.

(Of course I have thrown away ChromeOS, now I run elementary OS)

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I, too, got a acer c720 as an experiment, and it also has earned it's way into being my primary machine. Not only for casual browsing, but development too.

I use ChomeOS in developer mode and chromebrew (http://skycocker.github.io/chromebrew/) and then some installing binaries and building other dependencies. My current projects include node, ruby, java, and golang. Some days I miss having sublime, but Caret is a mostly competent stand-in.

I would love to get one of the dell chromebook but they are next to impossible to find.

How good is development on it (& elementary OS). I've only used Ubuntu/OSX for serious development.

Does the 2GB RAM cause any issues?

I think it's just perfect: the zero-bloat of elementary OS allows me to get my multitasking work done flawlessly, keeping firefox+sublime+atom+a-lot-of-terminals open without a glitch.

Also the dual core Celeron is fast in compiling things for elementary dev (of course just don't think to run Gentoo on it), while moderates the desire to play games.

About the 2GB RAM: as devs we are used to systems with 8/16 GB today; if you can accept that even RAM is a finite thing so it isn't an issue.

Anyway I try to preserve my SSD, so I keep my ~/Downloads folder in RAM, and at first I disabled the swap volume: the system just freezed too often. So I re-enabled the swap, but I reduced the swappiness and I plan to move it on an SD card.

> Anyway I try to preserve my SSD

You really don't need to do that anymore.

Why? Any writing cycle consumes it.

And trust me, the Downloads folder in RAM is one of the best thing you can do to reduce the bloating of files in a system: you learn to copy away the things you really need, and leave the others there; at the next reboot they'll be vanished.

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