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Comment by ripter | Hacker News Reader

I recently bought a ChromeBook for development (The $199 one). It's a super light linux machine that lasts for days. So I have all my dev tools and I can easily work on any git repo. I don't do any Chrome OS development.

I tried using a tablet for this, but as an emacs users, I have very specific keyboard bindings that the tablets always had issues with.

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Which Chromebook if you don't mind me asking?

I've been using an old Thinkpad T61 but it just seems a little bit underpowered/dated/inefficient now - considering jumping to something new.

ASUS Chromebook 13-Inch HD with Gigabit WiFi, 16GB Storage & 2GB RAM (Yellow) [http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00O5VX2AA/ref=oh_aui_det...]

I've been really surprised at how smooth the experience has been, especially since I'm running ubuntu in chroot.

It's not quite powerful enough to play minecraft, it runs but really slowly.

Yes, you bought it and you 'hacked it' in order to make it 'usable'. Most developers will buy a MBA which is an order of magnitude faster with more powerful CPU and feautures MacOSX which has tons of software to enhance development (especially for CLI users).

So definately no, developers are not a niche market for this toy-device althoguh I admit that I like my Samsung Chromebook (and Iinstalled xubuntu too on it...).

I never claimed that developers are the niche market. And I didn't have to 'hack it' other than turning on dev mode. Ubuntu runs in a tab, just like everything else.

It fills a niche in my life, I never claimed it would help anyone else.

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