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Engadget says it's STILL impractical - http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/11/chromebook-pixel-review-2...

I managed to work on a Chromebook for a few months. I was doing a mixture of web frontend (Angular) and Go based backend. I was using terminal for most things tmux, shell, vim, git, ssh which is how I work on my MBP anyway. Postman for api testing and I found some chrome apps for screenshots and other little things. It was all quite good. The only apps I really missed were Inkscape and Gimp and I could run those under Crouton if needed but my Chromebook was a bit memory constrained. I guess Skype was a bit of an issue as well. In the end I stopped because the hardware had reliability issues and the screen wasn't all that great.

I could see myself working on a Pixel fulltime.

>In the end I stopped because the hardware had reliability issues and the screen wasn't all that great.

That's not exactly a glowing endorsement, considering the price, why would you want to work on it full-time then?

Notice he said "Chromebook", not "Chromebook Pixel". Considering the Pixel's screen and keyboard were supposedly top-teir, I am presuming he had a normal $200 chromebook.

For what it's worth, I've been using a Acer Chromebook for awhile now. It's been an excellent machine, when you consider I only paid $180 for it and threw Arch on it before its second boot. It can't hold a candle to the Pixel or an XPS, but I never expected it to.

Chromebooks, like Netbooks before them, cut a lot of corners to get under a price. That is why a halo model like the Pixel excites people as it is a rare opportunity to see what the platform can do without the price constraints. Imagine what it would do to quality if the only Macbook you could buy was sub $400?

ChromeOS is not for everyone but I wouldn't dismiss them outright as some people don't need much more than access to a shell environment and web browser to be productive. There are a few small frustrations, openvpn limitations etc. And they could do a bit more to make them friendly to devs/linux users.

It depends on the user. The first-gen Pixel is my only laptop for the last 2 years.

Out of curiosity, is it also your only computer? (Aside from a phone / tablet)

I have a bunch of ARM boards around, as well as, a headless x86 server for personal media archive, plus some number of rented virtual servers in the cloud.

Basically, Chromebook is a terminal + a browser for me.

How do you do development?

SSH + emacs on the remote part.

For embedded programming, where I need to run a programmer to flash a microcontroller, I use an ARM board as a host.

That review is actually incredibly (and somewhat surprisingly) positive.

It mostly comes down to what everyone here already knows: Chromebooks don't run all the apps many people need, like Photoshop:

> Personally speaking, I wouldn't buy one -- but that's mostly because it won't run Photoshop, and it doesn't play nice with certain peripherals like my running watch. Barring that, though, I love the Pixel. Between the design, display, keyboard and battery life, it's among the finest notebooks I've had the pleasure of using. I'm sad to have to give my review unit back.

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