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by divbit 3504 days ago
As someone who's never owned one, I think there is something called 'crouton' which makes a chromebook into sort of like a low-end ubuntu laptop. Given that I've run VS code on Ubuntu with 2gb ram, it seems like it should be doable.
4 comments
intoverflow2 3504 days ago
Judging from comments in this thread 'crouton' still has a several second splash screen on boot telling you to press space that when pressed wipes your entire drive.

Hacks like this which devs seem to be happy to endure are not a solution for helping these kids to code.

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0xFFC 3504 days ago
People keep saying this without realizing what is going on truely, there is two option: 1. Install crouton and use shell to Chroot to your distro (which makes most sense, became what is the reason to buy Chromebook in first place, since maybe you can buy laptop with better Linux support about same price, in this option you have your dev tools in your distro and simultaneously you enjoying your command line dev tools) But remember you are inside chrome OS so you dont have any way to access graphic stack and run Linux GUI app, I think with recent port of Android stack to chrome OS , makes Chromebook more valuable except if you want to run something like Java Swing oe eclipse( eclipse working on web UI , named Che)

2.Use croutin to install complete stack to run Linux GUI apps too.( Honestly I don't understand rational behind this, since you don't have for example Win key in Chromebook and many other issues.)

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Touche 3504 days ago
The point of a Chromebook is ChromeOS. If you're using Ubuntu you might as well be using a low-end PC. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not a Chromebook any more. Chromebooks are not about the hardware.
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headmelted 3504 days ago
This actually uses Crouton to create the Ubuntu environment that Code is installed into. ;-)

More details here: https://code.headmelted.com

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divbit 3504 days ago
Btw - I totally just realized I have to teach my cousin (who only has a chromebook) python this week. So thanks for this! I might try it out.
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detaro 3504 days ago
You should also know about https://www.pythonanywhere.com/, which you can use completely remote.
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divbit 3504 days ago
Perfect, although I guess it was more of 'an easy language to get him started' than specifically python.
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divbit 3504 days ago
ah yeah, I totally missed the 'without dev mode' part of his comment, so sorry for the snark
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