[cjmoran]

Google is working on making Chromebooks more developer-friendly. Some of them support running full desktop Linux apps now, but it's still in the experimental stages and I wouldn't recommend buying one for that specific feature until it's more mature.

That said, I've been doing light webdev work on a Chromebook using Crouton (to run desktop Linux alongside ChromeOS, with seamless switching) and aside from difficulties with the MicroSD slot and apt-get on Ubuntu it's been quite nice. Getting solid, first-party Linux desktop app support would make Chromebooks a serious contender in the "cheap dev laptop for light work" space, and I think Google is working toward that.

Obviously, the hardware is going to preclude you from doing any serious heavy lifting, but I'm pretty excited to see what they come up with in another year or two. The battery life on these things is fantastic, plus some of them can also run Android apps.

Crouton installation instructions can be found here: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

A tip: while you can find ARM distributions of Linux distros and packages, it'll make your life much easier to get a Chromebook with an x86 processor.

[ashishb]

> Google is working on making Chromebooks more developer-friendly. Some of them support running full desktop Linux apps now, but it's still in the experimental stages and I wouldn't recommend buying one for that specific feature until it's more mature.

Why not just make full-fledged Linux laptops?