[wayneftw]

I got a Chromebook for my wife and she is able to use it for many things, but she still has to use Chrome Remote Desktop to get back to her Windows PC to get files that she didn't move to the cloud yet (most of them). For her kind of work, a third grade teacher, she could probably get away with Chrome OS forever. Some of the apps she uses on iOS weren't available though.

Before I gave her the Chromebook, I set it up for myself to try it out. After updating it (an Acer Chromebook 14), I was able to install Android apps which all ran pretty well. I also installed Sublime Text and VS Code in developer mode. Sublime ran much faster, but they both had issues compared to my nice fat PC. However, Chrome Remote Desktop works well enough that I could have just used the Chromebook as a remote screen for my PC. I don't think I could ever bring myself to use Chrome OS as my primary OS though...ever. It's too limited.

So, I switched to Manjaro Linux with XFCE for all of my web development and other work needs last year. I highly recommend it! (Before that I was mostly on Windows and sometimes on Mac.) I installed it on an Acer E5-575G and I got everything working including precision touchpad gestures which perform just as well as on any Macbook (I own a Mac Pro and also a Macbook Pro for comparison). It took some work to get the touchpad configured correctly, but not much. Then I got a 2nd PC workstation (a refurbished i7 desktop from Amazon for like $400) and I put a new 500GB ssd with Manjaro on that... Honestly, it's great. All the development tools that I need just work and there is plenty of software for Arch/Manjaro. I'll probably never go back to Mac or Windows for work, despite the fact that Manjaro updates have twice caused me a minor setback which were solved easily with help from threads like this - https://forum.manjaro.org/t/19-february-2019-system-update-i... (No big deal - I've had similar scares from Windows and Mac updates over the years.)

A Linux desktop is the only desktop OS that makes me feel like a kid again. The reasons I failed at moving to a Linux desktop before were because things broke all the time or required hella work just to get the proper drivers...or becuase I didn't like UI (on Ubuntu for instance), etc - but Manjaro with XFCE was a breeze and changed all that for me. I'm so glad I decided to try it out. I only ever tried Gnome or KDE before that.