[PNWChris]

Agreed. While doing my undergrad in CS a decade ago (wow - I can't believe it's been that long) a lot of coursework was relatively light-weight to execute, and when it wasn't it could be done by SSH-ing or VNC-ing into a university-managed RHEL environment.

We could even RDP into well-equipped Windows machines that had licenses for all the software you could ever want if you happened to need Windows.

This was at a large Midwestern research university. From talking with friends and colleagues over the years, it sounds like it was a pretty standard set-up.

I did try to do local development on an ARM Chromebook I got as a curiosity back then, but it was just too constrained. Cruton wasn't perfect and only the XFCE desktop environment had acceptable performance. Plus, not a lot of software was ARM compatible out of the box back then and compiling from source was a pain on the low-power processor I had.

These days, especially with the crazy fast ARM cores we're seeing and Android Apps working on ChromeOS, things look way more usable for a CS student's general computing needs. It's always cool to see stories like OP's to confirm what I hoped was the state of computing outside the Mac/Windows norm.

Disclosure since this is about ChromeOS: I work at Google, but this is all my personal experience and opinion.

[edgyquant]

I went to a community college and we had the ability to SSH into ridiculously powerful servers on campus + were given Azure credits, etc. I think it’s pretty standard