[akadempythag]

Fun deep dive. In a previous life I wrote web apps, and I liked to develop on Chromebooks to make sure that everything ran smoothly on low-end machines.

I would set a price point of $2-300, which usually meant I was lucky to get a Rockchip. And this was before it was popular to build for ARM architectures.

And yet, ChromeOS' chroot-based projects like crosh always managed to deliver. Surrounded by aluminum MacBooks and carbon-fiber Dells, I would run Rails apps and X GUIs and source builds on a rubberized hunk of plastic that had been designed for use in schools.

I have always been surprised at how well that worked. If it was using the same fundamentals as Docker and Podman, I'm not surprised that the containerization movement has enjoyed such popularity.

[j0hnyl]

Likewise it's amazing what one can do with Termux on an Android device.

[spiffytech]

There was something really nice about developing on a Chromebook. It felt simplified in a very pleasant way.

I ultimately discontinued the practice because beefy Chromebooks never become commonplace, some points of development friction got tiresome, and I stopped preferring Chrome.

Yet I'm nostalgic for the experience.