[washadjeffmad]

Not being snarky or anything, but do you have easy access to broadband internet where you are, or do you live in a locale that prohibits VPN?

It turned out more effective for me to buy a Chromebook and build a remote workstation to do actual work from, with the added benefit that I don't care if my Chromebook is lost or stolen because it doesn't store any data and costs less than a screen replacement (<$179).

I also wasn't impressed by the highly externalized "there's an adapter for that" dongle-shuffle for basic ports when Apple did it 2017, and if I wanted to bring it all with me, I'd still need to buy and lug around a eGPU if I wanted to do any compute. Plus I get like 14 hours of full-brightness work time off of one charge, similar to an M1 MacBook Air.

That's just my use case, of course. I've also built an SFF system with eDP when I have to travel and generate a lot of data and an Alienware m17 isn't enough.

[kibwen]

Remoting into a beefy workstation works for plenty of command-line tasks, but is going to yield a subpar experience for GUI tasks. As someone whose daily driver for several lean years was a $180 netbook (remember netbooks?), anything that I could do on my remote machine was grand (at the time, a $5 VPS), and anything that I had to do locally was a slog.

> "there's an adapter for that" dongle-shuffle

> lug around a eGPU

One of the unique selling points of the Framework is that you can customize the ports to your needs, so dongles are unnecessary unless you need a whole lot of ports. And the Framework 16 doesn't need an eGPU, you can plug in an actual GPU that integrates with the body of the laptop.

[zmk5]

No worries habibi. Your post isn't snarky and I get where you are coming from with what you wrote. I was more commenting on my expectations of the price given that this is a (relatively) new company on a larger form factor that has a lot of interchangeable parts, external GPU, etc.

This laptop isn't personally for me but I can see why people would like it. Also my workflow requires a lot of GUI applications for simulating and visualizing robotic movement and that is incredibly hard with ChromeOS or macOS.

[senknvd]

Which Chromebook did you go with? And what tools (IDEs, debuggers, etc.) do you use for development?

[washadjeffmad]

admittedly, my primary role hasn't been development in over a decade, so nothing fancy. primarily vim with plugins, good integrations, and native compilers/utilities, and Microcenter or Costco special Chromebooks (14" 1080p matte screen, plenty of ports, and uSD). besides some native Linux utilities, the Chromebooks just run a browser for guacamole and some other hosted services.

I'm very interested by the Framework Chromebook, but it's a bit excessive for my needs. I'm also provided a lot of Apple hardware, which I'll use in the office.

[Aerbil313]

That’s a great idea. Thanks, I’ll seriously consider it. I’m skeptical of the network usage though. I might need to use cellular with this approach, does this result in high usage?

[washadjeffmad]

that's based on your compression and what you're transferring, so it depends on your definition of "high" (ie- cost, likely to exceed an "unlimited" plan, etc).

I haven't exceeded 1GB/mo on cellular in over a year, but I also have easy access to wifi.

[Aerbil313]

Thanks! I was skeptical, but I took the time to actually compare Framework, Macbook and custom remote workstation on these metrics: battery life, security against theft and accidents, high speed networking, upgradability, repairability, compatibility (eg. external Nvidia GPU, coreboot), offline use, performance and weight. Remote won on every metric (has no single drawback) except offline use, which is not a problem when you are at home. So I decided on doing this. If you don’t mind, how do you connect? What is your setup? Are you able to eg. forward USB devices to the workstation?

[washadjeffmad]

Closed the tab on the original, better response. Sigh.

I don't use usbip, but it's an easy setup. I do use kvm/libvirt. Tailscale didn't exist when I built everything, but the documentation is excellent, and I could replace most of this with similar convenience.

Everything I'm mentioning here is locally hosted.

I connect via either wireguard or Unifi Teleport, depending on which network is needed. Wireguard connects to guacamole which manages connections to more secure core services, controllers, and shares. Unifi Teleport allows easy access to surface services like a book server, IOT, NVR, webuis, APIs, etc.

Chrome remote desktop is much more convenient than I expected, and I use it to connect to friends' systems or to hop onto graphical instances that I don't care to set up lasting connections to.

My three primary nodes are for GPGPU compute, "big" jobs, and storage. I've removed most IPMI/IPKVM to allow more flexible consolidation and upgrades. My "OOBM" is now UPS with remote power plugs with always-on BIOS settings. Once things gracefully halt, I can kill power if/until needed (my downtimes are all planned, but I reserve the capability).

I've greatly simplified over the past half decade so I can focus more on using than administrating, and while I haven't removed all of it, I try hard not to create environments more complicated than I can understand after not being touched for a few months.

[Aerbil313]

Thanks, that was one deep rabbit hole of a reply! I did not think things would be this complicated. I'm happy to hear some things for which I've intended to roll my own solution with my RPis already exist. I took my notes, I appreciate you!