Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by robgibbons 4244 days ago
I use a Samsung Chromebook 2, with a chroot environment running xfce. This allows me to do all of my development tasks on a sub-$400 laptop, with over 8 hours of battery life.

I've worked at Apple, and I love Mac OSX, but the expense of owning a Macbook far exceeds any additional returns I would get by using one professionally.
1 comments
tluyben2 4244 days ago
Yep. For almost everything I do I can use the Samsung Chromebook (2012 model) actually which is under $200 if you look. It is light, long battery life, Linux 'installation' (Crouton uses the ChromeOS kernel, you're not installing a total distro) is a few minutes work and always works with all hardware supported (because ChromeOS does). Besides the bad ARM support of some software (missing GHCi...) it is perfect.

I use my macbook for iOS coding next to it when needed.

link
robgibbons 4240 days ago
The biggest drawback as you mentioned is the ARM support. I found I wasn't able to use SVN when the occasion arose, but otherwise there has been no reason to regret going with this Chromebook.
link