[shirro]

I managed to work on a Chromebook for a few months. I was doing a mixture of web frontend (Angular) and Go based backend. I was using terminal for most things tmux, shell, vim, git, ssh which is how I work on my MBP anyway. Postman for api testing and I found some chrome apps for screenshots and other little things. It was all quite good. The only apps I really missed were Inkscape and Gimp and I could run those under Crouton if needed but my Chromebook was a bit memory constrained. I guess Skype was a bit of an issue as well. In the end I stopped because the hardware had reliability issues and the screen wasn't all that great.

I could see myself working on a Pixel fulltime.

[iSnow]

>In the end I stopped because the hardware had reliability issues and the screen wasn't all that great.

That's not exactly a glowing endorsement, considering the price, why would you want to work on it full-time then?

[fooqux]

Notice he said "Chromebook", not "Chromebook Pixel". Considering the Pixel's screen and keyboard were supposedly top-teir, I am presuming he had a normal $200 chromebook.

For what it's worth, I've been using a Acer Chromebook for awhile now. It's been an excellent machine, when you consider I only paid $180 for it and threw Arch on it before its second boot. It can't hold a candle to the Pixel or an XPS, but I never expected it to.

[shirro]

Chromebooks, like Netbooks before them, cut a lot of corners to get under a price. That is why a halo model like the Pixel excites people as it is a rare opportunity to see what the platform can do without the price constraints. Imagine what it would do to quality if the only Macbook you could buy was sub $400?

ChromeOS is not for everyone but I wouldn't dismiss them outright as some people don't need much more than access to a shell environment and web browser to be productive. There are a few small frustrations, openvpn limitations etc. And they could do a bit more to make them friendly to devs/linux users.