[georgemcbay]

Not necessarily.

I do virtually all my work split between my home office and an actual workplace office. Currently I drag a laptop back and forth between the two, but having a monitor/keyboard/mouse at both (which I already do and dock the laptop into) and just bringing a small stick literally in my pocket that I can plug in to either place and get my full, familiar, always-up-to-date development environment is very appealing.

Obviously YMMV depending upon use case, for me a full laptop (even a small one) is overkill for what I need for a work machine, since I never really use it anyplace other than work or home and in both places I plug it into "full-sized" keyboard/mouse/monitors anyway.

Since I do Android development, ChromeOS isn't the ideal platform for this, but I suspect these sticks will run crouton like other ChromeOS devices...

[derekp7]

For this workflow (where you already have most of a computer at two locations), wouldn't having a diskless workstation at work and home also work out, and just carry around a USB thumbdrive? That way you still have the same environment in both locations.

[georgemcbay]

I've actually considered USB before in years past and discounted it because the speed of USB sticks was very bad (in the context of keeping all your files on one, compiling from one, etc).

Thinking about it again in light of your comment made me realize there very well could be USB 3.0 thumbdrives with suitable speed (based on some Googling around it looks like there are some that are quite fast, but you have to be really careful with brand/model since it appears there is a very wide spread between the performance of different USB3.0 thumbdrives). But, yeah, I suppose using a fast USB3.0 thumbdrive would be another way to achieve this sort of setup.

[derekp7]

The fastest USB 3.0 drive I have is an msata card I had left over after I upgraded, which is mounted in an msata SSD to usb converter case. I haven't tried running my normal OS environment off it yet, but overall performance is way better than a typical USB stick, or USB hard drives.

[teacup50]

Why not switch to desktops? You'll be more productive (faster/bigger/more capable everything), and you won't have to haul around an entire laptop.

If you commit your work, you only need the network to sync between two desktops.