
My New Development Laptop: Samsung Chromebook - duck
http://stevengharms.com/blog/2012/12/16/my-new-development-laptop-samsung-chromebook/
======
ChuckMcM
I enjoyed his iPad one a bit more. Clearly there is a space here and the
Chrome book provides some additional leverage.

But it is most interesting to see the 'smart terminal' getting re-invented by
this author and others. Which really has me wondering about where those guys
are now. Is there an actual "use case" for this as a product? What would a
terminal designer do?

In many ways the ASUS tablets seem to be good starting points, or the
Microsoft Surface. Something that is expecting to have a keyboard attached.
And of course ssh and a really nice terminal program are essential. But what
else? Could we 'throw' with an air-play like service our social 'situational
awareness' feed up on the TV? It is kind of strange because I get this weird
"deja vu" feeling about this sort of capability and what you see in the movies
sometimes with a bunch of monitors (or projectors) showing aggregate data
while individuals toil away at their space.

So here is the picture, you're sitting on the couch coding, you've got your
twitter/g+/facebook/rss feeds bouncing around on the screen on the wall. I
don't know what the market for that is. Its at least two (me and the author
:-)

~~~
pm90
I've been along these lines a bit. Look at it this way: what if, say a pebble
sized computer held all the computing state. To actually use it, you would
have to keep it near, or pair it somehow, with a keyboard, monitor and
(optionally) mouse. Instead of having computers, tablets etc. we would have: a
tiny computer, and multiple screens, keyboards, whatever.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I like that too, although the the CPU/cc number is still too high. Presumably
this was part of the thinking of the moto phone that transformed, and my nexus
phone isn't _quite_ powerful enough to do all this.

------
benwerd
I use NetBeans for development, and always feel like I'm slightly inferior for
not relying on vim. There's certainly a lot to be said for it, but I really
like (1) being able to zoom straight to the definition of one of my functions
(can vim do this?), and (2) being able to code offline / on localhost
sometimes.

And I think the second point is my problem with this. Chances are, if I get a
cheapo PC or a tablet to code on, it's because I'm traveling. If I'm
traveling, chances are I'm not going to have a reliable Internet connection.
I've got a mobile hotspot, etc etc, but sometimes the simple method - working
locally - is the best.

~~~
WayneDB
Don't feel inferior for not using vim.

People who claim that vim/emacs are the ultimate environment typically have a
very narrow world-view in my experience. There are absolutely no absolutes!

~~~
slurgfest
Rather than just making baseless assertions about people who favor vim or
emacs, please mention an IDE with the same maturity, community, cross-platform
support, cross-language support, and customizability as either vim or emacs.

To pick just one random alternative, let's take gedit. It looks simple and
standard, which is nice. It's newer, that could be OK. It can be installed on
more than one platform (though not necessarily simply). It has the major
features, it's basically feature-complete. For fancier stuff and language-
specific tools, you can write plugins with Python, which makes all kinds of
things possible. On the other hand, it can get crashy when you use a few
plugins - maturity issue. There are few plugins and fewer actively maintained
because there's not a big community to support and build on it. A lot of its
behavior is reasonable but not really customizable. Random example - if I
personally want to have a simpler interface in the vein of scribes or
WriteRoom, I'm SOL. Of course, gedit simply cannot be used from a terminal, so
you will use another editor for that, with its own keybindings etc.

Most of the good editors have a story like this. Even if it seems to work
great and be flexible enough, the community and plugins aren't there.

If your goal is only (say) to write C# for Windows, Visual Studio is probably
best. If you only want to write Java, (say) IDEA is probably best. These are
powerful environments. But only for certain things, and in a certain way. If
you want to code on another platform, different language, really change the
behavior, get around a bug, or get a fancy new capability without paying a
vendor lots of money, you are just going to hit limits and have to pick up yet
another tool.

If you've learned vim or emacs then you at least have a default which licks
all these issues at once. In this sense they are "ultimate editors". And this
is an opinion informed by broad usage of many editors.

~~~
WayneDB
I'm speaking from personal experience, so no it's not at all baseless.
Furthermore, I don't need to satisfy your list of requirements. Those are
_your_ requirements.

I want my apps built with the best power-tool that was designed for the target
platform. Your list of requirements didn't include that. So, for you maybe
something like vim is the "ultimate editor", but for me it doesn't fulfill the
primary requirement.

I don't think anyone's a bad person if they really like vim, but it just seems
to me that people who think that usually just _can't imagine_ why anyone would
not make the same choice as them.

~~~
sp4rki
1) Baseless or not - your generalization is just as bad (or even worse) as the
inverse case.

2) He didn't tell you his list of requirements just so you would change your
mind about whatever your opinion is at the moment. He did it to explain why
people say what the say so fanatically. As a matter of fact, those weren't
even requirements per se.

3) Regarding the "best power-tool" comment. His list of "requirements" DID
INCLUDE what you just talked about. There are better tools than vim + command-
line in specific cases - according to the GP - and he gave you examples of his
opinion on such IDEs. Visual Studio is pretty much THE exemplary case, though
I supplement it with ViEmu as editing code in a way that's not modal or having
to use the arrow keys seems completely foreign to me after years of
indoctrination.

He made it clear that he believes that the people that go cookoo for vim +
command-line or emacs are so adamant to call them the ultimate environments
not only because they include/are better text editors than everything else in
the market, but because they're expandable, mature, and portable. And let's
not even get into the part that relates to working on a remote server through
a terminal emulator.

If you get ONE thing out of both the GP and my response today - let it be
this: you say that vim is not the "ultimate editor" for you because it doesn't
fulfill the primary requirement (being a power tool according to you)... Well,
I'm pretty sure the primary requirement of each and every competent hacker
regarding editors and IDE's should be to make the edition and creation of text
easy, fast, streamlined, and efficient. I can count the text editors that
fulfill that requirement to the T in a hand. Hell, there's three (or four if
you dislike being productive). And one of them doesn't have a term version.

4) There are a few very specific tools/toolsets for very specific tasks in the
programming world that make more sense to use than the classic "hardcore"
editors. Hell in some cases they aren't necessarily better, but are
obligatory! Nevertheless it doesn't change the fact that having either vim or
emacs as tools in your bat-belt, will indelibly make a more productive
developer by a factor of a quattuordecillion and one internet kittens.

5) I'm going to go ahead and make a generalization just as you did. "People
who claim that vim/emacs are not the ultimate environment typically have a
very naive world-view in my experience. Oh and in 98.64656% of the time (cause
internet statistics are just as bad as generalizations) such claims come from
people that failed to achieve proficiency in the aforementioned editors."

Notwithstanding the foregoing, I don't think you're bad for disliking vim, and
I can totally understand that personal preference, biases, opinions, and
memories will dictate what editor you end up using. But pissing a bunch of
geeks that love the editors in questions with a comment that sounds biggot-
ish, elitist (as elitist as the people you're confronting), and egocentric,
makes very little sense if you ask me.

------
niggler
The following phrase struck me as very odd:

"No, you want your phone book to be managed by Google or Apple"

I suspect lots of people will never ever want any company to manage their
phone books.

~~~
natrius
Before I got my first Android phone, my phone book was stored in featurephones
with proprietary address books that couldn't be accessed without going to a
phone store. Now my address book is everywhere with internet access. Whether
I'm calling from my phone or a web browser, I type in a name and it just
works.

The people who don't want this experience are a small minority.

~~~
niggler
You are confusing two different issues.

With the older iphones, the phone book was backed up every time you synced.
The phone numbers are still accessible on the computer and you could even get
vcards from it. Then, when you upgrade (like I did from 3GS to 4S)
transferring numbers was a snap: just connect and hit sync.

Note that no phone numbers were stored on google's or apple's servers. A very
significant portion of the iPhone crowd still sync via cable.

------
jetti
"It also costs less than one-tenth of the price of the MBP, so, given that,
the hardware performs much better than one-tenth the quality components."

Except that it may not. You have the initial cost and then the $25 a month for
basically the life of the Chromebook. Not to mention that it becomes rendered
useless if you hop on a plane and happen to be on one of the many planes not
equipped with wifi. Even if it does have wifi, it is just another expense to
add to the cost to use a Chromebook as a development computer.

~~~
sgharms
Fair enough. I never travel, so the plane argument isn't really applicable. I
also have linux running on this thing now so, i think that objection will go
away soon.

And yes, the VPS/month is a cost, but I pay that anyway regardless the
platform. I like having my contexts preserved and constant on a machine whose
costs I can expense for tax purposes.

------
dustinrodrigues

        Hardware
    
        Look, no one’s going to beat Apple at this game, so I won’t lie to you. It’s not as nice as typing away on a MacBook Pro. It also costs less than one-tenth of the price of the MBP, so, given that, the hardware performs much better than one-tenth the quality components.
    

I agree that Apple products are significantly more expensive, but saying that
it's "less than 1/10" the price of a MacBcook Pro is a bit disingenuous. The
most comprable Apple laptop to the Chromebook is the 11" MacBook Air, whose
price starts at $1000.

------
MatthewPhillips
Same here. I bought the original Samsung Series 5 as soon as it came out. I
enjoyed it as a couch computer for quite a while, but eventually began using
tablets for that purpose. For the last 6 months or so I have barely touched
the Chromebook. Then a few weeks ago I decided to give Secure Shell a try, and
I was impressed enough that I've been using the Chromebook all of the time.

Since I already use the browser to look up stuff all of the time anyways,
having that a tab next to my shell makes it all the more convenient. And I can
use split screen when needed, or make my shell its own window when I want to
do distraction-free coding. I see no reason to upgrade for now, I'll probably
wait until the 3rd generation to switch over to ARM.

To anyone planning on doing this, I would recommend getting dynamic dns, most
routers these days can work with dyn.com (the major provider), and the cost is
much lower than Linode or any VPS provider, and you probably already have an
older computer that's much better than cheap VPSes.

------
giulianob
If your entire development environment consists of a browser then I guess
it'll work

~~~
fragsworth
Yeah, I don't see how you can do anything other than simple web development
this way. For things like mobile, console, Flash, Unity, etc. I'm pretty sure
if you're not using the standard IDEs and emulators you're going to have a bad
time, and those are difficult to use remotely.

But if you're a web developer, you should by all means do whatever it takes to
make development easier.

------
primitur
My new development laptop is a re-purposed Motorola Lapdock, which cost me
$50, paired with an MK802 PC-on-a-stick, running Ubuntu, which cost me $65.
About $12 worth of cables and adapters later, and I have a totally enviable,
snappy Ubuntu workstation which fits right inside all my old Macbook Air
accessories.

For less than $200, I've supplanted my need for MacOSX with a neat system that
will upgrade _quite_ easily. There are already faster/nicer PC-on-a-stick
style products on the immediate horizon, so I think I'm going to be very happy
with this Lapdock for some time to come ..

------
terio
I would rather have my address book and all my data, including my photos and
videos, in my own storage.

------
ditoa
I see the authors point of view and I like the idea in theory however I just
can't help but want a real operating system to work on instead of just a
browser. I have seen some people have got Ubuntu working on the latest
Chromebooks which is a step in the right direction (for me).

If I could get a solid Linux install on a Chromebook (Debian or Slack for
example) with a super lightweight tiling WM I would be in heaven.

I love the idea of doing the heavy lifting on a remote server but I also
want/need the ability to do _some_ work on the system without internet access
so a local gcc, gdb, vim, emacs, java, python, etc. install is a must for
those times I can't get online but still want to hack a little bit.

I do believe the future for me will be cheap lower powered systems which I use
for the light work and offloading the heavy stuff to a VPS but the hardware
and software (OS) balance isn't there just yet.

------
dbro
For those interested in giving this a try, here are a few additional
suggestions from my recent experience.

There are less expensive alternatives to Linode. I switched to Loose Foot
Computing (<http://www.lfcvps.com>) about a year ago and their service has
been great. They often have promotional deals listed on lowendbox. See
[http://www.lowendbox.com/?s=loose+foot&searchsubmit=Find](http://www.lowendbox.com/?s=loose+foot&searchsubmit=Find)

tmux is amazing and takes care of window management. No need for dwm or xmonad
anymore.

Lastpass integration with the browser works great with Chrome OS. This
replaced keypassx for me.

USB tethering with my android phone "just works" to get on the internet.

Really happy so far. This is the right mix of easy, fast, cheap, and secure
for me.

------
ISL
Chrome OS still doesn't X-forward, right?

Hm. Googling suggests that there's kinda X-forwarding, but it's full screen
only? [http://blog.tomtasche.at/2012/01/developing-on-chromebook-
pa...](http://blog.tomtasche.at/2012/01/developing-on-chromebook-
part-3-x.html)

------
JohnBooty
As somebody who does a lot of web-oriented work, what weighs me down the most
(in terms of development environments) is the need to test my sites on
multiple browsers and operating systems. I suspect a lot of developers are in
the same boat.

At a bare minimum, unless you're targeting a very specific audience, you need
a couple of virtual machines running Windows so you can test in IE, and
ideally a way to run Safari as well.

Of course, you could keep it thin and have an instance running those virtual
machines up in the cloud somewhere, and VNC (or whatever) into it with your
Chromebook.

~~~
niggler
Check out browserling and testling as a solution to cross-browser testing.

~~~
JohnBooty
Wow, thanks. I hadn't realized how far services like that had advanced.

Browserling lets you run an interactive session (not just screenshots) and
will SSH tunnel so you can test sites on your local machine/network that
aren't publicly net-accessible. Neat!

------
Irregardless
I like the idea and I agree that this will be the way of the future, but it
just doesn't seem practical at the moment. Portability is hamstrung by the
need for a constant network connection to accomplish anything, and the cost
savings of a Chromebook are almost completely washed out when you factor in
_at least_ $20/mo. for Linode.

Why not just get something from System76? Or install whatever OS you like on
one of the notoriously Linux friendly Lenovo laptops? You end up with better
hardware specs, more flexibility, and comparable portability for the same
price.

~~~
sgharms
The chrome book is extremely light. It was also 250, much cheaper and lighter
than the lenovo.

I've also been able to use a local ubuntu on this machine, not that it matters
too much since I'm on a VPS, but i guess on planes or something I can have
code available to me by means of a git before i get on the flight (or cron or
something similar).

I don't know what a system 76 is...

------
sgharms
Hey all, I saw a huge spike in traffic and tracked it back to HN. Thanks for
caring.

Let me summarize a few points. I've tried to reply in-thread.

I recognize this approach isn't for everyone or for frequent air travelers,
but I walk everywhere (live in SF) and like being able to take my hack context
with me and pick it up wherever, whenever.

Yes there are risks: VPNs could tighten things up.

VIM is very fast, even over high latency.

Offline support is coming. I have an ubuntu running in the chromebook.

------
kuebelreiter
IMHO Steven only trades the risks. The laptop has no data on it, can't be
stolen, great. But doing work, you have a lot of things to work that are not
for the public.

But your (linode- or whereever)server, 24 h available and exposed on the net,
has a latent risk of being "0wned". And there goes your stuff.

IMHO the risk of your server being 0wned is much greater than losing your
notebook (or being stolen), so this model is the unsafer choice.

------
donniezazen
The only concern I have about cloud computing is that Google or other cloud
vendor might close my account and delete my data without prior notification or
my consent.

------
apl
At the moment, VPS prices are still prohibitive for many types of development.
I, for instance, simply couldn't work on a machine with less than 4GB of RAM;
preferably, there's 16GB or even 32GB in there. A 4GB Linode instance sets me
back a cool $330 a month, which is, of course, not a proposition worth
entertaining.

However, I'm sure it's enough for front-end development or what have you.

------
shpiel
I could see myself adapting this strategy, except that my employer requires me
to use a VPN client that runs only on Windows and OS X. As of right now this
solution makes economic sense if you already use cloud storage. Assuming
storage costs will continue to decrease and the network accessibility will
continue to increase, then I can definitely see myself using it for personal
projects.

------
manishsharan
I am Clojure noobie but this post got me thinking: Would it be possible to set
up a Clojure REPL on a JVM in the cloud. This would allow one to run a cheap
laptop/chromebook with local File system on a thumb-drive and do actual
execution on the cloud JVM. This would allow one to do a fast grep on local
files as needed while offloading heavy duty processing on the cloud m/c.

------
magic5227
What about installing Ubuntu on these and developing on that? Has anyone
reliably done that?

Doesn't that make more sense.

~~~
duck
From a couple weeks ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4929282>. From
that though, I got the impression that using linux isn't easier.

~~~
magic5227
Do you know if Ubuntu will be addressing the issues that were reported? They
must have ARM on the roadmap

------
dotmanish
I saw JetBrains' Sale attracting huge number of comments from people and
apparently their sales and site performance showed how popular their IDE
products were.

I am guessing all those "heavy IDE" users aren't subscribers to the "code in
the cloud" paradigm. Yet.

------
Yhippa
The unicorn will be a web-based GUI IDE (to help me code Java EE) for me while
storing my workspace in the cloud. This seems inevitable.

------
btipling
What is the latency like developing in vim over ssh? I would find the little
bit of wait with each key stroke annoying quickly.

~~~
enoch_r
Having done this occasionally, it usually wasn't bad at all, but occasionally
it got frustrating enough that I'd use a local clone of the repo. It's for
that reason that I'm hesitant to go this route (or the iPad/keyboard route).

Interestingly enough, one of the main problems vim was attempting to solve was
the annoyance of dealing with a high-latency connection:

<http://sourcefrog.net/weblog/software/people/joy-vi.html>

------
bmuon
I was expecting a post related to Cloud9 IDE. As a mostly-front-end developer
that's something I'd try.

------
martinced
"I really like the idea of this because should the laptop be stolen, no
seriously personal data can be stolen. Should the laptop be broken, it’s
essentially commodity hardware."

What does it have to do with a Chromebook / terminal exactly? I've got
_exactly_ the same for my regular workstation...

I'm using a Debian Linux workstation for development using full disk
encryption. Should it be stolen the account would be locked up (I _always_
lock it without even waiting the timeout when I stand up: one shortcut and
it's locked and you can't unlock it without my password) so there's no way
anyone is accessing my data without my password. No, sure, if an attacker
knows my password (and/or the boot-time disk encryption password) he can
access my data, just like he could access your cloud data should he know your
password.

Should my house burn and my workstation (be it a laptop or a desktop) be
broken, it's essentially commodity hardware too. What makes you think I don't
have automated backup scripts? (gpg + scp FTW).

There's simply no way I'm accepting latency back/forth to some cloud thing.
And the "bad" thing with physics is that physical ain't going to change: short
of major scientific breakthrough no matter the $$$ we're not getting better
latency anytime soon.

Also, I consider an environment which can suddenly "stop working" because
something changed server-side to be fundamentally broken: I'm in total control
of my dev environment and there isn't a single update that can be made without
my consent.

You're giving up all that power once you decide to develop using a "terminal".

Of course that power comes at a price: you need to be able to install and
configure your OS so that it uses full-disk encryption, you need to write a
few scripts taking care of automated encrypted backups, you need the
discipline to "lock" your system everytime you stand up (by now it's a habit),
etc.

But once it's set up, my dev environment doesn't change.

~~~
sgharms
Did your regular workstation cost 250? Does it weigh virtually nothing so that
you can tromp all about town easily?

Can you pick up your hacking session while at the apple store if you happen to
have no computer whatsoever with you? That's worth a lot to me since i rarely
travel and, if I do, my goal is to _get away from computers_.

------
mariusmg
Yeah, I would really like Google/Apple to manage my phone book. WTF dude ?

