Ask HN: Do you use a Chromebook or Pixelbook as your primary machine?
Primary laptop, yes.  I have a desktop with a vastly superior mechanical keyboard and multiple monitors, but for a primary laptop, sure.<p>The concept of &quot;primary machine&quot; is weird to me.  Since the early 80s, things keep getting separated out.  NFS home directories moved bulk file storage to a fileserver in the 80s or early 90s.  I could run ALL the self tests and build for ALL possible outputs by hand like the old days on a local machine, but that&#x27;s what the Jenkins vm is for.  I could run git without any centralized server, but no one really does that, there&#x27;s a host for that.  I could keep track of bugs in email or in my head like the baddest of bad old days, but there&#x27;s a host for that.  Logging for debugging is on separate hosts now a days.  I used to run my dev environment locally using lots of memory and CPU and battery power but I&#x27;ve had access to a vmware cluster that weighs several tons, I&#x27;m not carrying that kind of power around in a laptop.  Since everything has abstracted out into cloudy hosts, there&#x27;s really nothing I can do with local dev resources WRT the proverbial &quot;what do I do in an internet outage?&quot; question.  The answer is &quot;same thing I&#x27;d do with my desktop, nothing, because everything is online and cloudy today.&quot;  In 1981 I could program productively on one machine air gap isolated from every other machine on the planet, but that was a very long time ago.  There may also be inherent cultural issues, you can and we did program in Z80 assembler in &#x27;81 on completely isolated self hosted machines, but I&#x27;m not sure that even works culturally with modern languages, burned right into the tools are things like automatic dependency resolution that assume internet connectivity.<p>Having infinite cloud power laying around makes things weird talking with older generation devs.  Yes the Scala compiler is not fast if you run it on a low speed battery friendly laptop cpu with 2 gigs of ram and slow spinning rust for storage, but the vmware image I compile on has specs better than anything you can buy today in as a laptop so I just don&#x27;t care about speed.<p>You have to get used to some closed source weirdness, but can be worked around.  You &quot;right click&quot; using alt and the touchpad on my weird keyboard.  The keyboard feel is awful compared to an original model-M on my desk but it does work.  The cheapest chromebooks have ridiculous low res low dpi screens and one with a good screen, is, as you&#x27;d expect, hundreds of dollars not $49 or whatever the school kids get today.  The vnc client still complains about security every time I use it as if I&#x27;ll respond on the 35194th complaint.  The SSH client UI is like a weird re-interpretation of putty which is initially weird.<p>On the other hand, its never crashed or failed in any way not designed into it, OS security and maint patching isn&#x27;t an issue, the boot time is a couple seconds so I don&#x27;t bother with sleep mode, the battery really does last ten hours while it weighs practically nothing.  It just works as an appliance which is very unusual for general purpose computer use.<p>Most chromebook solutions are multistep which makes it either impossible to use or trivial to use depending on your mindset and past experience.  How to program an arduino on a chromebook?  Well, that&#x27;s impossible in one step there is no one click arduino IDE installer on the google play store, but absolutely trivial in multiple steps.  Setting up a VNC client on a chromebook is trivial.  Setting up VNC server on a dirt cheap pi and accessing it via the network is trivial.  Setting up arduino ide on a pi is trivial.  So its both impossible to program an arduino using a chromebook in one step, and its also four unimaginably trivial steps to accomplish.  So using &quot;windows monolithic thinking&quot; many things are simply impossible on the chromebook and will forever be impossible as long as you demand one click solutions, while &quot;unix small optimized tools thinking&quot; means everything is possible, even trivial, on a chromebook.  Chromebooks have acceptable individual tools that can be strung together unix-like to do anything, but there are very few swiss army multi-tool giant monolithic one click solutions.  You can&#x27;t one click install visual studio locally, but you can trivially VNC into a giant overpowered vmware image running emacs connected to cloudy fileserver and jenkins and gitlab and things...