I've been using Nitrous.io (formerly Action.io) on my ChromeBook Pixel and loving it. I've been using my Pixel full-time as a development environment for a couple of weeks now, and haven't given up in frustration yet :)<p>The Nitrous guys have been extremely responsive, fixing a bunch of bugs that were causing me problems (like awaken-from-sleep, problems with $COLUMNS on a retina display). Their terminal emulator is great; it even has mouse support (although it seems to be off by 1 diagonal column -- looking forward to seeing that fixed soon).<p>One extremely important point: by default today, ChromeOS discards tabs when it runs low on memory. This experience was sufficiently problematic for me that I almost gave up on the entire thing, until I learned about <a href="http://gigaom.com/2013/04/05/running-out-of-memory-on-a-chromebook-heres-a-30-second-solution/" rel="nofollow">http://gigaom.com/2013/04/05/running-out-of-memory-on-a-chro...</a>. tl;dr Google is experimenting with zRAM (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZRam" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZRam</a>), which will eventually be on by default, and you can trivially enable it right now. Do it.
- So this company sells a laptop that works as a browser for a online site and nothing else.<p>- great, i will buy one and waste a lot of time to make it work offline.<p>... genius. just genius.<p>I would just write it off as a good hack or something, but the chrome books have ZERO advantage. it's hardware is pure garbage if you compare it to anything on the same price range.
Nice write up, this will definitely come in handy if I ever decide to go the Chromebook route.<p>However, as much as I like the thought of trying something new, I'm still having trouble justifying the purchase. In other words - why develop on a Chromebook as opposed to a lightweight notebook?<p>I guess it's a question of typical use case, but I don't find myself too often developing in areas without wi-fi. A 100mb /mo plan also felt like fairly sparse offerings, but it sounds like that's NBD in practice.<p>As far as the price point is concerned, I'm pretty sure there are refurbished lenovo x220's / 230's available for the same as a Samsung Chromebook (~$500).<p>Especially with regards to the latter, I guess I'd feel a little weird spending close to the same about on $ on a 3g browser with a terminal.<p>I'd love to hear thoughts from anyone who's moved to a Chromebook for on-the-go development.
I'm sorry but the proposed options are not acceptable.<p>No VPN? SSH as a plugin ???<p>Using a Chrome plugin for SSH is taking unnecessary risks. I see no reason why there couldn't be a terminal application on the Chromebook.<p>If it's due to UI, maybe there could be a way out of the GUI - IIRC the Chromebook runs on X-Windows.<p>If you can't hack it in a way where ctrl-alt-f1 will get you to a genuine linux getty, running standard GNU/Linux command line software after a recompile, I don't want a Chromebook for development.<p>Unless you have money constraints, it makes more sense to purchase a real laptop - a macbook if you need the battery time.
We need a robust web-based development environment. Think jsFiddle for other languages but more complete. Version control integrated (think github or bitbucket). Deployment integrated (think heroku). Dependency management. Offline capabilities (probably limited). Technically, i have little doubt it could be possible. No idea what the business model would look like. SaaS/PaaS? A freemium setup would likely be possible? Free base usage, paid extensions?
[edit] looks like nitrous.io and/or cloud9 are doing exactly this.
Very ignorant question: "development" means developing what? Applications? Web sites? mobile something-or-other? chrome plugins? If applications then for what OS? Where does the compiler run? Is this just a shell into some other server that runs the compiler?