jasonvorhe

I've been working on Chromebooks since the 2013 Chromebook Pixel, though the laptop itself is almost irrelevant, because I've just moved everything into the cloud and work from a couple of VMs with tmux/vim/mosh. Of course that's not on option if you require a complete IDE, but it seems that support for local GUI apps is coming with a native ChromeOS feature called Crostini.

People runing the Development channel already play around with various apps like VS Code: https://chromeunboxed.com/news/chrome-os-container-crostini-...

They're also working for native support for running VMs via KVM, though it looks as if that'll be primarily targeted to the enterprise world.

It's an interesting time for Chromebooks.

sethrin
If you need a complete IDE on a chromebook, you might check out Cloud9[0], which seems to have been acquired by Amazon. It gives you a decent editor and a small VM as a workspace, and the nice thing is that you can close the browser window and do something else, and the workspace will be exactly as you left it when you return, including any running terminal commands. I used C9 for a while before discovering Crouton[1] and subsequently GalliumOS[2], and it's still a pretty credible alternative to local development.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/ [1] https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton [2] https://galliumos.org/

(I have no affiliation with any companies or projects mentioned.)