This. As much as I like Google, I've griped before that the Chromebook is a tempting but raw deal for a power user.
[1] You get a pretty locked down laptop that you have to boot into developer mode to do anything useful (which adds an additional 5-second boot time)
[2] I'm a happy camper at setting up dual-boot systems with Windows laptops, but crouton sounds like a pain to me.
[3] Limited disk space: I would think we would need at least a 64 GB or 128 GB SSD to do anything useful.
Note that I'm only speaking as a power-user. IMHO, the Chromebook is actually a great laptop for the older generation and people who use web-based products all the time ... but I do wish Google had put in some more though on how to make it useful for power users who need the Linux utilities as well as Eclipse, Thunderbird, and other X-based applications etc.
I really hate having to buy a good laptop that has Windows pre-installed and having to wipe it out just to install Ubuntu/variants, but it still is my only choice at this point. (Yes, I realize there are companies that produce pre-installed Linux laptops, but their build quality doesn't compare to the HP/Dell/Asus/Samsung kind.)
Note: not that I'm suggesting you get one, I'm just adding what I know. I've been tempted by the screen: the LTE version with a DigitalOcean SSD-based VM to do all the painful work (and completely disposable, my favorite part), combined with that screen for text editing, makes a lovely combination.
But, I just run Arch on a thinkpad. I still get a little kick when I boot a machine the first time I get it, try out the hardware to make sure it all works, get annoyed with windows being utterly awful, and then get to wipe it over. I might dd it with all zeroes first, depending on how annoying it was :-)
I find the 32GB Pixel more than adequate, but admittedly I am probably weird that way. The last time my primary computer happened to have 32GB was only 2007 and I've never really grown out of those usage patterns.
> IMHO, the Chromebook is actually a great laptop for the older generation and people who use web-based products all the time
I think a lot of us in the younger generation do this too, including the more tech savvy. I'm a software engineer in my 20s and my Chromebook is just fine for me 95% of the time. Sometimes I wish it had a little more RAM for when I get lazy about closing tabs, but that's about it: it's rare that I care about desktop apps.
Chromebooks are convenient if you fall on the lightweight side of the "power user" spectrum. With the help of Crouton, a chrooted "traditional" Linux environment is easy to set up. If all you need is Emacs, your command line utilities, and 10 gb of disk space for active development, then you would be surprised at how capable chromebooks are as lightweight development machines.
[1] You get a pretty locked down laptop that you have to boot into developer mode to do anything useful (which adds an additional 5-second boot time) [2] I'm a happy camper at setting up dual-boot systems with Windows laptops, but crouton sounds like a pain to me. [3] Limited disk space: I would think we would need at least a 64 GB or 128 GB SSD to do anything useful.
Note that I'm only speaking as a power-user. IMHO, the Chromebook is actually a great laptop for the older generation and people who use web-based products all the time ... but I do wish Google had put in some more though on how to make it useful for power users who need the Linux utilities as well as Eclipse, Thunderbird, and other X-based applications etc.
I really hate having to buy a good laptop that has Windows pre-installed and having to wipe it out just to install Ubuntu/variants, but it still is my only choice at this point. (Yes, I realize there are companies that produce pre-installed Linux laptops, but their build quality doesn't compare to the HP/Dell/Asus/Samsung kind.)