You can build it on a Chromebook

I was a Windows guy from the very beginning. I used Windows 1.02 on my IBM PS/2 Model 25 back in the late 1980s. I was thrilled to build applications for Windows 3.1 using Turbo Pascal for Windows. I remember how fun it was to allocate a whopping 2GB of RAM for an array. I stuck with Windows 2000 for many years, then became a Windows 7 die-hard. (Let’s not talk about Windows 8, okay?) Today I use Windows 11 all day in my work. Windows has been with me since the beginning.

But a couple of years ago, I realized a few things. First, I realized that I had gotten to the point where I spent 98% of my time in the Chrome browser and seldom ran Windows applications. The only Windows application I used frequently was Visual Studio Code.

After a while, I realized that Chromebooks were really Linux under the hood and I could run VS Code natively on one, so I made the switch. To my surprise, it ran just as smoothly as it did on Windows, with all the extensions I needed. The only real limitation was system memory. On an 8GB Chromebook, heavier workloads could slow things down.

A few adjustments

There were a few adjustments. I was pleased to find that ChromeOS provided many standard utilities, like a calculator and a text editor. I also found browser-based alternatives for a few more complex Windows utilities, like Chrome Remote Desktop. Finally, I figured out how to run Postman on ChromeOS’s Linux Development Environment alongside VS Code. Then I was pretty much set.

As a Google Pixel phone user, I was already deeply immersed in the Google Universe (and quite uninterested in the world of Apple), so switching to ChromeOS was a natural migration for me.

One of the main draws to ChromeOS was its simplicity. As the browser has become the center of the computing universe, there is little that I need to do that can’t be done in Chrome. I’ve never been a big Microsoft Office user, so the Google Office suite was more than enough. I’m not much of a gamer, but even browser-based gaming is coming along. Before long, I’ll be able to do all my development inside the browser.

A Chromebook boots in seconds, and updates itself in the background. No more long, arduous, fraught-with-peril updates done at inconvenient times. The Blue Screen of Death is a thing of the past. There is no bloatware to delete and no viruses to worry about, and thus no heavy virus-scanning software is necessary.

Smooth sailing

The hardware is generally inexpensive but pretty robust and incredibly easy to set up. However, most Chromebooks come with just 8GB of RAM, which, as I mentioned above, gets pushed to the limit when running VS Code in Linux. Finding a Chromebook with 16GB of RAM can be a challenge and disproportionately expensive, making the point less compelling, I suppose.

Of course, while I don’t want it to happen, I don’t worry about my Chromebook being lost or run over by a bus because it is quite easy to replace. The time from unboxing to being back in business is minutes, not hours like it would be with a Windows machine. While a couple hundred bucks is nothing to sneeze at, knowing that I can replace a missing or out-of-commission machine easily and quickly is nice indeed. (The downside here, though, is that the temptation to get a newer, faster, better machine is harder to resist.)

It wasn’t without trepidation that I made the switch, but it’s been two years of quite smooth sailing. I’m not a Linux genius by any stretch of the imagination, but even installing VS Code was nothing more than double-clicking on a *.deb file. Painless. ChromeOS even created an icon to run VS Code in the start menu. 

Fast, easy, simple, and cheap. If only everything in tech worked that way.