• Calling ChromeOS users slow is certainly uncalled for, so I’m not defending the previous poster. Still, I don’t think we should encourage development on ChromeOS.

    Google themselves do everything possible to make the platform hell to develop on and for, including breaking Google Cloud Code signin in Jetbrains IDEs, making it impossible to use Flutter Web in Android Studio without a second browser installed in the VM, and preventing gpu access in the VM.

    The Android dev experience is better on a Windows or Mac, too, since the Android environment runs in a vm on objectively worse hardware than any modern windows or Mac of comparable price.

    I can see why you enjoy ChromeOS (I do/did too), but I think Google is too dumb a company to run a true desktop platform.

    • I understand the concerns about Google owning the OS, that’s my only worry with my chromebook. If Google start preventing use of adblockers, or limiting freedoms in other ways that might sour my opinion. But the hardware can run other OSs natively, so that would be my get-out-of-jail option if needed.

      I’ve not encountered problems with broken support for dev tools, but I am using a completely different tool chain to you. My experience with linux dev and cross-compiling for android has been pretty seamless so far. My chromebook also seems to support GPU acceleration through both Android and Linux VMs, so perhaps that is a device-specific issue?

      I’m certainly not going to claim that chromebooks are perfect devices for everyone, nor a replacement for a fully-fledged laptop or desktop OS experience. For my particular usage, it’s worked out great but YMMV, my main point is that ChromeOS isn’t just for idiots as the poster above seemed to think.

      Also, a good percentage of my satisfaction with it is the hardware and form-factor rather than ChromeOS per se. The same device running Linux natively would still tick most of my boxes, although I’d probably miss a couple of android apps and tablet mode support.