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.
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.
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.
