Earlier this year, my mother-in-law-J’s hand-me-down MacBook kicked the bucket. To reduce complexity and “support” phone time, my wife convinced me to buy her a Chromebook. I still worry about not being able to help out (and I’m a sucker for gadgets), so I blew the net savings from the Chromebook gift in comparison to the potential MacBook purchase on a second Chromebook.

There are two stories here, one short and one developing…. The short story is that since for most people a Chromebook only runs a browser, there’s really no support beyond figuring out web services. We’ve yet to receive a cry for help from J. To increase n to 2, we gave mother-in-law-L a Chromebook for Christmas 5ish years ago…. and I wouldn’t know she used it ever, except that she says that she does and I occasionally see it on the kitchen island.

The longer story is what I should do with the extra Chromebook….

The Hardware

I dragged my feet on buying Chromebooks until BestBuy had a sale. Google had a sales rep at BestBuy, and from his enthusiasm, I think I might have been his only customer ever. I don’t think he believed that I was going to buy a pair, even, as he took my photo and walked me to the cashier. In the end, I bought two Samsung Chromebook Pros.

The display is beautiful, generating guilt never to use the touch screen; there’s a built in stylus that I’ve only used to demo Adobe Sketch; the keyboard has all the programming bracket keys, but oddly spaced; the case is a nice compromise between cheap, sturdy, and thin; the battery life lets me forget about the machine for a few days.

Messing Around

Google says that you can run Android apps on Chrome OS, but that might be stretching the truth a little. Chrome OS emulates Android for each app. Apps appear on a phone-sized rectangle, with a buggy option to resize to the entire screen. The file access seems to be limited to files under the app’s install directory, so text-editor output might not be useful and there’s no access to the SD-card from Android, presenting a hurdle for playing music stored locally.

I tried without success to get several Android music players to work. To make matters more confusing, VLC has two versions that appear identical in the application tray — one for Android and one for Chrome OS. The former is buggy and freezes. The latter is a Chrome app…. which Google won’t support outside Chrome OS, so I worry VLC’s future. Google Play Music no longer lets you play music from an SD card. In the end, I found that Remo works reliably, but exposes a track ordering and song selection identical to the filesystem.

I’m not so in love with my favorite Android apps, kWS and Jota, that I’ve unlocked Chrome OS beyond installing local Chrome Extensions.

Accessing a Server

The easiest way to get my code fix via Chrome OS is just to install an ssh Chrome extension and connect to my server. There are several similar extensions. I just chose the one recommended from the crosh shell. Programming via an ssh connection reminds me of VT-100 and modem wails in college, but out of the box I got the same syntax highlighting from vim, YouCompleteMe, and npx. mdv piped into less -R pretty prints markdown well enough.

Untethered Development

For proof of concept that one could write something using only a ChromeBook, I used Text to write a simple hello-world Chrome Extension from Google’s tutorial. Presumably one could work in the emulated Android environment with Termux, suggested on Medium….