I tried coding on a Chromebook for 7 days

these days the price of computer hardware is ridiculously expensive so it's worth considering what coders actually need to get the job done to that end i wanted to find out if coding on a chromebook is possible and even if it could be my primary coding device so i picked up this chromebook to use for a period of about a week or two and during that time i'm going to answer some fundamental questions like can a device like this even be used for programming if it can what is that experience like and would i recommend it to people learning to code and even continuing their coding journey let's find out the first thing i needed to do was get a chromebook so i jumped on google and went for the cheapest one this was the lenovo duet 5 which only comes in at around 400 so i ordered it and it arrived if you're not aware chromebooks are essentially just like laptops but instead of using something like windows or mac they have a special operating system called chrome os and this is also based on chromium os which is also based on linux but what i'm hoping here is that i should be able to run some linux applications on this operating system for me one of the most important things for a device like this is the keyboard and i was quite happy with this one i plugged it in with a usbc cable and i got started creating my account this is actually the very first time i've used a chromebook so i'm not too sure yet what to expect i downloaded some updates and then i logged into my account after which it did some more updates so i decided it was lunch time and i decided now that i have a mobile device like this i might as well take it with me on my way to grab some food you might be thinking why did i pick a chromebook well the macbooks and windows laptops these days are expensive like four thousand dollars or more i wanted something cheap because when i started out in my programming journey i didn't have much money and i actually picked up a secondhand laptop alright great so i've got the setup more or less done here but i'm having a bit of a problem because right now i can only open up google chrome so i did some digging on google and found out that you can actually enable a developer mode and that's the very first thing that i did the developer mode disables all security for the chromebook but it comes with the benefit of letting you access the shell so now with this i can start actually inputting my own commands like pinging or installing applications and really customizing my chromebook to work how i want okay let's move to the next day because i actually want to start utilizing this chromebook and seeing what it's capable of so today's goal is quite simple i just want to get vs code running on this chromebook of course life is never that simple the very first issue i had was no internet connection i needed to connect up to my wifi which wasn't even working the other thing i can do is connect it to my mobile phone using bluetooth and tethering which is always a good option instead what i decided to do is head over to my internet router and while i'm no it expert what i decided was to keep turning it off and on again until it came back online now that i'm connected let's have a look at some of the code editors available for the chromebook some of the easiest to get started with are web-based editors like code sandbox which allows you to have a vs code like interface on your browser but this isn't really what i'm after what i really want to do is open up vs code on the chromebook directly and have some files and even maybe a hosting server on here so let's find out how we can do this as a windows user i thought i'd just install it and went to vs code.com which actually isn't the website so i went on google and found out it's actually code.visualstudio.com now that we're on here i'm going to select to download the deb version which is the linux version which i assume that's what i'm running and hopefully it just works and it doesn't just work well this is starting to become a nightmare i thought originally that all i had to do is download it but there is apparently a difference between intel processors and maybe arm based processors where the arm ones just don't have support for vs code i'm gonna have to do some more digging to find out if it's actually possible to run a vs code on here because i don't wanna really give up i do want vs code running on here and there's gotta be some way to do it so i headed over to my favorite website youtube and here i'm gonna search for hopefully a tutorial on how to install vs code on a chromebook i'm sure there's someone out there who's done it and after some searching i did find a few different examples what i learned is that chromebooks can run on a number of different processors and i'm using an rm64 based processor this means i need a custom version of vs code and on top of that i also need a custom version of linux distro running on this chromebook luckily this is quite easy to set up and all i have to do is head over to the chromebook settings and then enable a special mode called the linux development environment this installs all the extra unnecessaries that i need to get this up and running and i guess this is my first bit of feedback about the chromebook while it's a cheap device it does mean that you have to spend some additional time setting it all up to work the way you want for some people that might be a relaxing experience where you get to know your device a little bit better whereas for other people that might be a little bit frustrating i now have access to the shell and i did some more digging on the vs code website and found there was an actual guide on how to be installed on chromebooks which i really should have followed but having a look at this guide i can see that first i need the linux mode enabled which i've already done and then i need to execute a couple of commands that will allow me to install new applications i ran the commands and then jumped back on to vs code and downloaded the damp version of arm64 and now i'm ready to install it and the installation is successful yes vs code's up and running loading it up it looks exactly the same as my version on the mac as well as on the windows so i guess the very first thing is to customize my settings and maybe even log into github and it's also time for lunch so what i'm gonna do is take this chromebook with me on the go and we're gonna see how it performs out and about in the wild whenever buying a device like this you wanna use it to its maximum potential and if i was just gonna be working at home i might as well buy a computer in my case i'm always taking my son out to different locations and being able to continue to work and do some stuff while he's playing always makes life a lot easier here i continued my sign into github and as soon as it authenticated my vs code was ready and not only that it actually installed all the same extensions that i'm using on my other devices which is great today is day three and i want to get into some real coding today this means i need a real shot of coffee and i'm hopefully going to get a real server up and running that might host a website on a development board other things that i think are important are just being able to download repositories maybe run up databases and do some builds to see the difference in build time between a device like this and a windows device i want to install node.js i had a look at some articles and it looks a lot easier than installing vs code of course i've been wrong before so let's do some quick digging to see what's involved and how we can install it i headed over to the node.js website and i got a couple of options for downloading it for windows but that's not what i'm on so i'm gonna select other downloads and have a look if there's an arm version there is there's an arm version seven and version eight so i'm not too sure which one to use and i think i need to do a little bit more research to find out which option to select i googled chromebook with nodejs to see what other people might have done and from what i can see most of them actually installed it through the terminal there is an actual command that allows you to install node.js so i'm going to install node version 14. i then copy-pasted this command straight into my terminal to execute just like any good developer but of course i did do double check and from what i could see it was downloading straight from the node website and running a sudo bash to actually execute that node installation this might take a while but once it's done i should be able to simply open up node by typing in node and then i should have access to the shell so i can write in some javascript commands success this worked and i've got node up and running so now not only can we code using vs code we can also run up an application on node.js and i'm thinking maybe we'll start off with a create react app just to get us started since i've got node up and running i can run npx command so i typed in npx create react app and my app here i want to find out if i can actually host a web server with create react app as well as run it up in vs code and start making some changes success looks like create react app installed along with all its node modules this means i can open it up in vs code which i've done and it's ready for me to start hosting as a web server as well so let's give this a shot i'm going to close down the terminal and expand out my instance of vs code because i usually prefer to run with the terminal inside vs code then i'll run npm start and we'll kick off this application one thing i immediately notice though is that these terminal fonts are terrible i think my coding fonts didn't carry across to the chromebook and i'll have to do that later but the application is up and running now so i can officially say that you can build react applications using the chromebook which i'm quite pleased to see it seems to work just like normal with the port 3000 being used for the web server as well as real time changes whenever i make them in vs code i think it's time for a real project now i previously created an rpg game with astradb so i'm going to clone this project i jumped into github to copy the syntax for its url and went to git clone it but i just realized something i don't actually have git installed so i better install that first since i'm running this linux distro any linux command should work so i'm gonna run a sudo app get space install space kit okay that ran successfully and now it's actually time to clone our project so i'm gonna do a git clone space and i'm gonna paste in the url of my project here in github but just as i was doing this i realized i didn't actually set up a private key to actually talk to github on this device this will take a little bit of work so what i'm thinking is just downloading the files manually npm installing them and giving them a run to see how they go once they were downloaded i was happy to see that i didn't have to download any unzipping software and i could simply drag and drop them straight into my computer i can open them up now in the terminal and browse into them and hopefully npm install all the packages i need to get them up and running since i want to see the performance of this machine i can definitely tell you that it takes a little bit longer to load up projects on this device while the drawback is that it's a little bit slower the benefits are that if you're someone new to web development you're not going to be running up large projects and most of them should be able to be installed and built quite simply well that is unless you install the wrong version of node.js and your project doesn't build successfully in my case i was running a very old version of a lot of the files which were probably compatible with node version 8 and i don't really want to update so i'm going to run up a different project to test it out and what i found was that it actually took about the same time on my computer as it did on this device be aware i don't have as many node modules or plugins as other repos might have but at least for a beginner project this is quite useful then i also tried building the project and even though it's a small project it still took about the same amount of time as my computer so quite impressive to be honest i'm pretty impressed so far with the chromebook today is the fourth day and i want to try to use this device outside one of the things i noticed though was that the screen isn't that great in terms of brightness it's actually kind of difficult to see vs code on the device and i find that this sunlight actually reflects quite a lot so i tried to go under a tree to see if i can get some shade and hopefully view the screen a little bit better the battery however has been quite good so far i've never had to really worry about the battery charge and i've had quite a few hours of usage every time i've gone out to use it activities i've done so far included things like checking emails using chrome browsing youtube as well as doing some of the scripts for this video one problem i did find with the device is that it didn't really fit on my lap very well sometimes i tried to reposition to see if i can fit it better but it just didn't work quite well while it's a tablet device and i can use my fingers for it i think i much prefer using this just on a simple desk generally speaking i probably wouldn't be coding with this device outside but if i'm going to be programming inside of a car this is something that i can probably do but if you need to make some last minute changes before you meet a client or you've accidentally pushed some faulty code to github that's crushed the entire system and deleted all the backups then this might be a useful way to make those changes quickly and of course i've never done anything like that and i'm gonna say that i'm not gonna recommend coding in the car so let's move on i've been using this chromebook for just about everything this includes a lot of meetings especially over zoom using the camera which unfortunately isn't that great but at least it gets the job done i also found it quite useful to take with me to client sites because showcasing demos of projects i'm working on is much more effective than trying to explain them so this chromebook really impressed me i came in with really low expectations but everything from the keyboard to the fact that i can get vs code up and running on here and use it to learn programming really was surprising for a device of this cost for just about three or four hundred dollars i can do everything from jump on free code camp and learn how to code two even build react applications or angular or schveldt and build up a web server and have access to all the kind of stuff we normally do in a liganox terminal i think if this is the device you're looking for and this is the area you're in it's just enough to get up and running but if for example you're looking at building mobile applications on react native or flutter this might not be able to serve those needs because it would need a little bit more power and that's where you might need to jump into windows or mac territory but hopefully this gave you a really good idea of what i use this device for how i used it and what the experience is like with it i hope you guys enjoyed this video if you have feedback and ideas on how i can improve the next one like this then let me know in the comments below otherwise i hope you guys hit like and subscribe and i'll see you in the next one thank you

Channel: Adrian Twarog

Views: 974,920

Keywords: I tried coding on a Chromebook for 7 days, coding, development, software engineer, programming, code, chromebook, coding on my chromebook, chromebook coding, chromebook programming, chromebook development, tablet coding, tablet programming, tablet development, adrian twarog, computer programming, chrome book coding, chrome book programming, chrome book

Id: goCtcsTe5g8

Length: 12min 56sec (776 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2022