Did the same for my freshman year of Uni on a $99 Chromebook. Java and C dev on 4GB of ram wasn't an issue.

That said, I quickly upgraded to a 4 year used Thinkpad and that was a huge difference.

> $200 Chromebook chrooted into Debian

Are there even any x86 Chromebooks left at that price point? They are only one that are still capable of chrooting into Linux. ARM Chromebooks remain locked up.

I mean, never mind younger us. I have a M5 MBP and even I am tempted for a Neo for travelling

Author of the post here. You nailed it here; I used Chromebook as the example in my post since the one I used in high school was locked down to basically a kiosk. Couldn’t even open dev tools, much less root it. Such a wild departure from the eMacs I used in my elementary school’s library where I could set bonkers `defaults write` commands and customize every aspect of my account.

If I got a Chromebook as a personal machine as a kid, I probably would’ve rooted it and see what I could do, but growing up, the beauty of the Mac (in that Snow Leopard era) was progressive disclosure. I could start on the happy path and have a perfectly stable machine, then customize the behaviors through the terminal, see what it does, mess with the system files, see what breaks, revert it, then go back to using iMovie like normal.

In my (admittedly limited) time using a rooted Chromebook, it’s much more like a switch flip. You go from mandatory water wings directly into getting pushed into the ocean and Google shouting “Good luck!!”

It was possible on the Acer model I got when it first came out, but it was still useless. A switch that wiped the whole thing back to defaults was needed to open a terminal and from there a shell script could install Ubuntu. It still ran the unmodifiable chromeos kernel with no updates and without some of the modules I'd like. And then the screen died.

It was junk. The EeePC was cheaper, lasted much longer and had Debian out of the box.

I've owned and used the CR-48 prototype Chromebook model, which very well did have a developer mode and a third kernel option built right in. Ran Ubuntu on it with no issues. This has been possible since before the device family was officially available for purchase.

The school thing is different, but also hardly unique. A school issued macbook is often similarly locked down and unusable as a dev machine, due to the student lacking permissions to install anything the school deems dangerous.

That includes school-issued Macs, so I don't see how that's an argument against Chromebooks.

Look, MacOS has certainly rotted over the past few years, but the primary reason I use it is because it's still a hundred times nicer to use than Windows (which is also regressing for worse reasons - shoving in AI and ads instead of benign neglect).

It's still the best desktop UNIX experience, especially since cheap PC laptops (and until very recently expensive ones) almost always have horrible build quality. It's also within only the last few years that PC trackpads came anywhere near the trackpads on Apple machines. Sometimes what you call a "tax" is literally some of us wanting quality.

What amount of that 600$ cost do you reckon is the Apple tax? I'm curious what comparables you see, and how much they cost.