It’s been a long time since I’ve ever bought a laptop. For the past decade+, I’ve only owned and used two old lowest-end (at the time) Macbooks Pros. At the moment, I was thinking about buying a cheapo to use temporarily, since I don’t have mine on me.
Also, I think it’s just nice to gather some solid (ARM) cheapos to be used as arcade machines.
I’m curious to hear what various multi-boot / virtual machine set-ups haxers use use? Maybe even some sort of iOS VM app set-up? All text ‘n terminal Plan9 sort of haxers??
I’m assuming you can just install a Linux distro on a solid Chromebook, and just pray to the Linux gods for hardware drivers…
I imagine a lot of people dual-boot or VM Windows just for the sake of using Flash/HaxeDevelop! (I did.) Though, maybe we’ve got better IDE options nowadays…
I’m still chugging along with a 2010 Macbook Pro. I put in an SSD and it’s pretty fast still. I use VirtualBox for some testing with Windows but my needs are minimal for that. Using VSCode for most development—it’s very good.
Modern Chromebooks can install and run Linux apps, so you might not even need to replace ChromeOS. I haven’t tried Haxe on a Chromebook, but a while back, I set up a development environment with Visual Studio Code and the AS3 & MXML extension. Code intelligence and debugging in Flash Player all worked! It was a super low-end Chromebook, so I wouldn’t use that as my main machine, but a higher end Chromebook might be tempting to try.
Yeah, an old Intel MBP is still tough to beat, even 10 years later! Can VM or even triple-boot into anything! I believe I used to have the last core2duo model, but even that was solid with a ssd, close to Confidant’s.
So recent ChromeOS can just install Linux apps straight out the box? That makes it infinitely more usable than I imagined! So it’s just a web-centric Linux distro now, yeah?..
I’ll keep an eye out for both then.
3rd gen MBPs and… well, I’ll have to research for a solid chromebook model.
I haven’t made the jump to a Chromebook yet, but I’ve definitely been tempted. I figure that if I do this, I’ll probably just make use of a cheap VPS (via Digital Ocean or some other provider) for various bits of dev work.
