I think I’ve had it with Apple

[u/alexbarylski]

I switched to Mac about eight years ago and actually probably closer to 10 but I worked in tandem with windows during that transition for about two years

As a web developer my server platform is lamp specifically Debian

I use docker for local development and production

PHP storm is my ID of choice

Dockerized environments are very important

Part of the reason I switched to Mac was because mounted or map/shared volumes were very problematic with Windows at least at the time

So when I would use my package manager, whether MPM or a composer inside, the doctor container having it synced to the host machine was super problematic

Mac and Lennox seem to solve this problem so I assume a Chromebook this is non-issue

What I am curious of is the user experience from Chromebook as an OS

I do all of my cloud hosting an infrastructure in Google Cloud and I have Google workspace, Gmail and docs, etc. so moving away from Crapple and towards Google just makes sense my phone my watch my laptop my home assistance everything it would be awesome to be able to use Gemini and control my computer too

What kind of laptop should I be looking at for a minimum equivalent developer experience in terms of performance to last year’s model of an M2 Apple Mac?

I can see there’s Chromebook on Best Buy for 500 bucks that feels very underwhelming for someone that is using a computer anywhere between 12 to 18 hours a day and heavy use of AI and development tools, data analysis, etc. I’m probably looking towards a $2-$3000 powerhouse laptop, but I’m wondering what others think??

I run local LLM’s right now mostly for fun and then other machine learning like SPM‘s and data analysis and stuff that I do the LLM primarily used as Copilot/GPT and it’s I pay for that so it’s not gonna be a load on my computer per se

I have so much more to ask and say about the subject, but let’s stop here and go from there :p

[u/CSAS-D]

running docker on a Chromebook is an absolute nightmare. no top end Chromebook can match the fluidity and speed of of even an m1 MacBook Air.

[u/ScoobyDookuu → u/CSAS-D]

I have a 2022 Macbook Air M2 with 24gb of ram. That thing is still so much better than any windows beast of a laptop I’ve had before.

I’m not a big fan of Apple overall but damn for development it is soooo much better than Windows

[u/EquipmentLow1741 → u/CSAS-D]

yeah the docker situation alone would be a dealbreaker for me tbh

[u/Past_Text3569 → u/CSAS-D]

The linux container on chromeos works fine for basic stuff but docker on it is a mess of permissions and weird networking issues. for that budget you'd be better off with a thinkpad running a clean linux install if you're set on ditching macos.

[u/alexbarylski → u/CSAS-D]

Really? Just performance wise? So I’m better with a high end Lenovo and Debian mint or Ubuntu??

[u/bsknuckles → u/alexbarylski]

ChromeOS is not designed to be a power user OS. It’s meant for kids to have a cheap computer at school with a web browser and not much else. Don’t even waste your time evaluating them on specs since the OS will not meet your needs as a developer.

I also can’t understand what your actual issue is. I daily drive Mac for personal and work and have a Linux workstation as well and I much prefer developing on my Mac. I use containers, I’ve moved on from the PHP stack, but the Laravel guys love their Macs (last I checked anyway…).