After many years growing more and more frustrated with the declining quality of laptops available on the market (Mac or PC), with the new local VM and container based and Cloud computing possibilities the solution seemed simple: a stable, stripped down OS running locally, and all other resources run via Vagrant or Dockers or on the cloud.
It seemed there was little in off the shelf solutions that were ready for the task, but upon closer inspection of a newer ChromeBook I discovered an option to install Linux with a single click. Was this the solution?
Some research into the higher end ChromeBook models later and a “ChromeBook” laptop (with no touchscreen and a trackpad) selected at the store and it’s off to the races. The Android apps are not designed for the laptop interface but the Linux that runs, runs fine. Some issues in getting a proper browser running but I was able to install some simple XWindows apps and the Eclipse IDE and all seems to be running well…though with little hard inspection yet can’t pass any true judgement.
Outlook: hopeful!