Can I develop with VS Code on the new Samsung Chromebook Pro?

Question

Thinking more about leaving my MBP at home and instead taking the new Samsung Chromebook PRO to Starbucks for the day.

Is this fantasy or will VS Code run properly on this new machine? I see options for the Arm chip based PLUS model but nothing for the PRO.

Is a port available and if so how has development been, good?

UPDATE

I guess this is a hard question to answer? Essentially, I just want to leave my heavy MBP that always needs a power outlet at home. Just want to head out with a light weight machine and work on it anywhere.

The PRO does run Linux but I have not verified clearly that VS Code can run in this environment. Being in Canada I have no access to the PRO yet, can only order it from USA at this point, which I might do once I know the verdict to my question.

Answer 1

My team and I have been experimenting heavily with the Samsung Chromebook Pro and have been actively switching our development environments completely over to the Chromebook ecosystem (away from Mac). Personally I run a combination of Atom and NeoVim with a complete development environment for Node.js, Postgres, and Redis on my Chromebook Pro.

For any desktop IDE you'll need to run Crouton which means you'll have to put your Chromebook into developer mode which is less secure. If you don't want to do that your only options are either use something like Caret (which will only do basic text editing) or to use some sort of cloud-based IDE; ones I know of: Cloud9, Codenvy, Shiftedit, and Eclipse Che (an open source one that just recently caught my eye).

The good news is Crouton can run effectively anything that Linux can (especially since the Pro has an x86 processor), and from what I can tell VSCode supports Ubuntu, the default Linux distribution for Crouton. You can even set up the Crouton Extension to put your GUI programs into Chrome tabs or windows within ChromeOS using Xiwi.

Anything with a GUI running in Crouton is going to hurt performance and battery life on Chromebook since ChromeOS is finely tuned for running specifically the Chrome Browser. I don't expect you run out and learn a terminal-based editor today if you haven't already, but I highly recommend at least getting comfortable using the terminal for quick editing, using git, and running simple shell commands. That will save you that sweet Chromebook battery life and a bit of frustration dealing with a somewhat-quirky Xiwi and Crouton Extension.

If you're willing to work out a few kinks the Chromebook Pro development experience is pretty great. It's truly a quality piece of hardware and ChromeOS is fantastic with the addition of the ability to run Android apps.

UPDATE (9/19/17):

There is another option now for at least getting server environments running on ChromeOS without using developer mode. It's called Termux, an Android app, which can bind to a local port and can be interfaced with via SSH. You can read more on the blog post we came across here: https://blog.lessonslearned.org/building-a-more-secure-development-chromebook/ You will, however, have to use a terminal-based text editor like VIM or a native ChromeOS one like Caret, so it will not run GUI editors like VSCode or Atom.