I wrote about my experience while looking for a personal laptop in 2013: https://ashishb.net/tech/the-weird-state-of-laptop-industry/
Little has changed since then. There is still a considerable gap, and no one is building a developer laptop. What surprises me is the amount of energy Google is pouring into Chromebooks, they could have made an excellent (GCP-integrated?) developer laptop instead. For backend engineers to front-end engineers to mobile developers, it could have become the defacto developer machine - provided the Wi-Fi, battery, and sleep/wake-up handling is as good as Macbooks.
Google is working on making Chromebooks more developer-friendly. Some of them support running full desktop Linux apps now, but it's still in the experimental stages and I wouldn't recommend buying one for that specific feature until it's more mature.
That said, I've been doing light webdev work on a Chromebook using Crouton (to run desktop Linux alongside ChromeOS, with seamless switching) and aside from difficulties with the MicroSD slot and apt-get on Ubuntu it's been quite nice. Getting solid, first-party Linux desktop app support would make Chromebooks a serious contender in the "cheap dev laptop for light work" space, and I think Google is working toward that.
Obviously, the hardware is going to preclude you from doing any serious heavy lifting, but I'm pretty excited to see what they come up with in another year or two. The battery life on these things is fantastic, plus some of them can also run Android apps.
> Google is working on making Chromebooks more developer-friendly. Some of them support running full desktop Linux apps now, but it's still in the experimental stages and I wouldn't recommend buying one for that specific feature until it's more mature.
Yep, I'm running Arch. Battery is great. On my work laptop (the 6th gen) I easily get >7 hours if I'm not doing things in the browser too much. Yes I know there are a million factors, and my general use case isn't the same as everyone elses. Let's put it this way, the way I use my previous mac and my new thinkpad, the thinkpad lasts around 1.5x as long (sometimes more).
In terms of WiFi. I haven't noticed it being worse than my mac, but I also don't think I've ever dug deep enough into this kind of thing on either platform to really say. Every time I've spent any energy looking into WiFi it's been on Linux.
