> about solutions to problems that doesn't actually exist in the real world.

Problems that don't exist, or that you personally don't have?

Why is enabling development on a Chromebook a bad thing? You ask "Why?", but it seems a more reasonable question to me is: "Why not?" This seems to pull one of the bricks away from "why not?" for working on a Chromebook. I don't see why that's a bad thing.

This "decent developer" thing sounds a bit gatekeepy - this solution isn't here to replace a fancy IDE on a MacBook Pro, it's here to help make coding easier to beginners or on shitty machines. I'd have loved to use this in high school/college instead of relying on the IDEs already installed in the lab.

It's entirely gatekeepy. We should be doing everything we can to encourage development where people are at, not trying to say that unless you do it a certain way (which costs a lot of money for a student, or someone in a developing country) you're not a "decent developer".

Plus there are more than enough "dark matter" developers making an otherwise good living at Fortune Xty companies that are afraid of technology and love micro-management and require all software to install to go through 6 month+ review processes. I've known some fantastic developers that will put up with that (and more), code in Notepad and Perforce if they have to, so long as they make a living wage and can clock out directly at 4:59pm every day. (In some of those cases there is maybe hope for them that getting a personal internet access firewall exception for vscode.dev might only be one form and a 30 minute review versus that 6 month+ process to get VS Code installed properly. I appreciate that it may be a nice new option for them by existing.)

It's not a lifestyle that I want for myself, but that doesn't mean I don't respect those folks as "decent developers". It takes a lot of fortitude to build software in those sorts of constraints.

It may be late in October, but I guess some people don't appreciate horror stories of actual development jobs that exist. If I could find a way to package that and sell it as Developer Haunted House experiences, I imagine I could make a quick buck.

Even if everything about remote workspaces were bad for professional developers, they will accept it if that's what companies are offering. Just like they accepted open offices, standup meetings, all-day video calls, agile, etc. And there's a lot to like for an employer: spend less on computers, reduce IT costs by locking down machines, get new employees productive sooner, make developers more interchangeable...

It's going to happen, and it doesn't matter much if employees like it or not.

It has happened since UNIX/VMS/.... systems exist.

That is a typical enterprise setup, thin clients with development taking place on a beefy server.

For Windows systems, you get a VM with RDP or Citrix access.

And native cloud development, is exactly the UNIX/VMS/.... model with fancy UI.

You should consider yourself lucky to never have been under the boot of a crappy IT department that won't let you have diddly (and even if they let you have diddly, it's five years out of date).

These aren't my solutions, they are the ones presented in the article.

That said, I do a lot of professional software engineering with a Chromebook and a Linux server, so.

Welcome to enterprise IT world.