>All my development happens in ssh and firefox. So performance is not an issue.

Does that really bear out? I like the idea of a low-powered netbook connecting to a high-powered server for development, but in my (very limited) experience it's a pain.

I have two machines, and old laptop with an AMD RM-70 and a Thinkpad X41 with a Pentium M 1.6 Ghz.

On both machines, using Firefox is a painful experience because the performance is so bad. Using chrome is pretty good.

I've been thinking about buying a newer netbook with better battery life, but the performance of newer low-powered mobile CPUs doesn't seem that much greater than the systems I already have.

> Does that really bear out?

Why wouldnt it? Been doing it for years now and cannot think of any other way of development anymore.

Depends on whether your use of Firefox is for Javascript or server-side scripting. Running heavy non-minified Javascript with caching disabled is much more pleasant on a fast machine.

Run Firefox on the server and export the display over the network to the weedy laptop.

Depending on the technology used, exporting sound can be an hour of fiddling about to get it setup first time around.

I'd rather get hit in the crotch than use Firefox over X forwarding. Slow on top of slow. There is some interesting work with NX and NX-like solutions that make it much more tolerable.

Haha :) I keep going back to X over SSH.

Out of VNC, RDP and NX, VNC is the lame duck.

Out of RDP & NX, both require extra software but RDP is more widely re-usable (virtual box, windows etc).

The bandwidth requirements aren't the problem with X these days - a 3G connection at under 1Mbps real world is fine for reasonable display sizes, it's the round trip latency is the killer. It's such a chatty protocol, but on a LAN / WiFi it's fine and works out of the box with... scratch that, you need to install XQuartz separately since Mountain Lion. I almost forgot about that.

nx is way faster than rdp if you have a large display

> it's the round trip latency is the killer

Yeah, my understanding is that NX mimicks the remote end locally and then translates the result and transmits that. There's an Android app called BVNC that uses X forwarding with a local X server to do the same thing. No extra software and it's more responsive than X-forwarding.

I should've just mentioned it before, it may be of use to you.

I think performance is still an issue. currently there are no gpu accelerated drivers if I understand correctly for non-chromeos linux, so until someone puts the effort into making that work.

>non-chromeos linux

Or you could just use the pre-installed linux kernel underneath a distribution of your choice.

I am also starting to consider this for development, but I need more assurance that it is a viable option. Does everything mostly work out of the box, or would there be a lot of tinkering / troubleshooting required, e.g. because of the somewhat non-standard nature of running ubuntu on ARM architecture? What about drivers, e.g. for wifi and trackpad?

After running debian on an ARM box for the past ~5 years, my experience has been pretty favorable. If there's a solid community following (which is a good bet with this product given the hype around it) the drivers should be a non-issue. Installation went very smoothly for me. Everything else, if it can get built from source, should be fine. On my box apt-get install "just works" for almost all of the software I use, and maybe 75% of make installs go smoothly with relatively little tinkering required.

For getting actually work done, I use an x86 laptop. I wouldn't ever go back to using a netbook or any non-mainstream notebook with iffy linux support. It's just not worth your time to deal with technical issues. Buy the best tools that you can find (best being what works for you).

Ubuntu is probably the most optimized distro for the ARM architecture out there. Canonical is really pushing support for ARM.