My current laptop (Windows 10) is wearing out, and I decided to get a Chromebook instead, should be delivered today. I was wondering whether to run it as a Chromebook, or alternatively run as Linux ( my understanding is a Chromebook is some kind of Linux branch).
Question is : if I want to do a little bit of Rust development on it (which I am not sure I will do, but might), what is the best way forward? Is anyone else using a Chromebook?
I couldn’t find many cases of users mentioning using chromeos, but this one would be one example
Also here was someone asking “is there a compiler available for chrome OS linux”:
https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/unt46p/new_to_rust/
and @kpreid shared tip on how to avoid using too much RAM (which I will agree is very useful to be aware of, having ran rust compilation on a low-RAM device at some point myself[1])
heck, if you were to go as far as to compiling something like rustc itself, even moderately large sizes of RAM can easily over-fill if parallelism isn’t limited 
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I had some issues which required setting up Linux swap on a 2GB cloud Linux machine hosted on AWS. But (with the last minute intervention of my wife!) my Chromebook will have a massive 4GB of RAM 
[ I say massive because my first computer had 4kb of RAM, later upgraded to 16kb ]
Maybe just us the chromebook as a chromebook and upgrade the OS on you old windows10 laptop to a current debian system. Unless the laptop is borked. A system that is to slow/outdated for windows is great for linux. Older hardware means the linux driver issues are probably solved.
The main issue is the speaker has almost gone, and the sound is terrible. Oh, and the keyboard is not good. I will keep the old laptop as a spare, but don't want to invest time in it.
The new Chromebook is running fine, I haven't set up Crostini yet, my slight concern with that is my hard drive space is quite limited, 32GB used so far, 95GB available, but it should be ok, I guess I can use USB memory sticks if it becomes a problem. Oh, and I have 8GB of RAM not 4GB.
The thing I wasn't quite sure about is whether to keep the ChromeOS, but I think I will at least for now.
Edit: well I now have the Crostini container running and am installing Rust. 85GB still available. And now have compiled and run hello world, everything seems good, still 85GB available.
I do Rust development in 4GB of Raspberry Pi 4. But it's server. It has 250GB of SSD which is overkill, but I have no other option. As for a client I use tablet. I believe that Chrome book works well in a tablet mode too.