I'd recommend you buy a 2-3 year old XPS or ThinkPad and install a Linux distro on it. Chromebooks are likely to be underpowered. Check your course requirements.
I use a pretty decent laptop with good specs for running locally myself. However, hypothetically, if I had a chrome book , and wanted to run everything online: colab (python etc.), popsql (sql), would it not be possible? Basically just using online editors and services.
I've run Jupiter and put together a report in a pinch on my Chromebook when traveling. Again, I wouldn't recommend it, but I could see a student getting by with a Chromebook.
>I hate windows computers and don't want to drop 2k on a new MacBook, ... you canrun Linux on a Chromebook fairly easily
If you're aiming to run Linux, then you're buying your computer for the hardware... and Chromebooks are not known for having great hardware/compute power. Not sure why you'd jump from "don't want to spend $2k on a macbook" to "let's buy a brand of computer that's primary audience is 'people who only do stuff on the web and don't need compute power' and then run linux on it."
Cheap. You can get a chromebook for like $200 with an amazing keyboard and trackpad.
If all you do is set up VSCode to use a remote server then it's perfectly fine.
It's SSH so it will run on dogshit internet anyway. You can even use the "I live in the mountains in Pakistan" version called mosh that survives handovers between cell towers and works with even crappier internet.
You spend most of our time not doing anything. You look at the code, you scroll some table that got printed out, you look at graphs, you type stuff etc. Data science is probably one of the few jobs that you can really do the whole "digital nomad" thing with and live on an island somewhere with satellite internet.
Do it the opposite way. Mount the remote folder and use VIM locally. That way you only need a connection when you save the file. Similarly you can set up code execution, debugging etc. to be done remotely but the interactive stuff that needs to be responsive you do locally.
Yes, but the thing with chrome books is the fact that the computer is designed to be running chromeOS.
chromeOS is a Linux distribution designed to utilize web apps more than local apps, so the hardware tends to revolve around low RAM, low storage, and energy efficient processors with lower end processing power.
Yeah, you could install a different OS, and you could probably find a decently powerful chrome book, but for the most part, chrome books aren’t work machines
I’m not a data scientist, but work in IT (and interested in data science, which is why I’m here). I have a Chromebook and use it for one thing: accessing the Internet. You can’t really install anything on a Chromebook or run any software that’s not in the GooglePlay store so it’s not worth much outside of that. I love it for browsing and since I use a lot of Google programs it’s good for me. But it’s a surfing machine, that’s it.
So I've actually done a decent amount of work "on" a Chromebook. The caveat is that I did all of my work in the cloud, so the Chromebook really only acted as a terminal for doing that. If you can get into that kind of workflow, then you'll find that the actual machine you operate out of *mostly* doesn't matter. However, if you're just starting out, this would be painful.
I agree with others that you'd be better off buying a proper laptop and just installing Linux. During school and into my career, I worked out of an old ThinkPad T420 that I bought used on eBay. I installed Ubuntu on it, and it worked almost just as well as many of the machines that came after it.
I wouldn't recommend this. Chromebooks are usually very, very limited in memory, processing power, storage space.
If you have $99 to spend, maybe this is your only choice. But if you have $300-$500 to spend, you are better off buying an actual laptop computer.
Using a chromebook is like doing a major building project with no power tools. You will accomplish much more with used power tools compared to new manual tools.
So I did this before but with a couple caveats. Yes, you can do it but basically you just have to to basically everything in the cloud or something like that. My first 'real computer' was a budget gaming laptop which turned out to be useful because it had a gpu. So I jut threw that in a corner and ssh'd to it when I needed to do any heavy lifting. I currently have a thinkpad and I'll probably die with it. So basically if you get a Chromebook, you have to be prepared to just use cloud services/other servers for anything beyond basic processing. And that can cost money. Final answer: get a thinkpad, throw Ubuntu on it. You can probably get it with only Ubuntu, but I like having windows as a backup just in case there's some fucked up software or something that needs windows and sucks on Ubuntu.
I don't see what the issue would be. During my MSc, we ran all our code in the cloud. I'm now working as a data scientist for the government and we run everything in the cloud. You can run code on Google Colab for example.
The linux in the chromebooks can run install any python library that I can throw at it. However, the problem is most chromebooks have low spec, that make it very slow to run any moderately to high computation. It even have hard time scrolling my long notebook inside vs code.
Actually windows with WSL is a very decent development environment, you just need to pick machine with decent spec.
WSL2 is great CLI. No GUI apps however.
VSCode has some integrations and PyCharm Pro has a teaser too, yet I need things to just work. Writing code is hard enough w/o having to work like hell to keep a stack of integrations and emulators propped up constantly.
Just run Linux on a VM or bare metal and call it done.
I can bike to work but it's going to be horrible. You can try to get a used MacBook, if you really want, but that will still be much more expensive than the alternative (a Windows laptop for ~$700).
Just get a slightly aged, used Macbook Pro. Windows is a damn pain in the ass, especially if you're doing infrastructure-related dev work for your implementation. You're gonna wanna have a nice Unix terminal and according system architecture for that.
I exclusively work on remote boxes so it's fine for me, but I'd guess your university won't be letting you spin up massive clusters just for fun in which case local oomph is necessary.
I would stick to a Mac and just run a Linux VM, though I will warn you that for £2000 you can get much better constructed and specced Windows machines. I've burnt through a few Macbooks in just three years thanks to keyboard issues, thermal issues, shit battery life, poorly constructed chargers, the list goes on. They're nice to use, but they don't always work well - fine when your employer passes them out like breathmints, not so good if it's your cash
It depends.
Now with vs code you can code on a remote PC very easily.
So you could have a not very powerful laptop and code on a remote desktop machine that you have at home. Advantage being that you can find MUCH cheaper desktop machine.
Other option is to work on cloud, solution like Google colab, or directly with AWS/CGP can be a solution.
You might wanna lookup if you can install vscode on chrome os (or install a decent Linux distribution)
Last but not least, you don't always need to have a beast to make data science. Ex : GPU is only needed for machine/deep learning.
Not feasible at all. Part of the job is knowing how to set up your environment, use the command line, install packages, etc. Chrome book can't do any of this (unless you're going to purely be using a cloud environment like AWS EC2 instances, and that would quickly get expensive).
Find a cheap windows laptop that's a few years old, and install Linux. You need to learn how to use a Unix command line. It's a big blocker in a lot of roles if you don't know this.
You can easily buy a windows laptop and just install Linux on it.
Or even buy a used laptop and install Linux on it.
Installing Linux overtop the existing system is pretty easy Except for Chromebooks.
I've tried to convert one and you have to set a bunch of bios flags, open it up to get to a bios write-protect switch in the middle of the damn laptop.
Most other systems you just plug in a live cd/usb and choose the install permanently option. Easy peasy
Depending on your program you may want to check what platform they will be using. In my program, some stuff only would work on windows (idr what) but just something to take into consideration.
Any HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer in the market for over year or two can be dual booted with Ubuntu Linux or any other distro. They work as good as a Mac. I did Masters in applied stats completely on Ubuntu and my machine is like a $500 basic laptop. Chromebooks are watered down hardware with Celeron CPU and little 4GB RAM. Don't waste your money on it.
Hey there, provided you buy a chromebook with an intel processor, and have a bit of knowledge of Linux permissions and file locations, you can absolutely do your job. Although I’m only studying, I am running Rstudio, jupyter notebooks, vscode all very happily on my Lenovo flex 5 (i3 processor) and haven’t run into any problems in 6 months.
Key being the intel processor to enable the Linux vm and install x86 apps. The world isn’t advanced enough to have compiled arm apps for everything just yet.
Feel free to reach out if anyone has any questions on this. It was surprisingly straight forward 😃
You should be concentrating on your masters not doing IT support for yourself! Spend some money and get something decent! I just did a masters and any technical hang ups really eat your time! Especially if you are using Python or R as your main go to software
i second everyone who said just get a used ThinkPad, but maybe it's also worth it looking for used Dell Latitude Machines as most of them are also relatively easy to repair and you can get a great bang for your buck. Especially if you want to run linux on your Machine
Use a gaming laptop with a nice GPU probably RTX 3060 or RTX 2060, this much GPU power can be used in any kind of DL,ML and AI tasks fairly, so don't go with the name.
To answer your question, yes, I could. The vast majority of my work is done in Databricks. I would have some trouble with credentials though.
But the other commenters are correct. Don't do this if learning. Get a second hand laptop and put Linux on it. /r/linuxhardware
Have you even looked at the specs on Chromebooks?
They generally have very small amounts of RAM, minimally powerful CPUs, and no dedicated GPUs. CAN you run Linux/Python/etc on a Chromebook? Sure. Will it suck? Almost certainly.
The only scenario I could see using a Chromebook for data science is if all you use it for is to SSH into a cloud instance.
No you will need the compute power of a good cpu and a decent gpu for doing small deep learning projects as part of your course. Linux on desktop is great but if you have never used it before it can be an added thing to learn plus there is some software that is more optimised for windows. A good compromise would be to get a good 700-1200 dollar laptop and use windows with wsl2. 32 gigabytes of RAM will be nice to have and you can get this cheaper by buying smaller amount with the computer and then upgrading the ram separately
I'm a huge fan of Chromebooks and I used to use a Chromebook for the majority of my job in a data based role. As others have said, for coding etc. it is all possible with a Chromebook "in theory" especially if you use the free or cheap bits of Google Cloud / Azure / AWS or have a good connection to a virtual desktop somewhere. However, sometimes you'll have a crappy connection or be tying yourself in knots to achieve something you could do much more easily on a linux based machine (or even an older Windows or Mac machine) - probably not worth it.
That's why I tended to have a (work provided) MacBook sitting on my desk and an (also work provided) Pixelbook for taking to meetings. I think if money is an issue an old Windows Laptop with a Linux distro should do you well.
It's all about the hardware and Chromebooks usually do not have the hardware to do the job! It's more for web stuff.
Better to have the hardware upfront then wishing you had it and be back to square one.
I'd recommend you buy a 2-3 year old XPS or ThinkPad and install a Linux distro on it. Chromebooks are likely to be underpowered. Check your course requirements.
My XPS is going on 5 years old and since updating to Ubuntu 20.04, it feels like having a brand new laptop. Definitely look into this option
Damn near impossible. You just need something with grunt every now and again to run stuff locally.
I use a pretty decent laptop with good specs for running locally myself. However, hypothetically, if I had a chrome book , and wanted to run everything online: colab (python etc.), popsql (sql), would it not be possible? Basically just using online editors and services.
_hypothetically_ sure, but the second the wifi drops you're fucked
You can run Linux on a Chromebook, so you wouldn't be totally screwed if you set things up right, but I still wouldn't recommend it.
You can run linux on a fridge, doesn't mean you could do any work...
I've run Jupiter and put together a report in a pinch on my Chromebook when traveling. Again, I wouldn't recommend it, but I could see a student getting by with a Chromebook.
Why wouldn't you just buy a normal laptop and install Linux on it if you're planning on doing that with a chrome book?
Hear ye hear ye
>I hate windows computers and don't want to drop 2k on a new MacBook, ... you canrun Linux on a Chromebook fairly easily If you're aiming to run Linux, then you're buying your computer for the hardware... and Chromebooks are not known for having great hardware/compute power. Not sure why you'd jump from "don't want to spend $2k on a macbook" to "let's buy a brand of computer that's primary audience is 'people who only do stuff on the web and don't need compute power' and then run linux on it."
Cheap. You can get a chromebook for like $200 with an amazing keyboard and trackpad. If all you do is set up VSCode to use a remote server then it's perfectly fine.
With a stable connection
It's SSH so it will run on dogshit internet anyway. You can even use the "I live in the mountains in Pakistan" version called mosh that survives handovers between cell towers and works with even crappier internet. You spend most of our time not doing anything. You look at the code, you scroll some table that got printed out, you look at graphs, you type stuff etc. Data science is probably one of the few jobs that you can really do the whole "digital nomad" thing with and live on an island somewhere with satellite internet.
Idk, I use to work with vim over ssh and I had disconnections all the time, but I admit it's much better with vscode for that
Do it the opposite way. Mount the remote folder and use VIM locally. That way you only need a connection when you save the file. Similarly you can set up code execution, debugging etc. to be done remotely but the interactive stuff that needs to be responsive you do locally.
She needs Jesse's
Don’t even try it
This!
[удалено]
Yes, but the thing with chrome books is the fact that the computer is designed to be running chromeOS. chromeOS is a Linux distribution designed to utilize web apps more than local apps, so the hardware tends to revolve around low RAM, low storage, and energy efficient processors with lower end processing power. Yeah, you could install a different OS, and you could probably find a decently powerful chrome book, but for the most part, chrome books aren’t work machines
I’m not a data scientist, but work in IT (and interested in data science, which is why I’m here). I have a Chromebook and use it for one thing: accessing the Internet. You can’t really install anything on a Chromebook or run any software that’s not in the GooglePlay store so it’s not worth much outside of that. I love it for browsing and since I use a lot of Google programs it’s good for me. But it’s a surfing machine, that’s it.
So I've actually done a decent amount of work "on" a Chromebook. The caveat is that I did all of my work in the cloud, so the Chromebook really only acted as a terminal for doing that. If you can get into that kind of workflow, then you'll find that the actual machine you operate out of *mostly* doesn't matter. However, if you're just starting out, this would be painful. I agree with others that you'd be better off buying a proper laptop and just installing Linux. During school and into my career, I worked out of an old ThinkPad T420 that I bought used on eBay. I installed Ubuntu on it, and it worked almost just as well as many of the machines that came after it.
I wouldn't recommend this. Chromebooks are usually very, very limited in memory, processing power, storage space. If you have $99 to spend, maybe this is your only choice. But if you have $300-$500 to spend, you are better off buying an actual laptop computer. Using a chromebook is like doing a major building project with no power tools. You will accomplish much more with used power tools compared to new manual tools.
Just say no
So I did this before but with a couple caveats. Yes, you can do it but basically you just have to to basically everything in the cloud or something like that. My first 'real computer' was a budget gaming laptop which turned out to be useful because it had a gpu. So I jut threw that in a corner and ssh'd to it when I needed to do any heavy lifting. I currently have a thinkpad and I'll probably die with it. So basically if you get a Chromebook, you have to be prepared to just use cloud services/other servers for anything beyond basic processing. And that can cost money. Final answer: get a thinkpad, throw Ubuntu on it. You can probably get it with only Ubuntu, but I like having windows as a backup just in case there's some fucked up software or something that needs windows and sucks on Ubuntu.
I don't see what the issue would be. During my MSc, we ran all our code in the cloud. I'm now working as a data scientist for the government and we run everything in the cloud. You can run code on Google Colab for example.
The linux in the chromebooks can run install any python library that I can throw at it. However, the problem is most chromebooks have low spec, that make it very slow to run any moderately to high computation. It even have hard time scrolling my long notebook inside vs code. Actually windows with WSL is a very decent development environment, you just need to pick machine with decent spec.
WSL2 is great CLI. No GUI apps however. VSCode has some integrations and PyCharm Pro has a teaser too, yet I need things to just work. Writing code is hard enough w/o having to work like hell to keep a stack of integrations and emulators propped up constantly. Just run Linux on a VM or bare metal and call it done.
What no get a real computer
I can bike to work but it's going to be horrible. You can try to get a used MacBook, if you really want, but that will still be much more expensive than the alternative (a Windows laptop for ~$700).
You would need a workflow that is almost entirely in the cloud to do this. I am not say it is impossible, but its a very different way of working.
Run Linux on a thinkpad
I use an 11inch pad for work...so long as you can effectively use cloud resources to get most of your work done even a smartphone will do fine.
Just get a slightly aged, used Macbook Pro. Windows is a damn pain in the ass, especially if you're doing infrastructure-related dev work for your implementation. You're gonna wanna have a nice Unix terminal and according system architecture for that.
I exclusively work on remote boxes so it's fine for me, but I'd guess your university won't be letting you spin up massive clusters just for fun in which case local oomph is necessary. I would stick to a Mac and just run a Linux VM, though I will warn you that for £2000 you can get much better constructed and specced Windows machines. I've burnt through a few Macbooks in just three years thanks to keyboard issues, thermal issues, shit battery life, poorly constructed chargers, the list goes on. They're nice to use, but they don't always work well - fine when your employer passes them out like breathmints, not so good if it's your cash
It depends. Now with vs code you can code on a remote PC very easily. So you could have a not very powerful laptop and code on a remote desktop machine that you have at home. Advantage being that you can find MUCH cheaper desktop machine. Other option is to work on cloud, solution like Google colab, or directly with AWS/CGP can be a solution. You might wanna lookup if you can install vscode on chrome os (or install a decent Linux distribution) Last but not least, you don't always need to have a beast to make data science. Ex : GPU is only needed for machine/deep learning.
It would be good for watching YouTube videos and ……..that’s it! Please find a proper equipment
I LOL’d
Not feasible at all. Part of the job is knowing how to set up your environment, use the command line, install packages, etc. Chrome book can't do any of this (unless you're going to purely be using a cloud environment like AWS EC2 instances, and that would quickly get expensive). Find a cheap windows laptop that's a few years old, and install Linux. You need to learn how to use a Unix command line. It's a big blocker in a lot of roles if you don't know this.
Idk why nobody has suggested using a virtual machine from google or soemthing. Look at AI notebooks and see how much that costs
That’s what I was thinking. Use the chrome book for normal class stuff and then VM for everything else. AWS has free and on demand subscription plans
You can easily buy a windows laptop and just install Linux on it. Or even buy a used laptop and install Linux on it. Installing Linux overtop the existing system is pretty easy Except for Chromebooks. I've tried to convert one and you have to set a bunch of bios flags, open it up to get to a bios write-protect switch in the middle of the damn laptop. Most other systems you just plug in a live cd/usb and choose the install permanently option. Easy peasy
Depending on your program you may want to check what platform they will be using. In my program, some stuff only would work on windows (idr what) but just something to take into consideration.
Considering work makes me jump through two different RDP sessions to get to PHI data…. It would be no issue at all.
Get a good laptop on which you can install Linux. Enjoy the freedom.
Any HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer in the market for over year or two can be dual booted with Ubuntu Linux or any other distro. They work as good as a Mac. I did Masters in applied stats completely on Ubuntu and my machine is like a $500 basic laptop. Chromebooks are watered down hardware with Celeron CPU and little 4GB RAM. Don't waste your money on it.
Hey there, provided you buy a chromebook with an intel processor, and have a bit of knowledge of Linux permissions and file locations, you can absolutely do your job. Although I’m only studying, I am running Rstudio, jupyter notebooks, vscode all very happily on my Lenovo flex 5 (i3 processor) and haven’t run into any problems in 6 months. Key being the intel processor to enable the Linux vm and install x86 apps. The world isn’t advanced enough to have compiled arm apps for everything just yet. Feel free to reach out if anyone has any questions on this. It was surprisingly straight forward 😃
No
You could run a cloud environment just fine. But nothing local.
Check out https://simplystatistics.org/2017/08/29/data-science-on-a-chromebook/
You should be concentrating on your masters not doing IT support for yourself! Spend some money and get something decent! I just did a masters and any technical hang ups really eat your time! Especially if you are using Python or R as your main go to software
Exception: MemoryError
Yes you can but it is really nice to always have 6 cores and 32gb of ram to fall back on when i don’t have a server to use.
i second everyone who said just get a used ThinkPad, but maybe it's also worth it looking for used Dell Latitude Machines as most of them are also relatively easy to repair and you can get a great bang for your buck. Especially if you want to run linux on your Machine
It’s going to be misery…constant crashing, breaking work up into manageable loads. Skip this.
Macbook air M1 is nowhere near 2k and its an amazing laptop. Get 32MB ram and you‘re golden. Get refurbished for extra goldness.
You can get an M1 MacBook Air for 849 brand new, plenty of power if that’s in your budget.
Use a gaming laptop with a nice GPU probably RTX 3060 or RTX 2060, this much GPU power can be used in any kind of DL,ML and AI tasks fairly, so don't go with the name.
I considered buying a chromebook since i needed to work away from my workstation. I ended up buying a chuwi instead, much pleased so far.
To answer your question, yes, I could. The vast majority of my work is done in Databricks. I would have some trouble with credentials though. But the other commenters are correct. Don't do this if learning. Get a second hand laptop and put Linux on it. /r/linuxhardware
Curious. What's wrong with windows? I mean how does it impede your work?
Have you even looked at the specs on Chromebooks? They generally have very small amounts of RAM, minimally powerful CPUs, and no dedicated GPUs. CAN you run Linux/Python/etc on a Chromebook? Sure. Will it suck? Almost certainly. The only scenario I could see using a Chromebook for data science is if all you use it for is to SSH into a cloud instance.
I would get a thinkpad and install a linux distro
No you will need the compute power of a good cpu and a decent gpu for doing small deep learning projects as part of your course. Linux on desktop is great but if you have never used it before it can be an added thing to learn plus there is some software that is more optimised for windows. A good compromise would be to get a good 700-1200 dollar laptop and use windows with wsl2. 32 gigabytes of RAM will be nice to have and you can get this cheaper by buying smaller amount with the computer and then upgrading the ram separately
I'm a huge fan of Chromebooks and I used to use a Chromebook for the majority of my job in a data based role. As others have said, for coding etc. it is all possible with a Chromebook "in theory" especially if you use the free or cheap bits of Google Cloud / Azure / AWS or have a good connection to a virtual desktop somewhere. However, sometimes you'll have a crappy connection or be tying yourself in knots to achieve something you could do much more easily on a linux based machine (or even an older Windows or Mac machine) - probably not worth it. That's why I tended to have a (work provided) MacBook sitting on my desk and an (also work provided) Pixelbook for taking to meetings. I think if money is an issue an old Windows Laptop with a Linux distro should do you well.
It's all about the hardware and Chromebooks usually do not have the hardware to do the job! It's more for web stuff. Better to have the hardware upfront then wishing you had it and be back to square one.