Actually turned into more of a challenge than I'd hoped.
Kinda curious what's most useful specs-wise, but what i see:
- Chrome version 81.0.4044.94
- Linux x86-64
- Intel Core i5 @ 1.2GHz
- 8 GB ram
As far as dev environment. I have code-server running on my linux VM and work through a chrome shortcut (so it opens like an app) in essence it just feels like vscode. Took me a while to get it working satisfactorily, but got there in the end!
The desktop version would grind the computer to a halt when opening the app for the first time or starting up a graph, but once it settled seems workable. The only issue was that I was struggling to connect to the server via chrome which i thought might lead to a better experience using it (rather than through a linux window). Not an issue if i was just playing around, but if i wanted to start making requests from code i was going to run into issues if i can't connect to the db.
In the end i decided to try and get neo4j running without the desktop version, but honed in on the issues connecting across to the VM because of (as far as i can tell) how crostini exposes ports (??). It seems like a common issue in the chromeos community so i gave up after a couple hours of wrestling. The best i could get to was access to the portal, but the auth server (bolt?) seemed to just hang.
Finally, decided to explore just using heroku to run a remote server to handle things which I'd say gave me the best long-term workflow, but something like this would obviously involve costs and admin that i'd rather not deal with if i'm just playing around.
I've only just started exploring how i'd use neo4j and have concluded i'd be using it for bursts of manual exploration and building so will probably work with it through the sandbox and store versions of the graphs to re-initialise in each session. Once I'm wanting to work with something linked to an app, I guess I'll have to go the hosted route sooner than I'd otherwise like.
Hope that makes some sense. I'm rather wedded to my dev flow on my chromebook nowadays and am constantly amazed by the pain i'm willing to go through to keep working on it! I think i need a better understanding of how to bridge across from chromos to the linux vm. it's probably just my lack of network skills that is preventing it working, but i guess connecting to anything remotely comes with a whole set of challenges and it does seem like the chromeos at large is frustrated by these sort of issues.
