"His electricity comes from solar panels, and every joule counts — so that’s out with Chrome and Electron and in with Scheme, C, assembly, and maybe someday Forth."
I used to live and program off grid, too. With a setup, I could carry all in my backpack ... so I can say, it mainly depends on the hard- and firmware in use. So my pure linux laptop did not last very long. Even with allmost only texteditor use
But my optimized rugged chromebook does last a long time, and with only modest sunshine -> unlimited worktime - with extensive use of chrome and electron.
But it might be not avaiable anymore but I think the successor is similar.
I put it in dev mode and worked mainly with chrome dev tools as IDE and a simple texteditor for node scripts.
That worked well and I did not needed more.
There is in theory a linux vm, but last time I tried, it was buggy and performance intense, so no option for my days work, but good to have the opportunity to have more powerful tools at hand at times, like inkscape, because chromeOS as itself is not so nice to use and very limited in every way, but what works, works.
Think I've read somewhere that those can be reloaded with pure Linux to replace Chrome OS. Not saying you should, only nothing that one probably could.
I used to live and program off grid, too. With a setup, I could carry all in my backpack ... so I can say, it mainly depends on the hard- and firmware in use. So my pure linux laptop did not last very long. Even with allmost only texteditor use
But my optimized rugged chromebook does last a long time, and with only modest sunshine -> unlimited worktime - with extensive use of chrome and electron.