The current Chromebooks will run a Linux userspace sandboxed very nicely *right out of the box, *neither crouton nor dev mode required. I have a Samsung Chromebook Plus (gen 1, with the high-dpi screen -- watch out for gen 2 where they dropped to 1080 (and also regressed from ARM to Intel)) and the LInux userspace (Debian) is fabulous -- full development toolchain (including gdb etc), X window and wayland app support, and so on. The environments are semi-integrated -- there's a separate directory in the ChromeOS "Files" application that maps to $HOME in the sandbox/container, but any graphical apps you install into the sandbox show up on the ChromeOS main menu (e.g., LibreOffice, Gimp, Eschema, and so forth). Apparently deeper integration is coming; releases in the pipeline include the ability to do things like mount your Google Drive filesystem within the sandbox. My wife has a Pixelbook (top-end Chromebook, gorgeous build with glass trackpad etc - I gave her the nice machine this time ;-) and the Linux userspace is supposed to work really well there, but I haven't tried it yet. -Chris On Thu, Nov 22, 2018 at 3:41 PM Christopher Browne via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On Wed, 21 Nov 2018 at 22:53, William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Just curious... Where/how do you use these little computers? I mean, $300 here, $200 there, $100 upgrade, $50 ram, $25 microSD, etc. they all add up.
I have been carrying around a Chromebook running Linux-y bits via Crouton for 3.5+ years now; it's coming towards the end of its lifespan, and only cost me a bit past $200, with no extras adding up.
Quoting my own email from 2015-03-15 on this list...
"I'm liking my Samsung ARM-based Chromebook well enough; I'm running Debian "in behind" via the Crouton layer, which has been working fine. I'll bet that by the time I care for something more, there will be a newer model with more storage, memory, and CPU than I presently have."
It's 2018, and the reason I'm looking for something newer mostly has to do with the fact that such a cheap laptop has a fairly fragile case, so it's beginning to age a bit ungracefully. That something newer has greater capacity is fine. -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?" --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk