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?"
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