Can you go into more detail about this "userspace Linux sandbox"? -- William Park <opengeometry@yahoo.ca> On Thu, Nov 22, 2018 at 05:28:00PM -0500, Chris Tyler via talk wrote:
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