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 >
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