Follow-up question: if i got a Chromebook and wanted to put a distro on it that does what ChromeOS does, what distro would you reccomend? Just to be clear, I strongly dislike Chrome but depend on Google apps for my schoolwork and my job, which is why I’m looking at a Chromebook at all.
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Rule 5. Locking.
Chromebooks are the answer to the question: “What’s the point of an operating system if I do everything through my web browser anyway? Why not make a computer that just opens a browser?”
Your choice of distro is probably less important than your choice of DE. Chromebooks vary quite a bit in their specs–many are low-end hardware, but some are quite impressive. With decent hardware, I’d recommend Mint with Cinnamon DE as a good starter. For lower specs, you could try Debian with XFCE.
They were designed to be cheap laptop thin clients for google web apps.
They’re spy machines designed for children. They give them to all students in school and force them to do all their homework with them!
Cheap internet browsing within Google’s sphere.
At least that’s what mine was for when I had one. It had minimal storage space, hardly any RAM, etc. it was a web browser with a keyboard.
Which was what I needed at the time and I didn’t have a lot of money.
I don’t have any insights though into your follow-up question
You can run pretty much any Linux distro on a Chromebook even though you may need to jump through some hoops to get it to run. From there you can run any Google app in the browser. As for distro recommendations, Mint is great for getting started with Linux.
Basically just a browser machine for people who only use a browser and/or web apps anyway. Wouldn’t recommend one personally but if it works for your use case then it’s great. Remember that the best software and hardware is whatever makes your life easier (or you like better, depending on your priorities).
I’m running ubuntu on it now which is fine, but I literally had to open it up and remove a screw to allow it to run another OS (on top of f*ing around with its bizarro shell to get the installer to run).
It’s not a secure system, but it’s cheap and it does what I want and it’s not google so - yay.
The Chromebooks were meant to be cheap computers to give you an Internet browser. They mainly target schools because kids destroy them fast, and older people that really just want to go to Facebook, YouTube and the likes. Their whole thing is basically they’re cloud based and kinda disposable. They even ran this ad about it.
It’s like the MacBook experience for cheap and the only thing it runs is Chome and Android apps.
They’re kind of slowly becoming the new thinkpads thanks to good coreboot support for them. People have really been unleashing them and doing all sorts of crazy things like eGPUs and stuff since they’re so easy to mod the BIOS.
