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Chromebook Pixel has been an awesome sometimes-Linux laptop for me. I'm still spending most of my time in ChromeOS, but the crouton project/extension allows me
by AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
Chromebook Pixel has been an awesome sometimes-Linux laptop for me. I'm still spending most of my time in ChromeOS, but the crouton project/extension allows me to have another linux chroot running for when I need to do work. There's a number of supported distros, although I've stuck with Ubuntu and XFCE, mostly because it stays out of my way.
The fact that you can have the entire chroot or an individual app run in a window under xiwi as though it were a regular Chrome tab makes it even better. I regularly have everything running in ChromeOS except Sublime running in its own tab while I'm coding.
Someone else can probably chime in as far as how well it works if you want to go full-Linux on the thing.
FWIW, I believe Linus Torvalds uses a Chromebook Pixel running Fedora. [0]
[0]: http://www.zdnet.com/article/chromebooks-biggest-fan-linus-torvalds/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/chromebooks-biggest-fan-linus-t...
- krakensden 11y agoDoes the pixel do the thing where your linux partition gets wiped out if you ever run down the battery? Because that scares me.
- precision 11y agoThe Pixel 1 did, but not the Pixel 2.
- neverminder 11y agoI can confirm that. Saw the comment of google rep last year on pixel's forum answering exactly this question.
- AdmiralAsshat 11y agoCan't say that's ever happened to me, but I don't recall how many times I've ever let my Pixel completely run out on battery.
- daveguy 11y agoCan anyone comment on how difficult it is to put Linux on a chromebook? Is it locked down with a need to "root"/jailbreak or is it just a matter of some startup keys? I have avoided chromebooks because ChromeOS always seemed like a limiting factor and potential privacy issue. Can someone summarize the ChromeOS -> Linux process and pain factor?
- RKoutnik 11y agoI've done it, it's an absolute cakewalk. No need to do crazy rooting.
- marcelluspye 11y agoFor crouton, which is still tied to chromeos, absolutely not. All that's required is developer mode enabled. For a full, clean linux install, it varies device to device, but is in general a bit more of a pain. There's a full list of compatibility on the arch wiki I believe.
- neverminder 11y agoI'm running vanilla Ubuntu on it (wiped out Chrome OS) with linux-samus kernel (https://github.com/raphael/linux-samus https://github.com/raphael/linux-samus) since the day I bought it - everything is perfect. The fact that AdmiralAsshat already mentioned, that it's the choice of laptop of Linus Torvalds himself should say a lot already.
- RussianCow 11y agoI feel like the 64GB SSD would be really limiting for development, though. I'm using about 200GB of space on my work machine, and I don't think I'm doing anything crazy with it.