7 ms·

I'm interested in Chromebooks for a different reason, the same reason that brings me to Pixel phones. I hate software that tracks me, but if I wipe out Android

by nextos 8y ago

I'm interested in Chromebooks for a different reason, the same reason that brings me to Pixel phones. I hate software that tracks me, but if I wipe out Android and I install a self compiled AOSP, it's a superb user experience for me. Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro? Right now, Xiaomi laptops are excellent cheap machines to run Linux on (thanks to having just Intel components). Same for Huawei if you are willing to spend a bit more, but on that price a Thinkpad is probably the way to go.

paulcarroty 8y ago
> if I wipe out Android and I install a self compiled AOSP, it's a superb user experience for me. It's doesn't resolve the tracking issues.
- nextos 8y ago
  Why not? I'm running vanilla AOSP with F-Droid apps only. No Google Apps framework. Threats are limited then to regular baseband radio issues. I know I could be doing better if we had open hardware, but that's the most practical solution I can implement today I think.
  - paulcarroty 8y ago
    Vanilla AOSP still use Google DNS by default and Google servers for an internet connection checker.
    - nextos 8y ago
      I patch that, and a few other things. It's a poor man's CopperheadOS.
      - TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
        Have you considered writing a guide on how you do this and what changes you make? I also own a Pixel, but kept running into problems when I tried to compile Android, eventually making me give up.
        nextos 8y ago
        There's great work around from many people. See e.g.: https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-stack https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-stack That's a whole toolset to compile your AOSP in AWS and then build your own over-the-air updates.
  - Fnoord 8y ago
    That does solve the tracking issues, parent assumed you flashed OpenGapps w/it. You can also run microG (LOS + microG I recommend; what I use on my smartphone) which contains UnifedNlp for location services.
Fnoord 8y ago
> Xiaomi laptops are excellent machines to run Linux on (thanks to having just Intel components) Which ones exactly? Do you have resources? The ones I've seen sport Nvidia GPUs [1] [2]. Which means no Wayland, and only proprietary drivers. Not "excellent" or "just Intel components" in my book. [1] https://www.banggood.com/XiaoMi-Gaming-Laptop-Intel-Core-I7-8750H-GTX-1060-GB-GDDR5-16GB-RAM-DDR4-256GB-15_6-Inch-Notebook-p-1337189.html https://www.banggood.com/XiaoMi-Gaming-Laptop-Intel-Core-I7-... [2] https://www.banggood.com/Xiaomi-Pro-Notebook-15_6-Inch-Intel-Core-i7-8550U-Quad-Core-8GB-256GB-Fingerprint-Sensor-Deep-Gray-p-1199403.html https://www.banggood.com/Xiaomi-Pro-Notebook-15_6-Inch-Intel...
- nextos 8y ago
  Air 12 inch, Intel HD Graphics: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/xiaomi-air-12-review/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/xiaomi-air-12-review...
  - Fnoord 8y ago
    Good bang for the buck but I want at least 8 GB DDR4 in a new laptop (bought in 2018), and preferably also TB3 and an AMD GPU. Regardless of the other unnecessary or lacking features Macbook laptops have (butterfly keyboard, touchbar, magsafe, USB-A ports come to mind) if you want a decent amount of RAM and an AMD GPU you pay the jackpot price on MBPs.
    - nextos 8y ago
      i5 has 8 GB of RAM and still an Intel HD card. Sadly, it's not fanless. Same as with MS Surface and virtually all fanless m3 setups, there's no 8 GB option.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - nl 8y ago
      https://www.gearbest.com/laptops/pp_651697.html https://www.gearbest.com/laptops/pp_651697.html 12.5”, 8gb, full Intel. I haven’t tried it but it looks interesting and well priced.
sgroppino 8y ago
Which Xiaomi laptop is good with Linux Mint? Are they better than Lenovo?
- nextos 8y ago
  The Xiaomi Air 12 is really good quality for ~$550 if you go for the m3 CPU. It's fanless (but only 4 GB of RAM), which is something I love. It's a different price point than Lenovo. Much cheaper. They are good ultrabooks. Regardless of the CPU you choose (e.g. i5 has 8 GB, but it's not fanless), all 12 inch models have Intel components only, including the wireless card. It's one of the few laptops that truly runs well on Linux out of the box with zero glitches. Only a few classic Thinkpads are better, with even good ACPI support for battery discharge events. But that's really rare, and does not make much difference if you run a HAL like UPower to abstract your ACPI-battery.
  - Fnoord 8y ago
    There's a few ThinkPads where you can remove the BIOS and replace it with Coreboot, and remove Intel ME as well. For example the ThinkPad T60 and X200, available on second hand market. Replace the keyboard if you find it dirty to use those 2nd hand. The advantage these have is the hardware is serviceable by the user.
    - user5994461 8y ago
      These Think pads were released 10 years ago, it's a really bad idea to invest in used hardware that old. They can fail anytime.
  - sgroppino 8y ago
    Thanks. I find $550 a bit expensive. Linux Mint runs flawlessly on a Lenovo S120 (11.6"/4GB RAM/32GB SSD) but I can't upgrade the SSD and that's a bummer. Can't complain, though, it was $170 new from Amazon...
- panda88888 8y ago
  Asus Zenbook UX305 also support Linux 100% out of the box. It’s essentially a MacBook clone with 13” 1080p screen, m3, 8 gb ram, and 256 ssd. I currently use one with Mint Linux and is happy with it.
ac29 8y ago
> Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro? Yes, with the caveat that full BIOS/UEFI support sometimes lags hardware releases by 6-12 months - out of the box most Chromebooks can only boot ChromeOS. Pretty much all the Chromebook firmware work to support 3rd-party OS' is done by one guy, see his page here: https://mrchromebox.tech https://mrchromebox.tech I run Arch on a cheap Chromebook for some tasks at work, I've generally been satisfied, and will probably buy another one eventually. I think if I was spending $500+, I'd just buy a Windows laptop and reformat it though - way more choices, and they tend to be upgradable. It's also worth keeping in mind most Chromebooks must be disassembled to remove a firmware write-protect screw in order to flash new firmware. The one I have requires removing the battery/keyboard/etc - more than just popping off a small panel on the bottom.
- j0hnml 8y ago
  Which chromebook do you have and what are its specs? I'm interested in doing the same, and I don't want to spend $800+ for a laptop I'm not going to be super happy with.
  - windexh8er 8y ago
    Check out GalliumOS. One of the best, Chrome specific, distros around. The question on hardware comes down to what you want. Many of the newest releases of ChromeBooks do not have removable media (M.2 form factor). So, choose wisely up front: hardware that is supported by current releases and storage and RAM suitable to your needs. The latest CB I have is a Toshiba Chromebook 2 with an i3 processor and 4GB of RAM. That model has a removable M.2 and so mine has an upgraded 128GB of storage. It has received app support for ChromeOS and also runs Gallium with full support. You can dual boot these machines easily, which is how mine is setup. Nick Janetakis had a nice write-up on setting it up from back when the machine was newer, but to give you an idea: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromebook-cb35-into-a-linux-development-environment-with-galliumos https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromeboo...
  - mcny 8y ago
rogerbinns 8y ago
> Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro? They aren't ideal. But they do have a good alternative that is in its late beta stages. Typically you could run a Linux distro in a chroot on the chromebook, after putting it into developer mode. Unfortunately the chroot does have limits - fox example it doesn't get another IP address so you can't coexist much with ChromeOS - such as using avahi. The new approach (named Crostini) instead uses a lightweight kvm based virtual machine mechanism to run a Linux guest isolated from the host. They also (by default) use the hardened ChromeOS kernel inside the guest. Note that not all chromebooks are currently supported but a new x86 chromebook should be fine. https://www.reddit.com/r/Crostini/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Crostini/ https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/containers_and_vms.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/c...
- samstave 8y ago
  Maybe you know the answer to this question I have always wanted: I want to be able to run multiple OSs/Installations-of-the-same-OS on a single machine such that I can swap between "running" OSs - meaning, I want to have one OS sleep while I use the other. So, if I have windows and ubuntu on the same machine - I dont want to reboot, I want to just put one to sleep and wake the other one up... OR Ideally - I want to be able to run them side-by-side in some manner that is greater than a VM running on top of the other... My System76 laptop has dual SSD drives in it, I'd like to have both machines running, with half the resources dedicated to each, and have my KVM switch between them. Anything come clsoe to this?
  - severine 8y ago
    I think you can do that with Proxmox.
  - rogerbinns 8y ago
    The specific functionality you describe is available in mainframes, although they are designed to always run a hypervisor. You can't practically do it in the PC world because the operating systems either expect to use a virtualisation interface, or they expect direct control over the hardware. The latter will also give better performance. Some virtualisation environments do have hardware passthrough. A good example would be having a high performance PCIE video card which is passed through to to a guest for gaming. You can also use real storage instead of files pretending to be storage, although this is less flexible (eg no snapshots). My recommendation is to use Ubuntu as your host OS and run Windows as a VM guest.
krn 8y ago
> Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro? GalliumOS[1] is a Ubuntu-based Linux distribution optimized for Chromebooks with a huge list of supported devices[2]. > Right now, Xiaomi laptops are excellent cheap machines to run Linux on (thanks to having just Intel components). Same for Huawei if you are willing to spend a bit more, but on that price a Thinkpad is probably the way to go. I find Lenovo Thinkpad E4*0 series to be the best low-cost, high build-quality Linux development machines, since they start from $569.99, allow a wide range of hardware customizations[3], and meet Mil-SPEC durability standards[4]. [1] https://galliumos.org/ https://galliumos.org/ [2] https://wiki.galliumos.org/Hardware_Compatibility https://wiki.galliumos.org/Hardware_Compatibility [3] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-e-series/ThinkPad-E480/p/22TP2TEE480 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-e-ser... [4] https://www.lenovo.com/hk/en/thisisthinkpad/innovation/thinkpad-mil-spec-tested-to-the-extreme/ https://www.lenovo.com/hk/en/thisisthinkpad/innovation/think...
- ChristianGeek 8y ago
  I cannot express enough love for the TrackPoint keyboard! (I use an external one at home and at the office.)
- binmanthrowaway 8y ago
  Can't see 4k screen. Come on it is 2018 I don't want to see pixels.
  - krn 8y ago
    This is a budget ThinkPad model, design for small businesses, where 4k display would be an overkill. I actually find FHD to be a better option for a development machine, because of the lower energy consumption and extended battery life.
    - binmanthrowaway 8y ago
      It is like preferring dried beans over a calculator to do sums...
openfuture 8y ago
So I bought a cheap chromebook with an intel chip to run linux on and use as a dev machine. The spacebar screen is a constant source of anxiety but it's even worse than that. The reason I am on chromeOS with sideloaded linux (crouton) is because when you flash custom bios (seabios) you need to authorize it, if your computer runs completely out of battery (like it did for me on a flight to Iran), then that authorization is revoked and you need to boot into chromeOS to fix it (something I couldn't do since I didn't have chromeOS) so the only thing you can do is press spacebar and wipe everything. I think I'll never buy a chromebook again, I'll just get something from puri.sm or slimbook.es.

by nextos 8y ago

paulcarroty 8y ago

> if I wipe out Android and I install a self compiled AOSP, it's a superb user experience for me. It's doesn't resolve the tracking issues.

nextos 8y ago
Why not? I'm running vanilla AOSP with F-Droid apps only. No Google Apps framework. Threats are limited then to regular baseband radio issues. I know I could be doing better if we had open hardware, but that's the most practical solution I can implement today I think.
- paulcarroty 8y ago
  Vanilla AOSP still use Google DNS by default and Google servers for an internet connection checker.
  - nextos 8y ago
    I patch that, and a few other things. It's a poor man's CopperheadOS.
    - TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
      Have you considered writing a guide on how you do this and what changes you make? I also own a Pixel, but kept running into problems when I tried to compile Android, eventually making me give up.
      - nextos 8y ago
        There's great work around from many people. See e.g.: https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-stack https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-stack That's a whole toolset to compile your AOSP in AWS and then build your own over-the-air updates.
- Fnoord 8y ago
  That does solve the tracking issues, parent assumed you flashed OpenGapps w/it. You can also run microG (LOS + microG I recommend; what I use on my smartphone) which contains UnifedNlp for location services.

Fnoord 8y ago

> Xiaomi laptops are excellent machines to run Linux on (thanks to having just Intel components) Which ones exactly? Do you have resources? The ones I've seen sport Nvidia GPUs [1] [2]. Which means no Wayland, and only proprietary drivers. Not "excellent" or "just Intel components" in my book. [1] https://www.banggood.com/XiaoMi-Gaming-Laptop-Intel-Core-I7-8750H-GTX-1060-GB-GDDR5-16GB-RAM-DDR4-256GB-15_6-Inch-Notebook-p-1337189.html https://www.banggood.com/XiaoMi-Gaming-Laptop-Intel-Core-I7-... [2] https://www.banggood.com/Xiaomi-Pro-Notebook-15_6-Inch-Intel-Core-i7-8550U-Quad-Core-8GB-256GB-Fingerprint-Sensor-Deep-Gray-p-1199403.html https://www.banggood.com/Xiaomi-Pro-Notebook-15_6-Inch-Intel...

nextos 8y ago
Air 12 inch, Intel HD Graphics: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/xiaomi-air-12-review/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/xiaomi-air-12-review...
- Fnoord 8y ago
  Good bang for the buck but I want at least 8 GB DDR4 in a new laptop (bought in 2018), and preferably also TB3 and an AMD GPU. Regardless of the other unnecessary or lacking features Macbook laptops have (butterfly keyboard, touchbar, magsafe, USB-A ports come to mind) if you want a decent amount of RAM and an AMD GPU you pay the jackpot price on MBPs.
  - nextos 8y ago
    i5 has 8 GB of RAM and still an Intel HD card. Sadly, it's not fanless. Same as with MS Surface and virtually all fanless m3 setups, there's no 8 GB option.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - nl 8y ago
    https://www.gearbest.com/laptops/pp_651697.html https://www.gearbest.com/laptops/pp_651697.html 12.5”, 8gb, full Intel. I haven’t tried it but it looks interesting and well priced.

sgroppino 8y ago

Which Xiaomi laptop is good with Linux Mint? Are they better than Lenovo?

nextos 8y ago
The Xiaomi Air 12 is really good quality for ~$550 if you go for the m3 CPU. It's fanless (but only 4 GB of RAM), which is something I love. It's a different price point than Lenovo. Much cheaper. They are good ultrabooks. Regardless of the CPU you choose (e.g. i5 has 8 GB, but it's not fanless), all 12 inch models have Intel components only, including the wireless card. It's one of the few laptops that truly runs well on Linux out of the box with zero glitches. Only a few classic Thinkpads are better, with even good ACPI support for battery discharge events. But that's really rare, and does not make much difference if you run a HAL like UPower to abstract your ACPI-battery.
- Fnoord 8y ago
  There's a few ThinkPads where you can remove the BIOS and replace it with Coreboot, and remove Intel ME as well. For example the ThinkPad T60 and X200, available on second hand market. Replace the keyboard if you find it dirty to use those 2nd hand. The advantage these have is the hardware is serviceable by the user.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    These Think pads were released 10 years ago, it's a really bad idea to invest in used hardware that old. They can fail anytime.
- sgroppino 8y ago
  Thanks. I find $550 a bit expensive. Linux Mint runs flawlessly on a Lenovo S120 (11.6"/4GB RAM/32GB SSD) but I can't upgrade the SSD and that's a bummer. Can't complain, though, it was $170 new from Amazon...
panda88888 8y ago
Asus Zenbook UX305 also support Linux 100% out of the box. It’s essentially a MacBook clone with 13” 1080p screen, m3, 8 gb ram, and 256 ssd. I currently use one with Mint Linux and is happy with it.

ac29 8y ago

> Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro? Yes, with the caveat that full BIOS/UEFI support sometimes lags hardware releases by 6-12 months - out of the box most Chromebooks can only boot ChromeOS. Pretty much all the Chromebook firmware work to support 3rd-party OS' is done by one guy, see his page here: https://mrchromebox.tech https://mrchromebox.tech I run Arch on a cheap Chromebook for some tasks at work, I've generally been satisfied, and will probably buy another one eventually. I think if I was spending $500+, I'd just buy a Windows laptop and reformat it though - way more choices, and they tend to be upgradable. It's also worth keeping in mind most Chromebooks must be disassembled to remove a firmware write-protect screw in order to flash new firmware. The one I have requires removing the battery/keyboard/etc - more than just popping off a small panel on the bottom.

j0hnml 8y ago
Which chromebook do you have and what are its specs? I'm interested in doing the same, and I don't want to spend $800+ for a laptop I'm not going to be super happy with.
- windexh8er 8y ago
  Check out GalliumOS. One of the best, Chrome specific, distros around. The question on hardware comes down to what you want. Many of the newest releases of ChromeBooks do not have removable media (M.2 form factor). So, choose wisely up front: hardware that is supported by current releases and storage and RAM suitable to your needs. The latest CB I have is a Toshiba Chromebook 2 with an i3 processor and 4GB of RAM. That model has a removable M.2 and so mine has an upgraded 128GB of storage. It has received app support for ChromeOS and also runs Gallium with full support. You can dual boot these machines easily, which is how mine is setup. Nick Janetakis had a nice write-up on setting it up from back when the machine was newer, but to give you an idea: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromebook-cb35-into-a-linux-development-environment-with-galliumos https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromeboo...
- mcny 8y ago

rogerbinns 8y ago

> Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro? They aren't ideal. But they do have a good alternative that is in its late beta stages. Typically you could run a Linux distro in a chroot on the chromebook, after putting it into developer mode. Unfortunately the chroot does have limits - fox example it doesn't get another IP address so you can't coexist much with ChromeOS - such as using avahi. The new approach (named Crostini) instead uses a lightweight kvm based virtual machine mechanism to run a Linux guest isolated from the host. They also (by default) use the hardened ChromeOS kernel inside the guest. Note that not all chromebooks are currently supported but a new x86 chromebook should be fine. https://www.reddit.com/r/Crostini/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Crostini/ https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/containers_and_vms.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/c...

samstave 8y ago
Maybe you know the answer to this question I have always wanted: I want to be able to run multiple OSs/Installations-of-the-same-OS on a single machine such that I can swap between "running" OSs - meaning, I want to have one OS sleep while I use the other. So, if I have windows and ubuntu on the same machine - I dont want to reboot, I want to just put one to sleep and wake the other one up... OR Ideally - I want to be able to run them side-by-side in some manner that is greater than a VM running on top of the other... My System76 laptop has dual SSD drives in it, I'd like to have both machines running, with half the resources dedicated to each, and have my KVM switch between them. Anything come clsoe to this?
- severine 8y ago
  I think you can do that with Proxmox.
- rogerbinns 8y ago
  The specific functionality you describe is available in mainframes, although they are designed to always run a hypervisor. You can't practically do it in the PC world because the operating systems either expect to use a virtualisation interface, or they expect direct control over the hardware. The latter will also give better performance. Some virtualisation environments do have hardware passthrough. A good example would be having a high performance PCIE video card which is passed through to to a guest for gaming. You can also use real storage instead of files pretending to be storage, although this is less flexible (eg no snapshots). My recommendation is to use Ubuntu as your host OS and run Windows as a VM guest.

krn 8y ago

> Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro? GalliumOS[1] is a Ubuntu-based Linux distribution optimized for Chromebooks with a huge list of supported devices[2]. > Right now, Xiaomi laptops are excellent cheap machines to run Linux on (thanks to having just Intel components). Same for Huawei if you are willing to spend a bit more, but on that price a Thinkpad is probably the way to go. I find Lenovo Thinkpad E4*0 series to be the best low-cost, high build-quality Linux development machines, since they start from $569.99, allow a wide range of hardware customizations[3], and meet Mil-SPEC durability standards[4]. [1] https://galliumos.org/ https://galliumos.org/ [2] https://wiki.galliumos.org/Hardware_Compatibility https://wiki.galliumos.org/Hardware_Compatibility [3] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-e-series/ThinkPad-E480/p/22TP2TEE480 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-e-ser... [4] https://www.lenovo.com/hk/en/thisisthinkpad/innovation/thinkpad-mil-spec-tested-to-the-extreme/ https://www.lenovo.com/hk/en/thisisthinkpad/innovation/think...

ChristianGeek 8y ago
I cannot express enough love for the TrackPoint keyboard! (I use an external one at home and at the office.)
binmanthrowaway 8y ago
Can't see 4k screen. Come on it is 2018 I don't want to see pixels.
- krn 8y ago
  This is a budget ThinkPad model, design for small businesses, where 4k display would be an overkill. I actually find FHD to be a better option for a development machine, because of the lower energy consumption and extended battery life.
  - binmanthrowaway 8y ago
    It is like preferring dried beans over a calculator to do sums...

openfuture 8y ago

So I bought a cheap chromebook with an intel chip to run linux on and use as a dev machine. The spacebar screen is a constant source of anxiety but it's even worse than that. The reason I am on chromeOS with sideloaded linux (crouton) is because when you flash custom bios (seabios) you need to authorize it, if your computer runs completely out of battery (like it did for me on a flight to Iran), then that authorization is revoked and you need to boot into chromeOS to fix it (something I couldn't do since I didn't have chromeOS) so the only thing you can do is press spacebar and wipe everything. I think I'll never buy a chromebook again, I'll just get something from puri.sm or slimbook.es.