4 ms·
+1 to Chromebooks, though I was never much interested in Gallium I picked up one of the original Acer C720's back in 2013. Anemic 2c1t (dual core) Celeron at 1
by IntelMiner 5y ago
+1 to Chromebooks, though I was never much interested in Gallium
I picked up one of the original Acer C720's back in 2013. Anemic 2c1t (dual core) Celeron at 1.2 Ghz and 2GB of memory. But Gentoo on it with XFCE was incredibly nippy. Add a processor optimized Firefox at the time and it was an extremely good tiny laptop
A year or so later I upgraded to its "big brother" the core i3 variant (2c2t, quad core) with 4GB of RAM. Same experience. Extremely happy with both machines
Eventually as the Chrome browser started to eclipse things though I moved to Dell's Chromebook 13 "Lulu" with a beastly Broadwell i5 quad core and 8GB (soldered) RAM
The biggest draw for me is these were the first Linux machines I'd used where everything didn't "just work" or "it works okay but you can tweak XYZ" it worked in the sense it was explicitly designed __to run Linux__
For all the flak Google deservedly gets, the decision to enforce a "no binary blobs, everything must be upstreamed to mainline Linux" kernel and Coreboot (BIOS) as well as making "jailbreaking" the thing with a permanent firmware flash as simple as removing a hardware screw was commendable
These days I'm stuck using an MSI Modern 14, which while "okay" is nowhere near as delightful as the Chromebooks were previously
- marktangotango 5y agoChromebooks generally run Linux well, no need for a specialized distro post 2016 or so. De-chrome by installing mr. chromebox firmware and xubuntu (or distro of your choice) and you're set. I still use my acer c720 as a daily driver today.
- jleahy 5y agoIt’s started to change unfortunately, for example audio doesn’t really work on skylake or kabylake chromebooks yet. They are moving to more custom hardware.
- jclulow 5y agoThe design of the Intel audio stuff in the Skylake systems is pretty horrid. Previously things had HD Audio hardware which was at least sufficiently self describing to be able to attach a general driver. The new stuff depends on this topology file which you have to pull out of your hat -- there's no reason it can't be open source as far as I can tell, but it's maddeningly not something the hardware itself can provide to you. It's not an improvement.
- forty 5y agoLast time I looked (a long time ago) there were some issues with running Linux on Chromebooks, like having to press some combination of keys at each boot and/or risking to erase everything if the wrong combination of keys was pressed (if I remember correctly). Does this mrchomebook firmware fix this kind of problems?
- pwdisswordfish8 5y agoI spent a couple years thinking about this risk every time I rebooted and got the white screen prompting me to press space to restore ChromeOS. In reality, at least for the Dell Lulu platform mentioned above, what will actually happen is it will probe for recovery media first. In the event that it doesn't find any, it will leave the underlying system untouched and just complain at you about it (and tell you to go visit a URL on another computer so you can create a USB/microSD recovery disk).
- thefunnyman 5y agoPerhaps the situation has changed recently, but a few years ago I had an acer c720 and remember this being mitigated by flashing seabios. This completely removed chromeos rather than dual booting, but it worked excellently for taking to lectures early in my undergrad.
- matheusmoreira 5y agoI have massive respect for Google's work in this area as well. They released awesome laptops with open firmware and Linux support. I wish they could use their power to improve the mobile Linux drivers situation. Just straight up require that hardware companies upstream their drivers to the Linux kernel.