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I have used crouton to install Debian with xfce on my Samsung Chromebook. It's a bit on the slow side compared to my Macbook Pro running Ubuntu but the lack of

I have used crouton to install Debian with xfce on my Samsung Chromebook. It's a bit on the slow side compared to my Macbook Pro running Ubuntu but the lack of a fan makes it an awesome little machine. I just wish that there was a version of the Pixel with an arm processor inside.

Nursie 13y ago
Crouton is a good thing then? I know a friend of mine said it works well, and you effectively get a full DE running alongside ChromeOS on (effectively) another virtual desktop. I've been dual-booting my ARM chromebook with Chrubuntu on an SD card, though debian is my preferred distro. I find that 90% of the time ChromeOS (with 'Developer Mode' shell unlocked) is good enough for what I use a computer for. The other 10%, well rebooting is pretty quick.
- brianfcoleman 13y ago
  I haven't tried dual booting but the nice thing about having debian in a chroot is that I can easily switch back and forward between ChromeOS and XFCE. Plus I'm guaranteed that all the hardware is fully supported. When I have encountered an issue with crouton, it's a sufficiently small project that you can hack up the scripts to work around stuff. David Schneider, who maintains the crouton project is also very responsive to any issues that are reported.
  - thebiglebrewski 13y ago
    He really is! He got back to my GitHub issue in a manner of hours. That guy rocks.
- jolby 13y ago
  I recently got a Samsung Chromebook, set it up with Crouton and absolutely love it. I ended up not even using X11 in the chroot'ed linux partition. I just use crosh + tmux + emacs and its a great little dev environment. I was even able to get clojure+nrepl working! (using the new arm7 hard-floating point jdk build). Probably the biggest issue is the small amount of local storage, so you have to commit to doing dev work on remote servers over ssh for larger projects, but I was already doing that anyways. I was initially just going to use this laptop as a short stop-gap while I saved up a bit for a new macbook air, but right now, I don't feel any need.

Nursie 13y ago

Crouton is a good thing then? I know a friend of mine said it works well, and you effectively get a full DE running alongside ChromeOS on (effectively) another virtual desktop. I've been dual-booting my ARM chromebook with Chrubuntu on an SD card, though debian is my preferred distro. I find that 90% of the time ChromeOS (with 'Developer Mode' shell unlocked) is good enough for what I use a computer for. The other 10%, well rebooting is pretty quick.

brianfcoleman 13y ago
I haven't tried dual booting but the nice thing about having debian in a chroot is that I can easily switch back and forward between ChromeOS and XFCE. Plus I'm guaranteed that all the hardware is fully supported. When I have encountered an issue with crouton, it's a sufficiently small project that you can hack up the scripts to work around stuff. David Schneider, who maintains the crouton project is also very responsive to any issues that are reported.
- thebiglebrewski 13y ago
  He really is! He got back to my GitHub issue in a manner of hours. That guy rocks.
jolby 13y ago
I recently got a Samsung Chromebook, set it up with Crouton and absolutely love it. I ended up not even using X11 in the chroot'ed linux partition. I just use crosh + tmux + emacs and its a great little dev environment. I was even able to get clojure+nrepl working! (using the new arm7 hard-floating point jdk build). Probably the biggest issue is the small amount of local storage, so you have to commit to doing dev work on remote servers over ssh for larger projects, but I was already doing that anyways. I was initially just going to use this laptop as a short stop-gap while I saved up a bit for a new macbook air, but right now, I don't feel any need.