I always loved the premise of the Chromebook: disposable device with a disposable OS; secure by default; your data is always backed up; if you have any doubts or problems you can always restore to the factory image and be back in action within minutes, etc.<p>I would love to see these principles implemented in a privacy-respecting manner: bring your own device, choose your identity provider (including self-hosted options that integrate with e.g. email or even plain old SSH), choose your storage backend (including other clouds but also e.g. Syncthing, SFTP...).<p>Immutable / secure-by-default OS would also be interesting, but nothing else out there is quite like ChromeOS. NixOS/Guix would be good candidates, but the underlying scaffolding is quite complex. Alpine & OpenBSD are both radically simpler, but lack the aspect of trivially reproducible builds. Then of course there's the question of providing a good UX on top of that base: I want to connect to Wifi, select the ID provider, type my username/password, and start working. That's an enormous gap to close.
I'm using a Chromebook 100% of the time. It's a great experience. The primary limitation is that the dev environment is a bit quirky - it's not running directly on the virtual machine, instead it's in a container. This can lead to some weird stuff when you're trying to do other containery things or if you need to run a nested virtual machine.<p>I've created a script to set up an EC2 instance, rsync changes from my project directories over to it, and manage the instance state to save money. This pretty much solves any issues.<p>I really like a couple of things:<p>1. It is the only OS that "just works" for me. It's the only non-Windows that I can actually plug multiple monitors into and not have it flip out and freeze for minutes.<p>2. It keeps risky stuff (code development) isolated from sensitive stuff (web browsing). If I SSO in my web browse and install malware in my devbox I'm actually pretty safe.<p>3. I get to use debian, which works well for me.<p>4. It's the only OS that feels truly multiuser. I can `ctrl + alt + .` to switch desktops to a totally different user and users are completely isolated with distinctly encrypted directories so if one person is logged in and another isn't you can't just access their stuff. This worked really well when I was using ChromeOS for work since my work profile was very isolated from my personal environment - I could follow 'work profile' stuff like "only install these extensions" while doing whatever I wanted in my personal profile.<p>Basically it's everything I want in a laptop and nothing I don't want. The main limitation is the VM, but the limitations are sorta niche - I doubt many people need to run Firecracker.
I actually picked up a Pixelbook Go off ebay this week because I wanted a really nice quality laptop for Linux. Getting things figured out was kind of hellish (I'm working on a guide) but I was looking into Depthboot yesterday as a way to see if I could get audio working (the custom kernel seemed like it had better chances).<p>Ended up not working, as Depthboot requires you to build your own images and there's a problem where the builder gets stuck on the DE step (and also the github seems to imply the project might be getting sunset?)<p>In my experience, follow MrChromebox's firmware utility guide to set up UEFI firmware, use a recent kernel as they have good support for most chrome os devices, and for audio the absolute amazing <a href="https://github.com/WeirdTreeThing/chromebook-linux-audio">https://github.com/WeirdTreeThing/chromebook-linux-audio</a> solved like 3 days of headache for me with one script.<p>I'd highly recommend it. Picked up an i5/16GB/128GB config for ~$200 and it's hardware on par with my M1 Macbook Air, and the first x86 laptop I've owned with battery life to match, especially with Arch. Amazing value and I think my favorite linux device ever.
Very interesting, seems to support fairly new devices (e.g. Jasper Lake).<p>Although newest ones tend to have unsupported boot or audio (e.g. Lenovo 100e Chromebook Gen 4, codename rusty): <a href="https://eupnea-linux.github.io/docs/project/supported-devices" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://eupnea-linux.github.io/docs/project/supported-device...</a><p>Mapping between devices and codenames: <a href="https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-for-chrome-os-devices/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-f...</a>
I was able to open the webpage yesterday. But today, now Jul 28 03:25 UTC time, it seems both the website and the github project (actually the whole namespace) were gone.<p><a href="https://eupnea-linux.github.io/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://eupnea-linux.github.io/</a> --> 404<p><a href="https://github.com/eupnea-linux">https://github.com/eupnea-linux</a> --> 404
This looks great, I'm going to try it on my Galaxy Chromebook 2, but aside from that:<p>"git clone --depth=1 <a href="https://github.com/eupnea-linux/depthboot-builder">https://github.com/eupnea-linux/depthboot-builder</a> && cd depthboot-builder && ./main.py"<p>STOP GIVING INSTRUCTIONS LIKE THESE. Holy crap, people will copy-paste malware right into their boxes if we let this become the new normal.
There needs to be a way to do this same thing with MediaTek and Snapdragon ARM-based Chromebooks. MediaTek and Qualcomm need to let their firmware and bootloaders allow ARM-based Linux distros to be installed on bare metal. Too many cheap Chromebooks that schools purchase use ARM-processors and get consigned to the e-cycle bin when they can continue to be useful low-end machines if only we could easily get pure Linux on them.
This is exciting. I was shocked to discover I could not change the OS on the Dell 3120 Chromebook I bought. Nor can I update the Chrome browser it includes to a version that understands HBO Max, which was why I bought it.
I find depressing that there aren't binaries available, as everyone is required to build their own distribution from scratch.<p>Why don't they use some hosted workers (GitHub Actions, GitLab Runners) to do the job?
I had a chromebook which required you to open it up and flip a hardware switch to allow write access to the OS. Have to open it up and push the switch with a little screwdriver.
Previously mentioned Depthboot from Eupnea Project (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36888598">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36888598</a>), while allows you to install Linux distributions on Chromebooks, requires user to generate modified images with custom kernels, which is harder to maintain than mainline/original distribution kernels.
Meanwhile Chrultrabook project is actively contributing to upstream projects, allowing for installation of Linux distributions from original images thanks to proper UEFI support with Coreboot - this makes it more future proof, despite more steps required for Coreboot installation.<p><a href="https://chrultrabook.github.io/docs/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://chrultrabook.github.io/docs/</a>
This project seems to be just gone now? All links in this post, and the repo, and the github account are 404s<p><a href="https://github.com/eupnea-linux/depthboot-builder">https://github.com/eupnea-linux/depthboot-builder</a><p>Anyone know what happened? It’s been one day
Can you share what Chromebook you have, and do you use it for light programming or something else?<p>The other day I read that there's an Android Studio for Chromebook, which kind of surprised me, in a pleasant way.
just a note: the owner (?) of the project has gone on some sort of archiving spree, and has hacked (?) the discord and github accounts of the real owner...
I have a very cheap Chromebook that I have been using for everything for the last few months since my laptop fan stopped working properly.<p>I have Linux setup in the settings and use it a lot. For work I usually end up sshing in to a VPS.<p>It seems like a normal Ubuntu. What benefit does the Depthboot have?
Somehow this doesn't work in my tiger lake chromebook. Actually it works, but the final "install-to-internal" script fails, it somehow gets stuck at the wipefs command.