Chromebooks and Linux - A deadly combo?

Communities Blog
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So if you keep an eye on technology, you will know that both Chromebooks and Linux saw an increased adoption rate in 2013, this is good news, very good news, now Chromebooks run a very secure Gentoo style OS, its not true Gentoo but it still is, get my drift?

Anyways both have the ability to crush MS and Apple in the market, imagine linking them together, Although I cant see Fedora or Sabayon coming to laptops as default OS, but us slightly technical people at least, can find a way to install Linux (Please avoid Ubuntu for this).

Why did I just say avoid Ubuntu, well look at it this way, Yes its more secure than Windows and OSX, but the fact it runs on old tech is awful, so keep the chromebooks modern and use a modern OS, of course if you don't want to tinker with chromebooks that is perfectly fine, they make superb laptops on their own merit in a cloud based world.

But if you like me, and need both online and offline ability, cloud based operating systems don't work well, I need stuff I can learn subjects with, and I like to tinker so yeah xD

If you wish to try this method I would suggest Acer C720, these are superb performing laptops, running what I like to call Cellewell processors, (Haswell with Celeron branding) these are not true Haswells but expect the tweaks and battery, The laptop is minimal and looks superb, fitting for a bleeding edge distro, make the OS match its colours xD

These laptops retail in the UK for about £200 and perform better than some £400 laptops (Again Linux) the SSD is small also but external drive of 1TB should fix your storage problems.

Don't expect to play games also, they are dual cores with 4GB RAM, maybe this year we may get some quad core 6GB RAM chromebooks (Please ASUS, Acer)

What do you think to this, by far its no new idea but could it work with people on low budgets and students wishing for a laptop or to learn :)

 

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Excellent post! I think we could all learn a lot if Chromebook users come together and share the benefits.

I personally use the Samsung Chromebook with an ARM processor as my daily computer. Being able to carry something this small, powerful and not battery hungry is amazing. The best way to come to terms with a Chromebook is to think of it as a tablet with a built in keyboard. No major gaming, no MS Office, etc...

But, what can you do? The answer is endless. Why? Thanks to cloud computing, its now possible to do word processing (even if you're an Apple hater, you can use Apple's iCloud Pages, Numbers and Keynote just by logging into your free Apple ID on icloud.com to suffice), photo editing and remote desktop. The list goes on and on. 

Getting your fingers on a Chromebook only introduces you to what technology is going towards. Sure my Chromebook comes with 16 GB internal storage. Google helped me out with 100 GB of Google Drive storage for the first two years. I also picked up a 128 GB SD card online which resides in the computer at all times. Some Chromebooks also come with ability of having built in LTE. I take advantage of this everyday. On a side note, sure you can tether to your phone, but why kill the battery on two devices when you can have cellular service on both!

I picked up this Samsung Chromebook a few months ago and it has not let me down. For the price of this thing, it has more than paid it self off. 

I also run Linux on this beast but we'll save that for another day!

Please, we need more people in this thread!

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I just started looking into getting a chromosome and linux(ing) it this afternoon, still have some decisions to make but right now im looking at the cheap acer c720 and throwing fedora onto it.I live in the UK and the price of that little ting is £200 from mainstream highstreet shops (pcworld)so I could probably find it a lil cheaper online, I have read that the hardware options can be somewhat limited with regard to adding a larger ram or storage drive but as a portable device its not going to be my main thing anyway just a handy out and about device for work to replace my poor old samsung nc10.

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Chromebooks show amazing possibility in many forms, although they dont posses the power for a video editor or video games, they show that PCs are cheap and powerful with cloud, I personally would get fedora or arch on it, I like to tinker, beef my security up and generally break stuff, I also need specific tools like wireshark and Vim/Pycharm.

I doubt chrome OS will ever get networking tools, its not designed for that, its designed for basic users my dad would love one of these, and the fact I dont have to maintain his windows OS all the time is a bonus on my part :)

do wait though if you are getting one, ASUS is supposed to be releasing the most powerful version of a chromebook yet, and avoid dell (NSA stuff...) but if you need one now, get the C710 for upgrade of if you dont want to get the c720.

Also I have checked in my local area PCWorld is cheapest which is strange to say they never are.

As for the OS installing, I am unsure 100% how to get Fedora on a chromebook, but Im sure someone on here can do it.

And I agree CAptchaKillsEverybody but I like to be offline at times :) so fedora will work better for me, and I get all latest stuff like HSA and PaX xD

If only amd could get their APUs into these things, I think AMD will take over the linux market soon, there APUs with HSA and an arm security core will rock linux, making it faster and more secure, so imagine a chromebook with APUs in!

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I haven't messed with a chromebook yet. Do they have portage since it is Gentoo?

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yes sort of, they dont update with commands, google pushes updates to them, I am unsure if when you do access the terminal it will allow the portage update command

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I know you said no Ubuntu but....

Because Chromebook specs are not the best, I would suggest an Ubuntu minimal with lxde. It will run really fast, stable, great support, and its not "old or unmodern". Using Ubuntu minimal would take care of bloatware, and if you wanted, you could load something cool like kde 4, gnome 3, mate etc

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You could, reason I said no Ubuntu is because its out dated compared, You could always run Fedora with Razr-qt :) the fact also Ubuntu is less secure than the stock OS which is a gentoo based distro, So if you recompile the kernel and mess about with the entire system you may get SELinux running and PaX but I would expect breakage