So ever since I got my chromebook I new that one day I would want ubuntu instead of google os. I have a samsung series 3 chromebook.
Do you think its a good idea?
Will everything work?
How long will my battery life be?
On the Series 3, which has a dual core exynos, Ubuntu is NOT a satisfactory experience AT ALL. So do it only if you can't do what you need to do with just dev mode/rooted terminal access. Even a minimalist DE on a bloody fast distro, still feels rather sluggish compared to CrOS or Android on that SoC.
Another thing with SoC's is, that they were never made by the same system standards as x86 products, so they don't have the support for legacy BIOS that enables deep system reflashing. On an x86 chromebook, you can flash coreboot and determine the way the system starts up on a hardware level, and define the low level system functionality. On an ARM-based device, you have to think in the same terms as tablets or phones, the deepest level you can reach, is whatever you can manage in developer mode, which is basically root access, which is not bad, but not the same. You NEVER EVER should be tempted or even consider flashing the "BIOS" of the Series 3, whatever solution some forum pretends to have, it's NOT the way it works on SoC devices. The "BIOS" (which isn't really a BIOS) is just a recovery tool, like on tablets and phones, it isn't capable of starting hardware devices by itself. For that, an open source bootloader called U-Boot is used. That is stored on read-only SPI flash memory, that can be flashed, and of which the source can be viewed and altered.
You have two options for running something else than CrOS on the Series 3: 1. enable USB booting, which can be done from the CLI in dev mode, without changing anything in the system itself. Once you've enabled that, you can get a tiny form factor USB stickdrive with a live ARM distro, and run it from USB, or 2. flash or alter the SPI memory to point U-Boot to another operating system, which is a more permanent and higher performance solution, but not without risks, because if you screw up the U-Boot settings, the only safety net you have left is the recovery, and that can be flaky.
Thanks for the info. I have looked into this several times but I could never find that great of info. I think im going to go with using a USB stick. What distro would you suggest? Im not amazing with linux but I know how to pretty much do everything I need.
I would go for Android, or a minimal Arch or Debian/Ubuntu Core or Fedora ARM with a lightweight DE. Due to the laptop form factor, you have more choice than on tablets, because you don't need touchscreen functionality. I personally like Arch on ARM, but that's because of the extra CLI power over bash. All packages you could ever need to make Debian Stable or Ubuntu Core LTS based ARM distros work, is made freely available through Google Code, and the bleeding edge character or Arch and Fedora makes for kernel hardware support, so you can go either way. I don't know exactly what the hardware support evolution is for the Series 3, but the latest Android 4.4 KitKat builds are built on kernel 3.10.something if I recall correctly, so that should work also out-of-the-box. My personal opinion is that it would definitely be worth checking if KitKat works on the Series 3, because in my opinion, that will give you the best user experience on that device, not only because it's pretty snappy, but also because it multitasks really well, and offers a lot of easy-to-get-and-use applications, including games, photo/video/audio editors, etc... with a very small storage footprint, that perform very well on an ARM SoC. Android may not be the perfect enthusiast distro (wow, understatement of the year), but it arguably is the most popular mobile devices distro, that is both snappy on ARM, and has huge developer support for all kinds of apps, and it's still a linux distro, it only looks like a linux distro if you look through pink glasses, and is as related to something like Arch as a Klipdassie is related to an Elephant, but in essence, it's still a linux distro nonetheless. I understand people that say that Android is evil because Google is evil, and Google is evil, and Android can be evil, but when those people then use Gnome or Unity on Fedora or Ubuntu, that's just the same from my point-of-view, because how is RedHat or Canonical less evil than Google, besides being less powerful maybe, which is very relative in RedHat's case, because nobody has more impact on the Linux kernel than RedHat. So yeah, if it works, I would definitely go for Android 4.4.2 as distro of choice, otherwise probably Arch with MATE or E17.