[TriLUG] Feedback on your favorite Linux distro on a Chromebook

Wed Aug 3 13:55:43 EDT 2016

I have been happy using Crouton on my Chromebook.  I have not used
ElementaryOS before (on any system).  My chromebook is an Acer Chromebook
15 C910-C37P 16-Inch Chromebook (1.5 GHz Intel Celeron 3205U Dual-core
processor, 4GB memory, 32GB SSD, Chrome OS).  I have been very happy with
the large screen and the long battery life.

I use crouton with Ubuntu 14.04 and LXDE. I chose this distro mostly
because it was the latest stable, and I am more accustomed to Ubuntu. I
mostly use terminal apps in Linux as well. It works well for me. I noticed
the CB35-C3350 has 16 GB SSD; you may want 32GB if you are considering
crouton.

The advantages of crouton I see :

1) easy installation - it is a shell script

2) easy to configure multiple chroots and multiple desktop environments and
modify them with a simple script

3) I can run Chrome OS and Linux distribution(s) at the same time - and
switch between them easily.

4) Easy to backup your environment to an SD card. I recommend this! I
crashed by Ubuntu VM. I think I ran out memory testing some of the code I
had written. When it rebooted, the OS thought it was in a "broken" state.
The solution is to powerwash the system on boot to get a working laptop
again. As far as I know, there is no way to interrupt this at boot. It is
equivalent to a factory reset. Which will delete all non-Chrome OS files.
So all of your crouton chroots will be deleted. A powerwash might delete
files if you have a dual-boot setup (using something other than crouton)
and something goes "horribly wrong". This is a danger of Developer Mode.

5) You can run a chroot from an external SD card. I have found this to be
too slow, personally.

6) You can move a saved environment from an external SD card back to SSD
easily.

James

On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 12:36 PM, Ron Kelley via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org>
wrote:

> Greetings all,
>
> Time to do the laptop shuffle at home (giving my MacBook pro to my wife)
> and am hoping I can switch over to a Chromebook instead of buying another
> >$2K-$3K Mac.  I love the Mac - it fits really well for my workflow -
> especially the shortcut keys (love spotlight).  However, I often find
> myself doing things that don’t require that much horsepower or special
> applications my laptop provides.  My typical night involves lots of
> terminal stuff (ssh, sftp, etc), VNC/RDP, email, general browsing, etc.
> Not heavy on any office-type apps (leave that to the day-job laptop), and I
> have a real desktop for any heavy-lifting work.
>
> Looking for feedback on your favorite Linux distro on a Chrome Book.  Why
> did you choose it, and how well does it work on your Chrome Book.  For the
> record, I am looking at getting the Toshiba Chromebook 2 - 2015 Edition
> (CB35-C3350) and installing either Crouton or ElementaryOS.
>
>
> Thanks.
>
> -Ron
> --
> This message was sent to: James Whisnant <jwhisnant at gmail.com>
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