[TriLUG] Chromebook specs: Was: Laptop recommendations

[Matt Pusateri via TriLUG]

Yeah, I’m hijacking this thread.

So I’ve thought about a chromebook, but haven’t kept up with whats out there.   So if I wanted a decent chromebook, that could last a few years. definitely would either want a chroot or convert it to another distro.  What kind of specs should I be looking at from those that have used them? I see alot of them with 2Gb ram and 16GSSD and that just doesn’t seem enough.


Matt P.


> On Feb 19, 2017, at 11:05 AM, Ken MacKenzie <ken at mack-z.com> wrote:
> 
> That is a lot of money for what basically a chrome book can do, which at its core is gentoo linux.  I consider for most cases a chromebook to be one of the best linux laptops you can buy, for any money.  If you need more than what chromeos offers then you can put it in developer mode and use crouton to install linux along side chromeos.  If you do plan to do that I would recommend avoiding the ARM based chromebooks.  Still with chromebooks (not all yet) supporting android apps as well as chromeos and the crouton linux install option they are pretty much a very powerful platform for just about anything you can imagine.
> 
> I am on my second chromebook of 3 in this house.  I am typing to you from it on an Acer R11.  It has android app support, and right now typing this from within the ubuntu trusty chroot in qtile and opera.  But for testament of power I have used chromebooks with the crouton chroot to run realtime audio synthesis and dj mixes from stage.  Do not under estimate what can be done with a chromebook.  And because it is already a linux based machine all the hardware pretty much works from within the chroot.  And yes you could run a full blown unity setup if you wish.
> 
> Caveats on distro, crouton is pretty much debian or ubuntu based distro install only.  And if you want touch screen support at present it is ubuntu based only.
> 
> Ken
> 
> On Sun, Feb 19, 2017 at 10:51 AM, Matt Pusateri via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org <mailto:trilug at trilug.org>> wrote:
> I happen to know that Lenovo T450’s and T460’s run RHEL and Fedora pretty well.  So I imagine that they’d run other distro’s well too.
> 
> Matt P.
> 
> > On Feb 19, 2017, at 10:47 AM, Thomas Delrue via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org <mailto:trilug at trilug.org>> wrote:
> >
> > Hey all,
> >
> > A friend of mine is looking to buy a new laptop(*) with a budget of
> > roughly 1000-1200 USD. Obviously, this device will run
> > $YOUR_FAVORITE_DISTRO Linux. It's purpose is not to do heavy computing
> > but mostly use it for what your grandma would use it for: i.e. browsing,
> > listening to music, some minor photo editing and -but this is
> > aspirational- maybe some video editing.
> >
> > What are the recommendations for laptops these days and what are some
> > common pitfalls that could prevent putting Linux on it?
> > We've looked at System76 and I think he's looked at those offered by
> > Costco but he was underwhelmed by all of them.
> >
> > (*) chromebooks are not an option
> >
> > --
> > This message was sent to: M. Pusateri <mpusateri at wickedtrails.com <mailto:mpusateri at wickedtrails.com>>
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> 
> 
> --
> This message was sent to: Ken M. <ken at mack-z.com <mailto:ken at mack-z.com>>
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