I’m looking at picking up a used chromebook for my kid to use after installing a Linux OS on it. So I have two questions that are very related:
Which would be a better one to get: Lenovo S330 or Acer CB3-431. Is one going to be easier to get the OS to run on?
The other question is which distro is going to work the easiest? I have been running Linux exclusively for over a decade on my person computer (Fedora currently) and my phone (PinePhonePro with Debian (well, Mobian anyways)) so I’m very comfortable with Linux in general, but haven’t played with this kind of hardware before so I’m not sure what the limitations will be.
You might find just the inbuilt linux (crostini) under chromeos is fine… it’s basically debian.
If you want just a linux box you basically start by installing coreboot to turn it into something more like a standard PC. See https://mrchromebox.tech/ - from the looks of that site the Lenovo isn’t supported and the Acer is, but needs hardware modification.
Of course there’s always the option of just getting a Thinkpad from ebay - really cheap and can run linux out of the box.
The S330 has an ARM processor, so definitely avoid that one (and any other Chromebook with an ARM processor). To be honest, I would buy a cheap Windows laptop and install Linux on that rather than fiddling with trying to get it to run on a Chromebook.
Or, as others have said, leave ChromeOS on the machine and run Linux in Crostini. If you have a reasonably speced machine it runs pretty well. Although again, I would avoid ARM as some Debian applications aren’t available for ARM Chromebooks.
Such as?
I knew someone was going to ask that and I’m going to give you the lame answer that I don’t remember for sure. It’s been a while since I used my Chromebook, but it was a fairly mainstream application that wasn’t compiled for ARM. I ended up using the Flatpak version, which worked fine but was a resource hog on an ARM Chromebook with only 4GB of RAM.
Linux is a great way to extend the usefulness of an EOL Chromebook. I would not buy a Chromebook for Linux though. You’d be better off getting a used Thinkpad or something.
I run opensuse leap on a convertible chromebook and I like it. There are some problems, though, most related to sleeping, but in recent software probably all of the issues would be gone.
Or at least, it’s much, much better than my previous (ancient…) one, but also I would just not use it with the original os that is made by google. Hell, besides the data mining that’s usual to google, they wanted me to log in with a google account to not delete my files when I reboot it!
The CB3-431 is device name EDGAR. You’d most likely pull the write protect screws and flash a UEFI payload into the firmware, probably using Mr. Chromebox’s tooling and payloads. Most modern Chromebooks boot Coreboot with a depthcharge payload, and it can either be coerced to boot something different with a lot of effort, or easily swapped with a Tianocore UEFI payload to make it behave like a normal PC. Once flashed, it’s an ordinary Braswell generation PC with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.
The S330 is an ARM machine built on a Mediatech MT8173C. Installing normal Linux on ARM Chromebooks is substantially less well-established, but often possible. It looks like those are doable but you won’t get graphics acceleration, and the bootloader situation is a little klutzy.
Of the two, the CB3-431will be easier and better documented to bend to your will.
The major limitation with Chromebooks is really just that there isn’t much onboard storage, so you’ll want to pick reasonably light software (A distro where you pick packages on a small base install or at least a lighter spin will be preferable) and avoid storage-intensive distros (eg. Nix or the immutable-core-plus-containers schemes whose packaging models have substantial storage overhead are probably unsuitable). You may have a little hassle with sound because many Chromebooks have a goofy half-soc-half-external-codec sound layout for which the Linux tooling is still improving - a pair of annoying PipeWire and Kernel bugs that sometimes cause them to come up wrong and spew log messages got fixed last week but aren’t in a release yet.
They aren’t fancy machines, but hacked used Chromebooks make great beaters.
Thanks for the detailed answer and pointing me towards the Mr. Chromebox tooling. I picked up the used Acer CB3 for $30 and was able to install the custom UEFI firmware and then install Gallium OS without too much hassle. Like you said, not a fancy machine, but hard to beat that price.
Suggestion: the Search key under your left pinkie emits SuperL (aka. Meta, same as a Windows key), and it is an great way to make up for some other keyboard weirdness Chromebooks have, and map to WM controls.
I recently discovered keyd, an excellent system-wide key remapper that works as a tiny daemon that intercepts input events and re-emits them as a virtual keyboard, and have it mapping Search+Arrows to PgUp/PgDn/Home/End (like a lot of laptops do with Fn+Arrows, or ChromeOS does with Ctrl+Shift+Arrows). I’ve already run into a couple other folks doing the same because it’s such a clean solution to the Chromebook keyboard.
AFIK GalliumOS has been unmaintained for over a year, and most of the patches they used to add are now in mainline, so long term you may want to consider a different distro - it’s probably OK for a while still though.
Reviving Chromebooks with Ubuntu
- goes the route of using an external drive so you’re not limited by the internal storage of a Chromebook
- defaults to Ubuntu just because its easy and common
- if you go Xubuntu or Lubuntu, you shouldn’t have any major problems with performance
- article more focused on using Chromebook as cheaper, more capable alternative to Raspberry Pi