Chromebooks came up a little after I worked for the big Garseholes as a translator typing monkey. I didn’t believe the hype anymore and never bought one. But this looks like a good option if you happen to have one sitting around.
I’ve made a small hobby out of fixing up ewaste laptops and giving them away (recently to a local refugee resettlement org) and I’ve been frustrated at how quickly apple and Google kill their OSs. Everything I get that still has a valid, supported commercial OS gets factory reset and updated, because I try to give people something familiar to them. Everything else gets Linux Mint running MATE, which so far seems to be intuitive enough for former windows users.
These laptops have so much more life in them than their OS support would have you believe.
This is such a great read. I’m a long time raspberry pi enjoyer, but we do have so many sbc units out in the world discarded. I’d love to tinker with this.
Love this. I’m a put-linux-on-everything tinkerer who’s made countless things work just by stripping off the junky OS that’s usually failing due to planned obsolescence – I still have a macbook from 2011 that stopped running MacOS in about 2017, but has been happily running linux ever since.
I was really angry when I got ahold of a decent chromebook in 2019 and found I couldn’t put linux on it, due to deliberate design decisions made to lock the hardware into only using the [expletives] excuse for an OS that is ChromeOS. But it looks like I won the waiting-game, because I put that laptop away rather than throw it out, and last weekend I pulled it out, did some reading and found out that smart folks have now caught up to its little games, and it can run linux now. Exciting! it’ll be a great little energy-efficient server-machine once the upgrade is done. Chromebooks age like fine wine :D
This is very helpful if you’re trying to liberate an old ChromeOS device. His scripts allow you to install a regular BIOS and any OS you want from there.
