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.
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.