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Comment by contingencies | Hacker News Reader

Chromebooks are interesting but the key concern with Linux + mobile hardware is "is it well tested?". The initial chromebooks had virtually no local storage. Has that changed? Another concern with Chrome is DRM. Also, there are so many potential driver hassles... wireless, touch, suspend, weird trackpads, brightness controls, power management efficacy in general, etc. Although an issue with mobile hardware review is that many issues appear only over time, and so are missed in reviews... is there a decent resource for Linux-oriented reviews of this class of hardware? I can't find one. Anyone want to start one? Random idea: We could take anonymized (eg. via proxy legal association) affiliate commissions on resulting sales so that editorial independence is maintained.

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https://galliumos.org/ has done a lot for this space. They're doing a great job at normalizing a *buntu distro across the various chromebook hardware.

Interesting. Support looks patchy, only about 50% of listed devices are fully supported. https://wiki.galliumos.org/Hardware_Compatibility I searched for fully functional 2016 models and found only Acer Chromebook 11. Closer inspection revealed their information was inconsistent and that only 2014-2015 models work - 2016 models apparently don't and use the unsupported NVIDIA Tegra K1 processor. http://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/models/laptops/acer-chr... Case in point: finding decent mobile Linux hardware is often a pain in the ass. Here is a frank discussion of Gentoo on Pixel Chromebook: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Google_Chromebook_Pixel_LTE

The hardware list should be correct. The ARM machines you linked are Acer Chromebooks 13s (CB5-311), not Chromebook 11s. The 2016 11s are Intel Bay Trail, and supported.

GalliumOS has good-to-very-good support for almost all Intel Chromebooks, but does not support any ARM models yet.

GalliumOS works very well on the 2015 Pixels. It was a lot of work to get there.

And as with all Linux laptops throughout history, you should definitely check the hardware compatibility list first.

Totally unsolicited, but relevant anecdote. I develop full time on a chromebook running gallium os--although I used Ubuntu for a good 9 months. Only perceivable differences is gallium has way less bloat and support for chrome keyboards.

A decent chunk of chromebooks have upgradable ssds. I put a 256 in mine. The big bottleneck is unfortunately non-ugradable ram, though this is increasingly a laptop in general gripe.

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