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Comment by rty32 | Hacker News Reader

I think Chromebook throttle the CPU frequency to a low level to make it run at a sweet spot where there is enough performance but not much heat.

Saying that as someone who installed Linux on a Chromebook with 1215u. (Don't do that)

I do that with other AMD machines as well. I always throttle CPU to base frequency unless I really need max performance, which has not happened yet.

I think that's just what I Intel or AMD should have done in the first place -- lower both the base frequency and max turbo frequency to the point that the fan does not even turn on in most workflows.

I suspect that they want to look good in benchmarks, so they set max turbo frequency very high. But that doesn't matter in 90% of the workflows.

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Good point actually, wanted to install Linux on it because Chromeox is very restricted, why do you say I shouldnt?

Now that you are interested, I'm happy to share more.

For context, I got this exact machine https://www.ebay.com/itm/134571642124 at $174, and did it because I wanted a cheap, 15.6" laptop with an accurate & high resolution screen that is more useful than an iPad Pro. A refurbished machine of this model almost perfectly fits those requirements. I installed Linux (Mint) because lots of things like window management and VPN are cumbersome on ChromeOS, and I want very little to do with Google. I didn't install Windows because memory is limited (8GB) and the experience wouldn't be good, but if it had 16GB I would have done that instead.

Issues I have run into:

* Keyboard layout

   * Apparently Caps Lock and Esc keys are going to be a problem. And if you have a remote session where the remote machine has Caps Lock and Esc swapped, it would be a mess. As a (vscode) vim user, I ended up doing Ctrl+[ for Esc. (If I spent more time on it I probably would have figured it out)

    * Also apparently, F11 and F12 keys don't exist, and it can be painful for debugging.

    * You need to properly map F1-F10 as well.

* Audio issues -- there is a chromebook-linux-audio project that enables audio on chromebooks, and I know other people have successfully used it for this model but on a different distro. The project clearly says it does not support Ubuntu, and it indeed didn't work for me. Not that I need or care about audio on this machine dedicated to programming, but missing audio can be annoying at times when you need it.

* Power management. I don't know if it's bad for this model, for Mint or bad for Linux in general, but it's annoying. I think I have properly throttled the CPU via auto-cpufreq, but sometimes the fan runs crazy when nothing is happening. (Granted, that happens on well-supported Windows laptops as well, and I don't know why.) Then something is weird with suspend ("sleep") -- even after setting things up so that closing lid = suspend, after doing it, the laptop goes out of battery within a few hours. I have to manually suspend every time I am done to preserve battery.

Basically, I am seeing a number of issues with using the machines, some specific to Chromebooks, and some that may or may not be associated with Chromebooks specifically. I know it is always a bumpy road to use Linux on laptops, but this is rougher. It's probably not worth the effort, unless you really want to do that, like in my case. Or to put it this way -- if I didn't intend the machine to do lots of development work and I want to be in the Google ecosystem, it would have been a perfect machine otherwise.

And it didn't occur to you to use just the Linux parts of ChromeOS? As in the Linux dev VM with Wayland passtrough. Firefox runs fine (including touchpad gestures) as does pretty much everything else.

It is okay, until is not. Funny enough WSL integration with Windows seems better the Chromeos one, mostly because the security model of the latter I think.

What do you mean, exactly?

(not the person you replied to)

Window management is very weird: try running vscode in crostini. Title bar is empty. I think there is a workaround that ... shows two title bars. Here you are. I didn't want to waste time on that. And I don't remember exactly what happened, but I can never arrange the windows the way I want. I am not talking about something as good as Microsoft Windows with all the regions and snaps, just something at native MacOS or a desktop Linux distro level. No you can't. Especially if you have an Android app open as well.

If you want to connect to VPN, you may need to go to play store and use an Android app for it, which probably doesn't support keyboard very well. I am talking about something as basic as using tabs.

I vaguely remember Firefox on crostini was not a great experience but I don't remember why. Firefox in Android is a big no-no for Chrome OS. Horrible tab management and there is no keyboard shortcut support.

You regular linux command may or may not work.

That's just some of the issues I had.

My experience with WSL isn't great, having spent many hours on it, mostly due to poor IO performance and weird bugs. But I would love to hear more about others' experience.

Especially the VPN was the biggest drawback for me. But a lot of commands wont just work, like lscpu or any other related to hardware.

Oh boy that a lot of problem. Guess it was not a good buy after all :(.

Thank you for all the info!

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