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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

Can you boot linux on it?

Would be very interested to see how well Ubuntu runs on this. As a once die-hard Apple fan I'm so sick of the mess that is Mac OS X Yosemite that I'm willing to abandon Apple and try a Linux laptop, but only if:

1) The wifi and sound work out of the box

2) Battery life is better than 2hrs

3) Suspend/resume works

I get around 6 hours on the old pixel after a few tweaks in Ubuntu. I dont use suspend / resume so cannot comment on that. Wifi and sound work beautifully.

Toshiba R30-ASMBN22

I have mine configured with:

256GB SSD

2TB HDD

MATTE 1080p screen

16GB ram

802.11ac 2x2 wifi

has lenovo-like nub mouse

cost me less than 1500

runs windows 7, linux mint, and OSX

battery life browsing web at medium brightness over wifi is over 10 hours in windows, 8 in linux, 7 in OSX

A matte display is essential for a developer (imho) so the Pixel is a non-starter.

I was Fedora, Ubuntu, and Arch before making the jump to OS X. I agree with you that they've gone downhill, but because of your numbers 1 and especially 2-3 I've always been negative on a laptop that isn't made by Apple. I've just had so many terrible experiences with PC laptops in those areas. They all work, but they have never worked as well.

You may consider the Dell XPS13 when the Linux edition comes out. See http://bartongeorge.net/ for status updates.

I too am shopping for a Linux laptop. It can be tough.

I use Crouton [1] on my cheapo chromebook and it works pretty OK for lots of tasks. I mainly just watch youtube on that thing, so this solution works since I only occasionally want to hop on Linux to get some stuff done.

[1] https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

I hope so. If they haven't locked the bootloader down on this one I'll be buying one.

The bootloader has never been locked on any ChromeOS device.

Sorry if I've misunderstood. When I read passages like this[0]:

> Installing Ubuntu is not easy , either. By default the bootloader of Chromebooks are signed and locked.

I assume that the writer is correct.

[0]: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/10/ubuntu-12-04-up-and-runni...

All the details are here:

http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/d...

Depending on your device, you unlock things by pressing Power-Refresh; that switches the device to unlocked mode. You can continue using ChromeOS, build your own ChromiumOS, or install another OS.

You can also kill off the bootloader completely. I've never done that before, but I believe the linked doc describes the process. I'm not exactly sure how to install Ubuntu, but the hardware is not going to stop you and never has.

The Pixel-specific instructions are here, though this is for the old revision and I'm not sure what (if anything) has changed:

http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-fo...

Thank you for the additional information.

I have a Samsung chromebook 2 and as far as I know I cannot install linux on it. I believe this is due to the chip architecture however, and my understanding is eventually it should be possible. Am I incorrect in any of this?

Is that an ARM one? You can certainly build Chromium OS (which is Linux), including packages that you want, and install that. It is a somewhat involved the first time, but possible. You probably want something more self-hosting though (like, apt-get dist-upgrade works), and that sounds like it would be a lot of work. There's also Crouton which might get you what you want.

But yeah, ARM booting is consistently crazy and I don't understand how it works at all.

Likely, but you have to flip it into "developer" mode first...

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