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Comment by a1r | Hacker News Reader

Why use Gallium over crouton?

I've used crouton/XUbuntu as my main laptop OS for a couple of years. I've pushed it pretty far, running Steam with a removable SD card to play things like DotA 2 - http://www.aaronbell.com/how-to-run-dota-on-a-chromebook/

Chromebooks are amazingly capable once you add a little storage and update the video drivers.

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This is maybe an OT reply, but crouton / dualboot still brings up the scare-screen on boot. Which is fine if you're a dev.

Not so good when you hand the computer to your brother-in-law to check out a web page, he opens it up

OS VERIFICATION OFF PRESS SPACE TO RE-ENABLE

and of course presses space and wipes your whole environment :(

Yes this was me :(

So, enabling OS verification wipes the data on the Chromebook or what?

Yes, it detects that the OS have been tampered with when you have dual boot or use crouton and nukes the disc with a clean install.

Yes, every time you enable or disable OS verification the whole eMMC flash memory is deleted.

For me, the main reason I keep checking out options to run a regular linux distro vs. chromeOS/crouton is to be able to run kernel modules like KVM. Android Studio requires KVM to be able to run the emulator at anything greater than glacial speed.

I actually once built a custom chromiumOS build with kvm enabled and was able run both Android emulator as well as Windows 7 for Office :-) But it proved to be too much of a hassle to rebuild updates over time.

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