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Comment by Pigo | Hacker News Reader

I bought a Chromebook Pixel out of curiosity and have loved every minute of it. It's fun and really slick, and even as the most expensive, by far, it's still a fraction the cost. It was easy to put Linux on it for real dev, and I keep hearing about more and more methods (https://mrchromebox.tech). Plus it has all the Play Store apps now. Everyone I know is just waiting for work to buy them a Surface, but doesn't want to pay for it themselves.

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I switched to a Pixel earlier this year and it's been fantastic.

I primarily run https://galliumos.org, but keep ChromeOS around for casual use. I'd highly recommend GalliumOS to people interested in putting linux on it: it makes things like the custom keyboard layout work out of the box.

The big thing that has deterred me so far, is that I heard it's not really usable unless you're cool with having a google account. Despite having one, I thought it was a bit offputting for that to be a dependency.

From what I've heard, throwing Linux in it works really well from a compatibility standpoint (and obviously doesn't require a Google account). I believe Linus was using a pixel as his dev laptop some time back.

There's s two ways to use Linux. You can load something called Crouton which runs inside of ChromeOS and basically exposes Linux. But this method everything goes away on reboot. Maybe way to fix.

The other is to replace ChromeOS with Linux. No different from buying a Windows laptop and replacing Windows with Linux.

Crouton doesn't necessarily go away on reboot. You just have to consistently boot into Developer Mode to keep it (and the rest of your data). You just get a warning and the option to do so each time it boots. That's how I've been doing it, though I hardly ever shut the thing down.

Well, yeah, I suppose it's like needing an AppleID for mobile devices. ChromeOS is web based, so a lot of it is tied to their services. Like the free drive storage you get with it.

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