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Comment by ralmidani | Hacker News Reader

I used a Samsung ChromeBook 2 (ARM) for about 3 years. You can load a full GNU/Linux environment such as Debian or Ubuntu with Crouton, but you have to enable developer mode.

This involves an annoying beep every time you turn your machine on (or otherwise hitting ctrl-d at the right time), and you run the risk of disabling developer mode--thereby reformatting your drive--if you accidentally hit Spacebar.

Unless they're changing how dev mode works on the new PixelBooks, I do not recommend using one as a dev machine. This year, I bought a Dell XPS Developer Edition and never looked back.

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If you are worried about that, just don't use Crouton. Completely remove all of the Chrome OS partitions and run linux natively.

I typically get several months of uptime. Suspend/resume has been flawless too. Pressing one button combo a couple times a year hasn't been a show shopper.

I did that on an Acer Chromebook and installed GalliumOS (https://galliumos.org/) which is a lightweight Linux distro for Chromebooks.

That's badass. I didn't know you could do a full linux install on a chromebook. I used to run Ubuntu using crouton but I had to press all these crazy button combinations to boot up in developer mode and then enter some more shell commands to finally bring up Ubuntu.

Several months of uptime with native linux, or with Crouton?

My crouton-using Pixel shuts itself down if I don't use it for 24h, even without low battery. So I press that button combo about once a week. It's definitely a mild pain in the butt, losing all the state in my dozen terminals.

Native. I wrote up that experience: http://kmkeen.com/c100p-tweaks/

I really liked that computer(haven't bought but have looked at it), well built imo and thin, can actually be useful with regard to the fold into a tablet.

I bought the ASUS Transformer 200 and yeah it's a bit bulky for tablet use but still decent with i3/Ubuntu.

Keeping Windows on there, nice to have.

I had Chromebook 2 as well (with the octacore processor) and having Chrome was nice to switch back into for general use.

Haha I did that before (data loss) sucks. Yeah the arm part sucked when I figured that out regarding not being able to install certain programs, specifically for me was VS Code.

for some models, there are ways to disable that.

https://www.coreboot.org/Chromebooks

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Custom_firmware_for_Chr...

+1 for Dell XPS developer edition. I bought one earlier this year and its fantastic.

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