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Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

I'd buy a Chromebook if I can kick Google out of the picture, use the hardware to run Linux in full control and still get outstanding battery life. Like a poor man's(or smart man's? ) M* Macs.

Why dont I just buy regular Windows laptop then? because they pay Windows tax and often come with weird power hungry choices because windows....

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A lot of the Chromebook's battery saving features are the result of features of ChromeOS, not the Linux kernel, i.e. ChromeOS uses ML to predict how fast to charge the battery [1]. Tight integration between hardware and software has its advantages, just like with Apple products.

If you want the same battery life without ChromeOS, you need to talk to your preferred Linux distribution vendor and ask them to implement similar features.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/27/23892651/chromeos-117-sta...

You absolutely can run full Linux on a Chromebook. I've done it with four.

There are great resources here:

https://mrchromebox.tech

I recently used 3x Dell 5190 and 1x Dell 3100 as touch-capable displays built into wooden cabinets running a Pygame app to communicate with a microcontroller and assorted electronics as part of a science festival booth.

https://justinmiller.io/posts/2023/09/18/wave-caught/

The machines are rugged, have great battery life & durable screens, enough USB ports, space to run plenty of stuff, and I got them for $60 a piece refurbished and guaranteed good screen quality.

Can you not already do that? You can do enable developer mode and from there (in theory) it’s possible to use them as regular PCs and boot any Linux distro or even Windows. I don’t know about things like battery life though

You need to remove a write-protection screw from the logic board and replace the firmware, or the Chromebook will prompt you to factory-reset it at each boot. Very annoying, makes it feel like a useless toy.

^^ very good to know. Thanks for that.

I think that’s not the case any more. I didn’t have to do this

Edit: “In newer devices, we've moved away from the WP signal being controlled by a physical screw and to a separate chip controlling the WP signal.”

While you need a (burner) gmail to login, you aren't obligated to use Google services on a Chromebook. The built-in Linux VM scratches the Linux development itch for me.

> run Linux in full control and still get outstanding battery life.

Why do you believe this would be the outcome? Good battery life is an attribute of software, not hardware. The likely outcome of slapping Fedora on a Chromebook will be exceedingly poor battery life and prolonged frustration as you attempt to figure out why it doesn't have energy efficiency parity with ChromeOS.

This hasn't been my experience with other devices that have upstreamed kernel device drivers. Worst case, you run powertop (or whatever), and change a few entries in /proc and /sys.

This is even true for phones. For instance, stock GrapheneOS gets 3-4x the battery life of stock Android on my Pixel 6 Pro.

(Graphene can't run many things from the android store until you install Google Play Services. That then reduces the battery life back to stock Android levels, except stuff is buggy. I gave up on using it.)

Gave up on using sandboxed Play Services, or GrapheneOS? I had Play Services on my last Pixel until I broke it. Got another of the same phone and installed GrapheneOS again, but didn't install Play nor Services, and honestly F-Droid has almost everything I need. The few apps I have from Play Store, I get through Aurora Store, and they work without Play Services with no complaints.

What do you mean by sandboxed? Is it any different to any other ROM?

They basically made Play and Play Services userland, to limit its snooping access.

https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play

Oh wow, thanks for the link.

You can buy the Framework Chromebook, although the battery life with Fedora is significantly worse than Windows

I don't see why it needs to be a Chromebook. You can install Linux on a regular Windows laptop, and you're probably not really paying extra for Windows preinstalled.

If you run vanilla Linux you don't get the outstanding battery life. ChromeOS runs a Google kernel and has all sorts of power management special sauce. I tried a few distros on an older Chromebook running SeaBIOS and I got maybe 60% of the runtime, not unlike Linux vs. Windows on my Framework 13.

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