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Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

Is there a best of breed piece of hardware for Chrultrabook?

Say, one where Firefox's webrender runs for GPU-accelerated browsing, standard fare like Youtube videos is also GPU-accelerated, WIFI chip runs flawlessly by default, and the touchpad also works flawlessly?

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Why not buy a regular laptop at that point?

Or you know, run ChromeOS on the Chromebook. This won't give you video acceleration in Firefox yet thought.

Yes -- it's called a previous-gen ThinkPad.

From their CCC presentation it looked like the Chrultrabook had parity with the previous-gen ThinkPads. That's why I asked the question-- I'd like to know which Chromebook to look at which can support the bog-standard features I mentioned using something like Debian (or whatever distro).

I doubt Chrultrabook is anywhere near ThinkPad. Lenovo officially supports Linux and ships some models with Ubuntu or Fedora Linux. The Debian wiki has a great list tracking what works on each model. I've had success with ThinkPads that don't officially support Linux, with help from the wiki.

The giant warning banners on the submission site suggest its a complex and incomplete project.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/configurator/cto/index.html?bun...

https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Thinkpad

"Chrultrabooks" are neat projects if you have a Chromebook kicking around, e.g., one that may be past its OS end-of-life date and you want to squeeze some more use out of it. If you're just looking for "a laptop to run Linux on", scoring a used or refurbished ThinkPad is going to be the most straightforward way to get that. You will probably get more CPU oomph and memory out of the ThinkPad than all but the most high-end of Chromebooks (which will cost significantly more).

For which OS?

Whichever distro gives me the relevant drivers out of the box.

ChromeOS is the only Linux that meets all of your criteria, especially touchpad works flawlessly. Windows is another option but none of the other Linux distros will give you working touchpad, gpu, audio, video, wifi, all the peripherals etc.

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