Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbeard4 | Hacker News Reader

I'd be curious to hear more about installing chrooted Debian/Ubuntu to provide a full GNU userland locally. I'm still not quite sure what this would look like, or what the limitations might be.

View on HN

Crouton is awesome—you get a chrooted Ubuntu accessible via crosh. You have CLI access with `sudo enter-chroot` and can launch XFCE4 with `sudo startxfce4`.

I never use XFCE, but if you do, you can seamlessly toggle between ChromeOS and XFCE with a keyboard shortcut (e.g. a YouTube video playing in ChromeOS remains playing if you switch to XFCE).

Can you not replace ChromeOS completely?

Seems a bit of a hacky mess if not TBH

Crouton is actually a breeze to use. While the crouton script itself might have a few hacks under-the-hood, the end result is quite slick. Everything just installs under `/usr/local/chroots'. Removing one of your potentially many chrooted installs is just an `rm -rf'.

I prefer keeping ChromeOS primary and just opening a crosh window to expose one of these chroots (a browser and terminal is similar to my work environment on a Mac). Granted, XFCE can act weird if you choose to launch it, but I've never needed that functionality.

If you do want to completely replace ChromeOS, there's Chrubuntu.

Crouton is interesting and I can see why people would like it. It's just I couldn't invest long term in something that requires effort on Googles part to support as they could drop support at any point.

Haven't heard of Chrubuntu I'll definitely check that out thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com