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Comment by imaffett | Hacker News Reader

(disclosure: I'm an Intel employee)

I love the C720. My dad got me one for xmas, and himself. I used crouton to install Ubuntu, but like your approach better. I work on the Intel XDK team and am pushing the C720 as a great development machine since we provide cloud based builds for hybrid apps. You should look into the XDK for Code Starter https://software.intel.com/en-us/html5/tools

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Crouton is pretty nice, and I experimented with that approach as well. A big reason we chose dual-boot is to give kids a playground in which they can really explore their laptops. I fondly remember the joy of installing every operating system I could get my hands on, and a full, independent install of Ubuntu demonstrates that this is possible. Thanks for the tip on XDK, I'll give that a look!

One other thing that I've learned the hard way with Crouton is that it's too easy for kids to delete the Ubuntu partition. It's doubly true when several kids use it.

I have fond memories of when we got our Amiga 2000. Must have been around 1986 or so (which would've made me 7 years old). My oldest brother spent half a day installing the OS onto the gigantic 40 MB scsi hard drive. When he was finally done, I spent about half an hour managing to bork the entire system, so he had to do a full reinstall... good times.

Still remember he told me that "it shouldn't have been possible to do that." -- by witch he meant that while it wasn't much of a surprise that'd I'd mucked up the install -- it shouldn't have been possible to do it the way I did. Still don't remember what I did, just that it involved a lot of dragging and clicking. I doubt I'd be able to do the same thing today ;-)

Man, what a great cool dad you have! (from the fact you're already working, and the gift is a geeky laptop).

If developer mode for ChromeOS gives you shell access, what do you gain by installing an Ubuntu partition?

Even in developer mode, ChromeOS provides a very limited set of tools, no package manager, and a mostly undocumented environment. It's not really appropriate to use as the base of a developer machine. Ubuntu, on the other hand, has all of the right things to make it easy to use and extensible for devs.

I think that in long term it will take much less effort to customize ChromeOS than Ubuntu. Initially it will be harder but after that it will require next to no maintenance. Changing the kernel sounds much more complicated than finding a way to install a package manager. Google might also be willing to participate in this in more ways than just helping set up the environment, which could be very beneficial for the whole project.

It turns it into an actual, normal Ubuntu machine.

At some point, you're going to run into a piece of software that you can't use, or a piece of software that you can't change/play with.

By using Ubuntu, kids can grow in any direction in terms of development, without running into a wall at some point.

Why should we use Crouton rather than regular Ubuntu on a Chromebook?

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