Last time I looked into this gallium always was discontinued. I got endeavor os working on a Chromebook. The problem is you need to flash your own bootloader and you generally can’t do that on arm Chromebooks you will generally want an Intel Chromebook to do this on and there aren’t very many of those. The one I have also suffers from having very low storage, I think the onboard storage is like 16 GB.

To be completely honest I’m burnt out on Chromebooks as a viable platform. I made one work in college but I wouldn’t really advise going down this path. I probably advise you to get a Pinetab with the keyboard cover or some other similar tablet for that niche, or find a small laptop of the more traditional sense to do this on.

Chromebooks are kind of all weird platform when you think about it, a disposable laptop that’s designed just to be a web browser. Google obviously made it to trap people in their ecosystem and the only real markets where they’ve seen much usages in education, where the very limited Suite of tool students use often were web-based anyways and they’re disposability means that if a student trashes them which is not to uncommon replacing them isn’t that big of a deal.

Probably not for organizations given they depend on the device management functionality that comes with Chromebook. If they’re to switch to another OS, they’ll have to take on this device management. Roll their own timely security updates, hardening, content filtering, security policy creation and provisioning, privacy compliance, you name it. All of this and more done by every org. Chromebooks aren’t merely just a bunch of hardware. Their value proposition leans heavily on the OS and the built-in support and device management features.

My dad has one expiring this year. I told him next time to get some regular laptop with AMD Zen and use it in Windows and if he misses Chrome OS I can just install some light Linux distribution.

Except if it runs on ARM. Because it can’t have general drivers, once that specific CPU is out of support, you’re out of luck.

Have you tried this? Apparently it takes only 4 clicks to enable Linux.

Which models? I thought the majority worked with Gallium at least if not others. And maybe cloud ready or something for longer support.

Also will your current in-support ones get Lacros? I thought all the current ones were going to. That’s the big one for long term use.

Do you happen to know what the main problems are with installing Linux on chromebooks? I’ve never used one before and I’m not super familiar with the hardware, I was wondering what the issues usually are (are the processors/network cards/other hardware poorly supported, etc.)