I want to like Chromebooks. They're small, light and affordable.
The problem is they're bloody useless. The only thing they do well is browsing the internet. They do not work well with anything else. The Chrome apps outside of Google's apps are awful. The Android apps are equally awful.
I bought one a few years ago and after finding how useless it was, removed the write protect screw, deleted ChromeOS and tried to put Linux on it as per the instructions on a website. Didn't work. Now I have a brick.
Every six months or so I rediscover the thing in the shed, pull it out and have another go at reinstalling Chromeos. Each time it is an abject failure..
Why do I keep punishing myself by trying to get something this bad to work?
It reminds me of a Vice article in which they talk about how bad for the environment Chromebooks are: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjv8mw/chromebooks-are-trash-literally
@britishtechguru I like ChromeOS a lot. With Crostini it is hugely useful, and I have nothing against being able to run Android apps either. The main OS boots up super fast and it gives me Android and Linux containers to use the normal Linux applications I’m familiar with. Sure the triple file system is a bit wacky, but it’s easy enough to share stuff across. And it is tied to Google… but then again that’s what you get with all commercial OSs.
@gpowerf That's the thing...
Chromeos does boot very fast. Linux on my Asus is no slouch either with the SSD.
I did not like the constraints that the system put on me. Having said that, if I'd simply run Linux from the SD card and just booted from SD every time then I'd have a pretty handy little device. I did not think of that at the time because I was following directions on a website to replace Chromeos with straight Linux. That way I would have had all of the limited SSD space on stuff I needed and wanted.
Didn't work for me so it stays in the shed. I tried downloading Gallium but it just never finished downloading in the time I had.