Thinking of getting a chromebook
 

Hey all,
I have my eye set op a chromebook (a Lenovo Chromebook s330) for E160.
Fair price? Any good?
I'd use it as a replacement for the tablet (slow and greasy screen ;) )
Thanks
Melissa

My brother has one of unknown quality and price.

He curses it, and moans continually.

They're great once you upgrade them using coreboot and then get a normal distro onto them. There is often no place for an expanded SSD usually. So you would have to build your own networked storage or else use an equivalent service.

Ow, that does'nt sound too good. I do understand that you cannot install what you want on it, but the daa does go with you. They are sayd to be low(est) end machines, though...

hmm, depends what space already is on it, of course...
And having to lug along an esternal drive does seem counterproductive...

Networked storage would not require lugging more than the Chromebook itself: You can set up SFTP to be easily accessible from anywhere with network access. Then you can use the standard file manager, such as Nautilus or PCManFM, and copy stuff back and forth as you need. Or you could access it via sshfs. That would be one of the easier options and a lot less trouble than carring around an extra drive.

Looking at 256 gig sd cards on amazon. 30 bucks for samsung evo won't break my pocket book. My bar bills are higher. Since I drink Red Stripe.

Been running AntiX on my 16 gig SSD acer c710 chromebook for years now.

I am mentioning this because sometimes my cell tower won't reach me on the motorcycle camping trips sometimes to connect me to the satellite overhead.

Not the best option, but usable - I have a 2GB ram model with a 16GB eMMC drive, I installed a regular Linux distro onto it.
I use it for my forums online mainly, & for this purpose it's quite good, however, mine doesn't have sound, as I haven't found a driver for it - so be careful - a pre used 11.6" laptop would likely be a better option. :)

I like chromebooks. I have a Pixelbook from Google, and I use it a lot. It's light, good battery life, and I can run both Android and regular Linux apps on it. For web browsing and such, it's hard to beat if you're okay with Google. I'm not a huge fan of the Chrome browser, so I have Firefox installed on it, as well as Thungerbird (there are no ChromeOS email clients) and several other Linux apps. It's almost instant on, comes back just the way it went to sleep or was turned off, and there are no known viruses or malware for ChromeOS, although Google offers a large bounty for finding them. The lid folds all the way back into tablet mode, although I seldom use that. I like the touchscreen a lot. It's not like a full Linux desktop, but for a portable device I don't think it can be beat. I have no experience at all with the specific device the OP listed, so I have no comment on it. The latest chromebooks can run ChromeOS, Android, and Linux apps completely transparently. You just run an app, whichever OS it came from.

I have a x131e Thinkpad chromebook ( school child edition). It is fat & ugly, but has a two thread 1.5 ghz ivy bridge cpu that was originally marketed as an i3, and the room & interface install a 2.5 ssd inside of it (which it doesn't ship with from Lenovo), and is ruggedized to survive the depredations of grade school student handling. I got it on ebay for $50. Some school was liquidating their old equipment (probably to upgrade to something much newer - but worse). Added coreboot, added a 500gb ssd, reamed out chrome os, installed slack64, and now I have a killer frankennetbook. For email, browsing, and portable media appliance its great. I don't expect it to play graphic intensive games, run VM's, CAD, audio visual authoring , major compiling jobs or anything such, but it's a nice netbook.

If you're not OVERLY concerned about battery life, the Chromebook I have is really nice and can be found pretty cheap. HP Chromebook 13 G1. Skylake Core, 8 or 16 GB ram, QHD+ LCD. They can be found on ebay for usually <$100 for the M5/8GB, ~$100 for the M7/16GB version. Fully coreboot compatible. I have the m7/16GB version running Debian Buster and it runs FANTASTIC. Because of the high end LCD vs. a small and skinny body = small battery leading to less than amazing runlife, this is one of the nicest laptops I've ever owned. You will need a power supply, but they take USB-C power supplies, so even if you don't have one they can be had for ~$20.

There are a number of ways posted on how to remove the original OS. You need to double check if the typical script could be used.

I think the price per performance on a chrome is good and you may be getting a slightly better computer for the price....if you can use it as you wish that is.

It seems to be the common opinion that ChromeOS should be replaced by Linux, without any discussion. I did that on the first couple of chromebooks I had, and they worked fine. After all, ChromeOS is really just another Linux variant, using a Linux kernel. But I no longer see any need for replacing ChromeOS entirely. The flexibility of being able to seamlessly run 3 OS's on one device makes it moot for me. I do have an Asus Chromebook which I bought when they first came out specifically for running Linux, and it has been my desktop up to now. No regrets about that, it runs Debian very well. However, for a portable device, a late-model Chromebook running ChromeOS makes more sense to me than converting it, because the utility of being able to run ChromeOS, Android apps, and Linux apps without needing to do anything other than click/tap on one icon outweighs the benefits of running pure Linux. Having all three combined into one system is amazingly convenient.

Yep. I woulda left mine alone but hardware reached EOL < ParrotOS>
No more ChromeOS updates coming down the pipe.
I kept the 2 gig recovery usb any hows.
Have bigger ones for storage.

Yeah, eventually everything becomes obsolete, but sometimes obsolete things can be repurposed. Early chromebooks are far better when running Linux, no doubt.