That is a good point, but also a feature in my view. I see my chromebook as a mobile workstation, so more or less everything on it is backed up in a git repository, cloud storage, that sort of thing. ChromeOS automatically restores extensions and installed Android apps, and I usually keep builds of software I use in crouton on separate external flash storage; 16-32GB of internal storage isn't that much when you have to build from sources because ARM binaries are still fairly rare.

So an inadvertent wipe is really just an inconvenience of 30-60 minutes, and if it's a border patrol or TSA agent you can then have fun acting all indignant at how they broke your device and you lost so much work and your boss is gonna kill you and you want to talk to their supervisor right now.

The lack of hardware security is a consideration, but frankly if your device is handled by a malicious actor outside of your control, you're kinda screwed anyways.

The drive where the OS lives isn't encrypted. Rather it is verified. It uses do-it-yourself to chain every read from the device to a trusted authority. secure boot is how verifies that the kernel (running do-it-yourself) hasn't been tampered with (e.g., to add more trusted authorities or disable verification).

This protection is not just against "evil maids" but any attack that modified the disk in the past. E.g., if the system is compromisd due to a software fault, nothing can persist on disk undetected (like ZFS/bcachefs/BtrFS checksummi preventa bit-rot from being undetected)

Link to Caret Text Editor https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/caret/fljalecfjcio...

In doesn't show up in Chrome Extensions search as easily as I would hope.

As someone who has an on-off interest in ChromeOS but with little to no knowledge about it, does vim/neovim work? I found some vim version on the chrome web store but it is last updated on 2014 and pinned to 7.4 which was a bit disappointing.

Yes and no.

Yes, they work.

No, they don't capture shortcuts like 'ctrl+W' which are handled by ChromeOS.

There is a chrome extension called Crosh Window that keeps the Chrome shortcuts from coming in. That way things like Ctrl-w in Vim still work. edit: this might just be when going through crouton though. I don't really use the crosh shell except to boot up my chroot.

Oh cool, I'll have to check that out. Thanks!

For some applications, like crosh, pinning the application and then launching it changes the semantics.

I see the security argument come up often but have never once heard an anecdote of someone having a security breach or whatever people are scared of happening because their chromebook was in developer mode.

Installing a chroot isn't that difficult, in fact it was actually kind of fun and started me on an incredible tech exploration journey that currently has me learning software development using Vim on a command line only linux distribution. I never would have imagined such a thing a year ago. It is weird thinking having a $140 refurbished acer c720 may have led me on a completely different, exciting life path.

I think I am misunderstanding you, but isn't paragraph 2 an argument for staying in normal Chrome OS (as this article suggests) instead of enabling developer mode?

It is an inconvenience and a danger, yes. But the tradeoff with having crouton is having full access to a Linux environment, with all of the tools and programs that enables. Short of System76/Entroware/Dell XPS Developer Editions, the fact remains that moddable, Intel-series chromebooks are some of the best preconfigured Linux laptops you can buy, once you peel back the ChromeOS layer.

I mentioned above that I think Caret is a great Sublime clone, but I also like having the real SublimeText, with its awesome add-on packages, Git integration, etc. The article's recommendation that you must stick with Android-enabled Chromebooks limits your options, and the only reason the recommendation exists is that he needs some way of getting access to the developer tools--gcc, etc. A crouton chroot gets you there the same way, and I'd argue it's better since the programs are running natively rather than through an emulated Android layer.

Just being curious here: to me crouton is also a quite limited Linux environment, for example docker is a no go on crouton, so what advantage do you think that has against android-based solution such as termux?

Maybe a separate Linux install such as GalliumOS can really be called full access Linux environment?

> for example docker is a no go on crouton

Been a few years since I used a chromebook w/crouton, but that wasn't my recollection. In fact I recall a fork of crouton that supported Fedora explicitly stating that it installs via docker.

https://github.com/nmilosev/crouton-fedora

True. But the other point was to be able to travel (read: not carry on your laptop) with less fear. That's a pretty worthy considered.