Yes, with the caveat that full BIOS/UEFI support sometimes lags hardware releases by 6-12 months - out of the box most Chromebooks can only boot ChromeOS. Pretty much all the Chromebook firmware work to support 3rd-party OS' is done by one guy, see his page here: https://mrchromebox.tech
I run Arch on a cheap Chromebook for some tasks at work, I've generally been satisfied, and will probably buy another one eventually. I think if I was spending $500+, I'd just buy a Windows laptop and reformat it though - way more choices, and they tend to be upgradable.
It's also worth keeping in mind most Chromebooks must be disassembled to remove a firmware write-protect screw in order to flash new firmware. The one I have requires removing the battery/keyboard/etc - more than just popping off a small panel on the bottom.
Nick Janetakis had a nice write-up on setting it up from back when the machine was newer, but to give you an idea:
https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromeboo...
Look for a Chromebook that you can unlock by just removing the battery. Anything else is just torture.
GalliumOS[1] is a Ubuntu-based Linux distribution optimized for Chromebooks with a huge list of supported devices[2].
> Right now, Xiaomi laptops are excellent cheap machines to run Linux on (thanks to having just Intel components). Same for Huawei if you are willing to spend a bit more, but on that price a Thinkpad is probably the way to go.
I find Lenovo Thinkpad E4*0 series to be the best low-cost, high build-quality Linux development machines, since they start from $569.99, allow a wide range of hardware customizations[3], and meet Mil-SPEC durability standards[4].
[2] https://wiki.galliumos.org/Hardware_Compatibility
[3] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-e-ser...
[4] https://www.lenovo.com/hk/en/thisisthinkpad/innovation/think...
The spacebar screen is a constant source of anxiety but it's even worse than that. The reason I am on chromeOS with sideloaded linux (crouton) is because when you flash custom bios (seabios) you need to authorize it, if your computer runs completely out of battery (like it did for me on a flight to Iran), then that authorization is revoked and you need to boot into chromeOS to fix it (something I couldn't do since I didn't have chromeOS) so the only thing you can do is press spacebar and wipe everything.
I think I'll never buy a chromebook again, I'll just get something from puri.sm or slimbook.es.
Which ones exactly? Do you have resources?
The ones I've seen sport Nvidia GPUs [1] [2]. Which means no Wayland, and only proprietary drivers. Not "excellent" or "just Intel components" in my book.
[1] https://www.banggood.com/XiaoMi-Gaming-Laptop-Intel-Core-I7-...
[2] https://www.banggood.com/Xiaomi-Pro-Notebook-15_6-Inch-Intel...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/xiaomi-air-12-review...
Regardless of the other unnecessary or lacking features Macbook laptops have (butterfly keyboard, touchbar, magsafe, USB-A ports come to mind) if you want a decent amount of RAM and an AMD GPU you pay the jackpot price on MBPs.
12.5”, 8gb, full Intel. I haven’t tried it but it looks interesting and well priced.
Its more secure than X, but you can compartmentalise as well via VMs (Qubes does this) or Docker (Jessie Frazelle runs everything in Docker).
Enlightenment [1] supports Wayland since E20.
If you use i3 right now, you can use Sway [2] as drop-in replacement. That's my plan (since I use i3) if I might some time.
SailfishOS [3] also already uses Wayland. Tizen apparently does as well. SailfishOS doesn't use profiling or ads, and has an Android compatibility layer.
KDE and Gnome might as well (according to [4] they do); I don't use those.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_(software)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_display_servers#Waylan...
If it provides more security (I guess applications cannot draw over other applications, nor grab keyboard input unless they're in focus), then how can I have a wm? How can I have a screensaver?
Is there any reason to use it if most of my applications are running in xwayland?
There should be zero tearing or artifacts in Wayland, and the latency should be lower as well. Both due to passive compositing.
Screensavers are a pointless waste of energy. I'm not sure why you mention them.
In Wayland, WM/DE use IPC to communicate with each other; not X.
In theory you can run multiple XWayland servers to separate from each other. If security is a concern, Qubes might also be an option. And you're still more secure and better performance with Wayland plus some XWayland than with X.
Can I run multiple wayland servers separate from each other? If not, then I still don't see how wm can prevent a random application from pretending to be a wm but actually being a keylogger.
I'm joking, but it really is super beta.
They aren't ideal. But they do have a good alternative that is in its late beta stages. Typically you could run a Linux distro in a chroot on the chromebook, after putting it into developer mode. Unfortunately the chroot does have limits - fox example it doesn't get another IP address so you can't coexist much with ChromeOS - such as using avahi.
The new approach (named Crostini) instead uses a lightweight kvm based virtual machine mechanism to run a Linux guest isolated from the host. They also (by default) use the hardened ChromeOS kernel inside the guest. Note that not all chromebooks are currently supported but a new x86 chromebook should be fine.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Crostini/ https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/c...
I want to be able to run multiple OSs/Installations-of-the-same-OS on a single machine such that I can swap between "running" OSs - meaning, I want to have one OS sleep while I use the other.
So, if I have windows and ubuntu on the same machine - I dont want to reboot, I want to just put one to sleep and wake the other one up...
OR Ideally - I want to be able to run them side-by-side in some manner that is greater than a VM running on top of the other... My System76 laptop has dual SSD drives in it, I'd like to have both machines running, with half the resources dedicated to each, and have my KVM switch between them.
Anything come clsoe to this?
Some virtualisation environments do have hardware passthrough. A good example would be having a high performance PCIE video card which is passed through to to a guest for gaming. You can also use real storage instead of files pretending to be storage, although this is less flexible (eg no snapshots).
My recommendation is to use Ubuntu as your host OS and run Windows as a VM guest.
It's a different price point than Lenovo. Much cheaper. They are good ultrabooks.
Regardless of the CPU you choose (e.g. i5 has 8 GB, but it's not fanless), all 12 inch models have Intel components only, including the wireless card. It's one of the few laptops that truly runs well on Linux out of the box with zero glitches.
Only a few classic Thinkpads are better, with even good ACPI support for battery discharge events. But that's really rare, and does not make much difference if you run a HAL like UPower to abstract your ACPI-battery.
It's doesn't resolve the tracking issues.
Threats are limited then to regular baseband radio issues. I know I could be doing better if we had open hardware, but that's the most practical solution I can implement today I think.
You can also run microG (LOS + microG I recommend; what I use on my smartphone) which contains UnifedNlp for location services.
That's a whole toolset to compile your AOSP in AWS and then build your own over-the-air updates.
I hate software that tracks me, but if I wipe out Android and I install a self compiled AOSP, it's a superb user experience for me.
Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro?
Right now, Xiaomi laptops are excellent cheap machines to run Linux on (thanks to having just Intel components). Same for Huawei if you are willing to spend a bit more, but on that price a Thinkpad is probably the way to go.