That's not what this article is about.

Yes, you can put the Chromebook in dev mode, disable secure boot and deal with that prompt.

But today you can install Debian or Ubuntu or other distros in a container without enabling dev mode, and without disabling secure boot.

Containers were only available on selected Chromebooks until now, and they'll be enabled on all new devices from here on.

You can easily share files between Linux containers and the ChromeOS filesystem, with USB and SD cards, and with Google Drive. There's one-click backup and restore of containers.

Linux apps like Firefox, LibreOffice, Gimp and VS Code are fully integrated into the ChromeOS window manager side by side with ChromeOS apps and Android apps.

All we need that is currently missing is for end-users to be able (by law) to sign their own boatloaders, by entering their own public key into the most minimal inspectable ring infimum bootloader...

Otherwise it's just a long and slow road towards either fab at home, or alternatively blind computation on the host, and encrypted communication with a minimal IO system attached to the host...

On the contrary; Linux continues to have pretty darn good support for hardware that's 10 or even 15 years old.

Linux support for the hardware of the notebooks was never as good as Windows. Experienced users, to be sure that they won't have problem with hardware, tend to buy either Thinkpad or Dell notebooks. Everything else is a lottery. From three non-Dell, non-Thinkpad notebooks that I've bought since 2000 only one had enough hardware support to be even usable for more than five years.

Moreover, the first one, an AMD-based Sony (also not cheap) worked better under Linux under the versions which were less than 5 years old than the model's introduction. Only since that point the problems with the drawing on the screen became so bad that it was not usable at all for anything but being used headless. I was installing every new Ubuntu version every 6 months there, and the hardware support for the video card came to be progressively worse. I've reported the bug behavior but was never contacted to help the investigation, the bug was closed unsolved eventually.

Recently, only two months ago, my Dell notebook, 2 years old, after an update stopped working with an external monitor under kernel packed in the 18.04 LTS Ubuntu (where everything worked for a year before that). It took only days to fix that, but the bug was wide spread enough to strike most users of external monitors.

So no, Linux won't magically work on a machine which is not continuously directly tested by enough developers. It will also even less work after 6.5 years of machine's introduction, again, unless there was a constant work to keep it working. Linux is not a magic pixie dust, but a product by humans that also needs active contributions to even keep working with the old hardware.

On the contrary, I also have direct experience with notebooks across a wide variety of makes, models, and eras (though most were from the Windows XP era, since a lot of my Linux installs were from migrating folks off XP).

> Experienced users, to be sure that you won't have problem with hardware, tend to buy either Thinkpad or Dell notebooks.

Well yeah. That tends to hold true regardless of operating system. The laptops that still manage to be terrible on Linux (which in my experience is constantly shrinking, even - and especially - for old ones) - were typically worse under Windows.

> So no, Linux won't magically work on a machine which is not continuously directly tested by enough developers.

Of course not. My point is that once it is working, it's typically unlikely that it'll regress all that much unless there's an explicit push to deprecate old hardware. The old laptops ain't popular now, but that doesn't mean they weren't popular enough 10 years ago (or similar enough internals-wise to popular notebooks from 10 years ago) to end up getting enough attention by Linux driver devs to still be usable to this day. Maybe someday bitrot will set in, but my experience with Linux support on old laptops suggests that to be relatively rare.

I gave already a direct counterexample, a Sony notebook. No problems under Windows for 10 years, unusable after 4-5 under newer Linux versions.

The example I haven't given: the Samsung notebook where touchpad never worked properly under Linux. The only response from community was "use an external mouse." Also the WIFi card on that Samsung never worked under Linux. Again the answer as "switch WiFi card or use an external one."

> once it is working, it's typically unlikely that it'll regress all that much unless there's an explicit push to deprecate old hardware.

For that I have 2 examples: Sony notebook graphic drivers regressed to make the notebook unusable. The Dell notebook regeressed with the LTS, it was fixed only because the bug stroke too much notebooks at once.

But hardware support does break in Linux unless enough of effort is made.

And some issues are totally broad. Last year I've bought a box with the APU which can't play videos under Linux without stuttering. No problem under Windows.

Nobody who claims that "Linux always works" seems to have an actual experience with notebooks which aren't intentionally pre-selected as "known to work." I don't know why would such claim be even controversial, it's widely known.

https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-laptop.html

"Wireless 802.11

Another hardware device may not work at all; if you do not pay attention to wireless devices. Most laptops comes with on-board 802.11 (a/b/g/N) wireless cards. Not all card supported so make sure you get Intel Pro series card such as 3945 or Atheros based cards. My advice is use Google to search for your driver or use specialized databases (a more or less complete listing of wireless devices with information about the chipset they are based on and whether or not they are supported in Linux) to search for your laptop card."

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Touchpad_Synaptics#Touc...

Not to mention the graphics problems even on the Dells:

https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/8lbf4o/arch_gnom...

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1105528/ubuntu-18-04-video-s...

For instance, I have a cheap asus notebook from the Windows 8 era. Windows 8 is EOL, so I upgraded it to Windows 10. Windows 10 takes literally half an hour to boot in the best case, which is after spending a whole day in the update-reboot loop, making sure the system is fully updated. (I do this every quarter or so.) So I dual boot Arch. Arch boots in 30 seconds.

And that's not to mention the stack of Thinkpads going back to 2002, all of which still work flawlessly. (But of course they work, because if Linux ever had a target laptop platform, it was 2000s era Thinkpads.)

The whole context of this thread is me responding to the answers to my initial claim (still hard to read, so let me repeat):

> One should always be able to sign one's bootloader. If it's only 6.5 years later it can be that not even Linux support for that hardware would exist then?

And your response finally, the way I see it, confirms exactly that: if you have some notebook for which Linux can't be normally developed and maintained, after 6.5 years the Linux won't "magically work." Which is what I claimed from the start. Full 6.5 years after the introduction, it can remain a non-target. Not as a notebook, but as a set of hardware parts which aren't openly supported. Like all non-Dells and non-Thinkpads for years were, as you also confirm. Being able to install VMs before 6.5 years are over is also not enough.

This is far far from the title's promise of being a "Linux laptop"... you might as well also claim all Windows PCs are now Linux PCs because of WSL.

I know I'm not alone when I expect a computer that claims to support Linux to mean running it on the hardware, without a hypervisor, outside of a container or any other kind of virtualization.

A few weeks ago I tried to run Debian and Ubuntu on an older Chromebook with Crouton (also a container solution).

Systemd failed booting, because the last published Chromebook kernel for that device had an incorrectly applied backport of some patch, which made nonexistent system calls return garbage data instead of erroring out.

You can read the details here:

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/11974

https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton/issues/3914#issuecommen...

This kind of stuff took me many tens of hours to debug, and I am relatively experienced with tasks like that.

If you want to have an easy time with Linux, better run the kernel provided with the OS. Containers don't do that.

It's misleading to people who haven't been in the ChromeOs ecosystem before to compare your Crouton setup to Termina. Crouton is not an officially supported Linux on Chromebook solution and requires you to turn on developer mode on the Chromebook which warns you that you are in unsupported land and things may not go as planned.

If you know how Debian works, the new solution Google has for Linux on Chromebooks should work fine for most people. There's only a few gotchas at all anymore. Snaps even work if you know what you're doing.

The Apple policy also only explicitly applies to hardware (repair parts), although software often falls not far behind (maybe supported for a year or two longer)

This kind of forced phasing out of devices is really unfortunate.

Performance for file transfers is also way faster and more reliable using `adb pull /sdcard/DCIM ./` than with `scp -r phone:/sdcard/DCIM/ ./`

I use termux mostly just run my own ruby scripts or SSH to cloud servers and stuff.

Mind if I ask where the conversation is? (if it's public). That sounds like something I'd enjoy :-)

[0]: https://syncthing.net/

Ah I see. Yeah I use USB when I need to, but I neither always have enough data to warrant the speed (often just a handful of pics...), nor is it true that I only want SSH for file transfer. =P

I think I like the Nokia 6 (not the more recent models) as a replacement.

It will sadly have to be replaced at some point.

That said, it is against the Hacker News guidelines to comment about voting/down-voting and generally only results in further down-votes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

Have fun running brand new Android on a seven year old tablet.

(I used the same MacBook, replaced the battery a couple of months ago, and have no plans to replace it anytime soon.)

It is essentially a Hackintosh, albeit a legal one, as the hardware is Apple hardware.

I do dev work on it, though it is ruby and/or javascript, not a lot of true compiling happening. But it works well.

I'd love it to be officially supported, but I mean you have to draw the line somewhere.

Edit: I forgot to mention the SSD I put in it, or the RAM I maxed out. (I did the upgrade work, I was not about to pay the premium for Apple to do it.)

Where did you purchase the battery from, and how is the performance, if you do not mind me asking?

I also use a mid 2009 Core 2 duo, but lately I have struggled to find a source for a battery that will last more that 1.5 hours in typical usage. I assume the issue is that any authentic Apple battery must have been manufactured so long ago that its capacity is severely degraded after having been stored (at non-ideal temperature) for so long, and it seems like even many third party batteries available are old and had inferior capacity to begin with.

I bought the battery from iFixit[1], and I am back to the original of 4ish-5ish hours.

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Mac/MacBook-Pro-15-Inch-Unibody...

If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about, this is a feature and you can turn it off by disabling “Recent Apps” in System Preferences.

Edit: added link

[0] https://github.com/rmc-team/macos-patcher

Also, you are still within your 7 years :)

It wasn't until the last ~6 months that I noticed a drop-off in battery performance. Not sure if it was from streaming football/hockey games or my tendency to throw it into sleep mode thinking "I'll have time later tonight" while keeping my server/db/container processes still running.

There appears to be some debate online as to whether turning off secure boot on T2 Macs allows Linux to work. It should, but there are some reports online that it does not, at least if you want to use the computer's internal storage. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/a4thsc/the_actual_fu....

I would have expected this to be sorted out by now, but that doesn't appear to be the case. If anyone knows more, please share...

https://www.cultofmac.com/162823/linux-creator-linus-torvald...

Apple doesn't always make things easy, but they do have a highly-uniform component set, which can simplify configuration so long as all elements are supported, and senior Linux devs running kit is an incentive to solve hardware issues.

I'm not implying either that all devices are supported (I don't know which are/aren't, though I've had success on Apple kit myself), or that Linus still uses an Apple laptop (he seems to have moved on). But some well-established Linux users have turned to those devices and ben satisfied.

I’ve installed OpenBSD on a 2007 MbPro and works like a charm. (I put an ssd like 8 years ago though).

Unfortunately, my Mac Pro 5,1 refuses to die!

Glass half-full I guess.

So, every move made by MS and Google on their popular, mainstream platforms is a step in the right direction. Neither is a full glass yet, but if these moves prove popular, both companies might decide to take even bolder steps toward desktop Linux.

6.5 years is not what would usually be described as "a few years."

As someone who still has functional PC hardware from the 90's, calling 6.5 "a few years" sounds about right...

And you still can, you just won't be getting updates. Just like Apple IIs and C64s from decades ago don't get any updates.

It's not like 6.5 years after release it just immediately refuses to power on anymore, it still works

You can "update" a C64 long after its manufacturer is gone, but these devices are literally designed to lock you out.

Chromebooks are designed to preserve data. The hardware is presumed vulnerable to failure.

They are basically modern version of a dumb/dumbed down network terminal. Chromebook experience is tailored for doing everything in the browser.

For fsck's sake you have to print through the "cloud": https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/how-to-set-up-google-prin...

You have to trust that Google will preserve your data in its cloud.

This is much better than getting an elderly relative off Windows XP.

There are several companies currently making new (more stable, more reliable) power supplies for C-64's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0

Old hardware can often be repaired. If you told a C64 user back in the day his machine would break in two years, he or she wouldn't shell out the $$ on it, but today people buy $400~$800 cellphones that turn into garbage.

Unsurprisingly, there's even a few hacks out there for upgrading old C64s with newer/better components, too, if you want to get another couple decades out of it. There's even new manufacture C64-compatible enthusiast boards being produced [1], although I believe you may have to supply your own SID chip. The latter doesn't count much for this topic, but it illustrates there's some interest. Further, the parts that are likely to break over time are fairly trivial for someone with soldering skills to replace. I know of at least a couple people who preemptively replaced capacitors on old C64s they bought and refurbished.

[1] https://icomp.de/shop-icomp/en/produkt-details/product/c64-r...

I wouldn't put money on that. A C64's starting price was $600 in 1982 dollars. For $154 in 1982, quite a few people might have been willing.

That was pretty much expected. Hardware upgrades were just as fast and furious as they are now, if not moreso. Backwards compatibility with years-old systems at the consumer level was a byproduct, not a plan.

Is 6.5 a magic perfect number? No, I'd like to see more like 10 years honestly (which matches what Microsoft supports with Windows). But let's at least use the actual numbers and not easily confused vague terms like "few"

I still use a lenovo t420 that is almost 8 years old. I bought it with the fastest processor available back then, and it is still plenty useful as a Debian desktop.

My T430 (one generation later) received a BIOS update in February and I expect more to come.

https://wiki.galliumos.org/Hardware_Compatibility

For me I won't mess with a Chromebook until they've consolidated Android and ChromeOS into a single platform (likely Fuchsia). Until then I don't expect any real support for edge cases to be adequately addressed. It will always "kind of but not really work" because Google's already working to replace it with something different.

It might make sense to have a the ability to enter a UEFI key that would disable the dangerous “press to erase” prompt, but I don’t think it would ever make sense to make such a modified machine boot completely silently and “out-of-the-box like” (unless you don’t believe they should have secure boot as a design goal in the first place.)

Probably the most burning in a UEFI key would do is change the “this is a dev-mode laptop” warning to a “this is a customized deployment; if you were expecting a device direct from Google, you are being attacked!” warning.

This looks like a job for QR codes!

This will make me rethink chromebook purchases in the future. I feel sorry for the people who bought into pixel.