Gallium is an amazing piece of work, and the documentation is superb, but it's starting to show that it's on a very out of date base and there's no sign of a new version for some time. The efforts seem to have slowed down, which is a shame.
It leaves me wondering if the main patches and drivers in the kernel fork could ever be merged upstream. Maybe there's some technical or legal reason why not, or maybe it's just the work required and nobody has the time.
Either way, I hope it remains possible to run old Chromebooks for a while yet! They are often decent, cheap hardware if a little slow.
Other commenters say that those drivers are now in other distros too, so Gallium may no longer have its original USPs...
Running other OSs on my chromebook is a bit of a pain, because every time you boot, you get a BIOS screen warning you about non-google software (and offering to wipe everything!). Also, (and maybe unique to my chromebook model), it has a nasty gotcha: if you ever let the battery drain empty, then the firmware loses its settings and it will no longer boot at all :( That one was fun to diagnose and fix...
"Why Linux? More applications Linux can run many different types of applicatons. No matter what you're trying to do, an application exists for Linux. ChromeOS is very limited. Sure, NaCl (Native Client) brings the ability to run native code to ChromeOS, but that's a hack at best, and there's still no good software to take advantage of it. With Linux you can install any Linux compatible software, totally natively. Firefox, Transmission (BitTorrent), LibreOffice, Steam, VLC Media Player, Kodi Media Center, the GIMP, VirtualBox, and many more are available on Linux to do things that simply aren't possible on ChromeOS. "
which... isn't true? chromeos can run at least most of those just fine, and has been able to for a while? https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en