I always try my best to reuse tech I already have. Both as a challenge and as a cost cutting measure. A lot of our tech gets thrown by the wayside, without really being pushed to their limits. I always try to remind myself what’s possible with the tech that I’ve got.
With that in mind, GalliumOS seems to be the best bet for the chromebook I had lying around. It’s a 2016 Asus C202. 4GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage, it’s not the beefiest machine you can find. It also houses a dual core celeron processor. But I needed it to be able to do JUST a little bit more. I used to run crouton and some xubuntu, but doing a little research, I discovered GalliumOS.
It’s got a smooth feel to it, and being from Xubuntu, it’s very light, but capable. And I can use some good tools and do stuff that I am not able to do with ChromeOS, and the linux capability of ChromeOS isnt really the same as knowing your way around a full linux operating system.
Another nice thing is that you’re able to do a native install or do a side by side install with ChromeOS using chrx. It’s very straight forward, and the steps are available on chrx or GalliumOS documentation.
If you have a chromebook lying around, and it runs an x86 processor, give it a shot, and let me know in the comments what experience you’re having, and what software you’ve got installed, pushing the limits of the hardware.
If you need a good book to get started with linux, I would suggest the following: