its kinda late, I feel pretty tired. Well okay, its not just kinda late, its 2:56 AM. I should sleep soon, but I just loaded ubuntu on my thinkpad t470s, which is my next big step to gain independence from windows, since I don’t love windows 10, and actively hate windows 11. As a result, I’ve been gradually converting all of my various PCs to various linux distros. And for fun, I also got galliumOS running on an old Chromebook that my boyfriend got me for Christmas, since I like messing with the limitations placed on me by chromeOS.
In saying that, there are a few things that I can say about ChromeOS. 1) its not a great way of doing almost any serious computing. Although its fine for webrowsing, any kind of productivity that requires downloading anything is next to impossible unless you have a new enough Chromebook to be able to access the Googleplay store, or to use a linux command prompt by default. So, if you have an old, no longer supported Chromebook (which are just about the most affordable, reasonably new PCs you can buy online), there’s next to nothing you can use it for beyond non-secure webb browsing, and accessing things like google docs. That is, unless you screw around with the chromebook and trick it into letting you install a linux distro on it, which is what I did. It wasn’t super hard, which was helped by me having an x86 CPU installed in the chromebook, as opposed to an ARM based processor, which is more difficult (although not impossible). That being said, I tried a few different distros until I found one that actually worked well on the chromebook. Although it was fairly obvious I should have just went with galliumOS, since it was specifically designed to be used on chromebooks, to such an extent that there are separate builds for different CPU architectures.
To briefly discuss my experience with getting various linux distros on my chromebook: I first tried getting Ubuntu working, which I did successfully on my first attempt, however the stability was next to unusable. Ubuntu actually launching successfully happened roughly 20% of the time, with most of my time dedicated to struggling to get the errors to cease long enough for the GUI to even display. I figured the problem was most likely that Ubuntu took up too much space on the hard drive, or maybe some driver problems associated with the specific hardware within the chromebook, so I installed lubuntu so I had more room to mess around with to potentially fix the driver issues, and perhaps fix the issue solely through having a lighter OS. This worked somewhat, as the percent that the GUI even loaded increased to 100%, however the chromebook would generally freeze at the logo for lubuntu about half the time, so I decided to finally give in and go with a distro that was actually made for chromebooks: galliumOS. Sure enough, gallium works perfect, with no issues whatsoever. I’m serious, the only kinda problem is that I have to select to boot into my disk rather than the nothing that chromeOS isn’t installed on (there’s probably a fix for it, but eh, I don’t care I just need to type ctrl+L and it works, so no biggie). Honestly, gallium runs better than chromeOS, at least on this particular hardware config. So, if you have an x86-based chromebook, dump ChromeOS, and get gallium.
Eventually, I plan on putting various linux distros on all my PCs with the exception of my main gaming rig, which I have windows 10 on for the simplicity of gaming on windows, although I haven’t had all too many problems gaming on the other devices I have linux on (I generally use ubuntu and ubuntu-based distros out of familiarity and the popularity). I don’t care for windows, although since nvidia graphics drivers work out of the box on windows, I keep it for gaming. That being said, I do much prefer linux for general productivity.
as an aside, I hate that the scrolling is reversed on chromebooks, I’m gonna change that soon.
this was just a quick rambley post, feel free to ignore. Bye, love you!
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