1y ago

Linux on a Chromebook, my favorite way | Veronica Explains

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Linux on a Chromebook, my favorite way

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Better to just buy a System 76 or Framework.
- Why did you buy that old Fiat Punto when you could buy a Porsche 911, are you stupid?
- It’s always better to buy the better thing. But, you can get a Chromebook for under $80 USD if you can operate on a 16gb disk. < $300 can get you a ton of features. This is obviously not for heavy tasks.
  
  can also use them as an alternative to Raspberry Pis
  if you can work with tight limitations, you can go down to $30 or less
  schools tend to be trying to get rid of palettes of the things because of Google’s policy of end-of-lifing the things after only a couple years
  
  I’d love to know where to get a palette of them
  
  If you're in the USA or Canada, take a look at https://www.govdeals.com/. A lot of government agencies auction off their old equipment on that site, including public school districts.
  If you're lucky, pallets of 150 Chromebooks or other lower-end laptops can be had for $1000-2000 ($6-$13 each) plus taxes and fees. You have to arrange your own pickup though - none of the auctions offer delivery.
  Not guaranteed to be in perfect condition of course - they were used in a school after all.
  
  I saw the category “Tanks” and got excited…
  
  a previous how-to (Reviving Chromebooks with Ubuntu) mentioned just talking to the IT contact for your local school
  without going into a whole palette, search eBay for: chromebook lot of – people selling anything from lots of 4 to lots of 15, generally averaging $20 each (pretty much guaranteed to be expired, would check models against Chrultrabook for usability)
  
  Yeah, if you just need something to browse the internet and edit documents, it's hard to do better than a Chromebook. A lot of them have insanely good battery life too since they are so light on compute power.
  I got one during my last couple years of university for around $200 that was so light you could hold it level with just your thumb and two fingers, and the battery lasted so long that I would sometimes forget to charge it after a whole day and it would still be good for the next day. I toyed with installing Linux on it, but at the time the experience was pretty horrible, so I stuck with the vanilla OS.
  
  Ubuntu Budgie ran really well. It is an HP 11 G5, 4 ram 16 disk. Most things are pretty snappy, but with that low of ram and no space for swap, it’s advisable to do only a few things at once.
  
  (if you’re really lucky, some models have NVME drives instead of soldered in storage)
- Both of which are generally a lot more money than a chromebook. I think this is a good guide for people who cannot afford those options, or already have a Chromebook they'd like to tinker with. :)
- The Framework costs more than a MacBook.

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