Converting a Chromebook to run Linux - any snags?

fwor

GDB2222 said:

Then I went back to the OP, which specified two different browsers, with lots of tabs, Google Earth and spreadsheets all running together. Forgetting about the technical details, is a Chromebook's hardware likely to be remotely near powerful enough for all that? 

The answer to that is "it depends on the Chromebook". It's quite easy to find a 14" Chromebook that's running on a recent-model Intel i5 with 8GB of memory and a half-TeraByte SSD, so a powerful Chromebook can have a fair bit of processing power behind it. But it will probably cost £500, which doesn't make it (in my terms) especially cheap.

MyRealNameToo

fwor said:

MyRealNameToo said:

ChromeOS is ultimately a Linux distribution and so yes a Chromebook can run Linux because thats what's on it when you buy it.

I guess we're heading into semantics now, but the generally accepted view of Linux (as I understand it) is that it is a fully open OS - and ChromeOS is not. It has a proprietary licence. It's not, by that standard, a Linux distribution but rather a derivative of Linux. 

One way in which it is not "open" is that it has a bootloader that (as I understand it) does not accommodate other operating systems. That is the main point that makes it difficult to turn one into a proper Linux-based device - and it's the main reason why I've come to the conclusion that converting a Chromebook is not the way I want to go!

Thats not a definition that I would recognise and Gemini also states that linux can be priority. The kernel of the Linux is/should be open source and the ChromeOS uses the opensource kernel. ChromeOS is the priority version, there is also ChromiumOS which is the fully open source version. Back in the day Red Hat used to have two versions too, though they focused more on the support side for their paid version 

Obviously these things all get a bit messy like MacOS (proprietary) which is built on DarwinOS (open source) which uses parts of FreeBSD Unix kernel (open source) plus some of its own. Linux kernel being independently created but to be an open source unix like kernel but then FreeBSD made an open source version of Unix