I’m looking at picking up a used chromebook for my kid to use after installing a Linux OS on it. So I have two questions that are very related:
Which would be a better one to get: Lenovo S330 or Acer CB3-431. Is one going to be easier to get the OS to run on?
The other question is which distro is going to work the easiest? I have been running Linux exclusively for over a decade on my person computer (Fedora currently) and my phone (PinePhonePro with Debian (well, Mobian anyways)) so I’m very comfortable with Linux in general, but haven’t played with this kind of hardware before so I’m not sure what the limitations will be.
Thanks for the detailed answer and pointing me towards the Mr. Chromebox tooling. I picked up the used Acer CB3 for $30 and was able to install the custom UEFI firmware and then install Gallium OS without too much hassle. Like you said, not a fancy machine, but hard to beat that price.
Suggestion: the Search key under your left pinkie emits SuperL (aka. Meta, same as a Windows key), and it is an great way to make up for some other keyboard weirdness Chromebooks have, and map to WM controls.
I recently discovered keyd, an excellent system-wide key remapper that works as a tiny daemon that intercepts input events and re-emits them as a virtual keyboard, and have it mapping Search+Arrows to PgUp/PgDn/Home/End (like a lot of laptops do with Fn+Arrows, or ChromeOS does with Ctrl+Shift+Arrows). I’ve already run into a couple other folks doing the same because it’s such a clean solution to the Chromebook keyboard.
AFIK GalliumOS has been unmaintained for over a year, and most of the patches they used to add are now in mainline, so long term you may want to consider a different distro - it’s probably OK for a while still though.