Yeah, Google did
Also there are a ton of guides online for how to put full fat linux on them if you Google
Yup.
I have a little Dell 3189 2-in-1 that I originally got used just to see what the ChromeOS fuss was about and hack on.
I’d rooted it, and played with the various hosted/injected Linux options (like chromebrew and the 1st party Linux VM stuff, neither of which was great) while it was under support, but some time after it went AUE I went ahead and flashed a Mr. Chromebox UEFI payload onto it and just slammed normal Linux onto it. It basically “Just Works” though that’s thanks to considerable efforts in the Coreboot port and Kernel because there is a bunch of cheap bullshit (badly plumbed i2c input devices, that stupid bay/cherry trail style half integrated audio setup, etc.) in the hardware. I had briefly flashed it over a couple years ago and that hadn’t all been smoothed over yet back then.
Lately its an Arch system playing with various Wayland options - Hyprland is ricer bullshit, but it actually does a pretty decent job at being not wildly broken compared to the big environments in Wayland mode, tiling makes good use of the not enough pixels, and the search key in the left pinkie position makes a great WM key.
It’s not a nice computer, an N3060 with 4GB of RAM 32GB of emmc and a 1366x768 panel is distinctly in craptop territory these days, but you can also get them for like $50 now because no one wants past AUE Chromebooks, and they make nice beaters - and unlike refurb SFF boxes, SBCs, and similar usual sub-$100 beater options, they come with a screen and keyboard and battery.
It’s been like 8 years, but a chromebook dual booted with debian+xfce got me through undergrad. There’s a set of scripts out there called “crouton” that made it really easy to do
I had an early Chromebook and Google made it super easy to convert to Linux. I tried it for a bit, then reverted,
Yep, I have Arch Linux running on a random Asus Chromebook I had lying around. Only 16GB of storage and 2GB of RAM so I have to keep things light, but it works!
Gonna give too much answer:
Arch is an “Install what you want” distro - the base installation is quite minimal (eg. No gui by default), and the defaults mostly follow upstream - so there isn’t much inherent heft.
If you pick light software it stays light, if you install bulky stuff, it gets bulky.
That said installing most of the major binary package distros (eg. Debian, Rocky) with the same package selections will be of similar size and runtime bulk. There are exceptions, eg. Nix is probably an unsuitable choice on a machine like a Chromebook with small storage because its package managent model keeps a lot more stuff around to enable some neat flexibility/compatibility tricks. Likewise, distros that depend heavily on Snaps or Flatpacks (eg. Silverblue, increasingly Ubuntu) will tend to use more disc space and have some runtime penalty that will be more noticeable on a low end machine.
Arch is “rolling” model, so they track current upstream fairly closely and just upgrade indefinitely. This means things are always fresh but change when they change, some other distros, like Suse Tumbleweed are similar. Stepped release distros like Debian Stable or Rocky try to keep things as consistent as possible for the support period of the release (but upgrading from release to release is likely to be more of a hassle).
There used to be some Chromebook specific distros like GalliumOS that carried patches for the common issues and pre-selected suitable weight packages, but as things got upstreamed they became unnecessary and died out.
