The biggest draw for me is these were the first Linux machines I'd used where everything didn't 'just work' or 'it works okay but you can tweak XYZ' it worked in the sense it was explicitly designed _to run Linux_įor all the flak Google deservedly gets, the decision to enforce a 'no binary blobs, everything must be upstreamed to mainline Linux' kernel and Coreboot (BIOS) as well as making 'jailbreaking' the thing with a permanent firmware flash as simple as removing a hardware screw was commendable Extremely happy with both machinesĮventually as the Chrome browser started to eclipse things though I moved to Dell's Chromebook 13 'Lulu' with a beastly Broadwell i5 quad core and 8GB (soldered) RAM Add a processor optimized Firefox at the time and it was an extremely good tiny laptopĪ year or so later I upgraded to its 'big brother' the core i3 variant (2c2t, quad core) with 4GB of RAM. But Gentoo on it with XFCE was incredibly nippy. Anemic 2c1t (dual core) Celeron at 1.2 Ghz and 2GB of memory. I picked up one of the original Acer C720's back in 2013. +1 to Chromebooks, though I was never much interested in Gallium With lower end machines, newness isn't always a deciding factor for goodness. I wouldn't insta buy it, but I'd at least keep it in the runnings vs a 2021 model, especially at that price point.

It's one of those rare combos of hardware that's really good at a fair price. If you can still find this exact model at that price point I'd consider it today. It's been a really nice outdoors / travel laptop for someone like me who normally uses a desktop workstation. Even decently sized Rails apps with Webpacker reload nearly instantly while developing and there's no type delay. It still runs great today and despite the low end specs it can deal with some programming work loads (Dockerized web apps, a bunch of browser tabs, mp3 player, editor with 40+ plugins, multiple workspaces, etc.).

It weighs under 3 pounds and has a backlight keyboard too. It is a good idea IMO, especially with GalliumOS (a Chromebook optimized variant of xubuntu) so you can run Linux natively.īack in 2016 I picked up a Toshiba CB35 Chromebook with a 13' 1080p IPS display, 4gb of memory, 1.7ghz Celeron and a 256GB SSD for $350.

Replacing chrome os with linux