As many of you may know I recently bought a refurbished acer c720 Chromebook.
And, I love it.
This thread is a collection of cool things, tips and resources for your next cheap, portable and even powerful Linux machine.

Not that I'm still using chrome OS anymore so if you have questions about that you should ask pockets69

The best thing I think about Chromebooks is the affordable price to get Linux hardware. You don't need to pay for the packaged os, and I don't think anyone on here is dying to install Windows anyways.
You get a nice little Linux machine.

If any of you are looking for a new machine and don't have deep pockets I would totally recommend a Chromebook.

With that recommendation comes a warning though.
Be careful about which one you buy because:

ARM vs x86 architecture
Most Chromebooks are ARM and while a lot of Linux distros can be installed on ARM it does complicate matters a little

BIOS
Some Chromebooks have locked down bios and to install Linux you'd have to flash. Risk voiding your warranty and bricking your computer

Screensize/ram/CPU/ssd

A lot of Chromebooks are small 11-13"
The largest are around 15"
If you're someone who hates small screens they might not be for you. (Or any laptop for that matter)

Most Chromebooks pack 2-4g of ram with the outlier being the pixel with 8
A lot of you run minimal setups and 2-4 should be fine. I'm not sure if you can upgrade the ram on other models but in my laptop the ram is soldiered down making such an upgrade impossible.


Processors range from i3 on the acer c720 to an i7 on the pixel. Many others pack lower end processors.

I don't know about you guys but I am perfectly fine with a 32 gb ssd drive. I don't have a huge picture collection or music library.
For many of you 16-32 gb is simply not enough. On the acer c720 you can upgrade the ssd.

Some neat resources and links I'll add to:

http://skycocker.github.io/chromebrew/
This is a package manager that I found out about on irc, once again thanks to pockets.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chrome_OS_devices
The arch wiki has a LOT of good stuff on the subject

More later!