Chromebook experiences?

Interested in getting a simple laptop and heard linux can be installed on chromebooks. Anyone have any experience with this?

 

I was snooping around the web yesterday about chromebooks. Most of them had a lesser processor than I'm accustomed to. I haven't used one, but I'm definitely wary of anything that says "Celeron".

 

That's basically Intell's way to brand name their bottom of the line processors. Whether it's branded as Celeron, i3, i5,i7 etc, they all have different characteristics, and the ones from different generations will have different characteristics.

Basically an i7 in the same generation will have more bells and whistles, but you can't really go by that.

My impression is that chromebooks are mostly for surfing the web. A crappy processor will probably do just fine for that.

OP, you may want to look up the specs for the chromebook that you want, and then do a search for flavor and distribution that you want. Ubuntu has (or at least had) a pretty good hardware compatibility list.

I should warn you that I'm not that linux savvy, and have never used a chromebook, but everyone seems to good things about linux and chromebooks.

You may want to check the specific processor model when researching compatibility. My experience with researching laptop compatibility listings is that people say things like "My [maker] [model name] worked just fine", which doesn't necessarily tell you that much. In addition to sub-model lines, even machines with the same sub-model line have different processors, and the processor is a critical factor in determining compatibility.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents.

Other folks might be able to give you some better advice, particularly if you indicate a particular distro that you are interested in, as well as what you intend to do with the laptop.

 

I was gifted a Chromebook. It's a bit of a pain. It seems unformatted for using the internet. For instance, the scroll bar on the right is so very slender. If I use Facebook, the dialogue boxes sometimes pop up so big I have no way to use them properly. I feel like I'm on some kids' toy computer he accidentally got connected to the internet, but it's better than nothing.