My happy place

After years and years of wanting a fantastic Linux on a laptop experience and being disappointed, I have been very happy with something for a couple years now. A 2015 Chromebook Pixel LS with Chromebrew.

When telling friends that I was going to order one, they asked why go for a Chromebook with an i7 – “Its a mobile workstation. Believe it or not.” It took Chromebrew to make that dream come true. Put the thing in developer mode, install Chromebrew and all your apps go into /usr/local/bin when installed. Not as elegant as Debian package management, but it works. You can delete everything in that directory and effectively remove all Chromebrew installed apps.

Why not Crouton / GalliumOS / straight Ubuntu?

It was always something. I tried them all. There was always a drawback – abysmal battery life after prodigious tuning, some key component not working well, no bluetooth, it was exhausting. I have used various Linuxes since the middle 90s. I’m no stranger to configuring your own machine. I didn’t want another machine I had to manage. I love ChromeOS because it works without issue every time. No management required.

Finally a Linux that I can install a few beloved utilities on – vim, tmux, python, nmap, zsh, git, hugo – and move on with my life. Minimal management required.

That said, if I wanted to manage another Linux, I would install GalliumOS. It worked well and was rapidly improving.