Help choosing distro for old EOL Chromebook

Linux@lemmy.ml – 35 points – 4 months ago

I have an Acer Chromebook R11 which has reached End of Life and won't receive updates (which is insane, I bought it new four years ago). I have checked, and my model is now fully supported by most Linux distros.

I need suggestions for a lightweight distro to use. I will use the machine for surfing, playing Pixel Dungeon, streaming some indie games over Moonlight/Steam Headless and manage my home server over ssh. So nothing major. I want something lightweight and really low maintenance.

Specs:

Processor: 1.6GHz quad-core Intel Celeron N3150 (quad-core, 3MB cache, up to 2.08GHz with Turbo Boost)
Graphics: Integrated Intel HD Graphics
Memory: 4GB DDR3L
Storage: 32GB (with SD card reader for more storage)

I have a lot of experience with Arch-based (EndeavourOS, Manjaro), Ubuntu-based (Mint, PopOS) and Debian-based (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Raspbian) distros, but I am open for other suggestions

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Wow, thanks for this write-up! I will definitely look into ZRAM! I have been wanting to give Fedora Atomic a go

First look if your Chromebook is supported.

You can do this in ChromeOS. The model number needs to match exactly.

Chromebooks run some version of Coreboot but that includes many proprietary drivers.

Mrchromebox is an awesome developer, patching coreboot to include all the needed drivers.

Thanks! I have figured all that out. I went with Tumbleweed for now, because I had it lying around on a USB stick and wanted to see if it worked. Looks like it works pretty much out of box. I found a ZRAM guide too. Might distro jump over to Fedora though

Tumbleweed is better than traditional Fedora. But it is worse than Fedora Atomic Desktops.

The key words are

rpm-ostree reset
rpm-osree rebase
rpm-ostree status

this is not possible even on OpenSUSEs "immutable" distros, which to my knowledge are not better than Tumbleweed in any way.