PeppermintOS? I’m trying to prepare an ancient Chromebook C202S for Linux and have had some ideas from antiX to MXLinux and Loc-OS, but it seems that PeppermintOS may be among the best choices.
The tech level of this Chromebook’s end user is unlikely to work well with Arch + BSPWM, which was recommended to me by someone else.
Same question for an old EEE pc with like maybe 1gb ram, trying antix now, may try Slax next, will look into peppermint.
I have had good luck with slitaz and anti-X for old laptops
Any lxQT based desktop will be fast on low end devices. Try Linux Mint LxQT edition
AntiX Linux has been the most efficient distro on my netbook. You gotta be okay without systemd though. For the most part I didn’t need it but some things are highly dependent on systemd to work.
WattOS was good too but AFAIK it’s not actually open source so I couldn’t trust it.
I use exactly that Chromebook and here is my optimized setup after trying several options. I use it as my daily on-the-go laptop.
I run Devuan with Runit. Anything that uses SystemD is going to be too slow for this little 2 core Chromebook.
I set it up with F2FS (follow the debian howto) instead of EXT4 in an attempt to prolong the life of the little internal SSD.
I did the minimal install and then installed only Enlightenment as the desktop. You will not find a better and less resource consuming DE.
The GUI Apps:
- Terminal: Terminology
- Writing: Abiword
- Spreadsheet: Gnumeric
- Email: Thunderbird but set to leave all mail on the server and not sync any folders locally. This save the tiny SSD space and also makes it faster.
- Media: Audacious and MPV
- Web: Firefox, it runs ok but big PWAs like Gmail are very very slow.
- Smolweb: Bombadillo, but everything else works great too.
- Network: ConnMan, this is all you need, no dhcpcd etc to manage network/wifi connections, and there is a nice simple GUI “gadget” for it included with Enlightenment
I love this specific chromebook, I have the blue and white one, its keyboard is so much better than it should be for the price.
I keep a 128G EXT4 sd card mounted at /home/<user>/data and I replace dirs that get a lot of use like ~/Downloads with a symlink to the sd card.
You can squeeze a little more juice out of the CPU by changing the default kernel command line to include turning off all the CPU security mitigations. You don’t need them on a single user chromebook anyway.
edit: formatting
eta: I forgot to mention that I also mapped all the top row keys onto functions in Enlightenment so they do what you expect them to do.
eta: ConnMan
Wow, thanks a bunch! My biggest fear is the dismantling to get at the write-protection screw… Hopefully I don’t screw something up… So, after that, enable dev mode and then boot via flash drive? Is that basically the way? I’ve gotta look up that Mr. Chromebook-or-whoever’s guide; the device is in not with me and I won’t be seeing it any time soon so I’ve been forgetting some of my research.
Yes, I love the look and feel of this laptop (netbook, really…)'s body and keyboard! I’m so glad that there is hope after Google’s terrible support drop.
Dang, I’ve never even heard of Devuan before. How’d you find this? Nice find. Reading up on: https://www.linuxcompatible.org/story/using-runit-on-devuan/
Still a great little laptop that I routinely get 4-6 hours out of between charges. Lots of useful life left in it!
Its been a little while, but I don’t recall any drama with the protection screw. You do have to install Mr Chromebox before you install a linux distro, after doing the protection screw.
I found Devuan a few years ago at FOSDEM.
I just remembered, if you find trackpad doesn’t work in the install don’t worry it will work after you update the kernel. If needed you can use a USB mouse to do the install.
eta: you can choose runit during the install of devuan and then you’re set
Oh, so Runit comes included with Devuan? Nice!
Good luck with the effort. I have a Chromebook that I was considering to do the same after messing with using it as-is but running Forefox under its Linux wrapper and seeing how painfully slow it was. But then I dived into Google’s efforts in locking them down and decided it wasn’t worth the effort (yet). I turned to an old Macbook that couldn’t be updated anymore and discovered the exact opposite. With a bit more RAM and a swap to a SSD, it runs current Linux Mint with little issues. I may explore the Chromebook again when I have extra time, as it’s doable, just a PIA.
Maybe puppy linux? Its very light on resources.
honestly the distro is not going to make much difference unless you go to some special distro that runs off the ram (instead of the ssd) like tinycore or porteus
the de/wm matters most actually, in this case i’d recommend icewm, xfce or lxde.
I think AntiX and Puppy Linux are RAM-based distros, yeah, or something like that. But I think I’ll try Devuan + Runit as per another commentator here who uses this same machine… sounds promising! I’ve never heard of icewm, though, thanks; I’ll check it out.
i3/sway in Manjaro/CachyOS or just install it on raw arch/debian
I have not used it at all, so I cannot speak for it, but look into Puppy Linux.
Oh, right, I read up a bit on that, as well as MenuetOS…
I recently revived a circa-2014 Thinkserver with a core install of antiX, and was pleasantly surprised. I went for the smallest footprint possible by installing only the core distro, and then choosing the packages I wanted/needed.
If you’re constrained by the user’s “tech level”, it’s unlikely that you’ll find anything significantly lighter … some other distro might shave off 50MB of RAM, but if it’s more difficult to use, that’s not really worth it.
The last “tiny linux” that I used was BunsenLabs. That was for a netbook, though. No idea about Chromebook compatibility. https://www.bunsenlabs.org/
