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:
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Processor: 1.6GHz quad-core Intel Celeron N3150 (quad-core, 3MB cache, up to 2.08GHz with Turbo Boost)
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Graphics: Integrated Intel HD Graphics
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Memory: 4GB DDR3L
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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
NixOS will do the thing for all the days
You could give FydeOS a shot. It’s based on ChromiumOS so if you like the ChromeOS experience, you’ll get to keep it. I believe it also has Linux app support and optional Android app support.
I replaced my Chromebook with Elementary OS. On it’s face, it’s a lightweight, web browsing OS with a limited “App Center” of approved apps (similar to ChromeOS), but underneath, it is a Debian-based distro that you can do anything you want with.
Elementary really isn’t very lightweight. It’s usually sluggish on slower systems (in my experience).
Interesting. I’m running it on a Celeron N4020 with 4GB RAM right now. This system was allegedly shitty in 2019.
I’ve no doubt it will run on such a system, but not nearly as smoothly as with a more powerful machine. Also depends what you run and how many things at a time, etc. not telling you anything you don’t already know, I’m sure :-)
I tried Elementary on some older machines and yes it runs ok but on a really fast system, holy shit is it gorgeous.
Have you replaced Plank with the generic one that you can zoom animate? I wanted to try that one of these days. I’ve used plank elsewhere and I would like for Elementary to have that version.
Try Puppy Linux on it. It runs with meager resources - ~100MB RAM, 250MB storage (only if you want to install it to disk). Everything runs in RAM and is blazing fast. It is a God send for older computers
Do read up about the philosophy of puppy Linux. They are based on different distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, etc. Puppy Linux aims to make these small and efficient with some minor utilities thrown in. So, for actual support, you can rely on those distributions as such. Any updates, software installation, etc can be had from the base distro itself.
Not an actual answer, but I think a Chromebook reaching EoL doesn’t mean it stops getting all updates. I think it’s something along the lines of it stops getting firmware updates but it still gets browser updates, though worth checking exactly what’s happening on your specific device. If you’re feeling crazy you can even try installing ChromeOS Flex on it and it should miraculously be “supported” again.
I thought so too, but then my Chrome stopped updating and all my extensions started breaking one by one. Never heard of ChromeOS Flex, will check out!
ChromeOS Flex is an interesting one; it’s definitely not as flexible as a proper Linux distro but if you need something simple and hard-to-break to run on an old machine (for instance for an elderly relative who’s still using Windows XP) then it could be worth a shot. That said, I’m now investigating whether Linux Mint is a better choice for my own elderly relatives!
It’s very interesting! I just find it weird that I’ve never heard of it. I will have it in the back of my head in case I need to do a full 360 and go back to ChromeOS
