(A better) Linux on Chromebook?

puppy linux

When you say memory, do you mean RAM or do you mean disk space?

For 16 GB SSD with 4 GBs of RAM (which is what most Chromebooks used to be), you will need Debian with XFce, with 2 GB of swap partition. Nothing else will either fit, or work properly. I have given away 3 such laptops to friends with that setup (Arch might fit ok too, but because I was giving it to friends, Debian was easier to work with). After installing the v12 Bookworm Debian OS, with libreoffice, a couple of simple games (e.g. solitaire), Gimp, and that 2 gb swap partition, I was left with 5 GB free space. I had to occasionally do sudo apt autoremove to make sure the space wasn't eaten away, but overall, it stayed steady (dh -h will give you that info). With Trixie, you might end up with 4 GBs of free space, as it's bigger. Bookworm has updates until 2029.

Maybe you can have a look at PostmarketOS, depending on the specific model your Chromebook is. They support some Chromebooks.

OP, got some specs? It will make it easier for us to give good suggestions. Thanks in advance!

I have 3 old Chromebooks (2gb/4gb ram and 16gb/32gb storage) and I run MX with XFCE which runs like a dream. Previously I used Arch with KDE which also ran smoothly enough which surprised me. One thing worth doing with whichever distro/DE you choose, remove all the software you won't use and it makes a huge difference!

Fedora + sway worked well on my C730 with4gb ram 15gb disk.

GalliumOS is a Linux distro made especially for Chromebooks.

Try chimera Linux, it is very lightweight (but also depends on the desktop environment)

I've also had a chromebook with only 30 GB of slow eMMC once. Adjusting I/O caching helped noticeably:

# /etc/sysctl.d/20-flash-speed-settings.conf
# https://lonesysadmin.net/2013/12/22/better-linux-disk-caching-performance-vm-dirty_ratio/

# (vm.dirty_background_ratio = 10) percent of memory to use for caching
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 15
# (vm.dirty_ratio = 20) the max percent of memory to use for caching
vm.dirty_ratio = 30
# (vm.dirty_writeback_centicecs = 5) how often the buffer is checked for work to do
vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 1000
# (vm.dirty_expire_centisecs = 500) sets how long something can be in the buffer
vm.dirty_expire_centisecs = 6000

And you might also want to set mount options in /etc/fstab to noatime or relatime and add commit=60 or so (default is 6).

To note that dirty_expire_centisecs and commit trade speed for data safety. But a laptop has a battery anyway.

About lack of space:
keep the system on the eMMC and mount a thumbdrive as /home? (in /etc/fstab)
Just don't do much compiling on it (or move the compiling path to RAM); i've broke a SDcard-as-home with compiling Firefox on the Chromebook.

Edit: ZorinOS is immutable, relying on flatpaks (high I/O and btrfs deduplication), no? Kinda the worst choice for such a device.

I would say try puppy Linux or a openbox based distro. My go to is MABOX Linux. Lightweight and VERY customizable.

I used to use Arch + KDE on a device with only 32 gb of storage space. I used BTRFS and transparent compression, and I got the actual Arch Linux install compressed down into 6 gb (where it would have been 10 gb uncompressed).

I've been distro-hopping on a 2018 cheapo Chromebook for about a year. So far, I've tried Debian (Bookworm) with XFCE, AntiX, PeppermintOS, and now ARCH with Sway. None of the first three were particularly snappy, but they were all running full desktop environments. With Arch/Sway, I'm running about as light as I can get: no login manager, only 441 packages installed. Web browser is Helium. It's early yet, but I think it does feel a little faster--most of the time. Helium still takes a few seconds to load, for example.

Running bare Arch is a bit extreme, but I think the real difference probably comes down to using a WM instead of a full DE. Sway is pretty light, and from what I could find, Wayland is supposed to be a little lighter/quicker than X11, but if toy want to go that way, you could use i3. Configuration from scratch can be a bit intimidating, but I looked online for shared dotfiles I liked and customized from there.

Good luck! Hope it goes all and is a fun experiment!

My specs: Astronaut (rev 3) Chromebook. Intel Celeron N3350 dual core @ 2.4 GHz with Intel HD Graphics 500 integrated graphics, 4 GB RAM, 32 GB eMMC storage.

I am going to try something else completely. I dont know if it will work.

The Plan: A thin client that connects to an always on RDP session either on a real computer or my servers virtual one.

Alpine Linux in Diskless mode, Xorg, Freedrp

No desktop environment, no window manager. Everything loads into ram.

A project for the weekend, curious how it will go.

Issues that need to be addressed:

suspend when lid closed will have to be added manually. RDP probably should drop or ask for a password at each wake up if the laptop leaves the house. When remote I guess tailscale or similar will have to be implemented.

Something like bunsen?

Have you tried cleaning up the cache?

'sudo apt autoclean' will remove outdated cache files.

'sudo apt clean' will remove all cache files.

I would go with debian with a light weight desktop. If you have issues after that maybe puppy Linux?

i'd just use debian with something like wmaker/icewm/jwm/lxde

Mine is painful for storage. The eMMC is the most painful part. I can deal with low memory, I can deal with the cpu, but read and writes are painfully slow.

I am using fedora cosmic atomic and it works better than most.

Look up how to tweak reads and writes for eMMC if you have it, you can help speed it up.

if your trying to find an OS that is low on resources, there's only one option: alpine linux. Yes it starts out as a TTY (no graphical environment) but they do have scripts to install the OS and a graphics environment of your choice.

the one concern is driver support, generally (unless using a popular distro such as zorin OS) driver support for Chromebooks are limited. I've tried getting alpine Linux on my Chromebook and can't because the wifi card would not work for it.

that said, if you're ready to manually configure driver support for it (which most likely will happen) the artix OS uses about 128 MB of memory. That said, if you have more, Linux will dynamically allocate more for core OS functionality