I had a few simple requirements for a new laptop: It had a shitty battery and power cable, both of which I replaced under warranty. My Dell XPS M1210 died after 5 or 6 years of use. If you're interested in learning a little bit about how all of this -including bits of the Chrubuntu script- works, my guide may be of some use to you. However, there are many things that it does not do, which includes setting up your keyboard, user accounts, customizing your touchpad and configuring sound. One way to install your own clean Ubuntu desktop is through the Chrubuntu script, which has become fairly sophisticated and installs several different flavors and releases of Xubuntu, Lubuntu and Ubuntu desktop. However, if you want your own clean complete Ubuntu desktop, with all the customizability it brings with it, a chroot isn't sufficient. Update from 2014 I tried the crouton chroot environment, and it works really well. A modern alternative to xmodmap is xbindkeys. I did have to tweak somethings with xmodmap, but this is trivial and highly customizable. All my function keys work in XFCE and gnome.I'm tired of the manual buggery with ALSA. This is great for backup, but its not like having a simple efficient syncing daemon that I do need to worry about. I no longer want to run unison and rsync using cronjobs. Dropbox works natively this is a large part of my work.I can watch flash video online when I need to unwind.I can chat using google talk, and make video calls using skype and google hangouts.

Here is a list of things that frustrated me with the ARM chromebook, and now work flawlessly with an Acer chromebook. I will never go back to an ARM machine again. Everything worked out-of-the-box or with a little minor tweaking. I switched to an intel machine that works so much better with linux. Update on This will probably be my last ever update on the ARM chromebook, which I now consider a big mistake on my part.

Run linux on chromebook