A couple of months ago I bought a Samsung Chromebook to use while travelling around Japan. So how did that work out?
I need to point out first that I was mostly using Fedora 17 (but could dual-boot into ChromeOS for occasional things like G+ Hangouts). Fedora 17 isn’t the latest release, and it is still using the ChromeOS kernel, not a Fedora-compiled kernel. I’ve marked with an asterisk all the points that I think are caused by the ChromeOS kernel rather than by Fedora or the Chromebook itself.
- * Suspend pretty much doesn’t work. It suspends OK, but can’t resume. This all works fine on ChromeOS however, and I suspect this is just a kernel issue which will/has been fixed in F18.
- Trackpad sucks quite a bit. For example, it’s very hard to accurately right click. Left clicking often causes the mouse to zoom around the screen. It works better in ChromeOS. Is this an X server issue and/or does ChromeOS use X?
- * There is some hardware clock problem I couldn’t quite fathom. Either the h/w clock is set to the local time or else Fedora cannot save the timezone, but either way, unless NTP was running (and hence I had wifi etc) it always flipped back to UTC after rebooting. Almost certainly some sort of kernel issue that has/will be fixed in F18.
- It’s very light weight. Carrying it around everywhere was no effort at all.
- Battery lasts “forever”. Well, at least 6 or 7 hours which was the longest I needed it for. XFCE Power Manager was predicting 8+ hours, but I don’t know how accurate that is.
- A touch screen would have been a really nice addition. But not if it meant increasing the price.
- It’s pretty robustly built.
- It’s fast enough, with enough storage, for serious development. While it’s not blazingly fast like x86-64, it’s good enough even for libguestfs development (libguestfs being a very large program).
I’m going to categorize this one as a definite success.
Richard WM Jones 
1) Will likely be fixed with a proper Fedora kernel
2) Known issue, the X driver sucks too which is going to be a PITA to deal with in the short to medium term
3) the rtc driver is likely a module. Fedora/linux/systemd has issues if it’s not built into the kernel. Still undecided the best way to deal with this. Its a problem on all ARM platforms in general.
Thanks Peter — pretty much confirms what I suspected.
I just bought one of these. After looking at all the other ARM hardware you’ve reviewed lately – do you still think this is worth having? I’m not planning on doing much serious (non-web) development on it, but installing Fedora eventually and playing around with ARM hardware virtualization will definitely be on my list. A little late now, but I definitely based this purchase on your review.
So what do you think? How does it compare with some of the newer ARM devices you’ve reviewed?
I would go for an AllWinner device, probably the Cubietruck. They aren’t as fast as the Chromebook, but far easier to get everything working (and much cheaper). Edit: And a friendly community who are working to put the AW hardware support upstream.
Thanks. This is helpful. I’m going to go ahead and get a Cubietruck too. Too late for me to back out of the Chromebook now, but it will also give me a chance to do a comparison of my own.