Google announced last month that it was bringing the ability to run Linux apps to Chromebooks, confirming the existence of Project Crostini, which was first spotted in the Chromium code earlier this year, and which adventurous users have been testing for months.
Up until now you’ve needed a Google Pixelbook to try Crostini. Now it looks like Google has added support for a second Chromebook.
Several users have noted in recent days that Crostini now works on the Samsung Chromebook Plus, allowing you to run desktop Linux apps alongside Chrome apps.
In order to try Crostini, you’ll need to switch to the Chrome OS developer channel and then jump through a few hoops to get started. It doesn’t look like a complicated process, but you should keep a few things in mind:
- The Dev channel is inherently less stable than the Beta or stable channels, so you’re more likely to encounter bugs.
- Crostini is still experimental, so don’t expect everything to work perfectly.
Still, if you’ve been looking for a way to install and run desktop applications that aren’t natively available for Chrome OS or Android (because Android apps also run on many Chromebooks these days), and didn’t want to go through the trouble of installing a full-fledged GNU/Linux operating system on your Chromebook, Crostini seems like a promising way to get more out of a Chromebook.
It’ll likely roll out to additional Chromebooks in the future. But right now, the Samsung Chromebook Plus is the most affordable Crostini-compatible device. You can pick one up for about $420 at the moment, which is a lot less than the $999 starting price for a Google Pixelbook (or even the discounted $750 price that the Pixelbook is selling for today).
The Samsung Chromebook pro is a convertible laptop with a 12.3 inch, 2400 x 1600 pixel touchscreen display, pen support, a Rockchip OP1 hexa-core processor, 4GB of RAM, and 32GB of eMMC storage.
Purchased a Pixel Book a couple of months ago and just love the hardware. I am sensistive to keyboards and easily best keyboard you can get on a laptop.
But where the PB really shines is software. I get GNU/Linux, Android and ChromeOS all native and built-in. You do not even realize as the magic all happens under the covers. From the desktop UI standpoint it is transparent.
I do a lot of development and having a machine with GNU/Linux is just ideal. My Mac was close with OS X but not the same as the cloud. Now I can use the same containers I use in the cloud on my laptop. So have a production Redis problem and you can easily just pull down the same containers you are using in production and debug on your laptop.
Or want to learn a new language or whatever there is a GNU/Linux container already and that now works on your laptop. Even taking a container snapshot and debug on the plane. This is just the ideal situation. I have not turned on my Mac since getting the Pixel Book.
The ideal development machine and finally we have it.
I am wondering if the linux apps will be packaged similar to a snap package with the dependencies bundled with the app. Also, these apps will need to be ARM64 binaries. It seems a lot simpler to just buy an x86 chromebook and install seabios and ubuntu.
Most apps have an arm version by now