Don’t throw away your out-of-date Chromebook just yet as newly found evidence suggests Google may expand the availability of ChromeOS Flex to the old laptops.
In another comment I said that I tried putting Linux on a different EOL Chromebook and something went wrong, it’s entirely possible I did something wrong, but it won’t work now. I don’t want to take the chance of killing this Chromebook too.
well you were considering buying a windows laptop. just do that and put Linux on it. better and more varied hardware than Chromebooks, a OS with no EOL, no spyware, and if you’ve been using Chromebook you probably don’t need nothing windows specific so it’s a win.
I’m not a Linux aficionado. I’ve been using Windows machines for a long time and I feel confident doing basic things like navigating control panel and updating drivers but I’ve never used a fully functional Linux OS. I wouldn’t know how to do anything and while I might consider trying it on a backup netbook or something I don’t want to spend money on something with a learning curve. Years ago I put OS/2 Warp on my machine and it was a nightmare trying to figure out how to do anything. I’m not interested in doing that all over again.
Okay if you want to dip your feet into Linux and see how you feel consider a live USB. It is a whole operating system on a flash drive. At this point you need a flash drive to install it anyway so you can play with it first and see how you like it. I would recommend Linux Mint. It is one of the most user friendly flavors out there. It comes with most of not all proprietary drives ready to go. Its goal is to make Linux the most user friendly experience. It can be installed with a few different desktop environments. If you are trying a light weight machine go for Xfce. Really at this point the difference between the user experience between mint and windows is almost zero. It is entirely possible that you could never open up a command line terminal.
