[deadlyllama]

I made the mistake of buying one of the early ARM chromebooks (Samsung 13"). Great little machine. Hardware still OK.

But - Google themselves don't support Chrome that old. Google docs doesn't function correctly. Performance wise, it's fine, but the I bar showing the cursor location is in the wrong place.

It's ARM, and old ARM, so the only distro producing images is Postmarket OS. And those images can't drive the internal display properly.

Once bitten, back to x86 for future laptops. I'd consider something like the Pinebook that had Linux support from the beginning, but not something that didn't support normal Linux out of the box.

[cnst]

I got a 99 USD Chromebook, AArch64 based, and I think it's amazing. It's so underpowered that it's incapable of consuming more than about 4W of power even at 100% CPU, which is a major benefit if you care about the power consumption, battery life, and being able to use the laptop on your lap.

It has better battery life than latest Apple M1/M2 products that cost 10x+ as much! Even if you enable the newest "Low power mode", because it's effectively still a performance-optimised mode by Apple.