I’m looking at picking up a used chromebook for my kid to use after installing a Linux OS on it. So I have two questions that are very related:
Which would be a better one to get: Lenovo S330 or Acer CB3-431. Is one going to be easier to get the OS to run on?
The other question is which distro is going to work the easiest? I have been running Linux exclusively for over a decade on my person computer (Fedora currently) and my phone (PinePhonePro with Debian (well, Mobian anyways)) so I’m very comfortable with Linux in general, but haven’t played with this kind of hardware before so I’m not sure what the limitations will be.
You might find just the inbuilt linux (crostini) under chromeos is fine… it’s basically debian.
If you want just a linux box you basically start by installing coreboot to turn it into something more like a standard PC. See https://mrchromebox.tech/ - from the looks of that site the Lenovo isn’t supported and the Acer is, but needs hardware modification.
Of course there’s always the option of just getting a Thinkpad from ebay - really cheap and can run linux out of the box.
Crostini is only sort of built-in Linux. It’s more like a built-in Linux VM, and performance suffers a bit because of it. If they’re not doing anything heavy, you should be correct, it’ll be fine.