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Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration

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71–78 of 78 posts

Re: Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration

#71
post #70

Wow, this is progressing much faster than I expected. I bought a Pixel on discount a few months ago with the intention to set up my dev environment (Docker, Java, Node, IDEs, etc) when hardware acceleration and Docker were working. Time for me to get cracking!

Hopefully this will allow applications like VS Code (Electron) to use straight Wayland rather than the slower XWayland as they do now. Of course, it's pretty amusing to have an embedded Chromium app running in a container inside a Chromium OS.

Re: Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration

#72
post #2

I am a hardcore Linux user. I went so far as buying Chromebooks to wipe ChromeOS and run Linux on them in the last 5 years. As of late, I have decided to leave ChromeOS alone on my new Pixelbook. There are two reasons for that decision: - I just love having the ability to have a pen to draw when I needed to share the screen to explain something for my friends when we talk about technical crap. ChromeOS supports the p…

Don't take it personally, but I think it is just growing older and getting more busy with work, life etc. The returns on investment on the time you spend tickering with your laptop are lower - because you have other uses for your time, and because you have expectations set in the past while ChomeOs keeps improving. Now if you take a long sabbatical or go back to school, maybe you'll tinker again!

Don't take it personal, but it's hardly a challenge. The process of download and burn then reboot really taxes you?

Re: Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration

#73
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

btrfs definitely supports extended attributes (and if it didn't you'd get ENOTSUP not EPERM when trying to use them). It's far more likely this is because you cannot set certain xattrs within a user namespace (such as some security.* ones) -- and LXC is being used with user namespaces in ChromeOS. In fact, I added code to Docker almost 4 years ago to ignore ENOTSUP on xattr errors specifically because of filesystem s…

Thanks for the clarification. I love btrfs by the way.

I love btrfs, but I love my data even more.

Re: Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration

#74
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Linux fanatic myself, I've been really interested in flashing a cheap Chromebook into Arch or something low resource, and using it as a super mobile workstation. I guess the only problem is, I haven't given up on my T430 from college. Upgraded parts, extended battery and dock makes for a very comfortable setup that's hard to leave.

Take a look at https://galliumos.org -- its Xubuntu tweaked for certain Chromebooks. I've been running it on a first gen Toshiba CB2 (4gb ram, 16gb eMMC, 1080p display) -- and it runs really well. I run i3 and the other standards. I use it as my out-on-the-town laptop out of fear of either dropping or losing my late 2013 macbook pro. Anyway, the dev community around this is pretty decent, and other distros do run wit…

> I should also mention that having a 8-10hr actual-use battery life is a dream come true.

This really is where the gold is. Many people don't prioritize battery life when picking a laptop, which is just hilarious in my mind.

Re: Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't take it personally, but I think it is just growing older and getting more busy with work, life etc. The returns on investment on the time you spend tickering with your laptop are lower - because you have other uses for your time, and because you have expectations set in the past while ChomeOs keeps improving. Now if you take a long sabbatical or go back to school, maybe you'll tinker again!

Don't take it personal, but it's hardly a challenge. The process of download and burn then reboot really taxes you?

No, but the zillion little fixes sap a limited amount of energy

I wouldn't be satisfied unless I compiled an optimized kernel with almost no module left, etc. This takes more time than I can allot

Re: Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration

#76
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at https://galliumos.org -- its Xubuntu tweaked for certain Chromebooks. I've been running it on a first gen Toshiba CB2 (4gb ram, 16gb eMMC, 1080p display) -- and it runs really well. I run i3 and the other standards. I use it as my out-on-the-town laptop out of fear of either dropping or losing my late 2013 macbook pro. Anyway, the dev community around this is pretty decent, and other distros do run wit…

> I should also mention that having a 8-10hr actual-use battery life is a dream come true. This really is where the gold is. Many people don't prioritize battery life when picking a laptop, which is just hilarious in my mind.

Its crazy, right? I confess that I was totally in that camp prior to getting this little chromebook. I always figured that 4 - 5 hours was as good as I'd ever get, but now I've seen the light.

I even gave it a cute cover (that most people think is hideous) using some mactac -- https://i.imgur.com/wO1WW2t.jpg

Re: Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration

#77
post #71
post #70

Wow, this is progressing much faster than I expected. I bought a Pixel on discount a few months ago with the intention to set up my dev environment (Docker, Java, Node, IDEs, etc) when hardware acceleration and Docker were working. Time for me to get cracking!

Hopefully this will allow applications like VS Code (Electron) to use straight Wayland rather than the slower XWayland as they do now. Of course, it's pretty amusing to have an embedded Chromium app running in a container inside a Chromium OS.

Electron doesn't use Wayland?

I just set it all up, got VS Code and IntelliJ running, and of the two, VS Code looks the best. It's the only app I've seen that integrates the menu bar items into the ChromeOS menu bar, which saves a lot of space and looks way better.

Re: Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration

#78
post #77
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully this will allow applications like VS Code (Electron) to use straight Wayland rather than the slower XWayland as they do now. Of course, it's pretty amusing to have an embedded Chromium app running in a container inside a Chromium OS.

Electron doesn't use Wayland? I just set it all up, got VS Code and IntelliJ running, and of the two, VS Code looks the best. It's the only app I've seen that integrates the menu bar items into the ChromeOS menu bar, which saves a lot of space and looks way better.

It's really an XWayland application, i.e. it uses X, whose protocol is forwarded to Wayland. That's why in this article you need to pass -X to Sommelier:

https://medium.com/@kennethrohde/sharp-looking-vscode-on-chr...

That post also highlights how, because it's not a Wayland native app, VSCode will still look crummy when e.g. you use it on monitors with varying DPI. Real Wayland apps have multiple, per-screen DPI settings:

https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/XWayland

"Multi DPI intends to allow clients to seamlessly move around on a display with multiple monitors connected, where each monitor may have very different DPIs, thus different scales, without any sudden size changes or glitches, while at the same time allowing clients to switch between different scaling factors."

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