Google says all new Chromebooks will be Linux-ready
One of the biggest announcements from this year's Google I/O related to the Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL, but this was far from being all there was to get excited about. Microsoft may be increasingly embracing Linux in Windows 10, and Google is doing the same with Linux on Chromebooks.
Support for Linux apps on Chromebook is nothing new, but Google has now announced that all Chromebooks that launch from this point forward will be fully functional Linux laptops, regardless of whether they are ARM or Intel devices.
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At Google I/O, the company said: "all devices launched this year will be Linux-ready right out of the box". This is great news for anyone looking for a cheap Linux laptop.
There's no suggestion that Chromebooks will come pre-installed with anything other than (the admittedly Linux-based) ChromeOS, but being Linux-ready should mean that it is easier than ever to run a different operating system.
As noted by ZDNet, however, you're not really going to be switching to a different Linux distro (at least not easily):
Linux on Chromebook laptops is not a dual-boot operation. You're running both operating systems simultaneously. That means, for example, you can do things like clicking on a document file via the Chrome OS file manager and open it with LibreOffice -- without even starting a Linux session.
2019 appears to be the year Chromebooks got a whole lot more useful.
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