I ran this setup for a few weeks and performed my entire job on it without trouble – including recording/editing audio and video and playing games (“Civilization V” and “XCOM: Enemy Unknown” both play quite well – high visual settings and high frame rates on the Pixel). The only annoyance is that every time you boot the Chromebook, you need to hit “Ctrl-L” in order to access the SeaBIOS before your distro will actually boot. In fact, it performed better than a similar Sony laptop (which had more RAM), likely thanks to the SSD. The Chromebook Pixel is aging a bit at this point (it first came out nearly two years ago), but the combination of a nice SSD and a quite capable quad-core i5 makes this a peppy little beast of a laptop. Though, in all honesty, Ubuntu Studio required the least post-install tweaking to get a well-behaving system. I managed to get all three to a point where everything functioned well (touchscreen, Wi-Fi, suspend, etc.). I tried a few different distros using this method: Ubuntu Studio, openSUSE and Debian. ( See here for a step-by-step guide on installing SeaBIOS and getting a distro installed.) It’s not a terribly complicated procedure – any Linux power user will have no trouble doing it – but it definitely requires a few more steps than the other options. It basically involves installing a custom BIOS (SeaBIOS) that will allow the laptop to boot a traditional OS. This is, by far, the most complicated approach to running a Linux distro on your Chromebook Pixel.
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