Specs looked good. Dual core x86 CPU, 4GB RAM 16GB SSD.
I already had an account on Google Chrome on a Linux machine. There was no recovery SD card. So, I thought of creating a recovery before I did anything. Google search and
Youtube videos suggested chrome://imageburner
That did nothing at all. I struggled and found that there is an
App that does it and it did. All this took 1hour.
Then I turned on the machine knowing that if something goes wrong, the machine can be restored because I did test the restore.
All good? No.
When I turned on the chrome book and opened the browser, It picked up
all the Addons as if they work on all platforms including ChromeOS. That
immediately caused chromecast not to work properly. I had to delete the cast app, re-start the machine, re-install the cast app and then it worked as expected. My wife wanted to be able to read Microsoft documents when offline. Found no way to do that except to
install ubuntu linux using what is called crouton.
The video said that you put the machine in developer mode and then it is easy. It was very tricky to put the machine in developer mode. I did it after google search and experimenting for an hour because I have the comfort of a recovery SD. I have used Ubuntu for 10yrs on X86 PCs. Installation took 30min and customization took 30min for a fresh install on X86 PC. Crouton took well over 2hrs to install and 3 hrs just to get firefox, libreoffice, java and silverlight to work. After all this, the machine was very slow. Either the internal memory is slow or 4GB RAM was just not enough. 11.6" screen was adequate compared to 13.3" I used for over 4yrs. The shine on the screen caused lot of glare. There was no DEL key! It is ctrl Backspace. It was very convoluted to start using ubuntu do begin with. So, packed up the machine and returned it and in the market for a Windows laptop to run ubuntu as in the past.
At least I tried...
