Chromebooks Are A LOT More Usable In 2020

The future looks bright for Google Chromebooks

A couple weeks ago, I bought a Chromebook for the sole purpose of adding to my ever expanding Lenovo collection. The Chromebook I decided on was the Lenovo C330 laptop. I chose this one for its decent performance, great price, and also because I like convertibles. It had been a while since I had used a Chromebook, I probably hadn’t used one since around the time they first hit the market back in the early part of this past decade.

Whenever I setup my Chromebook, the computer requested that I install Android apps that were obviously locked into my Google account, Slack and Zoom were among the few that I picked. But upon further inspection, I found out that you can in fact run Debian applications on a Chromebook, so of course I set out to do this. Setting up the Linux image is easy, and ChromeOS conveniently compartmentalizes an entire virtual machine to only run in a small chunk of your file-system, while also being entirely removable — which is kind of genius.

ChromeOS isn’t my favorite operating system or desktop environment, but it is definitely clean and usable. I can’t really…