08 February, 2025
So, I still routinely use a 2015 Toshiba Chromebook 2 (codename: Gandof [no, not Gandalf, Gandof]) just about every day in 2025. To be honest, I've been using it for so long now, it's just kind of cozy to still get to be able to utilize it.
Now, support for ChromeOS updates for this Chromebook ended quite a long time ago, but that was just the motivation that I needed in order to finally get off my butt and swap out the BIOS for coreboot and install Linux on it. This was done a couple of years ago now, so you know that I was successful already, but it wasn't easy? I also went ahead and updated the SSD at some point, because originally this system had something stupid like 16GB of space since it was meant to be web-only, but now it's a nice healthy 512GB which I harvested from one of my other laptops...when I upgraded that one.
Once I finally got Arch installed on the Chromebook, it really started to feel like home. Initially, I had Arch with KDE Plasma like I do on my more powerful systems, but the 4GB of RAM on this Chromebook made things feel a bit sluggish. So, I went for labwc as my window manager with sfwbar as my taskbar and foot for the terminal. Now, sitting at my fully graphical desktop ready to run whatever graphical stuff I want to run I'm only using about 460MB of RAM.
Speaking of graphical stuff, the heaviest thing I usually want to run is the web browser. Librewolf takes up almost 1GB of RAM all by itself, doing just about nothing. My old pal dillo is a lot more reasonable at around 37MB, so I try my best to run that instead. It's not that I can't run big, full-fat browsers, I just...feel like things are a bit snappier using a more reasonable solution.
I used to be able to run Second Life on this Chromebook, but after the PBR update the standard SL viewers don't really want to load in fully anymore with only 4GB of RAM. Now, I mostly use Radegast on here for text-mode SL, which is really fine with me, sometimes I prefer Radegast on my big PC as well.
As far as other gaming, I can play a lot of retro games and rereleases like Sims 1 & 2, visual novels, RPG maker games, etc. And anything else that I want to run I can quite easily stream from my bigger computer using Steam Play, it really is extremely handy.
So I guess the whole point of this post is that operating on a 2015 Chromebook in 2025 really doesn't feel limiting at all. To me, the fact that I have to be a little more thoughtful about my CPU and memory usage is actually kind of cozy to me. It's also a very power-efficient computer, only using about 3.4W at idle and maybe 12W max even when running something graphically straining. I like that. I know that there's more efficient computers that have been developed more recently, but I like this one, and it's also efficient just to keep using what I already have. :)