[YO! In case you didn’t know, installing a new OS on any computer is always risky. You are likely to lose all your data, brick your Flip, and suffer grievous injury if you follow the steps below.]
I’ve been a big fan of the Flip line of Chromebooks from Asus. It started with the absolutely fun 10.1″, which was a goddess-send on cramped flights (hello, Spirit?). I moved on to the C301, a plasticky thing that was all standard Chromebook and not as much fun. But once I saw the almost identically named C302. an all-aluminum unibody beauty, I knew I needed one.
On the other Flips, I installed Crouton. That’s software that allows you to run Linux on top of ChromeOS. That’s very useful: ChromeOS is great for media consumption and online work, but it lacks in everything else I want from a laptop. You can’t program, you can’t use software that isn’t available online, etc. Crouton allows you to do all that and then some and I loved it.
Still, I run Linux natively on all my computers and it was a pain to deal with the limitations of an add-on. Cron jobs wouldn’t work, init scripts weren’t run, and whenever something didn’t work as expected, the first task was always to figure out if it was a problem with the environment or with my code. I wanted real Linux, not just an emulation. But I wanted to be able to continue using ChromeOS because Google is powerful enough to force media companies to run their stuff on its platform.
Dual-boot it had to be. Fortunately, since installing on the C301, the options for Linux installation have vastly improved and gotten more stable, easy-to-use, and reliable. Also, the first Linux distributions specifically meant for Chromebooks have appeared and sounded quite awesome.