[conspire] Installing Linux on Elise Scher's Chromebook

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> Another comment on the desktop environment.  Over the years, they have
> tended to become heavy with fancy features to with GUI's to play music
> or movies.   I used LXDE for some time on a computer that had plenty
> of resources.  

LXDE has been commendably "light", and able to run in a sprightly manner
on machines short on RAM and CPU.  The only long-term problem is that,
metaphorically it's a dead DE walking, because its underlying graphics
toolkits are dead ends.  (But see below.)

Distrowatch lists 23 active Linux desktop distros for x86_64 that
provide LXDE.

https://distrowatch.com/search.php?ostype=Linux&category=Desktop&origin=All&basedon=All&notbasedon=None&desktop=LXDE&architecture=x86_64&package=All&rolling=All&isosize=All&netinstall=All&language=All&defaultinit=All&status=Active#simple

One of the 23 is KANOTIX, an old favourite of mine:  Debian-stable with 
an advanced graphical installer, "Live CD" mode, and updated kernel /
hardware support.

> Elise, What is it that you want to do with your computer?   Never mind
> what anyone else says, in the end it is your computer to do stuff that
> is important to you

Indeed.  But I was also trying to help by steering her away from
heavyweight-DE distros (GNOME/KDE-based) that tend to be relentlessly
advocated but would be a bit much for a Chromebook.


Someone may eventually quibble, so:  gtk3 is not technically EOLed 
(yet).  But it's been happening by degrees anyway, as the GNOME people
always do:  Development has largely shifted to the gtk4 effort, and
the gtk2 & 3 branches will suffer, as happened with gtk 1.x before them.
Also, the GNOME guys have made very clear that they really don't care
about any project other than GNOME having problems with their libs.
This problem was not seen during gtk2 days, but is now.