ChromeOS

I spent some time installing and configuring Linux (Arch) on pixel slate. Here is what I find.

The good parts.

• Basically everything works out of the box (with one small fixable caveat below). I installed Arch Linux with KDE Plasma.
• Firefox is simply great.
• Battery life is very good. I get very similar battery life compared to Chrome OS. Battery drain in suspend is minimal.
• Screen rotation works pretty well once iio-sensor-proxy is installed.
• virtual keyboard (maliit-keyboard) works well too.

The bad parts

• Stylus works, but lags a lot. Might have something to do with Wayland?
• Gesture navigation can definitely use some improvement.
• The flatpak Plex client appears to lack hardware acceleration and lags a lot with 4k content. I have to rely on the web client at the moment.

Some notes

• My motivation to do this was to completely remove chrome from my devices. I chose Full UEFI boot. There is a very well written tutorial for doing so. For me the only hurdle was to obtain a SuzyQable CCD Debugging cable.
• The default Arch Linux install works well. The only issue was the hid_google_hammer kernel module. It is causing very long delays during the startup and you basically won't be able to properly shutdown or reboot. Fortunately the fix is easy enough. I just had to blacklist the two modules (hid_google_hammer and hid_vivaldi_common). From what I tested, this issue affects many distros, including at least Arch and Void.