[ale] [EXTERNAL] Re: State of text based email programs?

[DJPfulio at jdpfu.com]

On 4/28/22 10:06, Byron Jeff via Ale wrote:
> there doesn't seem to be an equivalent to
> displaying a remote application through ssh directly on the chromebook.

In the old days, we'd run a light Linux distro inside a chroot on the chromebook. Then ssh -X works.
Or just flush chromeOS and load a full featured, not bloated, Linux directly on the chromebook. Many models can do that after flashing a new BIOS. Search for "Mr. Chromebox" - he has a good grid for which chromebooks support which type of solution and whether any hardware changes are necessary or not to load normal EFI boot firmware.  Typically, after reflashing the BIOS, there's no way to go back to ChromeOS, but you may be able to load ChromiumOS which is nearly the same.  If the HW is powerful enough, you can run a VM - say KVM - and run ChromiumOS inside it.

For me, the lack of NFS support by chromeOS was the main reason I switched everything.  Did it with 3 different chromebooks, but I was selective about the CPU and VT-x capabilities. All supported swapping the supplied SSD for a replacement.  At the time, they all came with 16G SSDs. Initially, I thought 120G would be the min needed, but that was wrong. When the 120G failed (SSDs can be really cheap and fail), I moved to a 64G SSD and always had 16+G free.  Taught me that mode of the storage was used by music or videos for travel - unnecessary things.  A $15 USB3 flash drive could easily hold that junk.  Or if you don't want to change the internal SSD (or it is that dastardly MMC storage), you can have an OS installed on an external USB3 flash drive. Just be certain to setup this to minimize writes.

Lots of options for having a real X11 environment on chromebook hardware.