I use exactly that Chromebook and here is my optimized setup after trying several options. I use it as my daily on-the-go laptop.
I run Devuan with Runit. Anything that uses SystemD is going to be too slow for this little 2 core Chromebook.
I set it up with F2FS (follow the debian howto) instead of EXT4 in an attempt to prolong the life of the little internal SSD.
I did the minimal install and then installed only Enlightenment as the desktop. You will not find a better and less resource consuming DE.
The GUI Apps:
- Terminal: Terminology
- Writing: Abiword
- Spreadsheet: Gnumeric
- Email: Thunderbird but set to leave all mail on the server and not sync any folders locally. This save the tiny SSD space and also makes it faster.
- Media: Audacious and MPV
- Web: Firefox, it runs ok but big PWAs like Gmail are very very slow.
- Smolweb: Bombadillo, but everything else works great too.
- Network: ConnMan, this is all you need, no dhcpcd etc to manage network/wifi connections, and there is a nice simple GUI "gadget" for it included with Enlightenment
I love this specific chromebook, I have the blue and white one, its keyboard is so much better than it should be for the price.
I keep a 128G EXT4 sd card mounted at /home//data and I replace dirs that get a lot of use like ~/Downloads with a symlink to the sd card.
You can squeeze a little more juice out of the CPU by changing the default kernel command line to include turning off all the CPU security mitigations. You don't need them on a single user chromebook anyway.
edit: formatting
eta: I forgot to mention that I also mapped all the top row keys onto functions in Enlightenment so they do what you expect them to do.
eta: ConnMan
Still a great little laptop that I routinely get 4-6 hours out of between charges. Lots of useful life left in it!
Its been a little while, but I don't recall any drama with the protection screw. You do have to install Mr Chromebox before you install a linux distro, after doing the protection screw.
I found Devuan a few years ago at FOSDEM.
I just remembered, if you find trackpad doesn't work in the install don't worry it will work after you update the kernel. If needed you can use a USB mouse to do the install.