AFAI understood, crouton is just a loader for Ubuntu like grub, so once Ubuntu is installed on a Chromebook, it's just another Ubuntu/Lubuntu/Xubuntu/...
So unless questions are specifically about loading Ubuntu using crouton, it's off-topic, but if someone already has Ubuntu running on a Chromebook, it's on-topic, right?
Or am I missing something, like processor architecture?
Historical conversations on this have mirrored your question fairly exactly:
That conversation stemmed from a bunch of questions being thrown in the review queue, and some ultimately closed, because the user mentioned Crouton or Chromebook, while their actual question had nothing to do with the installer and for all intents and purposes was just normal Ubuntu.
Note Crouton used to bundle its own set of packages (Kernel, etc) which made it a different thing. This may have changed again, but my current understanding is that is's just Ubuntu.
As far as my understanding goes, askubuntu is for officially supported versions of Ubuntu, by Canonical. Crouton , on the other hand, has nothing to do with official releases. So once a question mentions crouton, it's automatically asking for migration to unix.stackexchange.com . On the other hand, if a question merely mentions Ubuntu and issues with internals, it's a valid question.
In general we try to avoid absolutes and provide support as much as possible.
I think we are sometimes too quick to close these questions and it is frustrating to users to have questions closed. fdisk is, at least with respect to this specific question, the same across all distros.
I am sure you can find some difference in fdisk between distros as well, but again, with regard to the question I linked, it is the same.
IMO - answer the question and suggest they use an alternate means of support for Centos ;)
With that in mind, it is a community drive site, so the question was closed by consensus, and I am good with that as well in that the advantages of community moderation outweigh the disadvantages.
Crouton uses the ARM architecture, and again it depends. In general there is going to be a bias to close such questions as off topic, same as Mint, Centos, or any other distro as IMO , although supported, it is still in development.
A similar situation occurs with Ubuntu +1. At the time of this post, Ubuntu 15.10 is in development. As such it is an official release and it is supported by Canonical, but as it is in development it is not supported here until closer to the release date.
Crouton / ARM is similar to Ubuntu +1 , supported by Canonical as a work in progress, but not necessarily supported here as it is still in development.
As with the Centos question I linked, however, there may be a more generic question in regards to Crouton / ARM. IMO, in such situations, we should try to support such questions and re-direct to the ARM team - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARMTeam
@bodhi.zazen: […] I don't use crouton, but am just trying to find out if I have to treat "crouton" like I currently treat "Mint", "Elementary OS", "My iPhone can't connect to Windows" and head to the nearest "off topic" button I can find...
Sorry, I'm late to the game while I appear to be the sole editor of the chromebook tag here by just trying to bring my litte bit of knowledge to the table. You are correct, issues that relate to a crouton installation or some other way where the user ends up with a mix of components or packages that are not entirely Ubuntu are off-topic. That shouldn't contradict with Oli's answer I think.
The problem for all users is that some people are very careless about what to call Ubuntu, which confuses users who thought they installed Ubuntu proper (who didn't even know there was an improper way) when they encounter an issue that's rooted to the improper install. Canonical/Ubuntu fight hard to protect their cloud images against modifications, which is good as far as I followed, but they should also act against false advertising and misinformation which lead to various (Google) kernel-related issues with crouton, misconfigured bootloader setups caused by Boot-Repair and so forth. I'm not saying "sue them", just bring the message across that while it may look like it works it doesn't meet the criteria to be supported under the brand name, which is what active users around here try to do.
Crouton is not a bootloader. Crouton stands for ChRomium Os Universal chrooT envirONment.
A chroot doesn't have full access to the system and this is a quote from the crouton github page:
"The downside is that you must be running the correct chroot for your hardware, the software must be compatible with Chromium OS's kernel, and machine resources are inextricably tied between the host Chromium OS and the guest OS".
Once you get it up and running it's still running in a chroot as a "guest OS". It's more different to Ubuntu than a lot of unsupported Ubuntu derivatives as many of those at least use the Ubuntu kernel.
With that said, I do think that some questions are on topic. However, when the question is on topic, I see no use in mentioning crouton in the question.
