It doesn't say Ubuntu doesn't work, it says that the chrultrabook project doesn't support it - so if audio (eg) doesn't work, you're own your own.

> AFAIK Chromebooks are actually normal PC laptops with different firmware and OS

while it used to be (pre-2016), this is no longer correct. Audio in particular is significantly different than non-Chromebook laptops.

> I saw "Purchasing Drivers" was are you f'ing kidding me

you're right, the dev who wrote the custom drivers for the Chromebook audio should make them free "for exposure"

> Aren't they possibly just the freely available official manufacturer's drivers INF-edited with the slightly different device IDs of the hardware?

no, because they don't exist. They are custom written by the dev (coolstar).

> If I remember correctly, someone was able to turn a Chromebook into a standard PC by just flashing the BIOS corresponding to the identical non-Chromebook model, but this was a long time ago.

this is absolutely not possible on any ChromeOS device, unless you want a warm brick.

> > I saw "Purchasing Drivers" was are you f'ing kidding me

> you're right, the dev who wrote the custom drivers for the Chromebook audio should make them free "for exposure"

This comes across as an attack on the idea of FOSS.

not everything has to be FOSS, both models can coexist

To further support this statement: she has followed both paths, e.g. Ryzen audio drivers are F/OSS https://github.com/coolstar/csaudioacp3x

Devs deserve compensation for their effort, and paying like 10 bucks to get custom drivers that allow one to repurpose a cheap device into a useful general-purpose Windows laptop is absolutely reasonable

nearly a decade of continuous contributions to upstream coreboot, and featured on their own documentation: https://doc.coreboot.org/distributions.html#mrchromebox

* ensure you have coreboot prereqs installed per doc.coreboot.org

* git clone https://github.com/MrChromebox/coreboot.git

* cd coreboot

* git submodule update --init --checkout --recursive

* make crossgcc-i386

* ./build-uefi.sh <name of board to build>