Are you running this on native X, or is this through Crouton?
I'd kind of forgotten about this one, but a couple weeks ago the same Chromebook I've used for years to access a banking site now *always* merely spins after I provide creds and click "login", so now I have to access that with the phone, which I tend to despise.
Yep... tried clearing cookies.. rebooting... incognito mode... still just spins.. no idea what the frick cause the brick....
Another thing that goes back more like a month or two was some subtle change to the way copy/paste works on this machine, as though selecting text became more difficult than it did for years... now it seems grabbing the first character on the left side of a window is somehow more difficult, as though starting just a little too far left means nothing will be grabbed after pressing the left click and then dragging across the touchpad with a right finger.
I'm probably not describing it well, but the net of it is that I suddenly had to try a lot harder - as in more attempts required - to select copy text, which generally implies mistakenly pasting the last successful copy, which can be <deity> knows what....
Speaking of selecting text to copy... anyone know why selecting text in a scrollable textarea sometimes works.. and sometimes doesn't? By "works" I mean that if one is creating a selection and moves the cursor past the upper or lower textarea border, scrolling occurs so that text not originally visible winds up selected. I swear there are times I can't get that scrolling to occur... or it'll occur if dragging the selection area from down to up, or from up to down... but not both directions... I mean, WTF? And I swear that's been happening to me for the better part of a decade.
Or let's say your cursor is parked in a textarea, and you do Ctrl-a to select all. I swear that sometimes *only* text in the textarea is selected... but other times it selects text both within and without the textarea.
(EXTRA CREDIT: Any guesses on how long it would take to guess the correct search terms to wind up reading something meaningful/helpful on the actual topic instead of landfills of infinitely-monetized topic tripe...?)
Are you running this on native X, or is this through Crouton?
Not sure anymore. I recall installing Crouton on a previous Chromebook, but not my current. Perhaps Crouton - or the like - got subsumed in the over all execution path initiated by double clicking on the "Terminal" app icon...?
So I had a chromebook once (and regret selling it, it was a great device) and I vaguely recall having some of the issues you describe.
I got around it by installing linux onto an sd card, and booting the sdcard. At the time, this was a new thing since Tegra graphics werent in the mainline kernel yet, and it was really fun/inspiring watching and interacting with a keen developer who brought the fire to the people.
Maybe also a solution for you:
https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=12185
I appreciate the thoughts/suggestions!
My days of mucking too much with my computing environment are likely over, though. I'm attracted to whatever hardware gives me a reasonable Linux for next to zero effort, beyond which I can add a few sacred thingies like tmux, curl, lua, and homegrown scripts.