Major progress is being made on the Asus C201PA Chromebook.

It's been known for a while that the Asus C201PA is one of the more modern Librebootable devices on the market. However, it's been plagued by poor performance due to a lack of GPU support and limited options for operating systems.

Well, that's been changing lately.

PrawnOS (Previously Librean) is a fully blobless Debian without any non-free sources. It supports both xfce / lxqt desktop environments, and has a deblobbed mainline kernel with patches for reliable hardware support for the Asus C201PA specifically (USB, Wifi and bluetooth dongles). The latest Alpha 9 release is currently using kernel 4.19.49.

Well, what about the GPU?

Panfrost (a FOSS kernel driver compatible with the Mali T760 used in the C201PA) has been making rapid developments. A stable version of Panfrost was merged into kernel version 5.2 and should make its way into PrawnOS within the next couple of months. Benefits of Panfrost to PrawnOS will include: accelerated desktops, accelerated video playback (mpv and Kodi), and 3D games (SuperTuxKart, Minetest, and others).