Underrated Feature on a Chromebook: Install with Linux

aboutchromebooks.com

Not touching chromebooks anymore now that I have to throw two of them away. Can’t install another OS. Can’t get security updates. Hardware is perfectly fine. But unusable.

As someone that ditched his car to lessen his environmental impact, this hurts.

> Can’t install another OS

What? AFAIK literally every chromebook model supports unlocking the bootloader and installing a replacement OS. Now in practice, you need some combination of (drivers)&&((OS that can handle the native firmware)||(replacement firmware)), but the situation appears decent; for x86 chromebooks, https://mrchromebox.tech/ supports many (most?) devices, and postmarketos seems to cover both ARM and x86 (see https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Chrome_OS_devices for details - it looks like they can handle x86 without replacing the firmware).

I'd heard of Crouton and the like but I hadn't heard that Chromebooks had (what appears to be) a native and supported way of installing Linux applications. What distribution is hiding under the covers there?

Debian. https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en

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