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An edit of xkcd 2501, “Average Familiarity”:
[Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.]
Ponytail: Open-source alternatives are second nature to us foss nerds, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably only knows Linux and one or two degoogled Android ROMs.
Cueball: And Firefox, of course.
Ponytail: Of course.
[Caption below the panel]
Even when they’re trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person’s familiarity with their field.
partly inspired by the replies to this post but i see this kind of thing all the time (shoutout to the person who once genuinely asked “who still uses google these days?”)
made with this neat tool
This seems like a good thread to ask: I got a spare, handmedown chromebook and wanted to linux it. What the fuck should I do for that?
hmm, if it’s an x86 chromebook i’m assuming you could install linux on it like any other x86 device… not sure tbh, i’ve never done this 😅
if it’s ARM, then postmarketos may be your best bet, it’s typically used for phones but they have many laptops supported as well. maybe yours would work!
i’ve seen stuff like crouton, chrx and galliumOS which are all projects that are supposed to help run linux on chromebooks, but they’re all abandoned as of now so i wouldn’t recommend them.
I’ve done this with a chromebook recently, first it depends on a model and how old is it. In general you need to disable secureboot in recovery menu, enable ‘developer’ mode, and allow booting from usb. After that you can install your distro.
When in doubt, Linux Mint.
Windows to Mint, Apple to Ubuntu
If you are completely new don’t yet. Find someone to guide you if you are experienced => https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/getting-started.html I had to do minor soldering for the ones I jailbroke
really depends and you really gotta research if it’s even going to be worth your time. there’s a site where you can check if your chromebook will work and how difficult it will be: https://docs.chrultrabook.com/
some you have to physically open up and mess with like a screw or two. some use other methods. that site will tell you specifically what you have to physically do to get it working.
Then you have to take into consideration the SSD you have on your chromebook. like will it even have enough space to do anything worthwhile. I put linux on a chromebook and honestly all it’s good for is opening some terminals to do some basic things and maybe stream stuff online. that’s it. And it can be a struggle to get linux installed so again is it worth your time to have something that could potentially be a glorified terminal station? up to you. Don’t get me wrong it’s a fun hobby project but that’s about it.
If you haven’t installed an OS before, probably find someone who knows what they’re doing and ask for help.
Jailbreaking and installing a new OS on a Chromebook usually isn’t a simple process, and it can be incredibly specific to the exact model of Chromebook you’re working with. Installing Linux is the easy part. The difficult part is jailbreaking the device and installing a new bootloader that can handle non-ChromeOS software. And that process varies depending on what model of Chromebook you have. Some of them will require actual hardware modifications in order to do that, requiring disassembly and reassembly (mine did). For some Chromebooks, it’s just not possible at all. And in most cases, there are risks of permanently bricking the device if you do it wrong.
If you can’t find someone knowledgeable to hold your hand through it, then you’ll need to do lots of research, and not just research into installing Linux on Chromebooks in general – research into how to do it on your specific model of Chromebook and its specific chipset. Chromebooks are not at all standardized, and exactly what you need to do will depend on exactly which Chromebook you’ve got.
If I remember correctly you need to unlock the bootloader by taking the back off it and removing a screw. Then install MrChromebox firmware. Then you can flash a normal linux distro. Ignore all the chromebook specific ones they’re all dead and unmaintained. Arch with Sway worked perfectly on my 2015 chromebook with 4gb of ram and the worst cpu ever.
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