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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
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.