Larry Rothman wrote:
Read my note on purchasing Chromebooks. They actually come with an 'expiry date' after which Google will no longer offer any type of updates. A number of forum members have installed Linux on their older Chromebooks due to this 'Feature'.
Just did this to one owned by a friend. His Chromebook wasn't even that old yet, with a January 2019 date on the bottom. Yet they were already making noises about it going EOL soon.
Putting a different OS on there is somewhat a convoluted procedure but not at all difficult. Best bet for most devices is to just completely DITCH ChromeOS completely. Some hardware that's not true, but the run of the mill Chromebook takes linux-only installations in stride, and once it's done you'll love it. Most devices have tutorials on-line, be sure to look yours up before trying this.
After you get the thing into developer mode, it's fairly simple. There are several alternative BIOS files to choose from, and the "GalliumOS" Linux distribution is optimized for Chrome hardware, and is generally quite nice.
If your Chromebook is one of the smaller ones (16GB or less) then you need to set it up to use a largish USB or SD memory device, or an external hard disk or SSD, as the /home directory if you intend on keeping more than a little data on there.
My friend is ecstatic about GalliumOS on his little machine. It was bloody useless under ChromeOS, that thing being just a glorified web-browser meant only to access Google's revenue-generating stuff. He now has a real desktop, a real office suite with full capability for printing and formatting documents and spreadsheets and presentations. And it's all stored LOCALLY, and not out somewhere in never-never-land, with who knows what sort of security.
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w.will
n9kdy
