You can; however it will always show a message that leaves you a keypress away from nuking your system on boot
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
23 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
40861 readers
549 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Ok. Now I'm curious. How's that work?
Chromebooks have a special bios, it works with a chip on the motherboard to detect if chromeos is running or if some unverified os is running. If chromeos isn't running, it displays a warning message on boot. This behavior cannot be disabled.
Thanks! That is such pretty, jealous behavior.
It was unlikely that I was going to buy one of those before but now it's absolutely out of the question.
I'm assuming you were going for "petty," not rhapsodizing about the UI on the error.
https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/ provides custom coreboot firmware for a variety of ChromeOS devices. Once you've flashed it on your Chromebook, you should be able to just install Linux on it
Cool. I'll do some research from there. Ironically, I wish Google still worked for basic queries.
Neat, saw this just after I posted to the thread. Gonna bookmark this!
You'll also probably want to bookmark this: https://docs.chrultrabook.com/docs/installing/post-install.html#general-qol-fixes
The Chrultrabook project makes the distro run a bit smoother once it's installed by providing fixes for the audio stack and custom keyboard layouts to make the top row of keys work properly among other things
I'll second this, seemed to work without any issues. You can even install ChromeOS Flex on it if you still want to use a Chromebook after they stop getting updates!
Possibly. Which model?
ASUS CS23N.
C523 by any chance?
Yeah, that's likely a 5 sted S. My eyes aren't what they used to be.
pretty sure this is the Apollo Lake platform and it's very annoying to get proper Linux to run there: https://issei.space/blog/linux-on-apollo-lake/
I would only recommend you do this when you have a good idea how GNU/Linux works and have a second device to use once you need to tinker with your Chromebook to fix the inevitable issues.
If this is your only system: don't do it.
Yeah, I'm literally looking for a distro that I can slap Firefox on and nothing else. The battery life on my main system has gotten to the point that "atrocious" would be an improvement, and, well, my dad's not going to be using the Chromebook I got him in 2021, seeing as how he's dead. Much like my laptop battery.
It's possible, I've done it, but then I questioned myself as to why I did it.
If you're someone who loves to tinker and just try to get something to work for the sake of getting it to work and as a hobby project like me, then yeah, have at it.
If you're doing it to actually make it a viable and daily use pc...meh.
depending on the chromebook sometimes it's just not worth the struggle. you have the limited storage space, you potentially have quirks if the chromebook is one of those that can also be flipped around and used as a tablet. I had one and getting the screen rotation to work was a nightmare. The one I got linux on all it could really do is use a terminal and surf the web/potentially stream stuff but that's about it.
If you're looking to do it Veronica Explains has a great video on peertube about how to do it which helped me alot.
I'd just be using it so that I don't have to be plugged in all the damn time, as is needed with my daily driver.
I did this with a Lenovo N42-20. Worked really well, I got a usable Debian machine with Xfce and great battery life.
My whole goal is to just have a browsing machine. My main laptop is four years old (same age as the Chromebook, actually), but the battery has degraded to the point that I'm lucky to get a half-hour not being plugged in. Given the storage limitations, even VLC would be an extravagance, so I was just looking to do a somewhat slim install that gets me Firefox. I'd love to do KDE Neon, but that's a bit overkill for a single-app use case.
I've heard Chromebooks are such a pain to put alternative OSes on due to their BIOs. Are there efforts to just reflash these things so they aren't beholden to Alphabet? That would be the most libre-resistance move: "Un-Chrome" the device permanently.
Hmm as I was typing this I did a quick search: https://libreboot.org/docs/install/chromebooks.html
...but that's only for ARM Chromebooks.