How to convert a generic Chromebook to Linux OS
Background and Identification
A Chromebook is a laptop or a tablet that runs a Chrome OS operating system. They also have limited offline capability and are meant to operate a variety of tasks using the Google Chrome browser. Most of the data and applications are on the cloud and not on the machine itself. Because of this, they are not using traditional applications like word processing or instant messaging but instead Web apps from the Chrome Web Store. You aren’t able to install third-party software on a Chromebook, like with devices that have Windows 10 or macOS. In order to get apps, you have to go to Google Play Store. There are some features that can be viewed offline such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Keep, Google Drive, Amazon's Cloud Reader, the New York Times App, and Angry Birds. Android Apps are available on all newer Chromebooks. With the exception of the first three released devices, Chromebook uses Coreboot.
The first Chromebooks to the market were from Acer and Samsung in 2011. They were introduced at the Google I/O conference and started selling a few months later. Two years later Lenovo, Hewlett Packard, and Google entered the market. There are also non-laptop versions that have been released, for example, the Chromebox was introduced in 2012. It was a desktop. In 2014, an “all-in-one” device called the Chromebase by LG was introduced. In 2018, Acer and Google both released Chromebook tablets.
There are pros and cons of using a Chromebook. For example, Chromebooks are a lot faster than a regular laptop because it isn’t slowed down with a lot of Windows junk programs taking up storage. You don’t have a lot of processes running in the background for this reason, which makes the Chrome OS quicker. For the same reason, a downside is you can’t run your legacy macOS or Windows programs on a Chromebook and you might want to.