My Experience with Linux on a Chromebook

Note: This is not a tutorial, just what my experience has been.

So, recently, I needed a new laptop because the low specs of my previous one were starting to get really annoying (had little RAM and slow storage, leading to freezes).

What I got was an Acer Chromebook Spin 712. It was on sale for around $420 refurbished.

Getting a Linux-friendly bootloader on this laptop is more difficult than others, but not too bad. Newer Chromebooks like this one have more security features preventing you from installing other operating systems. Apparently, booting the laptop with the battery unplugged only from the power adapter disables it. Not too bad, but it was annoying to have to dismantle it. Then, I could use MrChromebox's firmware utility script to give me a new bootloader.

Once I had that done, I needed to find a Linux distro to try on it! My friend wanted me to try distros without systemd, since I'd never tried without it before. I tried two different distros before settling on one.

First, I tried Void Linux. They aren't based on anything and have their own package manager and stuff, which is pretty cool. First impressions of it were that it was very lean. This is great if you want to setup and tinker with your system yourself, but I like having stuff that works out of the box without a huge amount of configuration.

Next, I tried Artix Linux KDE. Artix is basically Arch with a nice installer and without systemd. I like Arch, so I enjoyed my time with it. It seemed to work pretty well, until I guess I must have installed something and it completely broke being able to boot it, so, I moved on to another distro.

Finally, I tried MX Linux, which is based on Debian. It's the only distro so far to have touch screen drivers without any setup.

So far, I am really liking MX Linux. It comes with a bunch of tools to help you do stuff, which is very nice to see. There are a lot of apps I don't want or need, but, I would honestly rather have extra apps I can remove afterwards than needing to install a bunch of stuff myself separately.

Unfortunately, the internal audio and the keyboard backlight do not work yet. I've found an old GitHub repository that allowed you to mess with the keyboard backlight, but I haven't gotten it to work yet. Possibly with some edits I can get it to work. Who knows.

Also, the default fan curve from the MrChromebox firmware makes the fan run really loud at idle. I'm not sure how to change or fix that either.

Anyway, that was my experience with it. Hope you enjoyed my journal-like article.