How I Turned My Chromebook Into A "Mintbook"

LXer Feature: 08-Jul-2024 How I turned a brand new Chromebook that kinda worked into a Linux Laptop that totally rocks!

So in my previous article I talked about how I got a nice Chromebook a couple of months back, but it wouldn't let me install any apps to it no matter what I tried. I called HP support (it's an HP) a few times and they had no idea what was going on which kinda ticked me off because I wanted to be able to take advantage of all the cool things I had heard it could do.

I had burned the latest Linux Mint 21.3 onto a USB stick I had and run it live a few times already and everything worked fine so I knew if I installed it, it should work just fine. I burned it by installing an extension onto Chrome called the 'Chromebook Recovery Extension Tool'. That tool allowed me to burn the .ios of Linux Mint 21.3 that I had downloaded onto my USB stick. It was that USB stick that I used to see if my Chromebook would run Linux like I wanted it too without any hardware issues and like I said before it did. It ran awesome, saw my WiFi card, HD, graphics worked great, everything.

I wanted to dual-boot Linux on it anyway and after sitting around with my hands in my pockets for two months I finally decided screw it! So, a about a week ago I plugged in the USB and installed Mint right over ChromeOS and in less than 30 minutes BANG! I had myself a brand new Linux Mint Laptop!

It's an HP, 14", 120-gig HD, 16gig RAM, Intel Celeron 4-core 2.6gh, Intel Gemini Lake GPU with a camera, microphone, USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports, a serial port and a Micro SD slot. Plus I got a 64-gig Micro SD drive to save files too for an extra backup. Along with the 64-gig USB stick I had off to the side.

I went through these two links worth of tweaks..

21 best things to do after installing Linux Mint – Linux Mint 21.3 edition

Speed Up your Mint!

I didn't do all of them but a lot, changed how much of my SWAP memory I used and all kinds of stuff. So far overall they have worked. My machine is faster and I assume going into the future will be much more in tune. I still have some programs I want to install and things like that but so far..I'm in love. Just like I knew I'd be. One of the great things about Cinnamon is how much you can configure it. I've customized the look of the terminal and made it see through as well as tweaked the color of the theme and all kinds of things.

One thing I haven't mentioned so far is that since installing Linux (it just so happens to be Mint) on my system by battery life has gotten much better, as in a lot, noticeably better. It lasts almost twice as long as it did running ChromeOS. I'm amazed.

Why have a Chromebook that kinda works, when you can have a Linux Laptop that totally rocks!