[nmglug] any experience with installing gnu/linux on chromebooks?

[Mark Galassi]

I know little about installing linux on a chromebook, and I don't have
one to try on, but i do have students who would like to use chromebooks
for my course.  Of course part of the course is to install a full
distribution with all the programmer tools, so we can't just use the
ChromeOS.

Here are things I have heard, but it is all vague:

1. There is a way to unlock the boot so that you can boot from your
debian or ubuntu or fedora USB drive.  But I don't know what it looks
like after that - do you do dual boot?  Full replacement?  Does the
original ChromOS live in ROM so that you can do a full replacement and
then return?

2. I've seen someone set up some kind of apt installation on top of
chromeOS and get emacs and gnuplot going.  It seemed insufficient to get
the benefits of all the great utilities.

3. I've heard that more recent chromebook models make the #2 type of
integration work better.  I'm guessing that there are revisions of
ChromeOS, or maybe a cutoff date (any Chromebook after (say) 2019-03 has
full debian behavior, or something like that).  In that case, would
there be a resource available that lets you look up which makes and
models (HP, Dell, Lenovo, ...) ones are good for that?

So, does anyone here have resources to point me to to answer this
question: "what's the best way to run a full GNU/Linux distro on a
chromebook?"