Now only you will know how to boot your Chromebook and there won’t be instructions on the screen. If you are concerned that another person will press the Spacebar and then Enter and destroy your little experiment, press the left arrow key a few times to change the language on this screen to something like Korean – this change will be saved for future boot-ups. You will see this screen every time you boot your Chromebook in Developer Mode.

The next screen will say that OS verification is off.

Then press and hold ESC+Refresh+Power until you get a screen that says ChromeOS is missing. Note that Developer Mode completely wipes your Chromebook, so back up any files to Google Drive or elsewhere before getting started. The newer (and cheaper) model of the Acer R11 has an Intel Celeron N3160 with Intel HD Graphics 400, making for a cheap, fast, long battery, netbook-like device that can still play games on the lower end of the spectrum. I haven’t tried anything twitchy, but I would assume only older titles will perform well. On my Acer R11 CB5-132T-C1LK with an Intel Celeron N3150, 4GB RAM, 32GB Flash storage, I can smoothly play: This should be possible on any Intel-based Chromebook. The way this works is that your device is always using ChromeOS’s Linux kernel, but you’re running a chroot (essentially a fake root file system) that contains everything needed to run software from Ubuntu. But, with Developer Mode, a script called Crouton developed by a Google employee in his off-time, and a bit of effort, you can have a low-end laptop that runs both ChromeOS and an Ubuntu Linux desktop at the same time – without dual-booting. You might think that ChromeOS cannot run games that aren’t browser-based, and by itself you would not be wrong. Update #2: A Chrome security update necessitates running a command on the Crouton script before running it the first time. Update: I recently updated this walkthrough for Ubuntu Xenial instead of Trusty because that’s what I’m using now.

Crouton chromeos