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How to install Linux
(learn.microsoft.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The what now?
Get a USB stick, make it bootable, get your chosen distro on it and then boot from that on your Chromebook. Everything else should be self explanatory, assuming you're not going to some advanced distro.
Ventoy is a very easy way to do this, as you just drop the .iso files into its folder (and you can have multiple ones on the stick too), but not every single distro is supported (most of the commonly used ones are though).
https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en
Basically you go into the settings and find Linux development environment and turn it on. Setup always fails for me. But yeah I have a few usb keys lying around. I'll charge this chromebook and give it another go later. Do you have any suggestions for a really lightweight distro? I just want to stop using it with chrome since updates ended a year ago.
That's installing Crostini, the vm/container (Debian). Which actually works really really well, especially on on higher-end CBs. But I'd be really surprised if it runs at all, let alone well, on a CB that old.
Better would maybe be replacing ChromeOS but I've never tried to tackle that myself.