Using Linux on Chrome OS
It’s now easy to enable Linux on Chrome OS, but why would you want to and are low-spec machines fast enough?
The early years of Chrome OS were often marred by grumbles that the Chromebook was too reliant on internet connectivity to get anything done, and that it couldn’t run “proper” applications, only simple web-based apps. It didn’t take Google long to address these issues, first with extensions that enabled many Chrome apps to run without a live connection and then by allowing users to install Android apps.
In 2018, however, Google added the ability to run Linux applications in a Linux container hosted within Chrome OS. At first an experimental option, dubbed Crostini, it has moved out of the Chrome OS beta channel and into the mainstream: it’s now accessible to all Chromebook users and has been enhanced and upgraded. And while it was primarily designed to allow developers to use Linux tools and IDEs on their Chromebooks, it also runs a wide range of Linux desktop apps. So, if you want to run a fully featured office application or image editor on a Chromebook, this is the best way to get it done.
Enabling Linux
Before you can install applications, you need to enable Linux support. Click on the notifications widget in the bottom-right corner of the screen, then click the gear icon to go into the Settings menu. Click Apps on the lefthand side and enable the “Linux development environment (beta)” on the right. This kickstarts the process, and while you’ll lose 7.5GB of your storage to the Linux container, you can adjust this later – or just remove the whole container if you don’t feel like using Linux anymore.
Installing applications
Once the environment installs, you’ll be hit with a Terminal window – there’s no UI for Linux within Chrome OS. This means you need to install applications using the Terminal, but this isn’t too challenging. For many common Linux applications, such as LibreOffice or GIMP, all it takes is a
sudo apt-get command, such as: sudo apt-get install libreoffice
This installs LibreOffice and… sudo apt-get install gimp …will install GIMP. The only reason not to do it this way is that you may be stuck with an older version. For example, installing LibreOffice this way gets you LibreOffice 6 from 2018 rather than the modern LibreOffice 7.
The easiest way around this is to use Flatpak, a utility for installing and managing Linux applications that works well within Chrome OS. First, you need to update the Chrome OS Linux installation with:
sudo apt update ; sudo apt upgrade ; sudo apt full-upgrade
Next, install Flatpak with:
sudo apt install flatpak
You can now add the latest Flatpak repository through:
flatpak --user remote-add --if-notexists flathub https://flathub. org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
Then search for the application you want to install with the command:
flatpak search 'application name'
You’ll get a list of any relevant applications, with what Flatpak calls each app listed in the Application column. Sticking with our example of LibreOffice, you can just install it with: flatpak install flathub org.libreoffice. LibreOffice
Using applications
Once you’ve installed applications, they’ll appear in a new Linux apps folder in the Chrome OS launcher, and they’ll launch within the Chrome OS UI with a click.
But there’s a gotcha. Linux apps can only see files within the new Linux files folder that appears under “My files” in the Files app. As a result, if you want to work with any existing documents or images, you’ll need to move them into that folder in Files. Similarly, any files you want to export out to Google Drive need to be copied out of that folder into a Drive folder. It’s a slight pain but not a major issue.
Is it worth it? It is if you’ve found yourself constrained by using web-based apps, although most serious Chromebook users would argue that the fast, direct-to-cloud usage model is one of the strengths of Chrome OS.
It’s also the only realistic way to use a Chromebook as a development platform. You can use tools such as Visual Studio Code or Atom and get work done, and the easy maintenance of Chromebooks, not to mention the ability to PowerWash and reset them, makes them an effective, low-cost tool for development and testing.
You need to be realistic about performance. It’s a lot better than it was, as Google has enabled hardware acceleration through Crostini without having to manually change a bunch of system-level flags, but performance will still vary, particularly on lowend, Celeron-based models. If you plan to use a lot of Linux apps, it’s worth splashing out on a higher-spec Chromebook and getting plenty of storage while you’re at it.
“If you want to run a fully featured office application or image editor on a Chromebook, this is the best way to get it done”