[conspire] Installing Linux on Elise Scher's Chromebook

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Elise Scher (elise.scher01 at gmail.com):

> I think I have played around with Mint a bit in the past.
> Husband Robert says he has thumb drives.

Linux Mint's OK.  On the Ubuntu-based platform, there are three DE
variants:

Cinnamon:  kind-of GNOME
MATE:  kind-of GNOME
Xfce:  what it says on the tin

Cinnamon and MATE are two different approaches to making happy people
who were fine with GNOME2 but violently hated GNOME3, trying to give them a
GNOME2-like experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon_(desktop_environment)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MATE_(software)

There's also a Debian platform, "LMDE" = Linux Mint Debian Edition,
which furnishes the KDE (v5 aka "Plasma") desktop environment.

So, one easy choice is the Xfce-flavoured ISO of the main (Ubuntu-based) 
Linux Mint ISOs.


> Now I would need to pick a distro and download it to a thumb drive.

Sure.  I'd just carefully avoid KDE and GNOME (to repeat).

> But I can’t do that on my old MacBook Air, which is the computer I use the
> most.

Sure you can.  Here's one way, and you don't even need extra software:
https://www.howtogeek.com/741125/how-to-create-a-bootable-linux-live-usb-on-your-mac/

There are also no-brainer ways, that _do_ involve downloading a little
open source tool specialised for the purpose.  One of many is Etcher 
(from Balena).  https://www.kali.org/docs/usb/live-usb-install-with-mac/

MacintoyOS is a Unix, so although a lot of the GUIfied tools are
gratuitously different, you can actually do on it just about anything
you could do on a Linux distro, including (certainly) ordinary tasks
like writing ISO files onto flash drives in a way that makes them
bootable.

One advantage of using Etcher or similar is that it reduces the
likelihood of you screwing up and overwriting your Macintoy's main
storage.  Caveat:  _Any_ time you start slinging around "sudo [blah]" 
commands (or GUIfied equivalents), you are playing with fire, wielding
root-user authority, and can with a single command clobber things past
fixing.  In general, any tools capable of doing overwriting of external
drive devices must inherently also possess the power to fire that same
cannon of destruction at the system itself.  With great power comes,
blah blah.

There are canned tutorials for writing ISOs to target disks on
Redmondware, too.

> I do have random laptops around that just sit there most of the time.

Yeah, you and I both.