I recently inherited an old Acer Chromebook that was EOL (end of life - not eligible for security updates from Google any more). That's unacceptable for me in the current cyber-climes.
I had some experience with ChromeOS Flex (link below), a new-ish version of ChromeOS that can be run on any hardware. I had put it on a USB drive and run it from there on my old Apple Air laptop, which was too old to get MAC security updates, and too slow really for Windows or current version of Ubuntu Linux. I had been running Server Ubuntu (command line only, no desktop). But ChromeOS really shined on that hardware, and running from USB. For browsing, including sites like Youtube, it felt snappy. It was really incredible.
So I wondered if I could somehow "jailbreak" the Chromebook and put ChromeOS Flex on it and get my updates that way. Sure enough I found some help doing that:
https://www.androidpolice.com/install-chromeos-flex-chromebook-explainer/
Those instructions required a UEFI bios, so I followed the link to:
There I learned how to turn off the physical firmware lock, by opening the laptop case and taking out a screw on the motherboard, enter Recovery mode and Developer mode, and from there run a script to wipe and reload the firmware with the UEFI bootloader.
So then back to the first link to figure out how to load ChromeOS Flex from USB.
I had a little trouble because my lock screw location did not match any of the pictures I could find Googling. But I eventually figured out which one it was. The motherboard hold down screws had little holes all around their location.
It runs great!
Learn:
https://chromeenterprise.google/os/chromeosflex/
Install:
