Native Manjaro on Acer Chromebook Spin 513, R841LT (aarch64)?

Hi! I would have liked to try install Manjaro on my Acer Chromebook Spin 513, R841LT - which is ARM aarch64 based:

$ uname -a
Linux localhost 5.15.89-16172-g8db7d2810659 #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Mar 7 19:06:47 PST 2023 aarch64 GNU/Linux

I thought I’ll just download https://github.com/manjaro-arm/generic-images/releases/download/23.02/Manjaro-ARM-kde-plasma-generic-23.02.img.xz put it on an USB-drive and boot from it, but it seems the Chromebook bootloader will only accept special Chrome-OS installation media. wtf :frowning:

Is there a way to get Manjaro on this device, besides using it as a virtual machine inside ChromeOS? With the low memory available on this device, I don’t consider that to be a good idea…

I’ve found this project:

But it seems that doesn’t support ARM-based Chromebooks.

There’s a project that looks like it installs Arch ARM with chroot inside ChromeOS:

but sadly it’s 6 years old…

please help, I’d love to read some suggestions how to get an OS that can run more than just a browser + android apps on this device…

Ah, so I now found this project:

which offers Debian & Ubuntu images for my device. Not perfect, but better than ChromeOS :slight_smile: