So... ChromeOS is basically Gentoo Linux fairly locked down, and running a pure Google ecosystem - that is, basically all the linux apps replaced with Chrome and links to all of Google's web properties and apps that they haven't killed yet :p (still bitter about reader, igoogle, wave, labs etc)

I've got one of them. It's kinda fun. Chrome's a memory hog but that's to be expected - and since it isn't running anything else, there's nothing for it to hog up except itself.

Luckily for you, back in 2012, Mozilla decided to play to the strength of their javascript engine and help support cross-compiling using emscripten. We had someone spend a fair amount of time on this and got to a functioning demo. These days, Chrome has gotten a lot better at accelerating that kind of JS so it would work pretty well - it even worked in ChromeOS of the time, kinda.

Unfortunately for you, it is using a deprecated API so the demo on the website probably won't work in your Chrome.

Last year, frd made some efforts to resurrect but ran into some bug w/ file system load and didn't dig further.

Now, these days, wasm is the new hotness, and Google has signed on board with that, so if someone wanted to attempt the web port again, that would probably be the target to use. It still requires someone to spend time on it. You interested in working on a cross-compile?

You do have another option. Since ChromeOS is basically Gentoo - switching to dev mode then dual booting or chrooting another linux is totally feasible... You could probably even, with some effort, get linux apps running in "ChromeOS"

There's one caveat. The Arm version of the laptops, last I checked, was using a proprietary graphics driver that wasn't capable of offering graphics acceleration in the chroots, and was pretty tricky to get running in a dual boot situation. If you're on an x86 chromebook, that wouldn't be the case.

Good luck!

Hmm, what about just installing proper GNU/Linux distro instead of this junk?

@Lyberta - that's actually what we did w/ ours - it's a pain tho since google makes it really really easy to wipe out all your work. You're prompted at boot to reset from the "dev" mode every startup, so one accidental keypress and boom. No more real OS.
Also the video driver thing was a pain. Apart from that worked well.

Wow, that's horrible. This proves that using anything made by Google is dangerous.

Heh... You might enjoy this then, although it wasn't *deliberately* malicious.
So, if you enable "dev mode" to gain root on your device, then enabled alsamixer, the alsamixer profile they had at the time exposed toggles that apparently allowed you to send way way way too much current to the speakers. When trying to figure out why the sound was so quiet and fiddling in alsamixer setting everything to 100% I suddenly noticed my speakers were smoking.

That wasn't directly google's fault - apart from their initial response to others discovering this too, and the fact that the bad profile hadn't really been tested.

But was kinda funny. Way way way too easy to set the chromebook on fire.

Oh. And if you enabled dev mode (which anyone could do) then doing this required nothing more than physical access to the laptop - it could even be done as a stupid prank by your schoolmate. That is, the way the chromebook is setup, once dev mode is enabled even a guest profile could do this.

Fun stuff. I installed Debian on my phone in chroot and a few days ago I wanted to update it to latest Testing release and glibc said I need kernel version at least 3.2. My phone has Linux 3.0.8. So basically my phone is useless. Thanks Google/Samsung.

hmmmm I'm using LTS ubuntu successfully in a chroot using these instructions. specifically for the udev stuff.
https://blog.tan-ce.com/chroot-ubuntu-14-04-on-android-nexus-10/

but yeah, annoying.

I figured out how to dual boot ubuntu on chromebook and am currently installing hedgewars. I must say, it's very hard. You have to go through this process: https://itsfoss.com/install-linux-chromebook/, download hedgewars, and install hedgewars.