Dual booting with chrome OS while retaining school content: is it possible?

Don't fuck with school computers, it's not your property. If you wanna mess around with Linux, I will literally send you my laptop. Don't get in trouble when it's not necessary, especially because it seems like your reasoning for this whole thing is, "they left a door open", like my cat every time I open the refrigerator. And just like my cat, you will be tossed out.

I have worked with district IT depts.

If you're in the US, and the school is public, you will get fucked.

The taxpayers paid for that Chromebook. The IT dept has agreements on how they're used. The technology Integrationist sets the rules.

You violate the rules, you get fucked. The school does not care if you fail; the liability is bigger than you. A lot bigger. You cross a line like this and you become a casualty. That's it. You will lose your device. Your account will be locked. You will get in further trouble trying (and failing) to sign in on a friends device. Your friend will also get in trouble, unless you stole it.

Do. Not. Do this.

Inb4 "don't do this": I do not care, and this does not help. If the task becomes too much for me, then I'm not doing it.

I don't care. Don't do this. Depending on where you live, altering your school assigned computer in this manner can be legally considered malicious abuse of a computer because you are not authorized to do so and would be exceeding your authorization to use that computer. That can carry a fine and imprisonment, and depending on circumstances can also remove your privilege to access any computer in the future, or even to be within a certain distance of one. This will severely limit your ability to live in increasingly computerized locations.

Even if you do think you got away with it, your school's IT department will know what you did, and they will be easily able to connect it to you. Whether they report that to police or not will depend on a lot of factors, but it would be more intelligent for you to simply avoid it altogether.

Even if you do decide to attempt this, you'll most likely lose all data on the ChromeOS side, but you would also not be able to access the ChromeOS software from Linux. Your school would just see your chromebook as powered off. So you would really only be using the Linux side when not at the school, at which point why not just use a different computer to do the work and then filetransfer to your chromebook? If its really as slow as you say then even a public library computer still running Windows XP would be more than fast enough for like, 95% of all schoolwork.

It isn't possible.

You would absolutely wipe those apps. Guardian might well reinstall, but the others won't, because they aren't installed the same way. The last time someone asked this on reddit, a response went into detail about why it's a fail, maybe you can find that post (assuming it wasn't deleted by the poster, and the responses are still there).

But the gist was that it isn't worth trying because it ends up being too easy to detect even if the apps did reinstall themselves. Since there's a degree of financial liability involved, it isn't like the experiment is consequence free; schools can, and will, send a nasty bill for it. There was a bit of a problem with it at some schools here and there, and it was generally considered to be the same as destroying the device. While that's dumb as hell, you or your parents would still be on the hook.

Now, if none of that means anything to you, do what you're gonna do, I ain't your dad. Just go into it aware that it probably won't end with you having a totally open device for free.

It wipes data, it’s often not worth it (usually CBs for k12 are 16gb rom). When I managed my admin console I ran Linux on a CB to help resolve an issue we had with Zoom due to device limitations, but Linux at the time was still crippled by no correct access to microphone, which may have since changed. It’s a school device, just leave it be. You’re going to come up on state standardized testing time which means they’ll likely lock down your updates to prevent any further ones from applying. Plus you’ll most likely create a situation where the device will have to be power washed and reset again to comply with secure browsers.

Most likely developer mode was left open as certain programming classes required it to be open in order to run some interface I can’t remember.

You'd want to image your disk to external media, wipe the Chromebook, set up the dual boot, then restore the image to the partition for Chrome.

That being said, I'm not sure you can do this, and, even if it did work, every time you're in Mint, as far as the school is concerned, your Chromebook would be off. The Kiosk apps, GoGuardian, what have you aren't going to run in Linux.

Does the machine have a socketed SSD? Just swap the drive.

Also I'd highly suggest not doing this because the last thing you'd want is to get caught and get banned from using a computer at school.

1. Don't modify the installed OS or the hardware. Too risky, for the reasons already mentioned.

2. Get a USB drive and install a live Linux system with persistent storage. Manually boot to the USB drive instead of the internal drive. That way, you can try out Linux and see if it lets you do everything you need.

The nice thing about running from a USB stick is that it'll be portable, so you'll be able to run it on other machines, too.

Permanently Deleted

If your intent is to bypass restrictions, at least test my project that is far safer than any of this.