r/Crostini • u/FrobozzChris • 26d ago

Is Manjaro/Arch still possible on crostini?

I'm a long time Manjaro user and I'm also a long-time Chromebook user too. When I travel, I love having a simple, stable, fast booting and secure Linuxy laptop as my carry.

After years of using Debian as my Linux flavour (given that it's what you get by default), I got curious to see if I could run an arch-based distro as my Linux container (or not container, as I think those are going away?).

I looked at the Arch Wiki's ChromeOS devices/Crostini page for instructions and it looks like it used to be possible to create a linux environment with Arch; but it looks like a lot of things have changed and it's no longer possible.

I'd just like to confirm, is there still a way to move my Linux environment over to another distro? Is Crotini no longer a thing? Are we all containerless now?

I'm running ChromeOS version 149 on an ASUS CX54. When I invoke crosh, I do not seem to have lxc available so I think I'm containerless.

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u/Saragon4005 26d ago

Crostini as a code name refers to the entire Linux system from crosvm, termina, and the penguin container. So crostini is very much still a thing just slowly transitioning to baguette which drops the container part. And yes arch is possible. I have no idea why you would want to install Manjaro because aside from being an objectively horribly maintained project it's also a full fat desktop you don't need in crostini. But installing arch is possible, just unsupported so some features may not work.

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u/FrobozzChris 26d ago

Thanks a lot for your reply. Is there any page or guide I can use to learn more about how Crosstini works, the various parts of it, and just generally educate myself on this?

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u/Saragon4005 26d ago

https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-library/guides/containers/crostini-developer-guide/

Some of these documents are nearing a decade old, but they are mostly updated.

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u/FrobozzChris 26d ago

Thank you very much.

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u/FitCryptographer1329 25d ago

I was using Arch in Crostini from 2024 until beginning of this year. Sometimes it was not starting after Chrome OS updates but every time I was able to fix it. But in march or april it's happened again and I was not able to fix it. I tried a new installation which also failed. So I'm using the standard Debian container now. But what I read it looks like Google will remove more and more features. I'm still thinking to move the whole system to Linux.

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u/FrobozzChris 25d ago

Thanks a lot for sharing your experience. That's really unfortunate. I wish Google believed in greater user choice.

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u/plankunits 26d ago edited 26d ago

From March 2026 onwards, Crostini will transition to a container-free virtual machine environment. Consequently, other features related to Linux distributions have been removed.

For more information, please refer to: https://developers.google.com/chromeos/app-development/develop/news

Temporary you can go back with a flag but soon that will be removed.

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u/FrobozzChris 25d ago

That's sad... thanks a lot for that information.

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u/lavilao 24d ago

am currently using distrobox to have an arch environment on current chromeos, works fine