If you have an Acer Aspire Switch, like my Acer Aspire Switch SW3–016, I recommend you throw it away; secondhand linuxified chromebooks are the way to go if you can secure one for yourself. But if you chose to suffer, I post the following snippet from my now deleted Medium article, jumping right to the core solution. 4 comments in Medium in 2022 vouched for this solution, but I am no longer and am unwilling to entertain any quirks regarding OS architecture or driver support for this device I long since thrown away.
So how did I do it? By conquering Secure Boot. Secure boot will be your major obstacle towards replacing your Windows 10 in your Acer Aspire Switch 10 with Linux Mint.
Installing Linux Mint in this device will be like any installation process involving installing a Linux Distribution on a device with Secure Boot. In our scenario, we will be using Linux Mint Cinnamon 20.3, the latest version as of this writing. Download the ISO, create a bootable flashdrive using Rufus, then from your device’s boot menu, set your device to boot from the flashdrive or USB port, and go through with Linux Mint installation, but create your own partitions. Follow this tutorial for a step-by-step process.
What I am going to show you is getting around the “No Bootable Media Found” error. Because when you are going to restart your device after installation, this would be the first error you’d see.
Remember Acer’s Boot Menu? Tutorials would often tell you to disable Secure Boot when installing Linux Mint. But after installing Linux Mint, once you have to reboot the device, you must enable it.
Again, I repeat, you must enable Secure Boot after installing Linux Mint on your Acer Aspire Switch 10.
This is temporary. You will do this so that you can register your Linux Mint’s Extensible System Interface (.efi) so that it can boot into it. What is this file is too much jargon for you and I; in our case we need our installation’s appropriate .efi file so that it boots.
Here are the steps:
- After installing Linux Mint, restart the device. But upon restart, enter the boot menu.
- Go to the setting where you disabled Secure Boot (which you most likely had to disable to enable to boot to USB). Enable this.
- Go to the setting where you had to set a Supervisor password. Set it up.
- Enabling Secure Boot and setting up a Supervisor password would open a setting in the Acer Aspire Switch boot menu that will allow you to register your new .efi file (“SELECT AN UEFI FILE AS TRUSTED FOR EXECUTING” under 3. Security). This is originally disabled. If this setting is still disabled when you’ve set your password or re-enabled Secure boot, you may have to restart your device again and go into the Boot Menu, which should give you a password prompt. Secure Boot must be enabled, and SELECT AN UEFI FILE AS TRUSTED FOR EXECUTING under 3. Security should already be open at this stage. Click that.
- Clicking the UEFI file selection should show you your newly installed partitions that have .efi files in it. Click through it, and click the boot files that you think should be trusted. There might be multiple .efi files, and you may have to make them all trusted. Tutorials usually tell you to register grubx64.efi as a trusted file, but after trusting all those .efi files, fbx64.efi was the boot file that allowed me to boot to Linux Mint.
- By the way, registering the file as trusted is tricky. When you click the file, a prompt menu will open, and an empty textbox will show with a button below. YOU MUST TYPE THE FILENAME WITH EXTENSION OF THE FILE ON THIS TEXTBOX THAT JUST APPEARED to register it as trusted. I took way too long on this part.
- Navigate back to the Boot Tab on your boot menu. You can already disable Secure Boot at this point.
- Among the list of bootable devices, your approved .efi files (or at least the one your device accepts) should show. It is a matter of trial and error of rearranging the boot order of the .efi files to see which one, when booted first, will allow you to boot directly to Linux Mint. In my case, shimx64.efi, mmx64.efi and fbx64.efi were the only ones to be recognized on the boot menu, and fbx64.efi was the only one that made my installation work. (I did set them all the detected .efi to trusted by the way, even the ones that were detected but did not appear on this part).
- And once you figured out the .efi that boots directly to your Linux Mint, you may remove/unregister the other .efis from the boot order (the boot menu gives you option to remove your custom added .efi files in the boot order).
And with that, I have salvaged a crappy 2–in-1 netbook from being bricked by Windows updates into a Linux Mint netbook. And yes it handles touch input reasonably well for a Linux distribution; the virtual touchpad just doesn’t pop up at the instance that touch typing is required. But it’s good enough for my docked typing needs. And hopefully this guide is good enough for those of you with barely-breathing Acer Aspire Switch devices broken down by Windows.