How I managed to install a working IntelliJ Idea CE on an ARM Chromebook

Despite official Linux support in ChromeOS, ARM based Chromebook owners are still being orphans of dedicated builds for most tools.

Nowadays you can easily download and install Visual Studio Code but ARM based Chromebook still lack official support from Android Studio (and we’re still a long way to it, if ever…) or even IntelliJ IDEA on which AS is based.

Here follows my experience in installing IntelliJ IDEA CE on my Lenovo Chromebook Duet and a simple step by step guide on how to succed in doing the same.

First of all let’s state that my Chromebook is an aarch64 (or ARM64) machine.
Crawling the web you will find that so far it is not possible to download an official package built for that architecture, so you have to start from the generic linux build.

Unfortunately Linux package of IDEA CE is not fully functional on ARM Chromebooks, in particular you will find that bundled JBR (Jetbrains runtime witch you should want to have beacause it ships with many patches from Jetbrains to the OpenJDK) is built for x86–64 as well as the bundled file watcher (fsnotifier) which will result in very slow external file changes sync.