You don't actually need to provide an email address if you have Google Chrome installed.
You can use the Chromebook recovery tool (a browser extension) to write an installer image to a flash drive. I'm pretty sure you need 8GB of space or more. Others have intercepted and extracted the downloaded image, but I never cared enough to use that approach.
This process doesn't work with all Chromium derived browsers, though, probably because they added extra permissions to the extension because I wouldn't normally want a browser extension to have raw disk access.
ChromeOS Flex is for amd64 chips as far as I can tell and your Chromebook actually runs on an ARM chip, so I doubt it'll work (for now, at least). You never know, maybe they'll release an ARM version in the future, but I sort of doubt it.
Is there a community of "ChromeOS distros" like how LineageOS does with open source Android for older phones?
My only experience trying to build ChromeOS was for "Container-Optimized OS" which doesn't have nearly the same "random binary blobs" problem as trying to build for a piece of consumer hardware
The ChromeOS equivalent of LineageOS is usually just installing a normal linux desktop distro, sometimes one that's been been tweaked to have drivers specific to chromebook hardware like GalliumOS (https://galliumos.org/)
And yet, there are a lot of early adopters of Chromebooks who modded them to share the kernel with a full linux environment, tied to a key toggle, while still using the lighter browser-as-OS for its strength, web browsing. Myself included.
Keep in mind, Google's reputation among hackers has dropped a lot in recent years. Trying out an operating system where the core premise was "you spend 95% of your time on your netbook just in a browser, why not optimize for that and strip away the rest" was an intriguing proposal. This was back when doing things in web apps instead of desktop apps was new and forward-thinking, not totally overdone the way it is now.
There's FydeOS (dunno much about it other than it came up in a search for "CloudReady ARM", CloudReady being the name of ChromeOS Flex prior to acquisition) or build-it-yourself ChromiumOS.
For x86 chromebooks there's https://mrchromebox.tech/ to replace the firmware with a normal UEFI-booting coreboot, and then you just install whatever you want on it because now it's basically a normal PC.
For ARM chromebooks I'm only aware of https://archlinuxarm.org/ and that's still pretty patchy; I hope that something comes together (or that it already exists and I just haven't found it yet).
I wanted to try this in a VM but the install image seems to lack decent drivers for libvirt/kvm/virt-manager/whatever caused issues. The cursor was invisible, the system was slow, and the system didn't boot after I finally got it to install.
This may say nothing about ChromeOS Flex's actual performance on real hardware, but open source virtualisation tech seems like an obvious point to start at when you're developing an OS for general purpose use.
Hopefully support will be better in time, this could be an excellent balance between Windows 11 growing ever more resource hungry and Linux being difficult to maintain by novices.
You shouldn’t be getting downvoted for that. It’s a fair question for those educated in Google’s history of cancelling products and uneducated in Chrome OS.
A lot of people are unaware that Google is deeply committed in the OS space. Apart from Android, which they saw/see as an existential need for their business, Chrome OS fills a similar space on the desktop (especially as MS ramps up their anticompetitive efforts with their own browser again).
Google also uses a chromium build internally in GCP/GKE, so the OS is being maintained for servers as well.
Lastly, Chrome OS has been around for a long time and is based off an open source project with passionate maintainers.
Lol at the comment around Microsoft's "anti-competitive efforts" which were making IE a core part of Windows, in a thread about Chrome OS which makes Chrome core to the OS, and in a world where Chrome has the dominant market share and is solidifying it by building it into their products.
I'm not sure that those are really the same; Google already had Chrome and then made an OS to run it, while MS had OS dominance and used that to force everyone to have IE. The analog would be if Google made Chrome automatically add a ChromeOS dual-boot option to every Windows PC it was installed on.
Both companies are cut from exactly the same cloth - e.g. for a closer example of how Google behaves in an identical way we can look at Android which has OS market dominance and uses that to encourage/force everyone to use their app store and services (e.g. you also nerf your phone without using a Google account, the average user will struggle to install alternative app stores).
Are you aware that MS is again making it difficult to switch away from their own browser and tries to force people to switch back to it even after having switched away? Would you not call that an increase in anticompetitiveness? Do you see how that plus them setting the default to Bing is harmful to Google’s interests?
Why is it anti-competitive when Microsoft does it but not when Google does it?
Google has the dominant mobile OS and pulls all the same tricks, and although Chrome OS isn't dominant yet it goes even further in entirely blocking other browsers by design.
> Do you see how that plus them setting the default to Bing is harmful to Google’s interests?
Anti-competitive doesn't mean harmful to Google's interests, it's supposed to mean it's harmful to a competitive market.
I was really excited about Flex when I first heard about it. I then heard it didn't have Widevine or Android or Linux features. I don't know if that changed, but I wouldn't be surprised if not. If it did ship those it would be a great distro for a lot of people.
It's debian. Yes you can install packages. You get a built in terminal running bash but you can install a terminal program or she'll just fine.
Linux app support is extremely good. Everything works with the window manager quite well. Even steam is available for games. Only limits I've hit are when interacting with hardware devices, but I havent done it enough to tell you exactly what the limits are
Assuming it's the same as normal ChromeOS, it's a containerized full linux shell that will run most GUI apps in the native window manager. It defaults to Debian, so uses standard apt, but you can make a container with any distro if you have the know-how.
Personally I would cut off more. "Early access to Chrome OS Flex" is the factual statement about the topic of the post and "The upgrade PCs and Macs have been waiting for" isn't
Meanwhile, the Chromebooks we use at an after-school program where I teach are no longer receiving security updates. I'm not sure how old the machines are, but they're quite speedy compared to other Chromebooks I've used, and perfectly capable of browsing the modern web.
I love the idea of Chrome OS Flex, but I wish Google extended the same support to hardware designed for Chrome OS...
Meanwhile 20 year old machines running linux still get updates. How is it that software support became tied to specific hardware? This used to be a solved problem, but with a lot of effort and ingenuity, a few corporations un-solved it, first for smartphones, tablets, and now for whatever Chromebooks count as.
I suspect Google will eventually use Chrome OS Flex as a subscription service to provide extended Hardware/Software support for Education and Enterprise. They came up with Chrome OS Flex after buying Neverware in 2020, which already provided Chrome OS support for Education and Enterprise.
Yeah, as I was reading the page I was wonder who this is really for, the links in the last paragraph were a tip-off.
> Visit the Chrome OS Flex _website_ to learn more, get installation instructions, and see certified devices. Additionally, if you want to combine modern computing with cloud-first management, you can _start a free trial_ of Chrome Enterprise Upgrade to secure and manage your Chrome OS Flex devices.
The free trial link says:
> Chrome Enterprise Upgrade provides a simple and secure way to manage your Chrome OS devices in the admin console.
> Sign up for a free 30-day trial of the Chrome Enterprise Upgrade and enroll up to 50 existing Chromebooks in your organization.
I am writing this comment on Chrome OS Flex and can not say enough good things about Chrome OS Flex. I installed it on my wife's old macbook air (~2013) and it brought new life to a machine that we had written off as useless.
The OS does a great job of exactly two things: web browsing and linux stuff. It won't do more than that, but if that's all you need it is great.
I honestly think you could make some decent cash just by buying 9 year old laptops off the internet, installing chrome OS flex, and selling them as perfectly usable chromebooks.
Last time I ran chromeOS it was those unofficial builds by a guy called “Lex”, needless to say it was a long time ago.
Back then it wasn’t possible to run anything other than Chrome itself outside of dev mode, but I’ve seen people running/installing VSCode on chromeOS (not in the web browser). Is that feasible?
At the same time as I was seeing this, it appeared that the OS actually has a windowing system now, so you can move windows around and have one on top of the other, is that the case? Any quirks with that?
By default, there is only web browsers and no Linux. Which is nice because by default there can be no malware and it's a good OS for non technical users.
But with one click it installs and makes available Linux. It appears to the user as a debain variant. You can install anything and when you run apps they seamlessly work with the window manager. I've used VScode for software development and it works great. Steam is even available for games, but I haven't tried it.
Window manager is the right balance of powerful and simple. Great at manipulating web browser windows (has virtual desktops if you want them), but works fine interacting with Linux apps as well.
Is it Google in name only or does it send telemetry of my every click to the mother ship? Would be interested in trying it as a VSCode remote development + minimal Linux utilities platform.
I don't know what sort of telemetry exists. It is easy to try out. From my memory you can use the install USB just as a normal boot drive without installing. So you can go try it out and see if you like it before you install it
The same way all browsers prevent malware? Sandboxing and regular patches to patch holes in the sandbox?
The Chrome team is very responsive to vulnerabilities in my experience, they roll out security patches extremely quickly and chrome autoupdates you to the latest version soon after.
Yes, the same way. That's literally the point I'm making. OPs original comment, "By default, there is only web browsers and no Linux. Which is nice because by default there can be no malware and it's a good OS for non technical users."
As if ChromeOS isn't going to get malware the same way all OSes do.
What's also great is you can install apps through Flatpak and Chrome OS Flex will recognize it and you can pin it to your shelf. There's a fork of VSCode called VSCodium through Flatpak, which doesn't send telemetry to Microsoft. I've also installed Steam, Discord, Libreoffice in Flatpak without any issues.
I mean, the fact that it can be done is neat, but on most entry-level Chromebooks it will be a memory hog, and you might be better served with vim or emacs (one or both of which should be learned to functional competence levels by every programmer), because then you'd have more room for running stuff.
The BestBuy around the corner from me, for example, is selling an Asus Chromebook with a Celeron N3350/4GB RAM/64GB eMMC and 15.6" 720p screen for $400 CAD.
Is this not underpowered? Sure there are other options, but to most people the appeal was the low cost. For $799, I'd just buy a PC.
A number of models with 4 GiB RAM are still floating around out there; I consider that underpowered if you are going to be running a browser + heavyweight apps (Visual Studio Code is heavyweight). For Windows 1x, 4 GiB is barely usable; ChromeOS does better but today's memory-hungry apps can take that advantage away.
The UX is extremely easy to use. For most users, you're just using web browsers and the window manager for chrome os is designed for just manipulating browser windows.
Unless you install Linux stuff (most users don't) you can't download any software. This means no malware is possible.
It guides you to store everything in the cloud, which allows you to treat your workstations as cattle rather than pets.
Yes. You can also install vscode etc. Seamlessly integrated into the UI - cannot tell the difference between "native" ChromeOS apps and e.g. Firefox etc.
At least on "normal" Chromebooks anyway you can - I have no direct experience or knowledge of flex.
I tried Visual Studio Code in this release and it doesn't work. Never opens. Tried this old suggestion https://www.reddit.com/r/chromeos/comments/m146zd/visual_stu... and the only change I see is that visual studio progress and trying to run until it doesn't after a few minutes.
It’s not supposed to be extraordinary. It’s supposed to be simple and cheap and robust and working. Storing data in the cloud is part of that contract — if something happens to your computer (physical damage), you can get up and working very quickly with a new one. As in — you buy a new computer, sign in, and you’re done.
It’s not a set of trade offs that work for everyone, but it works well for many environments. I would have loved these back I the day when I had to maintain Windows clients for people to just turn around and use RDP to connect to a terminal server. Having a light weight client (that was secure) would have made that scenario much nicer.
The difference between ChromeOS and any Linux distro is like night and day. The software updates are automatic, unobtrusive, and almost instantaneous. Multitouch input stack actually works. You can attach and detach displays as you like without anything weird happening. And all the binaries are highly optimized with profile guidance and link-time optimization.
> The software updates are automatic, unobtrusive, and almost instantaneous. Multitouch input stack actually works. You can attach and detach displays as you like without anything weird happening.
I don't know about that multitouch thing and what it provides (is it similar to using 2 fingers to scroll down), I never have any weird thing happening when I attach/detach display and I would describe my software update as automatic, unobtrusive and fast on my fedora laptops.
No idea what "binaries highly optimized with profile guidance and link-time optimization" are though.
I put stock Ubuntu on a 2011 Air and I've been having all sorts of problems with it, most notably black screen on re-opening the lid after every 2nd closure. And power management generally.
So I'd be tempted to try the Flex thing just to see how that goes.
That's odd. My wife is still using a mid-2013 MacBook Air as a daily driver - using MacOS, and it's fine or browsing, Office, e-mail etc etc. In what way was yours 'useless'?
My daily driver is a 2013 air on arch. Works 100% perfect for everything I want to do. My work computer is an i7 32 gig beast. I don’t need that for checking gmail.
Ha, for a minute I thought Google actually built a Cloud-native OS. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't really see the use-case for this. Sounds like it could be an orchestration solution for schools or bootcamps at best. What's incredible about real cloud-native operating systems is that "OS" is merely an acronym. The reality is that companies like Mighty are working on cloud-native computers, where even hardware upgradability is handled without you having to pay attention.
The endgame is that you don't have upgrade your laptop anymore, not just install apps fast.
Maybe I had the same perception as you. Seems like, removing the marketing thing of the Google's website, this is just the Chrome OS but with support for devices that are not designed for run Chrome OS, that's why "Flex" appended in the name. This is super nice, by the way.
My first thought, not knowing very much about Chrome OS history, was that the OS is just a ground to run the system that will connect with some machine in the cloud that will do all complicated-processing things and you'll just visualize that, like a VNC. But, seems not like it.
> for a minute I thought Google actually built a Cloud-native OS
I'm curious how you would define a cloud-native OS that doesn't include Chrome OS.
> The endgame is that you don't have upgrade your laptop anymore, not just install apps fast.
How are Chromebooks not already this? The whole thing is just a way to run a browser that connects to the real workloads in the cloud, and hardware is only obsolete when it stops getting updates (which is very "cloud native" behavior - the device lives and dies at the will of some remote company that manages it for you).
In the 1990s Microsoft was heavily criticized, and litigated against, for the deep integration of internet explorer with windows, and their monopoly on operating systems and web browsing. Stunning to think that people are willingly installing chrome the browsers, and chrome the os in 2022.
As history has unfolded, it seems to have become increasingly clear that the antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft in the 90s was ill-conceived. At the very least, it doesn't appear to have been based upon any underlying philosophy of monopoly that shows any consistency, for the very reasons you've indicated.
I mean that case was in 1998. Less than three years later bush jr was in power, and we haven’t seen significant antitrust since. It’s not for lack of there being a philosophy where that case makes sense - but it is for lack of cross-administration will to enact this kind of antitrust - and a lack of good object-permanence in the minds of the public. We forgot, the legislators and legal system forgot. Everybody forgot.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but what does "cloud first" mean in the context of an operating system, does it mean that you need to always be connected to the internet to use it, like can you use the computer offline?
It uses Google Drive (or similar) to store all your files. There is a local drive used for caching so you can work offline entirely but the idea is that the workstation is "cattle" - you can throw it into a shredder, log into a new chromebook and have all your apps/files/etc installed and ready to go.
The selling point for these are light computer users.
That sounds pretty cool, having access to all of your file from any computer that you login. But would guess that you'd have to pay quite a lot for such a luxury especially if you store more then just text files and such.
Storage is actually not that expensive in enterprise settings. One of the schools around where I lived ran some kind of google education enterprise solution (they rebranded it to something else now but it’s the same thing) and for something like $5/mo/person (probably more now) the institution had several hundred TB of common storage and each person had an additional hundred GB, along with a complete IT package with a LMS, enterprise level fleet deployment and management systems, etc.
Yeah licensing cost was a significant line item in the IT budget but not as much as you’d think. I mean, think about it, a 1k student school will have pay probably 100k to google (staff costs money too and price has probably gone up since I last looked at it), which is the salary+benefits of like 1 and a half IT guys. You’ll need way more than that for 1k students, plus enterprise internet, servers, hardware maintenance, laptops for everybody, etc. So if you add everything up it’s a small part of the IT budget to achieve this.
I've had two Google Nexus phones and one Android Wear watch, and all three became e-waste before their time purely because Google stopped updating them. In the case of the watch Google actually started sending out "updates" to their own apps that removed functionality from watches with older Android wear, with no possibility to update. It had less features when I threw it away than it had when I bought it.
I'm using Android on my phone not because I want to use a Google made OS, but because it's unfortunately the best option available, since I have other issues with Apple. A Google OS will never be the best option for my real computer, at least I certainly hope so.
I find it slightly hypocritical that the company that deliberately stops updating their own phones and computers based on dates can claim to want to reduce e-waste.
Not defending Google’s actions but it worth noting that not updating devices usually has to do with the SoC supplier ceasing support for the chip by not shipping BSPs which support new OS features. Yes google should have negotiated better support but it’s lack of support has to do more with inability to do so within reasonable means.
They have projects ongoing to decouple OS functionality from the base firmware (project treble and project keystone).
This whole issue is probably one reason that Google went through all the trouble to first develop their own support silicon and then the main SoC (pixel 6).
For Chrome OS not the problem a lot of the time, they drop support for devices using commodity SoCs that are still supported elsewhere... it's a quite hardcoded expiry date.
And they don't even drop support for all machines using a given SoC at the same time.
For Chrome OS updates are wholly owned by Google too.
I am more knowledgeable about the arm / android world.
I do wonder if for the chrome os world there are SoC+BSP vs ChromeOS feature requirements that cause this lack of ability to support (e.g. trust zone etc)
If you look for "longest supported Android devices", you might find:
- Nvidia Shield TV 2015: initially released with Android 6 and is currently on Android 11. It uses a CPU from Nvidia itself and is expected to continue receiving updates.
- Nexus Player: initially released with Android 5, last updated to Android 8. It uses an Intel CPU and does not require special binary blobs to support newer Linux kernels required by newer Android versions.
> not updating devices usually has to do with the SoC supplier ceasing support for the chip by not shipping BSPs which support new OS features
I don't know what a BSP is, but why can I update linux (or indeed almost any OS) on my PC without any support from the motherboard vendor? What OS features need SoC support, and why can the OS not live without them, when it was previously able to do so?
This was the case before smartphones. It is not an advanced feature of linux, developed later, that Android failed to backport. I suspect they broke it deliberately.
To my lay understanding, phone hardware offers approximately the same features today as it did a decade ago - make calls, connect to the internet, interface with the camera and GPS. Occasionally a protocol might change (LTE, 4G, 5G..), but maintaining support for a slightly older, still-in-use protocol or hardware device, that serves the same basic purpose as its new replacement, is the bare minimum - it is not a radical divergence of architecture or functionality that would make maintaining old versions prohibitively difficult.
> I don't know what a BSP is, but why can I update linux (or indeed almost any OS) on my PC without any support from the motherboard vendor? What OS features need SoC support, and why can the OS not live without them, when it was previously able to do so?
Basically, PCs have 2 things going for them:
First, they use standardized, enumerable interfaces. You can boot an arbitrary Linux-based system and the kernel can ask the PCI bus "what hardware is installed?" using the same query on every machine, and get back an answer in the same format. "Embedded" devices don't have that, generally (ARM ServerReady does add this, and does create ARM-based hardware where you just stick in a random distro's USB stick and boot and it works).
Second, Linux on PCs tends to use upstream drivers. When you run ex. Ubuntu on a laptop, it talks to your ex. graphics card using a driver that's in Torvald's official tree. For... reasons... that I don't claim to understand but that probably involve cost-cutting, Android phones rely on drivers that are written by hardware vendors and then abandoned without any effort to get included upstream.
So the result is that in many cases you can boot vanilla Linux on an arbitrary phone or whatever, but it'll come up with access to the CPU, RAM, and USB (because that is still an enumerable bus using a standard interface), but it will have no idea how to query the rest of the hardware and if it did it wouldn't have any drivers to talk to that hardware with.
Edit: I should mention, a BSP is the ... "solution" that vendors use to pretend this whole thing is workable. It stands for board support package, which is a giant blob of source code that includes at minimum a copy of Linux with all their delightfully buggy custom drivers included and all the necessary hardware devices hard-coded so the system can find the hardware when it boots. And by find, of course, I mean "blindly assume it's there". On a good day this data is encoded in a device tree, which is a file format for "here's what hardware is in this system and how to talk to it (ports, memory addresses, whatever) ".
Schools should be using Linux (or a BSD) exclusively. And preferably, open format alternatives to anything locked down. Proprietary software is fine if the data is easily exported to another format.
Transforming a perfectly good Linux machine into a Google data pipeline is a horrible thing to do to children.
If it is anything like my kids school, the maintenance would be exactly the same regardless of the OS. The students are instructed to keep everything in their synced drive, and they reimage machines at the drop of a hat.
"Timmy, you recompiled alsa? That's kind of impressive. I'm going to give you some more challenging work to try and help develop your computer skills. We sure are lucky that we have open computers that let you do things besides consume YouTube and be spied on."
For those maintaining a machine for older relatives: I found that switching them to Chrome OS has really taken the burden off me as their sole tech support. No installable applications means no vector for adware to convince them to fall into a cycle of installing other adware until the machine is bloated beyond functionality.
Google collects hardware data from users when they install Chrome OS Flex. You can opt out of it, but Google will continue to collect data anyways as stated in the agreement.
Welcome to governance: no machines are currently certified. Many are "verified to work" though. So probably some number of those will become certified eventually.
As an interesting alternative, Fedora Silverblue is another experiment with immutable OSes for the masses. Haven't played with it myself, but heard good things. The DevEx might not be a solved problem with it though - chaining multiple dev tools with Flatpaks might not provide quite the same experience as having an entire isolated LXD container, as in Chrome OS.
Also, it's too bad Nvidia remains a second-class citizen, even on Chrome OS.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadYou can use the Chromebook recovery tool (a browser extension) to write an installer image to a flash drive. I'm pretty sure you need 8GB of space or more. Others have intercepted and extracted the downloaded image, but I never cared enough to use that approach.
This process doesn't work with all Chromium derived browsers, though, probably because they added extra permissions to the extension because I wouldn't normally want a browser extension to have raw disk access.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chromebook-recover...
My only experience trying to build ChromeOS was for "Container-Optimized OS" which doesn't have nearly the same "random binary blobs" problem as trying to build for a piece of consumer hardware
Keep in mind, Google's reputation among hackers has dropped a lot in recent years. Trying out an operating system where the core premise was "you spend 95% of your time on your netbook just in a browser, why not optimize for that and strip away the rest" was an intriguing proposal. This was back when doing things in web apps instead of desktop apps was new and forward-thinking, not totally overdone the way it is now.
For ARM chromebooks I'm only aware of https://archlinuxarm.org/ and that's still pretty patchy; I hope that something comes together (or that it already exists and I just haven't found it yet).
This may say nothing about ChromeOS Flex's actual performance on real hardware, but open source virtualisation tech seems like an obvious point to start at when you're developing an OS for general purpose use.
Hopefully support will be better in time, this could be an excellent balance between Windows 11 growing ever more resource hungry and Linux being difficult to maintain by novices.
Yes, schools and businesses often replace technology on a schedule, but standardizing on an OS is a longer-term decision than desktop replacement.
A lot of people are unaware that Google is deeply committed in the OS space. Apart from Android, which they saw/see as an existential need for their business, Chrome OS fills a similar space on the desktop (especially as MS ramps up their anticompetitive efforts with their own browser again).
Google also uses a chromium build internally in GCP/GKE, so the OS is being maintained for servers as well.
Lastly, Chrome OS has been around for a long time and is based off an open source project with passionate maintainers.
Google has the dominant mobile OS and pulls all the same tricks, and although Chrome OS isn't dominant yet it goes even further in entirely blocking other browsers by design.
> Do you see how that plus them setting the default to Bing is harmful to Google’s interests?
Anti-competitive doesn't mean harmful to Google's interests, it's supposed to mean it's harmful to a competitive market.
That would strike me as a bit strange? You can get Widevine in open source versions of Chromium just by copying some files, e.g. https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-wiki... Why lock it out of Chrome OS Flex?
(Not saying Google didn't do it anyway, just that I find it odd.)
Edit: Although in a way, I'd welcome more Widevine-incapable machines as a disincentive to websites requiring Widevine.
Not sure what you are referring to, but I am writing this post from Chrome OS flex and the linux features work perfectly.
Linux app support is extremely good. Everything works with the window manager quite well. Even steam is available for games. Only limits I've hit are when interacting with hardware devices, but I havent done it enough to tell you exactly what the limits are
I love the idea of Chrome OS Flex, but I wish Google extended the same support to hardware designed for Chrome OS...
> Visit the Chrome OS Flex _website_ to learn more, get installation instructions, and see certified devices. Additionally, if you want to combine modern computing with cloud-first management, you can _start a free trial_ of Chrome Enterprise Upgrade to secure and manage your Chrome OS Flex devices.
The free trial link says:
> Chrome Enterprise Upgrade provides a simple and secure way to manage your Chrome OS devices in the admin console.
> Sign up for a free 30-day trial of the Chrome Enterprise Upgrade and enroll up to 50 existing Chromebooks in your organization.
If only my School District could use Chrome OS Flex to get some more life out of the fleet 4 year old Chromebook's that can no longer get updates
See https://support.google.com/chromeosflex/answer/11542901?hl=e... for more on the difference.
I wish they followed this philosophy with their phones.
The OS does a great job of exactly two things: web browsing and linux stuff. It won't do more than that, but if that's all you need it is great.
I honestly think you could make some decent cash just by buying 9 year old laptops off the internet, installing chrome OS flex, and selling them as perfectly usable chromebooks.
Any questions about what the OS can do? AMA
Back then it wasn’t possible to run anything other than Chrome itself outside of dev mode, but I’ve seen people running/installing VSCode on chromeOS (not in the web browser). Is that feasible?
At the same time as I was seeing this, it appeared that the OS actually has a windowing system now, so you can move windows around and have one on top of the other, is that the case? Any quirks with that?
But with one click it installs and makes available Linux. It appears to the user as a debain variant. You can install anything and when you run apps they seamlessly work with the window manager. I've used VScode for software development and it works great. Steam is even available for games, but I haven't tried it.
Window manager is the right balance of powerful and simple. Great at manipulating web browser windows (has virtual desktops if you want them), but works fine interacting with Linux apps as well.
That's like the number one way to get it.
The Chrome team is very responsive to vulnerabilities in my experience, they roll out security patches extremely quickly and chrome autoupdates you to the latest version soon after.
As if ChromeOS isn't going to get malware the same way all OSes do.
https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2020/12/03/chromebook-ge...
I mean, the fact that it can be done is neat, but on most entry-level Chromebooks it will be a memory hog, and you might be better served with vim or emacs (one or both of which should be learned to functional competence levels by every programmer), because then you'd have more room for running stuff.
The BestBuy around the corner from me, for example, is selling an Asus Chromebook with a Celeron N3350/4GB RAM/64GB eMMC and 15.6" 720p screen for $400 CAD.
Is this not underpowered? Sure there are other options, but to most people the appeal was the low cost. For $799, I'd just buy a PC.
Unless you install Linux stuff (most users don't) you can't download any software. This means no malware is possible.
It guides you to store everything in the cloud, which allows you to treat your workstations as cattle rather than pets.
At least on "normal" Chromebooks anyway you can - I have no direct experience or knowledge of flex.
It’s not a set of trade offs that work for everyone, but it works well for many environments. I would have loved these back I the day when I had to maintain Windows clients for people to just turn around and use RDP to connect to a terminal server. Having a light weight client (that was secure) would have made that scenario much nicer.
I don't know about that multitouch thing and what it provides (is it similar to using 2 fingers to scroll down), I never have any weird thing happening when I attach/detach display and I would describe my software update as automatic, unobtrusive and fast on my fedora laptops.
No idea what "binaries highly optimized with profile guidance and link-time optimization" are though.
PGO is a thing where you record runtime information about the program to optimize better later. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13881292/
So I'd be tempted to try the Flex thing just to see how that goes.
Mac trackpads are terrific, and I don’t know if that’s down to the hardware, firmware or software -- I assume a combination of all three.
The endgame is that you don't have upgrade your laptop anymore, not just install apps fast.
My first thought, not knowing very much about Chrome OS history, was that the OS is just a ground to run the system that will connect with some machine in the cloud that will do all complicated-processing things and you'll just visualize that, like a VNC. But, seems not like it.
I'm curious how you would define a cloud-native OS that doesn't include Chrome OS.
> The endgame is that you don't have upgrade your laptop anymore, not just install apps fast.
How are Chromebooks not already this? The whole thing is just a way to run a browser that connects to the real workloads in the cloud, and hardware is only obsolete when it stops getting updates (which is very "cloud native" behavior - the device lives and dies at the will of some remote company that manages it for you).
But I totally understand your point and the options I've listed aren't either user friendly or straight up require you to be able to use a console.
The selling point for these are light computer users.
Thanks for the explanation! ^o^
Yeah licensing cost was a significant line item in the IT budget but not as much as you’d think. I mean, think about it, a 1k student school will have pay probably 100k to google (staff costs money too and price has probably gone up since I last looked at it), which is the salary+benefits of like 1 and a half IT guys. You’ll need way more than that for 1k students, plus enterprise internet, servers, hardware maintenance, laptops for everybody, etc. So if you add everything up it’s a small part of the IT budget to achieve this.
I'm using Android on my phone not because I want to use a Google made OS, but because it's unfortunately the best option available, since I have other issues with Apple. A Google OS will never be the best option for my real computer, at least I certainly hope so.
I find it slightly hypocritical that the company that deliberately stops updating their own phones and computers based on dates can claim to want to reduce e-waste.
"Each device has an Auto Update Expiration (AUE) date." https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9367166?hl=en
"Reduce e-waste and extend the life of your existing devices by transforming them with a modern OS." https://chromeenterprise.google/os/chromeosflex/
They have projects ongoing to decouple OS functionality from the base firmware (project treble and project keystone).
https://www.googblogs.com/tag/keystone/
This whole issue is probably one reason that Google went through all the trouble to first develop their own support silicon and then the main SoC (pixel 6).
And they don't even drop support for all machines using a given SoC at the same time.
For Chrome OS updates are wholly owned by Google too.
I do wonder if for the chrome os world there are SoC+BSP vs ChromeOS feature requirements that cause this lack of ability to support (e.g. trust zone etc)
For chromeOS devices, the boot firmware (incl TZ) is owned by Google.
If you look for "longest supported Android devices", you might find: - Nvidia Shield TV 2015: initially released with Android 6 and is currently on Android 11. It uses a CPU from Nvidia itself and is expected to continue receiving updates. - Nexus Player: initially released with Android 5, last updated to Android 8. It uses an Intel CPU and does not require special binary blobs to support newer Linux kernels required by newer Android versions.
Their Pixels don't exactly enjoy long support lifecycles, either.
I don't know what a BSP is, but why can I update linux (or indeed almost any OS) on my PC without any support from the motherboard vendor? What OS features need SoC support, and why can the OS not live without them, when it was previously able to do so?
This was the case before smartphones. It is not an advanced feature of linux, developed later, that Android failed to backport. I suspect they broke it deliberately.
To my lay understanding, phone hardware offers approximately the same features today as it did a decade ago - make calls, connect to the internet, interface with the camera and GPS. Occasionally a protocol might change (LTE, 4G, 5G..), but maintaining support for a slightly older, still-in-use protocol or hardware device, that serves the same basic purpose as its new replacement, is the bare minimum - it is not a radical divergence of architecture or functionality that would make maintaining old versions prohibitively difficult.
Basically, PCs have 2 things going for them:
First, they use standardized, enumerable interfaces. You can boot an arbitrary Linux-based system and the kernel can ask the PCI bus "what hardware is installed?" using the same query on every machine, and get back an answer in the same format. "Embedded" devices don't have that, generally (ARM ServerReady does add this, and does create ARM-based hardware where you just stick in a random distro's USB stick and boot and it works).
Second, Linux on PCs tends to use upstream drivers. When you run ex. Ubuntu on a laptop, it talks to your ex. graphics card using a driver that's in Torvald's official tree. For... reasons... that I don't claim to understand but that probably involve cost-cutting, Android phones rely on drivers that are written by hardware vendors and then abandoned without any effort to get included upstream.
So the result is that in many cases you can boot vanilla Linux on an arbitrary phone or whatever, but it'll come up with access to the CPU, RAM, and USB (because that is still an enumerable bus using a standard interface), but it will have no idea how to query the rest of the hardware and if it did it wouldn't have any drivers to talk to that hardware with.
Edit: I should mention, a BSP is the ... "solution" that vendors use to pretend this whole thing is workable. It stands for board support package, which is a giant blob of source code that includes at minimum a copy of Linux with all their delightfully buggy custom drivers included and all the necessary hardware devices hard-coded so the system can find the hardware when it boots. And by find, of course, I mean "blindly assume it's there". On a good day this data is encoded in a device tree, which is a file format for "here's what hardware is in this system and how to talk to it (ports, memory addresses, whatever) ".
The traditional excuse is that Android is a rich ecosystem and they don't want to prevent partners from "innovation".
The mess continues as Google isn't willing to take a stand on it.
All my devices have had more updates during their lifetime than the Android devices I got from similar age.
Incredible how Microsoft managed to do something, that Google deems impossible in the Android ecosystem.
Transforming a perfectly good Linux machine into a Google data pipeline is a horrible thing to do to children.
"What do you mean you recompiled ALSA and now you can't join Zoom little Timmy? Did you try invoking modprobe again?"
I'm especially interested if this supports proper sleep on Intel/Lenovo hardware (instant on, not draining battery too quickly).
Google collects hardware data from users when they install Chrome OS Flex. You can opt out of it, but Google will continue to collect data anyways as stated in the agreement.
Also, it's too bad Nvidia remains a second-class citizen, even on Chrome OS.