Early Access to Chrome OS Flex: The Upgrade PCs and Macs
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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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chromebook-recover...
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.
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
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).
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.
Also, it's too bad Nvidia remains a second-class citizen, even on Chrome OS.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).