You might have used a Chromebook, Google’s funky, moderately dystopian cloud-centered take on the netbook formula. If you owned one, you likely needed a lightweight, cheap little laptop (with pretty solid battery life) for school, light office work or entertainment. As most of these things are done reasonably enough in a plain old web browser, pitching a lightweight operating system specifically for that purpose isn’t too farfetched.
As the Gentoo-based operating system that runs the Chromebook, ChromeOS, is quite lightweight, it should be able to run well on anything that could run Chrome. It shouldn’t be too bad for an older computer, either: although aging, even a sufficiently specced 15 year old machine – 2010 as of writing – can totally run Chrome just fine.
There’s also a whole niche of Chromebook-inspired Windows laptops that came out in the mid-2010s, immediately stifled by stiff storage requirements and an operating system not designed for them. Out of the box, they’re effectively ewaste. But they have modern guts! They’re rocking UEFI, some Celeron with a generic Intel case badge, and typically fanless, with some amount of power efficiency! This makes them an excellent candidate for the ChromeOS experience.
I’ve used ChromeOS Flex on and off on secondary machines of mine, and I think it is pretty neat! I think it fits these cases pretty well, especially for users who aren’t as technologically savvy and just want to extend the life of their computer hardware. I’ll discuss this a little more later, but I think it’s worth some history first – because despite the somewhat recent arrival of ChromeOS Flex in 2022, this is not the the operating system’s first rodeo on non-Google licensed hardware.
Chrome OS on regular PCs: Been a while!
The operating system formerly known as Chrome OS (that is, with a space) is the commercial counterpart of the operating system formerly known as Chromium OS, an open source project under Chromium. While the first Chromebooks were released in 2011, as early as 2009 we were seeing builds of the operating system circling online including outlet coverage of Hexxeh’s Flow distribution. This predates when the CR-48 prototype, the first Chromebook, was shown to the press in 2010.
Hexxeh was a notable distributor of Chromium OS builds. Some time later these manifested as Hexxeh’s Vanilla builds in 2013, with an interesting review from LinuxInsider. I actually remember trying these off a flash drive on my second ever laptop, and I remember it took some command line juggling to get Pepper Flash Player, required for YouTube and most other interactive parts of the web, to work. From Hexxeh:
ChromiumOS is a lightweight, lightning-fast operating system for your netbook, laptop or even desktop. With the familiar environment of Chromium/Chrome, the entire web is at your fingertips in seconds. HTML5 is fully supported, allowing you to enjoy the very best that the web has to offer.
Within the Chromebook’s first years on the market, Google took an interesting approach to lure existing PC users into its gospel, outside the existing Chromium OS efforts. Either as a nudge to consumers to consider the fledgling platform, or to push developers to make more HTML5-based Chrome applications, or some combination of both, January 2014’s Chrome 32 update brought a Windows 8 metro interface (article) that was a beat for beat replica of the Chrome OS desktop. (This version also brought the little speaker icon to tabs with playing media and multiple profiles- very standard browser features today. How cute is that!)
One box to end hardware upgrades: Enter Neverware
As we’ve seen, Chrome OS has had a bit of a history with being run on regular PCs. Most directly relevant to the story of Chrome OS Flex, however, is what Google acquired to form its basis. This was Neverware’s CloudReady, which has been around since 2015. This was a commercial distribution of Chromium OS specifically oriented towards particularly K-12 and enterprise organizations, and also freely offered to individuals, to squeeze more life out of their old gear. Interestingly, this was Neverware’s second product.
The first, the Juicebox, launched the company with its online presence around 2011. The pitch was this: instead of throwing out their old computer hardware (think Pentium 3s and 4s!), schools, non-profits, and other organizations could install a rackmount server that would run virtualized Windows 7 installs for each machine to run as a speedy thin client. All the heavy lifting would be done by the Juicebox. As far as the end user was concerned, they were running a fast, new computer.
Neverware installs a powerful server that connects to a school’s existing computers, taking over the ‘heavy lifting’ and allowing the computers to run like new. Neverware’s servers can supercharge any PC – even if it’s ten years old and missing its hard drive. Subscribers do not have to buy the server or any other hardware: Neverware’s pricing is based on affordable subscription model designed to fit into any school’s annual budget. When a school signs up, Neverware’s professional installation team works with the school administration to get the system up and running. All installation and maintenance costs are covered by Neverware for as long as the subscription continues – which means that a Neverware school is getting one of the best deals on reliable IT infrastructure in the world.
Product | Neverware (June 2013 snapshot)
Meanwhile, Chromebooks found their niche as a part of Google Apps’ growing popularity for the K-12 market. The laptops were low cost, and easily integrated into the Apps ecosystem, meaning each student could have a user that easily synced and roamed across loaner, or classroom laptops. They also didn’t require extra licenses for office software, and Docs and Slides were good enough for (and even good at!) teachers and students’ collaborative tasks. Educators were eating the platform up as online educational platforms made more sense in the classroom. (Google’s own venture in this space, Classroom, came about in late 2014.)
As the dynamics of what constituted aging hardware shifted (think from a 700mhz Pentium 3 running XP to a dual-core, 2.1ghz Core 2 E6400 running Vista or 7), Neverware’s product lineup did as well. Neverware introduced their Chromium OS fork in 2014, and rebranded the previous Juicebox solution as PCReady. The brand new CloudReady was oriented towards hardware released ‘in the last 6 years’, which would entail 2008 onward. This hardware was plenty servicable enough to run the Chrome browser and operating system, and could also run standalone, without the need for maintaining expensive servers on-premise. Neverware’s new solution was expanded to offer a Home edition, dual boot support with existing Windows 7 installs, and integration with Google Management Console for the enterprise edition.
In more recent memory, Neverware received funding from Google in 2017 to expand further into the enterprise market, and ultimately met its fate in an acquisition in December 2020 by Google, with plans for users of CloudReady to migrate to their new product. A little over a year later, we got ChromeOS Flex out of the product’s ashes.
Getting ahold of ChromeOS Flex
Google released ChromeOS Flex for public beta testing in February 2022, targeted towards the enterprise. Canary builds were available for a little while before then, and that’s when I started poking at it. It reached a stable branch that July.
No dual booting this time around, though it seems that feature had been scrapped from Neverware’s solution for a while – due to UEFI and Secure Boot, I would presume, which always complicated things. Setting up a flash drive or SD card to boot from is done in the same way as creating recovery media is for any Chromebook, from the Chromebook Recovery Utility extension.
Officially, Google puts the minimum at components from 2010 to later. Anything Intel HD Graphics or later should work fine, as they call out a few GMA models that don’t meet their performance requirements. There’s also a big ol list of certified models. These do have end of support dates as early as 2026, though. Will in time, Google stop these from being updated? I don’t really know, but the latest version will update just as well on uncertified models at the moment.
The out of box experience, if your device works with it – and again, most post-2010 will, and even a few Core 2 Duo machines in my experience – is pretty seamless. You can browse as a guest after booting to the drive before installation to make sure things are working, and something like wireless not working you’ll kinda be able to tell right away.
Rough thoughts – how is it?
I have used Flex quite a bit through 2023 and 2024, primarily as a low-fuss alternative operating system on my ThinkPad R61i. As its missing its hard drive caddy, and my regular setup for it is an SSD with a Vista and 7 dual boot, I keep Flex around on a hard drive that I just slide in when I want to use it. Then I go out and do whatever studying I want, with sort of less distraction from my main computers. (There are flavors of Chromium that run on these older versions of Windows as well, but just using Flex is a bit more stable.)
It’s a breezy solution for people who want to try something Linux-y on older or lower-spec modern computers, but don’t want to jump through the hoops of learning all the Linux stuff, or have a specifically web use in mind for that system. While the flexibility of Linux distributions (and your BSDs) put them apart, when it comes to using a computer, I like running with some sane defaults instead of spending more time configuring my environment on a secondary machine. The system takes after the simplicity of a Chromebook (without Android support), keeping Google accounts and Chrome sync and all that (though guest browsing is also supported, both from the live media, and after install).
It’s a bit of a harder sell for power users, for sure. ChromeOS however has become surprisingly capable in that regard over the last few years. On newer, faster devices (think i-series, let’s say starting around 3rd gen), you’ll be able to install Linux support to access a Debian shell, and run most of those applications on top of anything web-based. If you’re curious about what you can do with it, Brandon Stecklein‘s channel has a lot of good demonstrations of Steam, Inkscape and other Linux apps running on ChromeOS. (You can install Firefox too, if you’re feeling dangerous. Or Floorp.)
Compatibility notes
I mentioned earlier that lots of laptops, in aims to compete with Chromebooks, were built with low amounts of storage that makes a reasonably up to date Windows 10 or 11 install very challenging to run. A personal example of mine is my old Acer Spin 1 from school, that, while passively cooled, with good battery life and a 1080p display (that I remember more for the necessary 1.5x scaling and ugly blurring it would make most programs under Windows), did not have nearly enough storage to carry both Windows, Office, and basically any other programs. 32 GB was all you got; any more, you’d best resort to PortableApps on a heartier 64 GB microSD card. Acer’s not the only culprit; there are a few examples, from HP Streams to Lenovo Miix…es.
Flex is pretty good on these entry-level oddballs as well, certainly makes it less ewaste. No Secure Boot or UEFI issues, touch screen and accelerometer works fine, display scaling is fortunately very easily done as well (not easily said for most Linux environments, though this has improved a little within the last few years). YMMV, but I think if you got one of these lying around by any chance (or know a friend with one) I think it’s worth trying to squeeze some more life out of it.
It won’t make them blazing, necessarily; I tried getting on a Zoom call once under Chrome OS Flex on the Spin 1 and it started to lag horribly for the other end, but it made the same device very happy and fluid to watch YouTube videos. On Core 2 stuff – I have tried it on the R61i and SL510 – it does feel a little sluggish, but no more so than the lightest Linux distribution, I think. Invidious for YouTube videos does make things a little nicer on here. Again, your mileage may vary; I’d check it out over the live environment first and have a play around on a different drive if you can.
Do you have some experience with ChromeOS Flex, or Chromebooks in general? Think they’re ewaste? How can we use these things? Feel free to share your thoughts. This post kind of got stuck in the pipeline sadly, but I think it’s been a fun ride. Flex is something I’ll continue to try out on different hardware in the future.
Really good post, man! I’m glad you managed to get it out into the world, it’s an interesting subject. Reading this on my poor old laptop right now and the idea of having something on it that runs a bit smoother than Windows 10 is tempting 😛
Honestly? Since all you do on there is browse the Web and use Discord anyway, ChromeOS on that laptop probably would work quite nicely.