Steam to Chrome OS

I think some folks are missing the really neat thing about this: remote play.

Steam supports playing games remotely on another computer. So your desktop is doing the heavy lifting, but you can view the game on your TV in the livingroom. Now you can be playing the game on your Chromebook as well.

Then the next step is that Google Cloud offers you an on demand high end gaming machine, pay by the minute, which runs Steam on Windows x86 and has an instant VPN to your Chromebook.

I set this up successfully once on an AWS machine and a very low end laptop running Ubuntu, but I couldn't get the hardware accelerated video encoding to work right. 3 seconds per frame made the game hilariously unplayable, but it did function.

You can do remote play on a Chromebook right now with Moonlight! Works great (for me). Some other alternatives include Parsec and Rainway, and probably a few others I'm missing.

I remember when Chrome OS first came out. I have an old Chromebox I got at Google I/O over a decade ago too. And I remember all of the narrative about it being better because it was just the web browser, and the web was all you needed.

Chrome OS has firmly educated me on how to read marketing copy about things the product doesn't have. "Tell people they don't need it until you catch up to your competitors."

Ten years more from now if Chrome OS still exists, I expect it to simply be another macOS or Windows clone with more or less all of the same features and trappings.

With the exception of a few missing things like full USB pass-through to crostini containers, chromeOS with crostini works about as good as my fedora laptop. I like its window management defaults better then gnome as well. Also you get auto-updated and supported firmware from google and secure boot by default.

Currently running a framework laptop with fedora just because I like the hardware better then most chromebooks and I can very cheaply throw in a fast 2TB ssd rather then spend hundreds extra to upgrade a chromebook to 512GB.

> Then the next step is that Google Cloud offers you an on demand high end gaming machine, pay by the minute, which runs Steam on Windows x86 and has an instant VPN to your Chromebook.

I find it difficult to believe they'd offer this, given that they already have Stadia.

I do see how this could be more appealing for consumers, but aside from competing with themselves, I also would be curious about the economics. Considering how expensive GPUs are, is it even possible the prices for an on-demand gaming service could ever make that much sense? With Stadia, they are making you buy the games through Stadia itself, where they would get a cut of the revenue, which probably helps subsidize the actual cost of the service a bit more.

There's also other very irritating issues. For example, a litany of AAA game companies do not allow their games to be streamed via GeForce Now, even though it would be running your own copy that you bought from your Steam or other library. I assume they would fight to earn additional money on game streaming, even though the money simply isn't there.

This is unfortunate, but perhaps it's OK. Lower end devices will be getting more and more powerful and eventually I'm sure even reasonably priced Chromebooks will be able to play games decently. Given this launch only applies to newer Intel processor based Chromebooks, that day is not today... but still, it certainly could be on the horizon.