Early Access to Chrome OS Flex: The Upgrade PCs and Macs
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Early Access to Chrome OS Flex: The Upgrade PCs and Macs
1–10 of 151 posts
Re: Early Access to Chrome OS Flex: The Upgrade PCs and Macs
#2This looks really great. Here's the installation guide that they make you put in an email to get to: https://support.google.com/chromeosflex/answer/11552529
Re: Early Access to Chrome OS Flex: The Upgrade PCs and Macs
#3I wonder if my older "Samsung Chromebook 2 (2014)" model will work with this? Google removed support for that model a long time ago.
Re: Early Access to Chrome OS Flex: The Upgrade PCs and Macs
#4I 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.
Re: Early Access to Chrome OS Flex: The Upgrade PCs and Macs
#5I wonder if my older "Samsung Chromebook 2 (2014)" model will work with this? Google removed support for that model a long time ago.
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.
Re: Early Access to Chrome OS Flex: The Upgrade PCs and Macs
#6This looks really great. Here's the installation guide that they make you put in an email to get to: https://support.google.com/chromeosflex/answer/11552529
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.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chromebook-recover...
Re: Early Access to Chrome OS Flex: The Upgrade PCs and Macs
#7I wonder if my older "Samsung Chromebook 2 (2014)" model will work with this? Google removed support for that model a long time ago.
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.
It would be fun, and possibly quite useful, to run Flex on the Raspberry Pi.
Re: Early Access to Chrome OS Flex: The Upgrade PCs and Macs
#8With Google's track record for discontinuing products, would you commit to moving your school or business to this OS?
Yes, schools and businesses often replace technology on a schedule, but standardizing on an OS is a longer-term decision than desktop replacement.
Re: Early Access to Chrome OS Flex: The Upgrade PCs and Macs
#9I wonder if my older "Samsung Chromebook 2 (2014)" model will work with this? Google removed support for that model a long time ago.
I wish they'd make Flex available to out of date Chromebooks. You lose secure boot, but you could still get updated Chrome versions.
Re: Early Access to Chrome OS Flex: The Upgrade PCs and Macs
#10I 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.