Through a fair bit of digging, we were able to obtain a copy of Borealis, which turned out to be another full Linux distribution. Unlike Crostini, which is based on Debian, Borealis is based on Ubuntu, another popular variety of Linux. Just like the existing Linux apps support, we believe Borealis will integrate itself with Chrome OS rather than being a full desktop experience.
However, we found one key difference between Borealis and a normal installation of Ubuntu, as Borealis includes a pre-installed copy of Steam. This lines up with what we learned at CES 2020, when Kan Liu, Google’s director of product management for Chrome OS, shared that the upcoming Steam gaming support would be based on Linux.
I am very curious to see how this will perform. My gut feeling is that they will position this more as an endpoint for Steam’s in-home streaming feature than as a way to play games locally on-device, since I don’t know of any ChromeBook with more graphical power than whatever integrated GPU Intel stuffs in their low-end processors.
I am pretty sure Steam would run on current Chrome devices. I have not tested it with recent versions, but it is Linux after all (albeit in a container).
On the other hand, as Thom pointed out, I don’t know how performant it would be. It could still play some older games, like original Counter Strike, or older RPGs.
Actually, I do not need to know, since it turns out there are already people providing nice guides on the subject:
https://brismuth.com/how-to-install-steam-on-a-chromebook-57174d1f1f32
Modern iGPUs are perfectly capable of light gaming at 720p. How many triangles per second do you need for Helltaker or a visual novel?
Its the RAM, storage space and storage speed that would be the issue, being a web based OS Chromebooks have typically small and very slow eMMC storage and even the ones with SSDs are typically quite small. Considering even a 10+ year old game like Half Life 2 takes up several GB and Chromebooks usually only have a couple Gb of RAM you are talking a lot of swapping and with slow storage? Yeah…its gonna hurt.
Rather than performance, the issue is most chromebooks ship with 32GB SSD drives. Not enough space for many games to be installed locally.
Why are there some support issues for the incoming Chrome updates?
http://www.stemcures.com
Anyways, thank you so much for posting this.
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