Today, we’re excited to announce that ChromeOS Flex, the cloud-first, easy-to-manage, and fast operating system for PCs and Macs, is now ready for your fleet. Just like too much sun, software bloat, clunky hardware, and security vulnerabilities can cause unwanted damage. Thankfully, ChromeOS Flex is just the sunscreen your legacy devices need. And thanks to everyone who has participated in our early access program, we’ve been able to significantly improve the product in many areas while continuously certifying devices to run ChromeOS Flex.
ChromeOS Flex is effectively ChromeOS for everyone who doesn’t want to buy ChromeOS hardware, based on Google’s acquisition of CloudReady. There are various community projects that offer the same, but having an official offering from Google is great for organisations and companies.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Finally a Linux I can install on an old low power laptop that won’t confuse my mum
I should give some of the features not available on Flex vs base Chrome OS. (Assuming other can provide the good parts and the praise).
https://support.google.com/chromeosflex/answer/11542901?hl=en
– No Android support. nor Parallels Desktop for Windows apps. I think this is due to licensing issues
+ Linux VMs (Crostini) is there, but requires hardware support
– No tight firmware integration: no automated BIOS updates, no lockdown against tampering, only secureboot for verification
– Mixed driver support for models not on the “approved” list. I personally did not have much issues, but something like a proprietary fingerprint reader, or even a touchpad might not work
Overall it is no more difficult than installing any other Linux distribution. I could even say it is easier than most Linux distributions.
I can add one more to that. Once your Chromebook is out of official support, don’t expect that all your hardware will be supported by ChromeFlex/CloudReady. On a Toshiba CB30 Chromebook, sound no longer works, although recent CloudReady updates got rid of the jittery/freezing touchpad issues. Otherwise, the Chromebook is more than capable of handling recent CloudReady releases and I haven’t experienced anything like the slowing down you get with PC hardware running a full fat OS.
Toshiba has zero incentive to work with Google on supporting old hardware and Google has better things to do than reverse engineer drivers so if it doesn’t work from day one, it probably never will.