ChromeOS Adventures
I strongly believe that most people would be perfectly served by just using a device with a web browser. Not to say that they should, but I think they can. I am biased, being a designer and web developer - but I truly love and appreciate native apps. Among others, I distinctly prefer Lunacy to Figma because they have a native Mac app.
I have a respect for good apps and I will prefer them to bad web wrappers. There is a unique use case for websites, web apps and native apps and we need all of them for a good human computer interaction.
While I use many native apps, most people don't. Nor do they know the difference, other than this has an icon and this is in Chrome. So can they be perfectly served by just a web browser device? Like ChromeOS?
The operating system built atop the most popular browser. What could go wrong?
ChromeOS
It’s exactly what the name implies, a whole operating system based on Chrome. But if you’re a user, it’s a bit hard to notice. You do have different icons, including a Chrome one. You have system apps, settings, windows and a desktop environment. The computer doesn’t just start with the homepage of Chrome.
But you’re meant to use web apps, which are installed the same way they are anywhere else. By finding wherever the “install as web app” option is, or similar wording. Most users don’t even know they can do that. So the OS falls apart.
Until they allow Android apps to be installed. Now this is basically an Android device with a full desktop browser. You can also run Linux apps, which expands the use case significantly. Just target the low end and you’ve got a winner.
Until you remember that you’re using Chrome, a notoriously RAM hogging browser, that is supposed to run on devices with 4GB of RAM.
So while the Windows 11 minimum requirements are actually 4GB (a mind boggling number, especially when windows 11 ran poorly on my 16GB machine), ChromeOS runs better. It even runs very well, with the proper Chrome tweaks. But the problems are far more numerous than that.
Technological Problems
So you have a desktop browser and Android apps build in, plus a Linux development environment for the curious. But if you have a low spec PC, why wouldn’t you just install a low end linux distro? I’ve ran Linux Lite for years, recently tried Xubuntu and switched to Lubuntu on my living room PC. I would never consider running ChromeOS on it, cause why would I possibly do that?
But I’m not the target audience. Education is. Having personal experience every step of the educational latter, I get it. School computers are either up to date and unusable from lag and lack of care from the IT department or fossilized retro machines that belong to a hobbyist.
Having a company create specific educational services that are supposed to make your job easier is an easy sell. Having no experience in this, I won’t go into it yet. I might do some research and explore the field further on, but my current focus is on normal users. Why would anyone use ChromeOS?
Personal Experience
Well I’m one of those people. I have just such a device that I use every single day. A ChromeOS tablet. I bought it before I bought a MacBook, when the only “laptop” I had was a fat gaming PC. I consider that a portable desktop, so I wanted something I can use as a laptop in a pinch, but will mostly be used as a tablet.
Android tablets suck and I didn’t want one. The cheapest iPad wasn’t great then (it’s a lot better now), the Lenovo Duet was very affordable with a kickstand and keyboard, so I took the plunge. Turns out, I love it. The performance is great and strangely has gotten better with updates, which are frequent.
I use the thing to read books, comics and articles. I watch videos and listen to music. I write and have even used it to code. It’s great. But tablet is such a niche market, dominated by a single brand. Is ChromeOS good for anything else?
Pricing Failures
Running a good Linux distro is my recommendation, but people don’t have the will or understanding to take computing into their own hands. So having a commercial low spec OS can be good, if only they got the price right.
ChromeOS devices are too expensive. The recommended ones are around $700 dollars. That’s far too much for a device running a browser. Especially if this isn’t your main device or you rarely need a PC.
But at these prices, who’s gonna go for it?
thank you for reading this far, leave any comments in the Discussion page and stay tuned tomorrow for part 2