By now, most of you have probably heard about Chromebooks. They run ChromeOS by Google
and are mostly used for lightweight tasks and stuff often used in school.
But Google just released out of beta, something called ChromeOS
Flex, which is a version of ChromeOS that you can install on any computer.
Now, this is mostly geared towards like very old netbooks, low power laptops, stuff like that,
where you don't really use them anymore, cuz they're not powerful enough to use,
but maybe you want to give them new life. Now you can do that and turn them into
a Chromebook. So that's what we can do today. I have an old laptop that
was just sitting in a closet, so I can use that, install Chrome on it,
see what the installation process is like, and then kind of mess around in ChromeOS.
I've actually never used ChromeOS before, I don't have a Chromebook,
so this'll be interesting for everyone. So the way to install ChromeOS is you'll need a
8GB or larger flash drive, and then you'll install the installation media onto that.
And then that will be used to install onto the computer. So the way this works is you basically
run a Chrome extension/app that is called "Chromebook Recovery Utility". And this
pops up a thing and will walk you through the creation of this installation process on this
thumb drive. So you run this extension and it will ask you the model of your computer.
Now this is because there's actually a list of basically pre-certified ChromeOS devices
that Google has said, "yeah ChromeOS flex works especially well on these laptops",
but if it's not one of those, that's fine. You can just in the drop down,
look for the entry called "Google ChromeOS Flex". And then in the one below it you'd
just select ChromeOS Flex. And then you could put it on anything you want.
Then it's gonna ask you which USB device you want to use, and you want to double
check that this is correct, because it's going to wipe everything on it. Also,
I would recommend using probably the fastest USB drive you have,
I was using a USB 2.0 one first and it was taking like 20 minutes to copy this stuff over.
But then I tried on a Samsung T5 SSD, it's like external SSD, and then it was able to copy
it in like a minute. So it's definitely gonna be speed dependent. Anyway, you can also look
at the advanced settings and choose whether you want to use the stable or dev build channel. So
whether you want to get the main version or maybe the beta, effectively, that might be less stable.
And then it'll just go through the process of putting everything on the thumb drive and you'll
be good. And also keep in mind, there's no ISO or anything, you have to use the installation media.
I also tried installing this on a virtual machine, could not get it to work. Apparently some people
have been able to get it to work on certain virtual machine softwares, but I really couldn't.
So after it's all finished, we now have the installation media, and all you do is plug it
into the computer when you boot up. And hopefully it will default to that device. Although you might
have to look up on your computer how to choose a boot device, if not. You'll see this screen,
and it gives you the option to either install ChromOs Flex, or just try it first.
If you choose to try it first, it will run off the drive. Although it'll be way more limited,
there's not gonna be as many apps on it, it's basically just kind like to get a quick feel
for it. But it could be used in a pinch to just have a file Explorer to use easily. So
once you select that, it will tell you that it's going to erase the entire hard drive.
Although, one thing that is kind of weird is if you have multiple drives in your computer,
it doesn't let you choose which one it's going to install to,
and won't even tell you which one. So I'm gonna come back to that issue in a second,
but after you do choose to install it, it's gonna go through the process,
there's not really any options for you to choose, it'll just kind of do its thing. Then
it's gonna finish, it's gonna say installation complete, and that it's gonna auto shut down,
and then to unplug the thing after it shuts down. And then you boot it up
and should be running ChromeOS at that point. However, I ran into an issue that you might.
Which is my computer actually has two drives in there, a boot SSD, which is like 128 GB and then a
bigger 1TB SSD for like extra storage. And turns out ChromeOS went and installed onto the hard
drive, which is not the main one that the BIOS and stuff was booting to. And of course I couldn't
select to use the SSD. So what I had to do to get is go onto the SSD is actually
open up the computer, take out the hard drive. So it was only the SSD,
and then when I went through again, installed it on there, then after booting it up, it now
worked and I was in actual ChromOS installed on the SSD on my computer.
All right now before I get into booting into ChromeOS for the first time,
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And with all that being said, let's continue. All right so we can quickly go through the first time
setup. Again, not many options here. It'll tell you to get started, and then you choose the Wi-Fi
network that you want to connect to. And then after you do, you just accept the terms
and it's going ask you what type of user you want to create. Either "You", which is just
like a regular user account or a child, which is basically one with parental controls, restrictions
you want to add, stuff like that. So if you do this, it will ask you to log into a Google
account. So there's no local accounts on here like you can do with Windows. You have to log
in with a Google account. Then it's gonna ask you whether you want to sync your
settings. So I guess this is if you have multiple Chromebooks, it'll basically copy everything over.
Then the only two other options are whether you want to enable screen context,
so whether you want Google assistant looking at what's on the screen to aid in
requests you give it. And also another one, whether or not you want to enable the voice
version of the assistant. And after that, you boot to the desktop,
and now I can switch to the screen recorder, which is gonna look a lot nicer. So I can just kind of
poke around and show you what's in here. At the bottom, you basically have the equivalent to the
task bar, it's gonna show you some pinned apps, you can pin other ones or unpin them.
And then at the bottom left, there's the equivalent to the start button.
So you click that, the start menu I guess you could call it, pops up. It's got a search bar
and some recently used apps, I guess, or commonly used ones right there. If we open up the settings
real quick, we can see that it looks pretty much exactly like the Chrome web browser settings,
but we'll come back to this in a minute. Looking around the UI a little bit more, at the bottom
right you can see there's a pop-up for some quick settings. So you got stuff like Night
Light which is going to reduce the blue light, make the screen a little bit more orange,
nicer at night. And also the other usual stuff like toggling your Wi-Fi, your Bluetooth,
your notifications, do not disturb, the volume, the brightness, all that good stuff.
And there also is that screen capture tool, which lets you take screenshots of just certain sections
or a whole screen or screen recordings too, which is what I'm using for this.
If we look in the file browser, you can see it doesn't show you any of the file system.
It just shows you the top level directory,
and the only thing in there is a downloads folder. Although you can create additional
folders. Also on the left though, you will see you have access to your Google drive.
This isn't really stored on the laptop necessarily, although I think if you
click to run something, it kind of catches it from the cloud and stores it on the drive,
but it's not like everything on Google Drive is on the computer.
So it's super basic compared to Windows or something, it literally doesn't show you any
of the program files installed, or any settings files, anything like that. All that's hidden from
the user, it's just files you create or folders you create. If you want to actually move around
some files, it works pretty much like you'd expect, you can right click. And the right click
menu's gonna look familiar, you got the option to Open With, and then you choose the app.
You got copy and paste. You can also zip the selection so you can zip file stuff together.
And then also you can Get Info, sort of like the properties menu in Windows.
If you do plug in an external USB drive, you'll see that will appear on the left.
And if you want to copy files, one thing I noticed is interesting,
there's no progress bar. It'll just tell you at the bottom,
it just says "copying this file" and about eight seconds remaining, I kind of wish there
was like a progress bar like you would see in Windows, but that's one thing that's different
you might notice. Pre-installed on the computer there's a bunch of Google apps.
So Messages, if you have an Android phone, you could basically text from it, it'll sync
to your computer. There's the Chrome web browser quite obviously. There's also the YouTube app,
which interestingly doesn't actually just open up a Chrome window with YouTube,
it's a YouTube app in itself. There's also Google Calendar, same idea, it's its own app. And also
Google Meet, and some other stuff like that. If we go back to the start menu and expand that, we can
see all the apps installed. So the first page is mostly just Google Docs apps and service.
And the second page, there are more tools though.
For example there is Chrome canvas, which is the equivalent to MS Paint, and you can do some
basic drawing, like my beautiful picture here. Another example is the Text app, which is just
a text editor like Notepad. Interestingly though, you can also install Linux on this. So if you go
to the Linux Terminal app, it'll ask you if you want to install a Linux subsystem, basically.
So to do that, you select the option to set up Linux development environment,
and then it's going to download and install Linux, and then after it finishes,
you'll have a bash shell. Though, I don't really know enough to demonstrate anything
interesting here, but you can see that it is there. And also after you do this,
it will give a new location in the file Explorer called Linux Files.
So this is where Linux runs out of, and you can access files using the bash shell,
and that's where all that stuff would go. Now you can technically install
more apps if you go to the Chrome web store. So that app is also in the start menu.
And then you can go to the apps section on the left, and look through them.
However, there seemed to be a lot of limitations. For example, I went and tried to install the
Google Play app to install some apps from the play store. It wouldn't let me do that,
it just said that it was no longer available. Now I believe if you're running an actual Chromebook,
it will let you do that from my understanding,
but it just won't work on ChromeOS Flex, which is kind of unfortunate.
I also tried to install Spotify and it wouldn't let me again for the same. And actually a lot of
other ones that I tried were broken too. I also could install VLC media player,
although I noticed that this version hadn't been updated since 2015 and
it wasn't able to play the WebM files, like that the screen recorder created,
so this one didn't really work either, not exactly a good experience. Though of course to point out,
there is a built in media player that you can use to watch the videos,
but I was just using VLC as an example. So don't expect much
if you want to actually install a bunch of other apps on here. It's pretty much
just gonna be useful for like some light work for Google Docs and stuff like that.
If we look at these system settings, there's actually quite a bit that you can change.
So we can look even for example, at the mouse settings. So I can disable
mouse acceleration, which I'm not a fan of. You can also go into the security settings
and change some of the login stuff. You can look at the list of installed apps
obviously. Again, it looks really similar to the user interface in the web browser Chrome. You can
also see there's a section if you chose to install Linux, there's a section for that. Of course,
there's some personalization settings, like if you wanna change the wallpaper,
there's a couple pre-installed themes and wallpapers there, and there's other
stuff that's slightly more advanced, like DNS settings that you can change the too.
So overall it's definitely nice that you can install ChromeOS on any computer now.
Obviously, it's not meant to be like a heavy hitter computer installing on your main desktop
or anything like that. But I think it might be good if you have like a really old net book,
do you remember those? The super small laptops that barely had any power?
Well, maybe all you need it for is to be able to run some Google
Docs or something. Though like I said, if you want the full Chromebook experience,
you probably have to go and actually buy a Chromebook. Although there are some
really cheap ones out there. So anyway, hopefully guys enjoy this video, let me know,
are you gonna maybe use this on an old laptop you have? What do you plan to use it for, just kinda
something to have, maybe to be able to use ChromeOS if you haven't before? Let me know
down the comments. Thanks again to Guardio for sponsoring this video. Again, be sure to visit
Guard.io/ThioJoe to install the extension and scan your browser for threats for free.
That link is also in the description. If you guys enjoyed this video,
the next one I'd recommend is where I was talking about nine really cool Chrome
extensions you might wanna install. So kind of related. You need to click on that right there,
I'll have it pop up. So thanks so much for watching guys, and I'll see you in the next one.