- Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another video.
Now, in today's episode, we're going to be talking all about Chrome OS Flex.
A topic that has been heavily suggested by you guys out there.
I mean, I have received countless emails and DMs about this,
and so that's great.
We're going to be taking a look
at this today and checking it out and seeing what it's all about.
Now, for those who don't know, Chrome OS Flex is a new version
of Chrome OS designed specifically to run on non Chrome OS hardware
hardware that did not originally ship with Chrome OS.
Now, if that sounds familiar to you guys
who watched this video that I made back in 2020 on NeverWare's CloudReady...
That's because Google actually purchased that company so CloudReady, or NeverWare
is now a part of Google and Chrome OS Flex is the result of that buyout.
Now of course this did raise a couple of concerns about
what's going to happen to the CloudReady operating system itself.
But as of right now you can still download the home edition
of that for free though we're not sure if that's going to change in the future
though I would suspect that it will since Google
is going to want to be pushing Chrome OS Flex.
Now, of course,
this is going to do the exact same thing that CloudReady did,
but it's just neat to see Google
officially supporting it now and giving it the Chrome OS name.
Now, of course, with any video like this,
I had to ask myself the very important question
of "what computer am I going to install this operating system on?"
So I went into my realm of computers and pulled out an old friend that you
guys probably haven't seen in a while.
The low end Gateway Walmart laptop.
Yes, this is right here.
I did a video on this whole fiasco back in 2020 as well.
And it's quite the story because this right here
is a Gateway laptop in name only.
It is not sold, manufactured or supported by Gateway whatsoever.
And it's just a rebranded Chinese laptop that you can also get at Walmart
under a different brand name.
I mean there are some differences,
but it's essentially the same machine and it runs Windows 10, but barely.
I mean it
barely meets
the minimum system requirements and it runs extremely poorly as a result.
So let's install Chrome OS Flex on it and see if it makes the thing
actually usable.
So installing Chrome OS Flex is extremely straightforward
because it's the same process
you would go through to create recovery media for a Chromebook,
and that's by using the Chromebook Recovery Utility, fittingly named, right?
Which you can download in the Chrome Web Store.
Now I am using Microsoft Edge here, but since it is Chromium based,
I can just use it in here and add it to Microsoft Edge.
And so we're going to get started and you need to have an 8GB
or larger USB flash drive or an SD card.
I'm using a 16GB USB flash drive.
So right here is where you would type in the model number of your Chromebook.
Or you can select a model from a list and we're going to have to do this
because the manufacturer in this case is going to be
Chrome OS Flex, which is right down here, Google Chrome OS Flex.
And then the product there's only this one developer
unstable version here because this is still currently in development.
This has not been officially released yet.
It's going to ask us to select our USB drive.
We're going to go with that 14- well it's a 16 GB.
But Windows sees it as a 14.6 GB flash drive.
and we'll hit on continue and we will click on Create now
and it will erase the USB drive and copy over the necessary files to it
All right.
So we're off to a "great" start here.
It's been... I'd say like 5 minutes or so
and we have not progressed at all, which is mildly concerning.
And if we go into file explorer here, the USB drive is still empty.
There is nothing copied over to it's still mounted to the system.
So I'm wondering if you need to have Google Chrome proper.
I don't see why because Microsoft Edge is chromium based.
I could just do this entire process on another computer
but I mean, I want to do everything on this laptop itself, so.
Okay, it doesn't seem like we're getting anywhere.
I'm just going to cancel it from here.
And let's just go to as close out of this.
We will add the extension...
And it works!
Okay.
So yeah, you need to be-
You need to do it through Google Chrome.
All right. So we're all set.
We've got the recovery utility saying that it's finished, that we're done.
So we're going to click here to get out of it.
And we're now going to restart our computer and we're just gonna...
In Windows 10 here, we're going to open up the power options here
and we're going to hold the shift key on update and restart.
And that will bring us into the Advanced Boot Options menu here,
since this is a UEFI based firmware.
And so we're going to go down to use a device and we're going to select
the only device there, which is the USB drive,
and that should boot us into the Chrome OS installer.
So it's going to reboot the system here.
Got that good old Gateway logo.
There we go! Oh, check that out.
Now, what I found interesting is I saw some images of this setup process
and it actually still says "CloudReady"
There are some references to CloudReady that have not been changed yet.
And so that is yet another sign that this is not only a developer
beta, but also based on the existing CloudReady operating system
that's just been rebranded.
But Google has obviously done their thing to it.
"Google-ified" it
Put in the proper Google Chrome instead of Chromium
and all that jazz.
So, yeah, here we are on the... well...
We're on just a blank screen right now.
We got the shutdown options
and the volume options and everything in the bottom right.
And now we're at a black screen, which is even more exciting.
I wonder what it's doing right here.
I'm starting to get a little concerned here
because this should definitely not be happening.
I cannot interact with the system at all, and I think we're just going to
do a forced reset here.
Okay, so this is the screen we got to last time.
I can move the mouse around and we can okay.
So we can click down here and I think it's freezing up.
Yeah, because the mouse cursor,
I'm moving the mouse right now and is not responding.
So I think the entire
I think the entire system is locked up.
One thing that I probably should have mentioned earlier is
there is an official compatibility list
on the Google support pages for Chrome OS Flex.
I didn't really think we would run into a problem because this does meet
the minimum hardware requirements and all of that.
There's just certain things that are not going to function properly.
Like not every component in this computer is guaranteed to work properly
with Chrome OS Flex, for example, the touch screen and Bluetooth,
those might not work and I guarantee they're not going to work here,
but apparently we can't even get the installer to load up.
So let me just go and double check some things...
Ok, so we're back and I did a little bit of research.
Turns out this is a very common issue with the current
build of Chrome OS Flex.
This is a known bug and the best advice that people have been giving on
the subreddit is...
"try turning it off and back on again and eventually it'll work"
Some people have said
that it's a display issue, use an external monitor,
but I mean the entire I mean, you see it's freezing.
If the system itself is freezing up, that's not going to change anything.
So I boot into the BIOS here so we can change the boot option
because I don't want to have to boot into Windows 10
and go through what we went through last time.
So we're going to up boot option one
Ok.
Another suggestion has appeared: turning on a legacy mode in the BIOS.
All right.
We're going to go to the compatibility support module, enable that and change
boot option filter to legacy only.
Well, perhaps that and disabling the trusted platform module will help.
And we're moving around moving around, moving- and it did the same thing.
Oh, no.
All right.
So let's try a different system.
So we're just going to set the Gateway laptop aside here for now.
And I'm going to bring in my Acer laptop.
This is my
this is my old laptop that I was using before I switched to the MacBook Pro.
Now, you watch. This is going to work totally fine on here.
It's going to boot up.
And I'm not going to want to install it
because I don't want to overwrite the Windows 10 installation on here.
I don't want to bother with really dual booting it either.
Which is why I wanted to use this Gateway machine.
This is another one of those projects that I was like, you know what?
This will be a nice little video to do.
We can take a look at Chrome Flex,
we can explore and have a grand old time.
And of course, we run into all sorts of issues.
But hey again, this is what happens when-
Well, this is what happens when you watch an MJD video,
It's also what happens when you use developer software.
Okay, so here's the moment of truth, we're moving the mouse around,
we're moving the mouse around,
and...
it seems to be lasting a little longer here.
And it works!
Of course it works on the one machine
I don't want to actually install it on.
So. Okay, well, I guess Windows 10 is remaining on this laptop
for the time being.
I'm going to go and grab another system that I don't really mind
wiping the hard drive on and we'll install CloudReady-
See, this is what I was talking about.
It says CloudReady 2.0, even though this is now called Chrome OS Flex.
So kind of find that interesting.
But anyways, let's
go ahead and power this off, get a new system and check it out.
Remember this?
So yeah, this machine right here
is definitely not going to meet all of Chrome OS Flex's
minimum system requirements because it is from like 2008.
We're moving the mouse around.
We can go down to our settings here.
We're not connected, and it-
Oh, man
This right here is my Mac- And it's doing the same thing, ok.
Ok. So we're back finally.
It's been about an hour,
I think, since the last clip maybe an hour and a half,
and I've been just just testing this on as many laptops as I could find.
And you guys saw some of that footage,
some of it you didn't see.
These two MacBooks here- I mean it's-
and I've done multiple attempts here trying to get this to work.
And this Acer laptop is the only one that it actually
fully boots into the installer on.
And of course, it's the one machine that I said I did not want to mess with
because this is my old personal laptop and I still have some data on it.
I'm fully aware that I could just repartition the drive
but I just would rather not do that because I don't feel like messing
with the boot manager and all that jazz.
So, instead what I did because I'm committed to getting Chrome
OS Flex installed on something...
is I took out the hard drive and I put in a blank hard drive,
an SSD, actually.
That's why we have this screen right here
because there is currently no bootable device.
So we are going to pop in our USB stick-
Oh, one of the other things I did is I reformatted this and went through
the Chrome OS Flex or just the Chrome OS
Restore Wizard again and that didn't change anything.
So we're going to pop this into a USB port on here
and we are going to restart.
We'll just have to do a force restart here and it should find that USB device.
Now this is, as I have mentioned already, an ongoing problem
and it very well could be fixed
by the time that this video goes out in the next release of Chrome OS Flex.
This is a pretty widespread issue from what I've seen.
There's a lot of people on Reddit talking about this
within the last couple of days.
These posts are fairly new, and there's one guy,
one of my favorite posts is, there's a guy
who's been trying to install Chrome OS Flex on a fleet of laptops
and this problem will just happen intermittently.
So honestly, it could happen on this laptop right now.
Let's just hope it does and let me hope I didn't jinx myself here.
I'm getting anxious here because it's like, okay, okay.
I was oh, okay.
Yeah.
I think this model
I mean, just look up on the official supported device list here.
So this right here is an Acer Aspire E15.
The exact model number is the E5-575G5341
lot of 5s in there, right?
And it is not on the Chrome OS Flex supported
devices list, which just means that Google has not tested it.
It doesn't mean that it's not going to work.
And the fact that we're here on the setup screen is a great sign
because again, all those other machines, we didn't get to this point.
So we're going to get started.
And this is where you have the option
of either installing it or trying it first.
If you wanted just to
boot off of the USB drive and try out Chrome OS Flex, you can do that.
"Welcome to CloudReady 2.0, fast, secure, and effortless"
Oh, isn't that beautiful?
And okay,
next.
Okay, that was.
Oh, my gosh. It's doing
it's freezing up again.
Are you kidding me?
Oh, my gosh. I actually.
Oh, I actually had hope that that was going to work, so it looped us
back to the beginning of the setup, and then it just locked up all right.
We're just going to we're just going to turn it off.
But that's good that we got to that point.
Let's try it again here.
I mean, this is just not my day, man.
I mean, I did I woke up thinking, I'm going to record this video.
It'll be pretty simple.
Then I can move on to another video project that I want to do.
And no, that's not really happening.
But okay, this is good.
So we didn't get to this point before.
"Before starting, make sure you have a backup of your data"
Install, install and erase hard disk.
Oh, and this is the thing to to apparently doesn't
give you the option to partition your-
does it really not give you?
Yeah, I guess it doesn't give you the option
to partition your drive or like install it on a specific partition
because this drive has multiple partitions on it.
Yeah.
It's just going to overwrite the entire drive
which honestly now that I think about it isn't really a big deal at all.
Oh look, the installations complete. That's nice.
Your device will shut down in 48 seconds.
Okay, so we'll just let it time out there.
It's honestly not a huge deal that you can't configure the partitions
because I mean if you're installing Chrome OS Flex on a laptop
to convert it into a Chromebook,
you're going to probably be using it as a Chromebook.
I mean, it doesn't really make sense to dualboot it with Windows
because if you just want to browse the web, you can do that from Windows.
The only reason you'd be installing Chrome OS is like in the case of the Gateway
laptop here: Windows just runs so poorly and you just want to browse the web
and use the device as a Chromebook, as a lightweight laptop.
And so yeah, I mean, that's that's what this is for.
There's certainly scenarios where, you know,
you would want to do that if you were trying it out, for instance.
But I mean, you could just do that in a virtual machine, right?
There's no need to like section off a partition on your hard
drive for Chrome OS.
But anyway, so it's restarting here and there we go.
We're doing our first boot here. Welcome.
This looks eerily familiar. Okay.
I was going to say, like, please do not tell me that something screwed up
and this is where you have to sign and we'll just browse as a guest for now.
So we'll click that button down there just to launch into Chrome OS.
And there we go.
"You're browsing as a guest"
isn't that- this is like the most excited I've ever been to see Chrome OS.
Like after going through this
ridiculously long video, trying to get it to install
I've tried frickin' five laptops, so I think the first thing I'm going to do
is "enable Linux on the Chromebook."
I think that's what they call it.
It's not really worded well because I mean, it is based off of Linux.
Uh, yeah "Linux is a feature"
oh get ready for all the Linux people to be pissed off
at that woding "Linux isn't a feature, it's an operating system!1!!1!1!"
Okay, we know, but that's the way Google words it here
lets you develop software using your Chromebook.
You can install Linux command line tools that are.
So I think you have to be signed in to do this.
So okay, so let's go to Settings and then let's go to Advanced and yeah,
of course now we have the developer options, Linux development enrollment.
We're going to turn that on with the user name as Michael
Disk size "recommended" that's fine.
Installing Linux. Okay.
Chrome OS update required.
Okay.
Nearly up to date. Okay.
Was that just released today?
Hang on a second.
There's no because that was the latest-
unless the installer wasn't updated.
"Error installing Linux"
Oh lord. Okay.
"Error starting penguin container launching vmshell failed"
Oh yeah.
Developer mode is currently not available in Flex.
There you go.
That's that's as simple as it is.
It is currently not supported by Google. So, yeah...
Hey, that doesn't surprise me because Chrome OS Flex...
this is definitely, definitely, 100% still in development.
I mean there's no doubt about it.
It's probably going to be a little while until until it fully gets released
which is good
because you want to make sure all these bugs and problems are fixed.
You want to make sure every device that is officially supported-
Of course, to be fair to Google,
none of these devices that I've tested today are officially supported.
Well, yeah.
There you have it, guys.
That is the long journey I took to get Chrome OS Flex
installed on a laptop and well, I'm just glad that we got it installed.
What can I say?
I mean, this was a long time coming.
This video was way longer than I wanted it to be, but hey,
hopefully you guys enjoyed it.
If you did, be sure to give it a thumbs up, get subscribed down below,
turn on those notifications, all that good stuff.
And as always, I want to
thank you all so much for watching, and I will see you in the next video.
(outro music)