You have to create a USB drive on a working computer and the installer gives you no options to, say, install as a secondary operating system. The installation is painless but inflexible. Some distributions are better than others, but in the end, if you are having a bad day, you really need to know something about the system or be willing to learn it.Ĭhrome OS deliberately doesn’t give you much choice. Even people who are pretty comfortable with Windows or the Mac can find the number of options, log files, and command lines daunting for Linux. If you want to give Grandpa your old laptop, putting Linux on it can be very challenging, unless Grandpa is pretty tech-savvy. That is, in fact, the exact use case for Chrome OS Flex. That assumes you know how to install, tweak, and maintain Linux. There are several distributions that are made for that purpose and, honestly, even most of the major distributions will work fine on older hardware with a little tweaking to turn off some of the more resource-costly features. The other option, of course, is to just install Linux on that old hardware. Unfortunately, Chrome OS Flex has a very different use case and I would only recommend installing it if you meet the exact use case it addresses. Seems attractive to take that only Windows 7 laptop and repurpose it to run Chrome OS, especially if you can run Linux apps on it.

However, Google has recently pushed out Chrome OS Flex which is meant to install on a spare laptop you might happen to have hanging around. If you have a real Chromebook, you can also use it to run certain other kinds of programs via virtualization. Like Android, Chrome OS is based on some variant of Linux, but it is targeted at the “cloud first” strategy so Chromebooks typically don’t have a huge amount of storage or compute power. You’ve probably heard about Google Chromebooks. The Flex Desktop is user-friendly and responsive

How to install linux apps on chromebook