Buying a Chromebook was a BIG MISTAKE - Chrome OS Flex

Your old MacBook is really chugging these days. But new computers with fancy Nvidia GPUs and AMD Ryzen chips are very expensive. Here's a way you could save a buck! Chrome OS Flex! Google will now let you install Chrome OS on your own device for free. But can it actually improve old devices? We tested to find out!

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MUSIC CREDIT
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Intro: Laszlo - Supernova

Outro: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High

CHAPTERS
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0:00 CrINgeTRO
1:45 The Laptops
3:05 How we tested
4:04 How slow are they?
5:25 Installing Chrome OS Flex
6:34 BIG CAVEAT
7:49 Chrome OS Flex Results
10:39 Can you run it?
11:53 Chrome OS Flex limitations
13:17 Alternatives
14:32 Outro

[jamiepilkey]

Shoutout to my Thinkpad for doing so well! This was the device I both wrote my script about and on when I interviewed as a writer, before getting hired in Logistics. It’s a great little machine and I cannot recommend it more, even in 2022.

[sentry]

the intro is like watching a bunch of overly supportive dads during a practice match

[speckkatze]

A comparison to a lightweight linux distro would have been interesting, just to see how much of a difference the operating system could make.

[eruk]

I think the main takeaway here is that thinkpads are still amazing and last forever

[LegGiant]

Honestly the Thinkpad was the star of the show. As they said, change the HD to a SSD and buy a replacement battery and you've got a great web browsing and doc writing machine. Here in the UK I see them starting around £120. Brilliant robust school work machine.

[CarlClifford]

I didn't hear mention of it in the video, but there is one more performance-oriented oddity with ChromeOS to consider. If you have (I believe) a Skylake or older CPU in your device, ChromeOS disables hyper-threading by default as a way to alleviate a known hardware security flaw in those CPUs. You can re-enable it in the chrome-flags page by changing the setting and rebooting. This may change some of the performance benchmark \ battery life scores in the tests quite a bit, assuming the devices are HT capable.

[slartibartfast]

Can we all give the ThinkPad a round of applause for being so solid and useable after 10 years?

Edit: Do NOT buy Crucial BX SSDs as linked below in the description unless you are on a really tight budget. They have no DRAM cache so suck with sustained reads and writes, as well as having poor endurance. The MX500 lineup is much better.

[potorrero]

This video made me love my Thinkpad even more. 8 years being my main machine and still going strong.

[airplanenut]

I spent $36 to upgrade my in-laws 3-4yr old laptop to a 500gb ssd and the difference is mind blowing. It was almost unusable before and now it feels just like a new computer for light tasks (which is all they did anyway). It’s so aggravating how long oem’s stuck to spinning drives, and you have to wonder how many people bought new computers because they didn’t realize all they needed was an ssd.

[CheddarCheeez]

I was skeptical when I saw Bush's Baked Beans listed as an SSD option, but once I tried it out, I canned my old hard drive. The performance wasn't perfect straight from the tin, but after a night of updates, it really sprouted and the performance gains grew incredibly fast.

[SilentKaliSmoker]

I finally updated my HDD to a SSD a while back. The change in speed was more than I thought. It makes such a big difference for not a big price. Depending on the size obviously.

[spikeshartell]

TBH I've always found switching to an SSD does do quite a lot for an older computer but another thing that works well in conjunction with that upgrade is to also upgrade the ram. Older laptops generally have upgradable ram and even if it's only a 2GB jump it still helps quite a lot

[HKlink]

I can definitely confirm the SSD upgrade makes a world of difference. Recently wanted to throw away my mom's old computer since it runs like garbage, checked the specs to see why it ran so poorly, and noticed it had a perfectly good i5-4400 in it. It was just paired with 4GB RAM and a hard drive. Upgraded to a nice 16 gig kit and a zippy SSD, and wham bam, it's like a new machine!

My mom uses it for work and we have some security cameras, I installed the program to peek into the cameras, but she never ended up using it because it just made the whole thing slow down to a crawl. After the upgrade, it could easily handle twenty Firefox tabs, basic image editor, remote desktop connection, and the camera software at the same time. It really is like a new machine now. She's super happy with it :) It's like I bought her a whole new computer for 120 bucks.

[etheth]

A video where Linus goes over different benchmark programs to run on your own system at home would be cool. Diving more into the meanings of the results and tips on things you can do without just upgrading components to better your performance. As always love these videos you guys put out.

[Freakmaster]

I'd love to see this done with linux mint or some other easy, user friendly linux distro. Chrome os is too limiting but a good linus distro is actually versatile.

[loRDoFThEWoLveS]

I’ve put chrome OS flex on a crappy old laptop. It definitely made it much more usable, though after sustained use it seems to struggle. I tried lubuntu and other light Linux distros first, but chrome OS was much more usable

[Kurumi.tokisaki.]

Just a note. They bought a company called neverware that made a distro of chromium OS (the open source version that the proprietary version is based on just like the web browser) called cloudready with some proprietary bits added in minus somethings like android app support. It's been around for ages but google swept in bought them and rebranded it as chrome OS flex

[lifeHacker]

Can we talk about how great that ThinkPad was running both before and after getting chrome OS. I bought a second hand 2011 x220 a few years ago for my computer science degree at uni of all things. With a £20 SSD it still runs like a dream, particularly with Ubuntu

[warthunder]

Honestly Chrome OS Flex is just the Chrome OS I used back in 2015 in college - back before the linux container or android apps on chrome were even a thing ( I had a cheap $100 chromebook back then). Running it on any fairly modern machine if all you do is stream, type up a few docs etc is honestly just as good of an experience as it was then. Its not for gaming, video editing or heavy lifting - just the basics.

[Wlfenstrike]

Been using SSDs since 2012 and ever since, I've been a HUGE advocator for using an SSD on EVERYTHING possible, from my dad's 2007 HP PC to my sister's HP Netbook (remember those?), even a cheapo SSD can bring a seemingly "dead" laptop back to life, it's INSANE.