CHROME OS Flex is a BAD operating system

👏 SUPPORT THE CHANNEL:
Get access to a weekly podcast, vote on the next topics I cover, and get your name in the credits:

🏆 FOLLOW ME ELSEWHERE:

This video is distributed under the Creative Commons Share Alike license.

#chromeosflex #chromeos #google

00:00 Intro
00:42 Sponsor: 100$ free credit for your Linux or Gaming server
01:42 Install process: unnecessarily complex
03:09 Desktop: simple and good, on the surface
06:17 Issues: it's not ChromeOS
07:55 App switching is completely broken
09:45 Interacting with windows is sub-par
10:44 Big UX errors in the Settings app
12:11 The Overview isn't useful
13:39 Who is this thing for?
16:14 Sponsor: Get a device that runs Linux perfectly
17:14 Support the channel

The interface is extremely simple. You have a basic bottom bar with a main menu and search field at the far left, app icons that also serve as a task bar in the middle, and a calendar and system menu on the right. If you have something playing in an app, you also get a media indicator next to the calendar to let you control playback.

You can't change anything apart from the wallpaper and the position of that task bar: bottom, left or right, no top option. You also have a dark mode.

You have touchpad gestures, with a 3 finger swipe up to display an overview of all your windows and virtual desktops, and 4 finger swipes left or right to switch between desktops.

Windows use the windows button layout, on the right hand side, wit minimize, maximize and close, plus a menu to interact with the window.

You can run any webapp from the CHrome Web store, which has a lot of stuff, you can add any website as a shortcut that will appear in the main menu and be usable as an app, or you can enable the Linux development environment from the settings.

It gives you a Debian container, with access to basic repos, but you can install faltpak, add flathub, and run anything you'd like, although since it's a container, some stuff won't work, like OBS for example

The problems:

First, the killer feature for ChromeOS is that it has its own Android container that runs any Android app really well. CHrome OS Flex can't do that. It doesn't have access to Android apps, which is a big bummer.

Then, we have more factual, UX based problems, like the window inconsistencies. Chrome OS uses web apps and passes them for desktop applications. The problem is, not all apps are treated in the same way. Opening youtube, or the file manager brings a window that looks like an application: short title bar, and standard controls. But if I open Google drive, then I get a browser window with a URL bar, tabs and a different title bar. Then, if I open Google sheets, I don't get a separate application window, it opens in a tab inside of the Google drive window, so I don't get an app icon in the task bar.

It's completely illegible: you never know what to expect when opening an application, where it's going to open, where your tab or window is, and if it's been minimized by another application.

Then you have that horrible visual aid when resizing a window: as your mouse pointer gets towards a window's side, you get this black bar that appears around that side.

Moving windows around sucks. See, the theme is either completely white, or dark. The title bar merges with the header or toolbar. Except you can only drag a window from its titlebar, and you don't know exactly where it starts or ends, because the title bar doesn't show a window title, just buttons. And you can't press Super or Alt while dragging anywhere on the window to move it either.

The settings are all displayed in a single page, with a sidebar. CLicking the sidebar moves you to the relevant section of that single settings page. Moves you, not scrolls you, so you don't immediately realize it's a single page. If you scroll yourself, the sidebar selected item doesn't change. So the sidebar is now telling me I'm in the Accessibility settings, when I'm looking at the network settings. Pretty bad design.

And then the overview. It lists all your open windows, pretty useful. But ChromeOS doesn't know what is a window or not, so no, I don't see all my windows, I see all individual apps, and then a Chrome window with multiple tabs that should be separate apps.

[AnErrupTion]

Btw, for the install proesss, you should've clicked on "Looking to install on a personal device? Start here", since the info is only required for businesses.

[MyReviews_karkan]

How TF does Google take Linux and make it not compatible with Linux? If this is not a crime, I don't know what it is.

[Deezter]

Totally agree with title. My daughter uses a chrome book at school. I installed Chrome Flex on an old laptop to give her a familiar environment to do her school work.
1) Getting the ISO was indeed terrible, I use Firefox so I was forced to install Chrome just to get the OS.
2) Installing was terrible too; no partition options, no app options, no progress bar, nada
3) Getting into the OS was fine, but the school account my daughter uses is protected, so half the default apps she can't access without a way to uninstall them. So basically she can only use Chrome ... but she could have done that on every OS.
4) I get this OS is not Android based, so no Android app support, I knew that before I installed, but that leaves a very marginal set of apps. Why would you want to limit yourself this way.
5) All other things you said in the video :)

[godtable]

I use it for my parents, my mother has a Chromebook, my father has a slow old PC with Chrome OS flex. My parents only need - know the browser, anything else is a nuisance to them. The way Chrome OS is a self-managed operating system, with automatic updates that applied instantly after rebooting or shutting down, is great.
In the past, I was using Linux Mint with disabled updates, is not ideal. No Linux distro has "set it and forget it" mentality, everyone is like "the power to do stuff and owning your PC", but with great power comes great responsibility! :) And nobody has time for that :).

[BUDA]

is bizarre the lack of attention to properly support web apps, when everything is a web app

[bibasik]

"Mom, can I have Linux?"
"No, we have Linux at home."

Linux at home:

[steveful]

When I heard about the limits of Flex I knew what this was for: taking a laptop destined for the recycle bin and turning it into a Chome Browser machine for a parent/other family member. This is assuming that they absolutely don’t need to use any other apps, which is true for a lot of people, especially say retired people who just want to access web mail and Facebook. You obviously could install a Linux distro, but I trust ChomeOS a lot better to update silently in the background and not break.

edit: there also another thing about the Linux desktop that is a real problem: lack of hardware video decode in the web browser. I’m guessing this isn’t an issue in Flex as Google controls everything including the drivers. I might install on an old laptop and find out.

[andrewpalm]

I've been using Linux as my primary OS for several years. After a lot of distro-hopping I've landed on Debian and Fedora, both with Xfce; and the "family" computer has Ubuntu Mate (at least until I get up the energy to convert it back to Mint). However, a few months ago on a whim I installed Chrome OS Flex on a Thinkpad T420s to see what it was like. I'm not an enthusiastic supporter for it, but my experience was better than expected and much better than your video would suggest. I've used that laptop almost every evening while relaxing--checking news, email, and some social media, but mostly playing simple card and puzzle games. Perhaps the novelty will wear off, but more likely Google will eventually stop supporting my old hardware, just as it does with Chromebooks. Now I'm a 75 year old grandpa and my evening computing needs are modest, but my experience with Chrome OS Flex is that it is at least better than Windows 10 and is easy to use and update.

[SignalChange]

Bite your tongue.
I am using chromeos flex on a lenovo tiny m900 with a 1tb nvme, wifi 6 / bt 5.2 on a well supported intel ax200 and this thing is just a ridiculously fast, bullet proof primary computer for me. If I need an app, I just install the linux container, but of what I do is online. Email, SoundCloud, drive, editing, and all of my design and AI work I do with this, If I want to play the some hot game, GeForce now works wonderfully. I've made so many linux keys/cds that the stack would kill me if it ever fell on me and I've never found one of them that has any kind of polish.

So I will stick with this. Might not suite your needs, but I've been computing since the amiga days and this little dual screened monster is f'n awesome. (and yes, I have a ryzen 5800x/radeon 6600m sitting in my livingroom, running ChimeraOS.

[mjdxp]

basically, it's linux for people afraid of linux

[heneverreturnasahorse]

I agree with you 90 per cent. There is only one application where Chrome OS beats Linux application - the visually impaired. I have commented before, there is a significant clientele who are visually impaired and only a large funded company like Apple, Google and Microsoft can give us the accessibility options we need to have a good experience with home computers. I would love to give up these three for a Linux distribution that had 90 per cent of the ease of use, but so far there is nothing available in the Linux community.

[DavidEsotica]

I put this on an old laptop for my mum when her Chromebook went EOL. Just so she wouldn't get lost in something else. Basically the only use case that I can come up with.

[crocodilemedia]

ChromeOS Flex beats every Linux distro in scaling, stability, icons, interface and google drive integration. Every Linux distro is a scaling nightmare with ugly icons and no thumbnails in file manager. Linux has had decades and decades of failure and has gotten nowhere.

[yjk_music]

Most things you described are definitely weird and not optimal, but it also doesn't feel like totally unusable disaster. The *only* major downside I can see is lack of Android app support.
NOTE: I'm not Chrome OS user.

[wsippel]

Waydroid does have the Google Play Store - if you use a GAPPS image. But yeah, getting it working isn't super straight forward. It needs special kernel modules and tweaked boot options, and I didn't really have a great time trying to get ARM applications to work, even with libhoudini installed.

[imtopher]

Sheets, Docs, etc.: Create a shortcut for each app to make it a PWA. Have them open as windows, not as tabs. You should, then, be able to make individual documents open as separate (doc, sheet, etc.) windows instead of a tab going forward by selecting the option in search bar, once opened in a tab.

[twb]

15:30

Not sure if this can be disclosed, but w/e, Amazon uses mostly ChromeOS for customer service. So it does work for some companies

[stevenmishos]

I ran Chrome OS Flex as an experiment to "learn" it and stopped after a few days because there isn't much to learn, but I consider that a positive.
It just works and its user experience has none of the weird quirks we all put up with daily in Linux (none of the "nightmare" issues mentioned in the vid compare).
Viewers of this channel probably won't run it, but it's the perfect OS for my neighbours who simply surf the web.

[owlstead]

I don't think "illegible" is what you should be going for, it's "illogical". "Illegible" means that you cannot read it. Literally as in that you would not be able to read text. "legere" is Latin for reading.

[NikiDaDude]

I tried ChromiumOS a long time ago, and later played around with CloudReady. It was at the time the lightest OS and could even make old single core Athlon 64 computers feel usable.
While it is limited and I don't like the user experience compared to Mint and the Cinnamon DE, it is also a fact that popular distros and desktop environments are quite resource intensive.
I see it as a niche OS for a very specific purpose, like repurposing an old PC for basic web browsing and document editing. while still running an up to date and secure OS rather than something like Windows 7.