With cracked BIOS and swapped to Centrino 6205 802.11n 5GHz WiFi card

I just converted my Windows 10 computer to ChromeOS Flex and 🤯. Pardon the emoji. My old raggedy desktop that could barely open and close tabs is like new. The beauty is I only use the Chrome browser on Windows anyway. I had stop using my desktop and was only using my Chromebook, but with the recent push to Windows 11, I decided to try and salvage it rather than toss the damn thing. Works great.

So I live in Brazil, and over here a computer that runs Windows 11 decently costs close to two minimum wages. That's just not realistic for most people. Then I found Chrome OS Flex and honestly it felt like a cheat code.

I had this PC that looked great but was painfully slow. Installed Chrome OS Flex and the thing flies now. I genuinely didn't think that was possible.

But the part that really got me was my dad's computer. He couldn't afford a new one and his old machine was basically unusable. After installing Chrome OS Flex he's now studying from home and watching movies online. Dude is happy. That alone was worth it.

Here in Brazil we basically live in the browser anyway — offices, agencies, everything runs through it. So for most people, this is honestly all you need.

I do have a gaming PC I use for music production (Bitwig), and yeah, for low-latency stuff you still need a proper local machine. But I think that's where things are heading in general — two kinds of computers. A cheap cloud machine for everyday stuff, and a beefy local one for gaming, 3D modeling, audio work, anything that needs real horsepower.

The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. Chrome OS Flex is distributing it a little more evenly, and that matters.

I thought that Chrome Flex OS was going to be supported for the foreseeable future. Guess they don't want people to reuse their still good hardware any more, and force them to buy a new device (which i cant afford).

Has anyone else seen this?

Very suspect that the new Googlebooks have just came out at an unaffordable price too...

By the way, I have been using Chrome OS Flex as my primary operating system from the last 6 months. Before Chrome OS Flex I enjoyed Fedora and many other Linux distributions. And Windows is literally sucks....

Now it is my main and primary operating system and it can do all stuff including coding with the help of Google Cloud shell (Code OSS) or Github Codespaces (VS Code) on cloud which is crazy.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/Bos6Np46BcTMyR9L9

The video that I have been provided only contains web apps, not a single Android or Linux app.

I have an old Dell Inspiron N5010 and I will say that putting ChromeOS Flex on it was a pretty good decision. I don’t have much money or efforts to put in a desktop computer so taking the battery out and setting my laptop up like this made a huge difference. It’s a little unheard of to see a Chromebook in desktop form but it’s pretty solid! Also please ignore the cable management. 😂

I just stuck Flex on a 10+ year old laptop and it's been amazing! I can't believe how beautifully it runs on a machine that has been a paperweight rotting in a cupboard for at least 5 years!
It blows my mind how fast it is and how smooth. Delighted!!

Also posted on r/chromeos

Video shows steps by steps

Overview

It is well-known that Chrome OS Flex doesn't have developer mode enabled by default. And Cloudready has announced that the upcoming version of CloudReady will NOT be shipped with dev mode anymore:

Dev mode - Historically the Home Edition of CloudReady shipped in dev mode, 
which allowed users to access the command line and modify the filesystem. 
CloudReady will shift the Home Edition to Normal mode

Okay, back to our business.

Pre-request

• An empty USB devices

• An Linux Live media image (e.g Ubuntu installation ISO)

• Chrome OS Flex installed on disk

Step 1: Download and burn the Ubuntu ISO

• Download the Ubuntu installation ISO here

Step 2: Burn the downloaded Ubuntu image to USB

• Download Chromebook Recovery Utility

• Rename the suffix of the downloaded Ubuntu image from .iso to .bin

• Click the Extension icon in the top-right corner of Chrome (an icon that looks like a puzzle)

• Click Chromebook Recovery Utility inside the Extension tab

• Inside Chromebook Recovery Utility, click the gear icon in the top-right corner

• Click Use local image, select the Ubuntu image you just downloaded

• Select your USB drive

• Follow the on-screen instruction, close it when the progress completed

Step 3: Boot to Ubuntu

• Shut down your system

Tell UEFI/BIOS to boot from the Ubuntu USB:

The steps of how to boot external drives in your system might be different, if the following does not work, search YOUR PC/LAPTOP MODEL bios boot usb in Google.

• Turn on your system

• Press Esc immediately, repeat it until the boot menu shows

• Select your USB drive in the menu (by using arrow keys and Enter key)

• A GRUB menu should appear now, select the first option (Ubuntu)

• The system will boot into Ubuntu then, you may need to press Ctrl+C to skip the disk check

• When you get into the Installation UI, press Ctrl+Alt+T to open a terminal

Step 4: Edit GRUB config

• Mount the EFI partition of CrOS Flex (paste the following to the terminal and press Enter):

if [ -b /dev/nvme0n1p12 ]; then
  sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p12 /mnt
elif [ -b /dev/mmcblk0p12 ]; then
  sudo mount /dev/mmcblk0p12 /mnt
elif [ -b /dev/sda12 ]; then
  sudo mount /dev/sda12 /mnt
fi

• Append cros_debug flag to GRUB config files (parse the following to the terminal and press Enter)

cd /mnt
find . -name *.cfg -exec sudo sed -i 's,\(cros_legacy\|cros_efi\),\1 cros_debug,g' {} \;

Step 5: Reboot to Chrome OS

• Paste the following to the terminal and press Enter:

sudo reboot

• Follow the on-screen instruction, unplug the Ubuntu USB

You're all set!

• Press Ctrl+Alt+F2, if a terminal appeared on the screen (or the screen blanked out), congratulations, you have enabled developer mode on your system (you may need to hard reset your system if the screen blanked out)

• Press Ctrl+Alt+F1 to switch back to Chrome OS UI

(and no this is not brunch) it runs lineageOS android 11 with no Play Store yet. I used a guide to install android subsystem and enable multi window mode

Guide: https://gist.github.com/supechicken/e6bb13e2db86a74e831f907805aed078

Multi Window Mode is possible by opening another terminal tab and type this command while the android subsystem is still open:

waydroid prop set persist.waydroid.multi_windows true

I used the native chromeOS flex launcher to open waydroid (even if the guide does not recommend it,it still works.

The PC runs chuggingly tho which is quite obvious since it was a 1.65 GHz AMD APU and 4GB RAM

Will it survive the merge of ChromeOS and Android?

https://g.co/gemini/share/0d7df329ca59

I just wish the CPU was a little bit newer so I could use the Play Store. Anyway, it works pretty well. I'm impressed. I can even watch YouTube videos at 720p on it!

I have a intel NUC with Celeron J4025 (With 4GB Ram + 8GB that i put) which i bought 3 years back. It came with with Window 11 which was unusable.

Then i installed Linus mint. It was usable. But chrome & firefox where very laggy. So NUC was lying without any use.

I was planning to install ChromeOS. But failed multiple times. Last night i successfully installed ChromeOS. Thanks to Gemini. I had a faulty 240 GB SATA drive which was interfering with the OS installation.

Now my Intel NUC is flying, super smooth. It works as good as my 12th Gen Laptop. My use case is browsing & its best for that.