“There were a lot of people who wanted to get an extra 12 months of life out of devices - and they were willing to make really any trade,” he told me. Enterprises can also apply their Chrome OS licenses to Chrome OS Flex devices (while previously, CloudReady had a different license structure).įorrest Smith, the former director of Product at CloudReady-maker Neverware and now the product manager for CloudReady at Google, told me that somewhere around 2016, enterprises started catching up to the idea of using its service to extend the life of their devices. All of the usual IT management abilities that apply to Chrome OS also apply to Chrome OS Flex. If you still have a white MacBook lying around, maybe now is the time to dust it off.īecause it’s based on the work of CloudReady, there is also an enterprise component here. Most pre-2016 devices should work just fine, though. If you’re on a modern Mac or MacBook, chances are you are out of luck, just as Apple’s proprietary hardware makes it nearly impossible to install a Linux distribution on those machines - and especially the newer M1 devices. Thomas Riedl, Google’s director of product management for Chrome OS, noted that the install experience can still be a bit rough for consumers if they have to go into their BIOS and configure their machine to boot from a USB drive. Google has published a list of certified machines (mostly laptops), but chances are others will work as well - and giving it a try is about as hard as trying out a modern Linux distribution, which Chrome OS is obviously based on.

Right now, that may not be the case, given that there is an infinite number of possible PC configurations out there. The idea here is to bring the full Chrome OS experience to virtually any computer.

There is an obvious sustainability angle here. Built on top of CloudReady, which Google acquired in 2020, Chrome OS Flex is aimed at enterprises and educational users who want to prolong the lifetime of their existing devices, but anyone with access to a USB drive can use it to give an older PC - or maybe even a low-powered new one - a new lease on life. Google today announced Chrome OS Flex, an early preview of a new initiative that aims to bring Chrome OS to virtually any PC (and older Intel-based Macs).

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