Chrome OS Flex: Google’s New PC OS

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers this time we're going to check out chrome os flex this is a new version of chrome os the cloud-based operating system used on google chromebooks and can be installed on almost any pc for example chrome os flex can be used to bring new life to an old laptop so let's go and take a closer look to understand chrome os flex it's useful to delve a little into where it came from and in november 2009 google decided to open source for development of chrome os and this enabled other companies to create their own version and this included fidos as we can see here as well as cloud ready from a company called and google clearly kept an eye on what was going on here and in december 2020 google acquired neverwhere as we can see here neverwhere is now part of google neverwhere and cloudready are now officially part of the google and the chrome os team and then in february 2022 google announced chrome os flex as as we can see the cloud first operating system for pcs and macs chrome os flex is being built for businesses and schools and at the time of making this video it remains in beta however like many beta google products it's highly functional and it's also got great potential for anybody who wants a simple cloud-based operating system and indeed an operating system that can bring new life to an old computer if we scroll all the way down this page we get right to the bottom there's a big friendly yellow box for trying chrome os flex if we click on that we get to another page and if we click here on try chrome os flex like that there were various fields you have to fill in here quite a few this is clearly intended for a business and many people won't want to fill all this in and go through this process however rather than completing all of this information it's also possible to create a bootable usb drive for chrome os flex using the google chromebook recovery utility which we find information about on this page which of course i'll link in the video description and what we need to do is to add this utility to a browser and it works in microsoft edge or google chrome or chromium and here i'm in chrome so i'm going to click add to chrome like that and add extension and there we are it's been added and it's fine i'll turn that off up there and we now have a little jigsaw icon at the top to get to extensions and if i go down here and click on chromebook recovery utility the chromebook recovery utility runs up and as we can see we need to use an eight gigabyte or larger usb drive and this drive will be completely erased to create our chrome os flex media do be aware of that but provided we are we'll click on get started like that and then on this screen ignore the box on the top and click on select a model from a list like that we then go to select a manufacturer and we scroll down here and we find somewhere down here there it is google chrome os flex like that and then we select a product there's only one option it is chrome os flex developer unstable and this does remind us that chrome os flex is still in beta although in my experience of trying it out it runs very well and it's certainly fun to test so let's click on continue like that and select on media i've got a usb drive plugged into this computer i'll select it there and we'll click on continue again and then as a final check as you can see so we'll click on create now and here we are windows is just asking for confirmation everything's okay to write on media we'll click on yes and whilst the process completes i just note that if you want to use your usb drive again having turned it into a bootable media you might have to clean the drive rather than simply reformatting it and you can do this in windows using a utility called this part and i've got a video all about this which i'll link in the video description and there we are it's finished we've got our chrome os flex bootable media so we'll just click on ok and also to be tidy here i'm going to go up to extensions in chrome and go to the chromebook recovery utility and go to the menu at the end here i'm going to remove this from chrome no point leaving an extension hanging around in a browser for longer than i need to right i thought we'd start out with a very simple test so i plugged the usb drive into my i5 test rig and we'll turn it on there we go and i'm holding down the f11 key to get to the boot menu on this system it might be a different key on other computers but here as you can see it allows us to choose between booting from the ubuntu ssd on this system the windows ssd and the usb drive so we'll select usb drive and here we are booting into chrome os flex our usb drive clearly works and here we are we're welcome to chrome os flex that's a rather nice little google animation let's get started and we'll try it first we're not going to install here just going to see if the thing runs so we'll try it first and next and we also need to accept the terms of service and now it's asking us who's going to use this computer you or a child but i'm not going to set anything up here to use an account in this test i'm just going to go down to the bottom of the screen and to click on browser's guest you don't have to log in when using a chromebook and it's the same here in chrome os flex but what i am going to do straight away is to go down to here to this menu and go to settings and to displays and we'll just make the screen a bit bigger like that so we can see it more clearly on video that's a rather good isn't it and here we are browsing as a guest in chrome os flex which is very much a browser-based operating system as we can see with very little else here other than the browser and the file manager let's try going to there for a website there we go that seems to work and hopefully we can also go to youtube we'll just try that out as well we can go to the explaining computer's website on youtube everything will be fine won't it there we are and here we are on youtube seems to be playing that's full screen that except we've got full hd why does the auto never work that's definitely full hd that's working okay although it's going to be very strange look it's me talking to me can't tell that far too confusing but we proved the point we can use the the web here in chrome os flex we've also got our file manager down there look to look at files on this system it's showing us both of the ssds connected to this computer let's see if we can view a file let's open up the windows drive there must be something here we can experiment with oh yes there's a desktop folder one picture file we can look at that yes we've got a picture viewer that works absolutely fine and down here on the left menu we've got access to all the apps on the system and to search that's pretty straightforward and over on the right we've got the menu we saw earlier where we can access settings we can close down we can change our network settings capture the screen all to volume and we can also auto brightness although you can't see that on video so this is a very successful test we're clearly running chrome os in the form of chrome os flex so what i'm now going to do is to close this down and we'll try installing on an old netbook greetings here i am back with my acer aspire1725 netbook on which i intended to install chrome os flex in fact i have installed chrome os flex on this device if i just bring it back to life out of sleep it'll hopefully in a second show you want to display what it is running there we are it's running chrome os flex but i've had a lot of difficulties recording the hdmi output from this device during the installation process so i can't show you on video so what i am going to show you is something slightly different we're going to install chrome os flex on this a rock pi x single board computer which has got a similar specification to many netbooks it's got a quad core atom processor an atom z8350 with four gigabytes of memory and 32 gigabytes of emmc flash storage and it's worth noting that to install chrome os flex your computer has to have a 64-bit processor and four gigabytes of ram so let's grab the usb drive and get this connected up and booted and if you need assistance booting your computer from a usb drive just look to my video on pc bios settings anyway as you can see we're now entering into chrome os flex and once again we can get started where this time we're going to do a full install and we just have to confirm that we understand that what we're going to do here will delete everything on the drive on this computer i understand that i'll do the install and in fact it checks again to check we're really certain we're blanking everything from the machine i'm okay with that and there we are the install process has begun which will take it says up to about 20 minutes i would guess more like 10 minutes on this computer and there we are it's finished it was actually just under 4 minutes and so now what we need to do is to shut down and i'll now take out the usb drive and we'll reboot the computer and here we are coming up again it's all very exciting i've effectively turned this rockpi x sbc into a chromebook so we now need to uh get started like that and i've got underneath that the connected as you might have noticed so we don't have to set up wi-fi although you would set up wi-fi here if you needed to so all i need to do is to accept the terms and conditions from google like that and now it's asking who's going to be using this device i think it's going to be me so we'll click on next and all i now need to do is to sign in with one of my many google accounts there we go and two-step verification leaps into action so i need to let myself in from another device like this and now there's just a few google setup questions i'm not going to save my device info and i'm not going to sync with any other devices and there we are we're all set with an exciting google animation we can get started running google os flex right i've now restarted the system so i can show you the full chrome os flex experience and here we are on the login screen where i need to enter my password although we could browse as guest if we wanted to but i am going to log in and here we are it's telling us keyboard shortcuts have been improved that's very exciting but other than that the main thing you'll have noticed is that as we've now installed chrome os flex and logged in with an account we've got more things available we've still got the browser that would work i would hope yes it does we can get back to explaining computers but we've also got app links here to gmail to google calendar still to the file browser to google meet and indeed to youtube and go to youtube via that little link there which will come up there we are things are not quite as fast as they were on my i5 you wouldn't expect it on a quad core atom computer but it still works perfectly well lots of exciting things seem to be going on here on youtube i'll look at some of that later on but the big change other than that if we go down here to look to this menu and we click that thing up like that you can see there's lots of apps right these app links here on this system which we can scroll through as you can see so for example i can click on google docs obviously one of the main purposes of using something like a chromebook or chrome os flex is to use google apps and in my view any computer with google docs installed is ready for action so this one most clearly is but there's also a few things down here that i hadn't looked at previously there's things like a calculator here in the chrome os flex we won't look at that we can't get too excited in one video but we do have here something i've not seen before which is chrome canvas this is a little drawing package for chrome os and here chrome os flex let's get started very exciting not tried this before this is a live test and oh look we've got various tools we can use to uh scribble with like that which seems to work we can presumably change our color we can go to red there we are we can scribble in red oh this is very exciting indeed so there we are chrome os flex is working here very nicely as a very straightforward a very easy to use cloud-based operating system at the time of making this video chrome os flex is still in beta this said i've been experimenting with it with great success and i intend to keep it on this rock pi x and to try it out some more i also think it's excellent that now when we're choosing an operating system to install on a pc we've got another option available and i do expect that chrome os flex is going to become rather popular but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 482,694

Keywords: ChromeOS Flex, Chrome OS Flex, Chrome OS for PC, ChromeOS for PC, Chrome OS for laptop, installing Chrome OS, installing Chome OS Flex, installation, download, Chrome OS Flex download, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, Chrome OS Flex install, Chrome OS Flex demo, Cloudready, Neverware, FydeOS, Windows alternative, alternative operating system, alternative OS, OS for old laptop, Chrome OS old laptop, cloud computing, cloud operating system, cloud OS, Google Chrome OS

Id: AFAg1FkGgMM

Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 12 2022