How To Install Steam on A Chromebook

as many of you are undoubtedly aware of at this point steam gaming has come to chrome os well sort of anyway it's like in an alpha stage it's being tested and all this stuff and it's only really available on a handful of chromebooks and we've already done a video showing you what it looks like up and running it's it's fun to use but i personally have not gone through the steps to get this all working and i would say a lot of you are out there probably trying to figure those steps out for yourself so we figured let's make a video walking through those steps and getting steam up and running on an eligible chromebook [Music] okay so we're going to start off right on the chrome unboxed website where we already have kind of detailed some of these steps and again the video that we made prior to this we did this on a chromebook that gabe had gone through and done all the setup process on so i didn't really get a chance to do any of this stuff the only one we have here in the office that fits that description is the asus chromebook cx-9 and you'll see here on the website we have a list of current supported chromebooks and that list is going to change that's not going to stay stagnant we're not going to be stuck with the exact same thing forever but right now in this alpha stage as we're testing these are the chromebooks they are the acer chromebook 514 the 515 the spin 713 the cx-5 cx-9 from asus hp pro c640 and then the lenovo 5i 14 and so the the variations of any of those chromebooks are going to have to have the intel 11th gen processors inside because you need the gpu on board with them and so devices like the cx-5 for instance that come with an i3 it is 11th gen and it's nice and fast and that's great but the i3 doesn't have the upgraded gpu needed to push these games so it's going to have to be a core i5 or higher and 11th gen intel processor so if you're if you're looking at buying a device that you want to like start playing steam on right now and you're looking at this list make sure that the device you buy has at least a core i5 in it and again it's got to be 11th gen intel so scrolling on down this article uh towards the center here we've got these steps and again like i said i'm going to just kind of go through these right along here with you now what i will say is you have to have your chromebook in developer channel it's not developer mode so you're not you know losing any of the security of your device but you need to be in a dev channel and so in the event that you've never done that i'm not sure that going into doing all of the steam gaming testing is probably for you but hey maybe this is the first thing you want to do that's kind of in this vein so i'm going to walk you through doing that you're going to go to your settings here and then under about chrome os you're going to go to additional details and right here is a button where you can change channel and you're going to select developer you're going to select accept at that point and when you do that it's going to start downloading it when you're upgrading to developer channel no big deal it's going to restart your chromebook and you'll be in dev channel you're not going to lose anything but the minute you decide to go back it will wipe your device and it will power wash it so just know that going in you'll lose stuff when you revert you're not going to lose stuff when you move to the deaf channel could be a little buggy that this is your daily driver chromebook and something you need for work and all that kind of stuff i would caution you again against doing this but you could do it try it power wash your device re-sign in and get back to you know get back to square uh pretty quickly uh if if you do just want to give this a chance okay so step two is we actually need to turn on the borealis flags borealis is the code name for this whole steam on chromebook so in order to do that we're going to open up a new tab you're going to type chrome colon forward slash forward slash flags and it will open up a new window again this is after you've moved to the dev channel so make you make sure you are in the dev channel and as you can see in the post here it's forward slash borealis enabled you can put that exactly in if you want to or you can just search for borealis once you're in here and it's borealis enabled so it's this final flag down here there there may be new flags in here the next time all of these may be gone it's the dev channel so stuff's going to move in and out of there this is the one flag you really need to turn on borealis enabled down here at the bottom i'm going to set that to enabled it's going to ask me if i want to restart chrome os and at this point obviously that's what you got to do so go ahead and click that button and then we'll move on to the next step okay so now we've got developer mode on we've got the flags in place step three now is after restarting we need to open a cross terminal so ctrl alt t we'll do that i'm going to go ahead and do that i'm going to move this actually over to a separate desk just so we can kind of bounce back and forth we're going to open the terminal so i've got that it should look like this here on the screen and then the next step is we're going to type this so instead of messing with this i'm just going to copy that so to insert here you can actually just press your right mouse button and it's going to actually insert what you have copied and we're going to click enter uh and this this little uh graphic down here is is fun that they took the time to make a little uh uh arcade machine but anyway we're not going to stay stuck on that we're going to go and hit install and again like remember this this thing once it's not behind a flag once it's not in an experimental mode you're not gonna have to do any of this stuff there's just gonna be an option probably in the settings somewhere just like there is for linux apps and android apps you want to install steam pool click the button and this thing is going to come up it's going to set up steam so we'll cut away real quick while this is doing this because you probably don't want to sit and watch a progress bar move across the screen okay well that didn't take very long at all says you're all set enjoy your gaming on your chromebook they probably need to fix that enjoy your gaming that's a weird sentence but enjoy your games maybe is what they're going for anywho alpha right this is this isn't ready yet so i'm gonna go click launch and just see what happens here uh updating steam that looks good i'm gonna close this shell back here it always pops us up whenever you go to close the chroma shell yes you want to leave it's fine so right now i've got steam running in this particular desk here updating steam does take just a minute and then i'm going to have to log into steam if you've never used steam before this you'll have to create an account and all that kind of stuff obviously i'm not going to punch in my my account details here on camera so as soon as this updates this is going to be the the general uh you know normal startup stuff for steam that we're going to see here so once we get logged into steam we'll cut back and continue and show you this thing actually up and running in a quick note while this is going obviously we've really revved up the cpus here so the fans are kicking on that's just going to be a normal case whenever you're running games or anything like that if you use your chromebook in such a way where your fans don't kick on very often you start running some games on here you're going to hear those fans okay and just like that it took just a couple minutes again the cx-9 has got a core i7 in it so it's not hurting for performance in any way but once it finishes up as you can see here on the screen everything's here the way you would expect it to be so sometimes with these containerized things stuff runs on on chromebooks in strange ways like some of these pop-up windows would be in like another window or something not the case here this this looks completely completely native because generally speaking it basically is here uh the the container the borealis container that's running um steam is custom built made just for this purpose right here so it can take full advantage of the gpu and all that kind of stuff and again we've made a video showing you actually games running on this this was more about getting this up and running uh but i'm logged in i'm gonna close some of these extra little windows that steam always loves to pop up and let's go full screen here and as you can see you know my uh my favorites are over here on the side and go to my uh go to my library and you know decide to install i don't know let's uh just so you can see one installing we'll go counter strike global offensive and now we want to go to this computer sure and click install i've got disk space available we just wiped this thing so i've got half a terabyte on here but it's going to take up 27 gigs gonna go to next and you can start see it installing and again if you've ever been in steam you know that this is exactly how things work i can look down here in my downloading i can see this game beginning to download it's going to take a little bit of time but it'll work and again i've referenced the other video that we made about this if you want to actually see this up and running because all we wanted to do here was show you how to get from i haven't done anything to 100 having steam installed and up and running and as you can see it didn't take very long i was even talking through this whole thing if i was just concentrating and doing this it was a handful of minutes and steam is up and running so even though we're in an alpha stage here it's really encouraging to see all of this working together so quickly so seamlessly and as they really work out the bugs and there come those fans again as they really work out the bugs here i mean this is going to be a really great experience for chromebook users that want to go and purchase a device maybe to get work done on sure but hey i want to do some some decent gaming on this thing as well and hopefully down the road we'll start seeing chromebooks with discreet gpus inside that are built yeah to get your normal stuff done but yeah this is also built to do some really high-end steam gaming and who would have thought on a chromebook that we'd have this and that it would it would work so seamlessly even in an alpha build but guys uh that's it for this one uh hopefully if you've got a chromebook that this runs on you can hop in there follow these steps and get this up and running for yourself enjoy some steam gaming and help the community make this whole thing better but again that's it for this one if you enjoyed this video give us a thumbs up head down there hit the subscribe button ring that notification icon as well if you liked what you saw here and you want to see future videos just like this one till next time we'll see [Music] you

Channel: Chrome Unboxed

Views: 203,834

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Id: P95MsCmbbmM

Length: 10min 3sec (603 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2022