PCs and Macs can now officially run Chrome OS. Google has just announced the availability in Preview of Chrome OS Flex, a version of Chrome OS adapted to old computers. And this is not very surprising. At the end of 2020, Google acquired Neverware, the company behind CloudReady, an operating system based on Chromium OS that can already be installed on old machines.
Also read: How to bring an old PC back to life by installing Chrome OS
For Chrome OS Flex, Google therefore relied heavily on the work done by the Neverware teams, Google explaining in its blog post that it had “worked hard to integrate all the advantages of CloudReady into a new version of Chrome OS”.
An update every four weeks
If this new operating system has been designed to allow companies and schools to revive their fleet of aging machines, the general public will no doubt also be able to take advantage of it to revive an old PC or an old Mac. Installing Chrome OS Flex only takes a few minutes, and machines using it are able to boot up in seconds. Another major advantage, Chrome OS Flex being cloud-based, it benefits from increased security thanks to Google’s sandboxing system and regular updates, Chrome OS taking advantage of an update frequency modeled on that of the Chrome browser, i.e. every four weeks.
Once installed, simply connect Chrome OS Flex to your Google account to synchronize all your data on the machine. In addition, to ensure a consistent user experience, the interface of Chrome Flex is the same as that offered by Chrome OS.
Chrome OS Flex is currently available for free in early access within the development channel. So it may still be prone to bugs. Google, however, promises to offer a stable version of its OS in the coming months and indicates that current CloudReady users will automatically benefit from an upgrade to Chrome OS Flex for free.
Source: google