We've all heard the criticism and seen countless photos from schoool administrators showing piles of chromebooks collecting dust - Chromebooks only get a few years of software updates before they are abandoned and sent to a e-waste landfill or sold off for scrap. It looks like Google is finally looking to change that perception with a major announcement that will see Chrome OS devices supported for over a decade.
This website has been a resource for ChromeOS related news, tips and tricks for the past several years with several of my articles/tutorials being referenced to by dozens of popular websites over the years. Readers may have noticed the lack of content on my website over the past 18 months and might have assumed I have decided to stop writing about ChromeOS, the truth is actually completely opposite. I have actually been dedicating much of my spare time writing a series of books for ChromeOS users. This book started as one single book but … well … is now over 180 unique books and counting. You can even buy them now on Google Play and Amazon!
Attention all ChromiumOS for GPD Pocket Users. There is a new update that is currently rolling out. This update has been in the works for a few months and brings countless new features to GPD Pocket Owners. This new build not only adds several new features but i put a lot of work into ensuring the GPD Pocket 1 features are on par with the GPD Pocket 2. The previous build of ChromiumOS for GPD sadly did not perform the best for GPD Pocket 1 users, my GPD Pocket 1 needed a replacement battery which did not allow me to test. I have been running this build on my personal devices for a few days and am very happy with the stability and performance of this new build.
I watch a lot of tech YouTubers for education and entertainment and the quality of the content is normally far above other genres of videos. I have been watching a up-and-coming YouTuber for a while, Jays Tech Vault and love his videos of him putting knockoffs from wish.com to the test and his videos are well produced and entertaining. Jay published a new video targeting Chromebooks and while I agree with many of his talking points, I do have some disagreements with several other talking points. Normally I would respond in a YouTube Comment however there is so much I want to say so I figured I would post them here. This is not to bash Jay or his videos and I strongly encourage everyone subscribe and support smaller creates like him.
This website has seen a lot of growth over the past few years with my ChromeOS related content seeing over a thousand unique visitors a week and trending up. I love covering ChromeOS related news and coming up with new tutorials but one of the consequences of creating all of these tutorials is that I get a lot of emails from readers, often between 5-10 a week asking for help and advice. I have been contacted by people from all walks of life ranging from Chromebook manufacturers all the way down to parents who have questions about the Chromebooks that the kids were issued from school. I welcome these emails and will continue to welcome these emails but in many cases, I feel that there is more value in having these discussions in the open when possible so I am introducing the Chromebook Community!
I have not covered many ChromeOS updates for a while but there were some surprises in 86.0.4208.0 that I had to make a post. It looks like the Chromium team quietly enabled support for additional USB device past-through in Crostini.
It should not come as a shock that I am a huge fan of ChromeOS/ChromiumOS and while I am clearly a fan, I am also very critical of the operating system and want to see it evolve. A bit over 3 years ago, I wrote a article on my website outlining some of the major shortcomings with ChromeOS in 2017 and I am happy to say that ChromeOS has come a very long way. A lot of new and impressive features have come to ChromeOS since my post including proper SD card support for Android, upgrading the dated Android 6.0 and various other improvements that were not on my radar such as Linux application support. ChromeOS is a great operating system that has been a daily driver of mine for a long time but there are still several major shortcomings that I would love to see resolved in future releases of ChromeOS.
Samsung announced a new feature with the Samsung Galaxy Note 10, the ability to access Samsung Dex on a Windows or MacOS device. This in my opinion was a game changer as it could allow users to use the insane power of their Galaxy Note 10/Note 10+ devices on inexpensive hardware. Samsung released a client for MacOS and Windows but as usual left us ChromeOS/Linux users out in the cold. It turns out that there is indeed a way to use Samsung Dex on Linux and X64 Chromebooks like the Pixelbook (Affiliate Link), Pixelbook Go (Affiliate Link) or even Samsung’s own line of Chromebooks, It does need a bit of inexpensive hardware and WiFi to setup .
Attention all ChromiumOS for GPD Pocket Users. There is a new update that is currently rolling out. This update has been in the works for a few months and brings countless new features to GPD Pocket Owners. I have been running this build on my personal devices for a few weeks and am very happy with the stability and performance of this new build.
The Chromium team is hard at work with bringing new features to Chromebooks, recently a change was made to set Debian 10 (Buster) as the default operating system for the Crostini “Penguin” container. Unfortunately this change does not upgrade existing installations of from Debian 9 (Stretch) to Debian 10. You are in luck though as upgrading your existing container is pretty easy, here are the steps.