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The Shortcomings of ChromeOS in 2023

K

Every few years, I try to take some time to write an article about the shortcomings of ChromeOS and offer advice to the developers on the ChromiumOS team to consider when implementing new features on ChromeOS. Admittedly, I fully intended this to be a yearly publication; however, I do tend to fall victim to procrastination. This article is not intended to demonstrate that ChromeOS is somehow a sub-par operating system that people should not use; it's quite the opposite, as I feel that if the ChromiumOS team were to adopt these features, it could compel more users to adopt ChromeOS as their primary operating system. 

Upgrading Crostini to Debian Buster (10)

K

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.

ChromeOS 77.0.3849.0 Fixes Android Application Connectivity Issues and Restores Crostini Backups by Default

K

If you are on the ChromeOS dev channel, you may have noticed that network connectivity has been hit and miss over the past few weeks and if so, you may want to start mashing your check for updates button now to update to ChromeOS 77.0.3849.0 while reading this post. I am still working my way through the changelog for this build and it is pretty lengthy. Here are the notable changes that I have been able to find so far. This is also the first official beta for ChromeOS 77

Crostini USB – What works and what does not

K

It has been a crazy year for those watching the rapid evolution of ChromeOS, in fact it has been a month since I first broke that ChromeOS had implemented proper USB support in Crostini 75.0.3759.4. Officially the Crostini USB support is limited to Android Phones, specifically to allow for developers to connect to adb on the phone to test applications on actual hardware however it is possible to pass support to many other devices by activating a hidden flag. There is a myriad of USB devices out there and this article provides a overview of what works and what does not work.

Introducing the ChromeOS Crostini Machine Learning Setup Script

K

Over the past month, I have been researching Machine Learning and the insane amount of future possibilities that will result in the breakthroughs being made today. Projects like Keras and Tensorflow are pushing the boundaries on what computers are capable of and enabling just about anyone without a multi-million dollar server cluster to get into machine learning. I have built a simple setup script that will automate the process of setting up all of the tools needed to get started with Miniconda, TensorFlow, Keras, Pytorch, OpenCV and more in a ChromeOS Crostini Container. Here is how to get started:

ChromeOS 75.0.3761.0 Rolling out to the Dev Channel – Enables Crostini USB by default and Minor refinements

K

Heads up all ChromeOS users on the Dev channel, Google is currently rolling out ChromeOS 75.0.3761.0 to your devices. After performing a quick backup of Crostini, I took some time to install the update and find out what changed – it seems that it is not much. It is important to backup your “Downloads” folder as many items were deleted after the installation.