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Chrome Remote Desktop On Ubuntu 20.04 Setup Guide/Setup Script

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Chrome Remote Desktop is a excellent tool to allow you to access your computer’s desktop remotely. If you are a MacOS or Windows user, the installation of Chrome Remote Desktop is reliability easy but if you are a Linux user, there are a few extra steps you will need to follow to allow your computer to be accessed remotely. There are several tutorials on the internet to assist with this but many are outdated and no longer work. I decided to update the guide to allow it to work properly on Ubuntu 20.04 (and beyond), to make it easier, I even scripted out the hard parts to automate the installation. Here are the steps.

Will 2021 Be The Year of The Android Desktop?

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In the Linux community, there is a longstanding trope aptly referred to as “The Year of The Linux Desktop” in which everyone predicts the year that the Linux desktop usage rates are the majority instead of the minority for typical home users. It is no secret that Microsoft has been hemorrhaging Windows users to MacOS, iPads, Android Tablets and even ChromeOS at a high rate, mostly due to the fact that the typical home users computer needs have vastly changed over the past few years to be more “browser-centric”. Many companies have tried to push Linux desktops as a alternative to Windows however they often failed, ChromeOS was the first consumer Linux distribution to see widespread home usage and widespread education usage. I would argue that 2020 may have been the year of the Linux Desktop, especially with many schools issuing Chromebooks to students for remote learning due to COVID however I feel that Android might be next.

DexOnLinux/DexOnChromeOS – How To (NO ROOT)

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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 .

ChromiumOS for the GPD Pocket R84-13054.0 Released – Major Update

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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.

Upgrading Crostini to Debian Buster (10)

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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.

Crostini USB – What works and what does not

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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.

A Guide On Building Your Own ChromiumOS Distribution (with OTA Updates and Crostini)

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There are a few pre-made distributions to allow you to run a version of ChromiumOS on existing hardware such as CloudReady and FideOS however there are several benefits to building your own distribution from scratch. ChromiumOS is the open source of the popular ChromeOS operating system. By following this guide, you will get a version of ChromiumOS that should boot on most hardware (with a 64 bit Intel or AMD Processor). This version will also give you access to Linux Apps via Crostini and even enable the same OTA upgrade service that users on ChromeOS enjoy.