A few months ago I tried out ChromeFlex. This is a version of ChromeOS that’s easy to install on traditional laptops. I had an old Surface Pro 3 machine which was collecting dust. It just waited for me to carry it to electronics recycling. As it turns out, ChromeFlex gave it another lease on life. The installation was easy. You create a bootable USB drive via a Chrome browser extension. Then you can choose whether you want to just try (boot from USB drive) or go all in(wipe machine and install ChromeOS for good).
The whole process took less than 30 minutes. Booting from pressing the on/off button to entering your Google ID to enter the machine takes 20 seconds. And then you are ready to go. The gist of ChromeOS is that everything runs in a browser. My nearly nine year old Surface Pro can watch YouTube, I can use the web version of WhatsApp, of course manage my email, run Microsoft Office in the browser (even inking in OneNote works without problems), … and last, but not least, write blog posts without problems. I have a dozen browser tabs open without any performance issues. There are some UI glitches on YouTube, but nothing that makes YouTube unusable.
The wonderful thing about this approach are the limitations. There is not an unlimited amount of apps and configurations, and one has to get a bit creative on how to get things done. For example: How do I get images from my phone into my blog, while converting from Apple’s HEIC image format to JPEG. It took me a while, but now I know that …
- selecting the relevant photos on my phone, …
- uploading them to Google Photos to then …
- download as JPEG and …
- upload into the WordPress Media Library
does the trick. Sounds complicated? It is. But WordPress is partially at fault, because I have not managed to understand how I could upload photos from my phone to my self-hosted WordPress instance. Somewhere between my phone, my host and my WordPress installation the system breaks. The workflow above is cumbersome, but it works. And it works on my new/ old machine. Because it is so limited, it takes out the complexity that comes with having degrees of freedom. Besides, creativity thrives under constraints. And ChromeOS has just the right amount of constraints while getting the basics (i.e. speed, speed, speed) right.
Long story, short: If you have an old machine lying around, give ChromeOS Flex a shot. It is a lot less complicated than installing a Linux distro … although, ChromeOS is based on Linux itself.