Shiny Chrome

When Chrome OS was announced I became immediately interested in it.  The concept of a "light" OS that was generally web based intrigued me and I was interested in investigating it but it was only available pre-installed on select hardware known as Chromebooks.  Since I am a cheapskate at heart I declined on purchasing  a Chromebook.  Over the next few years, Several vendors produced Chromebooks of varying quality, from incredibly cheap to insanely expensive.  The market was all over the place.

Fast forward to 2015 and a company called Neverware releases a version of Chrome OS called "Cloudready" that will run on a multitude of laptops, including my sandbox,an HP 6730b.  I did  not need any more prompting than that.  I quickly downloaded the image and burned it to a USB stick.

I booted up my sandbox off the USB stick and was shortly greeted with m first look at Chrome OS. I ran Cloudready for a  week or so off the USB stick before taking the plunge and install it on the laptop. Installation was quick and simple. No major hoops to jump through.  I was up and running in less than 30 minutes.

To be clear, this is not a vanilla Chrome OS installation.  This is Chrome OS with Neverware's wrapper around it.  That being said, updates are slower (mine just updated to version 45.1.20 and the official release from Google is 47.0.2526.74) so you will  never be at the most current up to date version Google offers but on the plus side, you can run it on almost any laptop.  It runs very well on my HP 6730b  .

One of the nicest things about this OS is that your Google profile follows you so there is no need to back-up anything.  All your bookmarks and documents go with you.

My only major complaint so far is with Hulu.  I watch a fair number of videos on that site and it does not appear to allow videos to be played in Chrome on Linux...not sure why.