ChromeOS Flex ============== ChromeOS Flex is now my OS on my "daily driver" laptop. How could that happen? Now, i mentioned in a previos phlog post that i am testing "Big G's" OS for use in the company i work for. Interestingly something happened what i never experienced since about 20 years ago when i first used an Mac with OS X: I had an Unix system where i simply didn't need to use the shell. Everything just worked right out of the box. Now, will i return to "cruel and unusual" operating systems? Hell yeah! I already started the download of Open Indiana to use on a spare system i have standing around, there is still my raspberry pi running plan9 and my mother still uses her horribly outdated 486 Laptop running OS/2... so, there is enough weirdness to delve into. So, what do i do with ChromeOS? Well, i am a lucky person who is permitted to develop my stuff in the way i want to, in my case its indeed smalltalk i work the most time with, to be more precise: Squeak. There is now direct port of Squeak to ChromeOS, but there is SqueakJS, which at least for my purposes works good enough. Then there is the whole office stuff (Email, Text, Spreadsheet, Presentations...) which is covered with the google workplace tools which - again - for my purposes "just work". File sharing via google drive is also no big thing. For a text editor there is caret, it may be no emacs, but it does its job. Oh, and of course there is "cloudmacs", an emacs running in a docker container which i want to try out some time... And at last there is a native ssh client supplied with ChromeOS, the one i am typing this from. Conclusion ========== So... is ChromeOS a good operating system? It depends: It IS an incredible simple OS to install and use, i give it that. The thing is, it is a complete paradigm shift from your normal Windows or Unix system, it is more akin to a terminal hooked up to a mainframe. If you view it in this way i think you can get a fairly usable day-to-day system.