2022-02-20

Google Chrome OS Flex and Broader Adoption of Linux

I recently read [Chin, The Verge (2022); Raphael, Computerworld (2022)] that Google is releasing a version of Chrome OS called Chrome OS Flex which can be copied to a USB storage drive and installed on computers that didn't come with Chrome OS. This seems very similar to how many popular Linux distributions work, so I initially wondered if Chrome OS Flex will succeed with the muscle of Google behind it where similar efforts by Linux distributions backed by smaller not-for-profit organizations have failed. At the same time, it seems clear to me that Google will not hesitate to use this as an opportunity to collect more valuable data from people who use Chrome OS Flex. This got me to think more broadly about how much ordinary people who might consider using Chrome OS Flex really care about their privacy (especially considering that such people would typically use Microsoft Windows 10/11, which are known to collect significant amounts of data from users) even after revelations about Facebook's practices, earlier revelations about government surveillance, and so on.

However, upon closer reading, I noticed that the first article makes clear that the target audience is schools & businesses which have many old computers whose Windows versions may no longer be supported. This makes more sense to me than targeting ordinary individuals, because I get the sense that the learning curve even to copy an ISO file onto a USB storage drive and install it onto a computer is steep for most ordinary individuals (despite the significant progress that distributions like Ubuntu & Linux Mint have made in making the installation process easy). By contrast, it seems more reasonable to expect specialists in schools & businesses to learn these things once and then do them for many different computers. Meanwhile, the second article makes clear that while traditional Chrome OS is capable of running many programs built for Windows, Chrome OS Flex will not have such capabilities. This suggests to me that while many schools may take up this opportunity given that few user-facing applications need to be installed on the computer and most user-facing applications can be accessed through web equivalents, this might not be the case for many businesses, so it is unclear to me which businesses will actually take this up.

Ultimately, I don't expect to see much adoption among ordinary individuals even though they aren't forbidden from installing & using Chrome OS Flex. That said, I would be interested to see how adoption evolves in schools & businesses over time.