I Wanted to Hate ChromeOS But Then I Tried It

This is my Dell XPS 15. On the surface, it's a great laptop. Modern, new, sleek, over-specced, premium even. But underneath, it's the opposite. Poor battery life, slow boot up, and a barely working touchpad. And over the past few months, I've been committed to finding the best fix that will prolong this laptop's life. That also means I've been stricken with a common tech disease, distro hopping. You know, the one where you finally decide to quit Windows for good, only to open up the doors to the Linux rabbit hole. And this one goes surprisingly deep. This laptop started off with Windows 10, then was forced to upgrade to 11. But the ads and the battery drain made it so inconvenient that it just sat in a dark closet for many months. Then the Linux Nation attacked, convincing me to try it out. And what better way than to switch to Mint Cinnamon, the most commonly recommended beginner Linux distro. Instantly, I knew I was hooked. The terminal commands felt like hacking the matrix, and it was too much fun. Then Fedora came along and secured its place as the modern, beautiful distro, followed by KDE, the ultra customizable distro. Eventually, I switched to Framework 13, and it took Dell's place in Linux experimentation, once again, forcing it to the dark edge of the closet. And now, this thing is ready to be revived again. It's the perfect candidate for an OS that's supposed to bring back computers from the very dead and boast super fast boot up times. Chrome OS. Yeah, you heard me right. I know what you're thinking. How could you? You've gone down the Linux rabbit hole of freedom and control, only to give it up for Chrome? For Google? But here's the thing. Linux gave me freedom, but it also gave me something else. Endless hours troubleshooting. In fact, I've spent weeks and months of my life so far troubleshooting Linux problems, like getting Bluetooth to work, installing drivers, random things. That should just work. So I thought, why do I keep choosing to suffer when there's this thing over there? Chrome OS claiming to just work. Secretly, I'm actually hoping Chrome OS is going to fail, because the past couple months, I've been trying to escape Google. I got a Proton email, and I forwarded all of my Gmail to it. I even went into home labbing to build my own server to get away from Google Drive and those atrocious storage fees. Heck, I even use DuckDuckGo and Firefox now. But the more I pay attention to how I use my laptops and my PCs, the more I realize I don't even open up local software anymore. Everything is a web app. Notion, web app. YouTube, web app. Spotify, web app. And you know what else uses web apps? Browsers, like Chrome OS. So here I am, actively running from Google, only to realize I've been running in a complete circle. Or have I? So when I say Chrome OS, you're probably thinking of cheap school laptops that they're not real computers. Now, I haven't touched a real Chromebook in over a decade, but chances are that things have changed a lot. Like how you can install Chrome OS on any old PC or laptop, and you don't even need to pay for it. In a way, it's like Linux. Oh wait, it uses a Linux kernel. So maybe it is Linux. And it's called Chrome OS Flex. Google's goal with this is to revive older hardware and to reduce waste going into landfills. It sounds like a nightly cause, but is that all? Is Google helping people gain freedom over their devices by not having to buy new ones? Or is this really about ecosystem control? Trying to get more users stuck in Google's ecosystem and just trap them there. We'll see. With all of that in mind, I think my Dell XPS might actually make a good candidate. If Chrome OS sucks, then I can just go back to Linux. But if it doesn't, well, that's where things get interesting. You know how I'm always tweaking my setup at home and at the office to make life easier? Well, I realized my car needed that same upgrade. That's where today's sponsor, LastFit, comes in. Our RAV4 has gone through the ringer lately with a seven-hour road trip. There was car snacking, a nasty throw up, and milk spills. Let's just say it wasn't ideal. And after all that, the thing desperately needed a clean. So we put our new LastFit mats to the test. And honestly, they still look as good as the day we installed them. That's because LastFit makes custom cut floor mats for a ton of vehicles. All you do is head to their website, select your car model, and boom, the mats fit perfectly, latch in properly, and install in like five minutes. And keeping them clean is ridiculously simple. Just pull them out, hose them off, let them dry, and you're good to go. Way easier than scrubbing fabric or fighting with cheap mats. The thick material makes it easy to handle too. They're made of thick TPE that won't curl or crack like OEM mats. They've got deep grooves that trap big spills and make vacuuming super easy as well. They're anti-slip for safer driving, and let's be honest, they look way cooler than stock mats. If you've got kids or pets, these are a game changer. They're easy to clean, tough enough for daily messes, plus they're reusable and recyclable. So someday they can be melted down and made into something new instead of ending in a landfill. So if you want floor mats that can handle life's messes and still look brand new, check out LastFit. They're celebrating their 10th anniversary right now, so you can use code SC20 for 20% off. Links in the description. Thanks to LastFit for sponsoring this video. Google gives Chrome OS Flex a simple landing page, so installation should be a breeze, right? You scroll all the way to the bottom to get to the installation tutorial. It says to use Chromebook recovery utility, but apparently this only works if you already have a Chromebook. And who has a Chromebook? It also has terrible reviews, coming in at a 2.6 star rating with over 1700 reviews. That's not good. Would you go to a restaurant rated that? No, definitely not. So I'm going to opt for the typical USB boot drive route. But first, I need to buy more USBs. My servers have eaten up all my boot drives lately. So I use my typical Balena Etcher to flash, then install the ISO to my flash drive. And here's where I made my first mistake. Haha, I did bad here. Chrome OS Flex has a try it live mode before installing, and that would be the smart thing to do. But I figured, I'm in it for good. Might as well just jump into the install. Nothing could go wrong, or so I had thought. The install took a very short amount of time, maybe 10 minutes total. When you first turn it on, you're prompted to log in to the internet. I put in my Wi-Fi network information and nothing. Maybe my Wi-Fi card was turned off. So I dove into the settings, and it wouldn't scan for nearby networks. After all, it's a web-based OS, so no web, no OS. And every time I toggled the Wi-Fi to go on, it would toggle itself back to off. Something must be wrong. So I went searching on the internet on another computer, and I really, really should have tried it live before committing to it. Apparently it's a common problem for Chrome OS Flex to not have drivers with certain Wi-Fi cards, and mine just happens to be one of those cards. So I made sure by looking at the certified devices list from Chrome OS, the Dell XPS 13 is there, but no 15, which honestly I didn't think would be a problem. It's a size difference, but it's a problem. So no Wi-Fi, no problem. I'll just hardwire myself to the wall. How bad could that be? So before the land of wireless internet, people had to be connected through ethernet cables. I could go back to that time, right? Can't be that bad. We'll see if this lasts. But first impressions of Chrome OS are, it's not bad. The UI is very simple, very clean. At the bottom right, you've got your little time, your date, little icons for connectivity and battery life. Then you've got your menu on the bottom left, which I didn't realize was a menu at first. I thought it was like GNOME, where you have to press certain keys to open up your overview and your app. Then the bottom center, you have your apps dock, which are things like Google apps, like Docs, Sheets, Chrome, et cetera. So it looks great. I can see myself getting into this, but this is ridiculous. Having to be hardwired on a laptop to access the internet. I cannot sit on the floor all day. It would destroy me and it would destroy YouTube. There has to be a fix, right? On Linux, I can just open up the terminal, type in a bunch of random commands, restart, and then pray that it would work. And it probably would. On Chrome OS though, there's not much you can do. You don't get access under the hood. You don't have power. You have no ability to hack the matrix. If the OS doesn't support it, then that's it. All there is to do is wait until the engineers decide to make my laptop compatible. So I guess that's it. All that hope just for it to come crumbling down within 30 minutes of even starting. And I know, I didn't even give it a fair chance, but would you have if you couldn't have your Wi-Fi connection? Back to Fedora, I suppose. But wait, there's another solution. One that's similar to Chrome OS, but more Linux-like. It's called FydeOS. Apparently, it's a de-googled version of Chrome OS. Then I thought, why would I use a de-googled Chrome OS when I could just use another Linux distro? Doesn't this defeat the initial purpose of trying out Chrome OS? I'm trying to make life easier, not harder. But after looking at a bunch of videos and reading other people's experiences on it, I figured, why not? I'm gonna have to install a clean OS on this laptop anyways. I might as well give this a try first. This way, I can experience Chrome OS the way it's meant to be experienced with Wi-Fi. And we're off to the races once again. New boot drive, new OS to install. And I was pretty shocked when I finally got it to work. FydeOS literally looks exactly like Chrome OS. So it all felt really familiar, and I guess it is sort of the same. FydeOS is a fork off of the original Chrome OS, so it makes sense that there's so much in common. I'm sure we're gonna see a bunch of differences later on though. But you know the most shocking part? The Wi-Fi actually worked. It scanned, it saw all the local networks, I could log in without any problems. And then I followed basically the same setup menu as Chrome OS Flex. And unlike Chrome OS, Fyde lets you use your laptop without logging into a Google account. That's right. But I'll do so anyways. And once that was done, I got to doing my usual tinkering, going through the menus. Let's be real, there wasn't much to go through. Unlike KDE Plasma, this is child's play. I basically did reverse scrolling, wallpaper, dark mode, and some real small other options. I did see some cool things here though, like the possibility of Linux and Android apps. I've got to try that later. So now that we're in a working OS, I've got a list of goals to make this a viable permanent OS for my Dell XPS 15. That maybe someone in the office could use to work and write scripts. Speaking of writing scripts, we're looking to hire a script writer living in the US or Canada so we can actually send products to. If you absolutely love tech and talking to others about it, even when they may not care about it, you might be a good fit. Check out the link in the description about our current job openings and to learn more. Back to FydeOS though. It's Linux but sure doesn't feel like it. If this all goes well, then I might have been overspending on all the PCs and laptops in the office. Maybe we don't have to buy several $100 MacBooks after all. Everyone can just get a used, very old Chrome OS Flex. You get one, you get one, you get one. But time shall be the answer to that. First, let's get to work. I need music. So let's connect some headphones. How bad could that be to connect some headphones, some Bluetooth earbuds to my laptop with FydeOS? Apparently, not easy. Not easy at all. No Wi-Fi on Chrome OS Flex, no Bluetooth on FydeOS. Maybe this distro just doesn't work like I initially thought. But most distros are like this, at least in my experience so far. In fact, this is a very similar problem I had on Fedora KDE on my Framework 13 where the Bluetooth drivers just weren't recognized. And after spending two whole work days trying to make that work, a random restart fixed the problem so I had no idea what I did to fix it. And then the microphone broke, which I couldn't even fix. So this time, I'm going to take a pass on fixing Bluetooth and just use my laptop's speakers. Keep it simple. Which is what I initially said, but I still spent some time trying to disable some root stuff and turn on a shell so I could mess with the terminal. It didn't work. In case you were wondering, don't waste your time. I've read posts of other people making it work, but there's something about my Dell XPS that it just, it doesn't do these things right. So I also spent a couple more hours trying to mess with BIOS boot settings so I could try something called GApps, which lets me use Android apps on my laptop. Again, didn't work. But it would have been real cool since I don't have an Android phone. I would have liked that. Luck is not on my side right now since nothing works. With that, I'm pretty bummed. All my other distros I've tried, I could at least solve the problem eventually. This one just feels like a dead end. Like it's like, hey, here's a problem. You can't fix it though. On the bright side, it's a work computer, so maybe it's a good thing. I can't download apps like Instagram, Reddit, and YouTube. I have most of those things on the browser anyways. Not Instagram though, because meta sucks like that. While using Fyde for the past few days, there's something that I can't seem to shake. Who is this for? Why would someone choose this over another Linux distro that's more capable, less restrictive, and less Chrome OS like? And most of all, why would someone even pick Chrome OS? I kept thinking and thinking, but nothing came to mind until I remembered a time when my parents actually made me troubleshoot every single thing on their computers. Sometimes they accidentally download viruses somehow, and honestly, I do worry for them. You know those weird scam text messages or phone calls that you get where they bill you for an iPhone you didn't buy? I'm honestly scared my parents will fall for them someday. But anyways, they get malware and pop-ups all over the place on their home PCs and laptops, and then they call me to reformat their PC and get it ready for the cycle to just repeat again. So in that situation, maybe Chrome OS is the answer. It's smooth, it's fast, it doesn't need super expensive hardware to run, it doesn't need someone to have an ID background to maintain or update, and if it does break, a quick reset is easy and you don't lose any data since it's all stored in your Google account anyways. Plus, with how easy I could transfer my entire workload to I realized how many apps today are just websites. You've got Spotify, Docs, Notion Sheets, Canva, YouTube, pretty much everything is a web app anyways. Even my battery life has been phenomenal lately with constant usage during the workday. So while many of us are perfectly capable of troubleshooting Linux, maybe you don't have to. Chrome OS Flex and FydeOS is perfect for grandparents, kids, so it makes sense why schools require kids to get Chromebooks. And honestly, this is the perfect dishrow for my parents, who aren't the most confident in their English skills either. Now, I haven't gotten Android apps to work, but I'm sure other people have. Maybe it's just my laptop. And let's not mention the other disadvantages I've run into while using FydeOS. Screen captures. For some reason, they come out to a WebM format, which I have to convert to MP4 using a web app called File Converter. It's horribly inconvenient and it makes zero sense. Why can't I just record it in MP4? And the other problem? Part of me just wants to dive in deep and figure out GApps, like how I couldn't quit KDE Plasma after encountering Bluetooth. Like I had to solve those problems. But I also know it's not worth it. It's not worth it spending hours and hours and hours trying to problem solve something that maybe you can't problem solve. So should you switch to either Chrome OS or FydeOS? Sure, I don't hate this OS, but I don't love it either. When I turn on this computer, I don't feel compelled to do anything distracting. It does feel like a dedicated work machine. It's simple, it's sleek, it's modern. But if you're watching this channel, then the answer is most likely no. You like your freedom, your control, your tinkering, your troubleshooting. And most of all, you probably don't like Google or big corporations who harvest you for money and data. But if you do find yourself forced to use Chrome OS someday, whether it's for work or your kids at school, Chrome OS Flex and FydeOS actually aren't that bad. It's simple, easy, it's useful, and you don't have to buy a Chromebook. So that's a win. So while it has its place in the world, it's not for me. But if you want to de-Google your life, you can start by building your own server to install all of your files instead of relying on Google Drive. And you can do that with this video here or this one here.