Don’t see any reason to run this. But good to know that such an option exists.
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Google Wants to Turn Your Old Mac into a Chromebook With Chrome OS Flex
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There's actually a very long list of Chromebook's. What model do you have? Have you looked at the device list?
At the start of the corona crisis, upon the closure of schools, the primary school of my kid got quite low on chromebooks to lend out. I had a not-so-old Macbook Air alike Windows-laptop lying around. Downloaded and installed CloudReady and got it to work pretty quickly. And it's not that bad actually - it was faster than those school chromebooks but did lack a touch screen.
From the instructions, for Apple Computers you're supposed to choose Google Chrome OS Flex / Chrome OS Flex (Developer-Unstable). That should show you a build of "Chrome OS Flex (Developer-Unstable) (14516.0.0)"
As noted in many other places in these comments & posts, and on the instructions page itself, you can run this from a USB stick. So I can run this on my 2010 & 2015 MBP's, and then take it to my folks' house and run it on their Windows PC, all from the same USB Stick.
I've thought about just replacing my 2010's OS with this and then setting it up with my daughter's Google Classroom account. Just because you can't think of a reason why it's useful, doesn't mean I'm not in a "right mind" set...
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It’s Google, and they run Chrome. It certainly can’t be any easier to maintain support for Chrome OS on old hardware than it is to maintain support for Chrome itself on old hardware and software. There’s no guarantee you’ll get Chrome OS updates for more than a year or two at most, especially if your hardware is already on the margins of what Chrome currently supports. At best, this gives a bit more breathing room for RAM requirements for Chrome by not running on top of the normal host OS.Partly agree. However, it gets to a stage where you can't use the internet because no modern browsers work (and if they do, there's serious security/rendering issues).
I use a 2008 Mac Pro with a Vega 64 and have installed Monterey (using OpenCore). This OS supports my semi-modern GPU and all the features I want.
But yeah... I wouldn't go OpenCore'ing old Macs that doesn't support Metal in order to install Monterey. That's just silly.
Chrome? Meh. Guessing it'll give you a modern web browser, a word processing app and some Android-style games? I'll stick with Monterey on my 2008 Mac Pro thanks
No, it’s mostly for school or corporate IT staff, not end users. That said, I’m not sure it has legs, vs just keeping the existing software (and existing installed software) and running Chrome on it.
Actually, we’re talking about the same Chrome here, right? The Chrome whose memory usage made Firefox back in the day look like a lean, mean web rendering machine?
Probably better performance and a better selection of software, sure. Chrome OS is really only useable if the web applications you need to replace the desktop software you use can easily run in the memory and processor restraints of your older hardware. LibreOffice running locally will almost certainly be less resource hungry than Google Docs running in Chrome, and LibreOffice has the advantage of not needing to be online.
Hence the necessity of ad blockers. But, in reality, malicious ads with zero-click payloads are something of a thing of the past and were mostly limited to IE and XP (both with a ridiculous number of remote code execution and privilege escalation bugs). Now, malicious ads generally try to entice you to click, just appearing in the ad network usually doesn’t expose users to risk these days. The browsers, in particular, have gotten patched to minimize the risk of drive-by exploits (hence the rise of social engineering tactics in the cybercrime space).
Yes, but I doubt Chrome OS is working on the sorts of machines that Lion supported but were dropped by Mountain Lion, like my old 2007 MacBook. But I might be able to find a low resource Linux distro that runs on the same hardware.
I dunno, Apple already has better support for older machines with the most recent OS than Microsoft does. And this is meant more for corporate and large educational environments, anyway.
Wait, why spend the money on an M1 MBA and only use it for Chrome? That’s a lot of wasted hardware and money!
Bought into the hype but there's not much native software compared to x64. Whatever runs through translation, virtualization or emulation don't always work or is too slow. It's a great Chromebook, though, if disregarding the cost.
Firefox LTS supports most older Macs that still have enough horsepower to make web use worth it.
Many old OS exploits are probably only viable on the local/home network. The rest rely on social engineering rather than technical exploits.
Well, it can be as simple as using Firefox to download a PDF that happens to be malicious, then opening it. Whether it's social engineering to trick someone into opening the file doesn't really matter; it's still a case of fewer security protections.
That's a big maybe, and likely wouldn't surpport end users. When MS extends support it's usually only to corporate users who pay for it.
By enforcing specific system requirements, Microsoft pulled a big Apple on this one, but it will likely backfire. There are millions of perfectly capable *still* high end hardware that can comfortably run Windows 11.
I said “willingly” and replacing “macOS” like on a personal computer. You took my statement in a different direction.
Not if I can run it from a USB drive. I don’t want to sign in with my account on someone else’s computer.