Switcher 2026: ChromeOS and Chromebooks for the Win ⭐️

While my recent ChromeOS Flex experience was lacking, ChromeOS is a surprisingly strong contender depending on your needs and expectations. Which is interesting given all the uncertainty around ChromeOS and Chromebooks these days. So let's start with that.
📜 A little history
It may be difficult to believe, but Google announced the Chrome OS open source project over 15 years ago, in November 2009, a few months after it initially revealed that it was creating this platform. As difficult, Google (and Alphabet) CEO Sundar Pichai, then a Google vice president of Chrome, was the person who headlined the launch event and he looks like a child compared to today. But Google (and, arguably, Pichai) was riding a wave thanks to the launch of the Chrome web browser just 14 months before this event, which was perhaps most notable for its performance when compared to the then market leaders, Internet Explorer and Firefox.

That was the point, definitely: Google created Chrome specifically because it couldn't trust its competitors to meet its needs as the web transitioned from displaying content to being a full-featured application platform. But where Chrome was a shot at other web browsers, Chrome OS–as it was called then, now it's ChromeOS–was Google's take on a desktop OS, one that would initially run on netbooks, later renamed to Chromebooks. Like so much that Google does, ChromeOS was quirky–one might say "Googley"–and quite different from established desktop OSes like Windows and Mac OS X.

And yes, this really was the netbook era. But it was also a time when developers, especially on Windows, were abandoning native apps specific to only a single desktop OS to focus on web apps. This new breed of apps included such things as Amazon, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube, and of course Google's apps, like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Maps. So Chrome OS would be super-fast but also small and lightweight, making it far more responsive and usable on low-end, netbook-like hardware. It would be dramatically simpler than Windows and Mac OS X, too, which would be appealing to consumers, Google felt, but also to those managing environments in education and business because this simplicity was extended to the system's security and management capabilities.

Under the covers, ChromeOS was and still is based on a lightweight Linux variant, but it's not really a Linux distribution per se, and there is no native app platform beyond the web. Aside from a small collection of built-in apps, Chrome OS was designed to run only web applications natively using a full-featured Chrome web browser that helps it bridge the mobile world of smartphones and tablets with the desktop OS world dominated by Windows. But since the initial announcement, Google has added two key capabilities that make this platform much more interesting, especially to those who find web apps too limiting: Today, it can run Android apps and, after a separate in-box install...