It would be great if there was a version of the Framework Laptop and its motherboard produced in the future which shipped with Chrome OS.
In addition to the advantages the FL already has when running Windows or Linux over other laptops, it could be unique among Chromebooks in having robust support for dual booting Windows and Linux, which in many cases does not work well do to drivers not being compatible.
From what I understand, Chrome OS requires certain hardware features to be present which the FL may not currently have, so a different version of the motherboard would probably be required.
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Considering that there’s really no proprietary or exotic components in the FL, I wouldn’t be surprised if Brunch was a working option from pretty much day one. It’s already being used to get ChromeOS on a variety of x86_64 hardware.
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You can try Neverware’s version of ChromeOS.
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Did anyone try Neverware CloudReady on Framework laptop? Anyone willing to share your experience?
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I gave it a quick try a few months ago. My notes at the time were: It seems the installer is fixed to 8GB or 16GB preventing installing onto our 250GB Expansion Card, but the Chromebook Recovery Utility path worked (with the odd glitch below). It does boot successfully on the Framework Laptop, and keyboard, touchpad, backlight, and speakers work. The Intel AX210 WiFi we use in some of our models didn’t work though, so I couldn’t get onto the network and stopped there.
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I tested it installed on one of the USB expansion cards. it works a treat except the wifi. I have to use a USB ethernet adapter for that. It wasn’t very stable though and crashed frequently after going to sleep.
If you want to give it a try yourself onto one of the expansion cards, boot the installer and then hit ctrl+alt+fn+f2 to get to the chrome shell.
Enter chronos as the username
cd /usr/sbin
sudo chromeos-install --dev /dev/sdXX where XX is whatever drive you want to install it on.
Wait and then reboot.
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With Brunch and kernel 5.10 you can get the AX210 working, it is quite lovely.
You need to select kernel 5.10 in the Brunch settings, plus turn on the iwlwifi_backports AND after booting, delete a pnvm file /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0.pnvm (and maybe a second one that was present on my system /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-so-a0-gf-a0.pnvm) and then reboot to get the AX210 working properly (but without BT due to an issue in 5.10, and Brunch doesn’t have a newer kernel available yet).
I think it tries to use a sleep state which the Framework doesn’t support, so I’ve just disabled the sleep for the time being. The downside being that closing the lid doesn’t sleep, so it doesn’t actually stop using battery (as I found out this morning when I left the Framework unplugged overnight with Brunch booted). There is an option to try a different sleep state in the Brunch framework, but if the BIOS/UEFI doesn’t support it, I probably won’t have any luck with that either.
After a bit more poking around I discovered there is a Brunch option for S3 suspend and it appears to be working pretty well.
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One fun quirk (and this is probably related to my attempt to remap Caps to something useful) is that when the system wakes from sleep now, the Caps LED is lit, but Caps isn’t actually activated, when I press it THEN it enables Caps, then pressing it again clears the LED.
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Is there a way to install the “real” Chrome OS or to make the framework laptop a “real” chromebook, that supports Android and has updates for eight years?
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No wifi, no security risks! Joking aside, I think I read that the chipset franework uses is supported now.
As I see it, the framework laptop would be a better version of the acer spin 713 (repairability, webcam, speakers) but giving up touch screen and 2-1 convertability.
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Yeah, because Android is way more tightly controlled as a platform (and they want certain DRM guarantees which a lot of Linux distros find hard to actually provide, I think?).
Chrome OS Flex sounds like the path forward with this: Meet Chrome OS Flex, Google's new weapon for desktop domination | Computerworld
Anyone tried yet?
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I’m reasonable sure you can simply download it, recently Google Announced Chrome OS Flex, so it should be availible!
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Not sure I want Google dominating the desktop… Them dominating email, search, maps, online storage, calendar, online document editing, and more is quite enough, thank you.
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Lol it’s just a clickbait title. Think it’s cool Google is providing a lighter-weight OS for older computers. It’s a nice option for people that don’t want to deal with the complexity/quirks of Linux, and the greater hardware demands of Windows. It’s also a really secure OS. Great option for parents handing down laptops to their kids.
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I just tried installing Chrome OS Flex onto Framework Laptop. The experience was really flaky. The boot-up crashes 9 out of 10 times (which looks like an infinite boot loop). The one time that it successfully booted up, the wifi wasn’t working, so I could not proceed further.
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The Intel AX210 does not agree with Flex. I suspect the 5.10 kernel (AX210 issues were not smoothed out until 5.13). So unfortunately we’re going to have to wait for Google to fix this one, unless you want to swap to an older radio (the AX201 should work better).
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I gave up on waiting for Google to update the kernel and picked up an Intel AX200, which works flawlessly with Chrome OS Flex.
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