Chrome OS has plenty of regular users

Google’s Chrome OS has been available for roughly a decade now, carving out a niche in the enterprise and education space. But it still pales in comparison to Windows and Mac OS when it comes to global market share.

Rita El-Khoury recently waxed lyrical about her experience with Chrome OS in 2022, posting a poll to ask whether you’ve used the platform in the last year. Here’s how you answered that question.

Have you used Chrome OS in the last year?

Results

Just about 1,600 votes were counted as of writing, and it turns out that ~52% of respondents say they use Chrome OS all the time. This was reflected in the comments, with several readers noting that they actively use a Chromebook.

Meanwhile, ~16% of surveyed readers said they used Chrome OS from time to time, while 8% said they rarely used it in the last year. Finally, ~24% of polled readers said they haven’t tried out Chrome OS in the past year. This is understandable, as we’re guessing that these readers are happy with their existing Windows, Mac, or Linux machines.

Nevertheless, as Rita noted in her post, you should probably give Chrome OS a try if you haven’t used it for a few years. Between Android phone integration, annotation/screen capture/screen cast tools, and the ability to run apps from a variety of platforms, there are plenty of recent additions.

Comments

• Adam Johannes: Get a pixelbook go from eBay and you will love it even more! I had a pixel slate,.the keyboard doesn’t last but with the bridge type g, it’s perfect
• ManFredMann: Can you really fall back in love with something that you left previously? Maybe you never stop loving it, but there’s something about something else that is new. That also allows us to go back to the beginning. I’m just hoping that chromos stays as lightweight as it is. I recently installed Chrome OS flex on a second generation i3 all-in-one Dell desktop and the thing flies!
• bluedye17: I had a Chromebook at work, and I’m pretty computer competent, but I literally could not access or download letterhead with Chrome OS. I would invariably end up saving whatever I had written as the letterhead itself, causing problems for everyone. I could not get my head around the whole file system thing. I eventually just asked my work if I could bring a PC in, and they allowed me to do it.
• Beardednomad: I use the Lenovo Duet 5 every day as my main computer. I do have a Microsoft Surface laptop as well but I rarely use it these days. Between Linux, Android and web apps there’s not much you can’t do on a Chromebook.
• eszklar: A friend of mine lent me their 2017 Pixelbook at the beginning of last October when he and his girlfriend went on a three-week vacation to Paris, France. Like you Rita, I was pretty impressed with how far ChromeOS had evolved. Used ChromeOS, Android apps from the Play Store, installed Linux containers and I also tested CrossOver for ChromeOS. Gave the Pixelbook back when my friend returned from his vacation and thought about what Chromebook would I ever get and saw the Framework Chromebook Edition laptop. Expensive, but can install up to 64 GB RAM, the Framework USB-C side modules available are amazing and the machine’s core main-board can be replaced with a “regular” main-board to install Windows or Linux. That’s what I’d go for Rita.