Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyBU6FPmXi0
They De-Googled ChromeOS… What’s That All About Then?
Introduction
FydeOS is a project to take Google’s ChromeOS offline… ish. With the ability to run Android and Linux apps, it should be a compelling offering, right?
Script
I recently picked up this rather sweet little Intel MacBook Air from 2013. It’s a 6,2 with an i5 CPU clocked at 1.3 gigahertz, four gigabytes of RAM and Intel HD 5000 integrated graphics - and if you’re wondering perhaps where I acquired such a fantastical machine, it was from a fellow YouTuber, a bloody lovely chap called Keith, who has a channel called Yawning Angel, where he predominantly focuses on AMOS game development on the Amiga - so if that sounds like your kind of bag, please do check out the link to his channel down in the description.
But anyway, attempts to sabotage my own retention aside, what are my plans for this machine? Well, as you can probably see, I have already installed macOS Ventura on here, which is a modern, supported version of macOS - albeit not officially supported on this machine. Of course, I used the same method that I used in my recent OCLP video where I installed the very same on my 17-year-old Mac Pro with great results - but unfortunately, it’s just not going to fly with this spec.
I mean, it’s only got 4 gigabytes of ram, it’s got those integrated graphics, and the performance is pretty abysmal at best. I mean, it’s pretty much unusable. I have, of course, also installed Windows 11 on that same Mac Pro and in an earlier video on a 20-year-old Pentium 4 - so perhaps that was going to be an option on this MacBook Air, but I wanted to take things in a slightly different direction, and that’s where ChromeOS came up on my radar, an operating system that I have zero hands-on experience with, so I went and downloaded ChromeOS Flex - which is Google’s release that supposedly supports pretty much any hardware out there - had a bit of a play with it, and to be honest, I wasn’t impressed at all: I don’t like the fact that you have to be logged into a Google account at all times, and the fact that it pretty much just doesn’t do much at all when it’s not connected to the internet.
So that’s when FydeOS came up on my radar and I thought it was worth checking out.
But before we dive into the installation process, I suppose it would be prudent to spend at least a couple of minutes finding out what FydeOS actually is - and that’s a story that started way back in 2009 with Google’s ChromeOS, a Linux-based operating system that uses the Chrome web browser as its frontend, although - interesting historical aside - the initial internal versions of ChromeOS actually used Firefox because the Chrome browser didn’t actually exist yet, although by the time they publicly released it alongside the Chromebooks in 2010, they had switched to using the Google Chrome browser as the front end.
With that in mind, and as you might expect, ChromeOS is a cloud-based operating system, meaning that you need to be logged into a Google account at all times to be able to use it, and it’s basically built on the assumption that you will always have access to a high speed internet connection. Yes, it does have some offline functionality, but it’s essentially caching stuff locally, and it’s pretty much completely useless without an internet connection.
Now, if you know anything at all about Linux and the GPL and Open Source licenses, you’ll no doubt be aware that there is an obligation for anyone building stuff on top of this to release their modifications to the world under a similar license - and of course, Google is no exception to this - so along with the Chromium web browser, which is the open source version of the Google Chrome browser, they also release ChromiumOS, which is the open source version of, yep, you guessed it: ChromeOS - so this is where FydeOS comes in.
Back in 2016, FydeOS - then known as FlintOS - took Google’s open source ChromiumOS, made their own modifications to it, and released their own version: not for Google’s Chromebooks, but for the Raspberry Pi ARM-based single board computer - and to be honest, things were pretty much uneventful for the next few years with FlintOS releasing their own slightly customized version of ChromiumOS for the Raspberry Pi and later standard x86-based systems as well, until 2018 when they were acquired by a company called Neverware.
Now, why is this interesting? Well, two short years after that acquisition in 2020, Neverwear was acquired by…
Google! Yep, that’s right - so through a series of acquisitions, FydeOS, formerly known as FlintOS, a Fork of ChromiumOS, which is the open source version of Google’s ChromeOS operating system, is now once more owned by Google.
Thankfully, somehow, despite all this, over the past five years, the FydeOS project has been largely left to its own devices - pun intended - and has grown into a rather interesting operating system in its own right. Of course, it still has those Linux-based underpinnings and that focus on minimalism that ChromeOS has pretty much had since day one but crucially, as far as I’m concerned, they have severed their ties to the Google mothership - somehow - and remove that always online requirement and even the requirement to be logged into a Google account to use the operating system in the first place - and for that reason, I think FydeOS sounds very, very interesting indeed and worth a look.
So before we dive in and get this installed, let’s just have a very quick look at FydeOS.io, the official website and see what they have to offer, see what we can expect - so as we can see here, the headline here is “Simple, Swift, and Secure OS for Everyone” - and as you’ll notice this focus on the performance and security of the operating system is very much kind of how they’re pitching this - and why not?
So as we scroll down, we can see that they are particularly pushing this for digital signage and kiosks, which I think makes perfect sense: if you just want to run something in a web browser and not have to worry about the underlying operating system, have something that boots up very, very quickly and just gets out of the way, then I can absolutely see how this would be ideal based on my own experience - and you can also see that they are offering their own hardware as well: the Fydetab Duo. Now, I’m not nearly big or important enough to have been sent one of these for review, but if you are interested in their hardware offering - the Fydetab Duo - I will link a video down below by MichaelMJD, where he actually gets this thing, unboxes this thing and has a look at it.
I was already working on this video when he released his, but I decided to not let that hold me back and hopefully I can cover some interesting aspects that he didn’t.
So what is FydeOS? Of course, I’ve talked a little bit about the history of the operating system, but perhaps not what they’re actually focusing on and how they’re targeting this thing in the market - so there is a very short introductory video here on the website:
It’s “a sleek, mighty, and cloud first operating system. It’s the ideal pick for old computers” - which of course is where my interest comes from.
“Transforming from sluggish to lightning fast almost instantly.”
“Experience a rapid transition from startup to desktop in a mere eight seconds. Complimented by seamless background updates, your digital life stays in sync with the cloud. Lose your device? No sweat. Log into your cloud account and voila all your data reappears.”
“Now, what’s the FydeOS? Magic FydeOS supports web, Android, and Linux applications.” - as I explained earlier - “you might be an educator shaping minds, a geek exploring at Tech Frontiers, a talented creator…”
Do we know any of those?
“…or a streaming and gaming aficionado. FydeOS rises to every occasion with ease, security, its system file read-only nature inherently safeguards your data - and for privacy FydeOS stands firm with protection policies, never trading your privacy for profit. This is FydeOS.”
So there we go - “are you ready to leap into this adventure?”
That’s something that I didn’t mention actually - the operating system files are installed as read-only - so it’s - I think it’s known as an immutable OS - unlike, say, Windows, where applications can kind of go in willy-nilly and start, you know, injecting their own system files and stuff, so that’s quite an interesting security benefit of these kind of Chromium-based operating systems - so yeah, we’ve got seamless background updates, of course, a lot of the stuff in the Linux world can be installed se silently and seamlessly in the background about having to restart the system, which is pretty cool.
Yeah, we’ve got all of your apps in one place - so we’ve again, they’re touting the fact that you can install web, Android, and Linux apps.
Boots up in eight seconds - and in my testing, that’s actually pretty much true: it is ridiculous just how lightweight and how fast this operating system is, particularly on older hardware.
Built in security, so read-only access and virus armor, of course, Linux-based - so you know, we’ve got all of the security that comes along with that. We’ve got some AI stuff built in - I’m not going to look at that in this video, to be honest, I’m not really interested in that at all.
But yeah, there we go - so we can see the benefits versus Windows - so of course it’s free. There is a free version available. Yeah, it’s rock solid stable, of course. It’s based on Linux. We’ve got the security and privacy, performance, updates and maintenance. Simple user-friendly interface, multi-platform support: supports Android and Linux apps and hardware compatibility, so it runs on your ARM-based SBCs, Raspberry Pis, that kind of thing - and they’re also, interestingly enough here comparing it to ChromeOS - on which, of course, FydeOS is based - so one of the main benefits of this is that it is broadly compatible with a very wide range of hardware. Now, of course there is ChromeOS Flex, which oddly enough is where this journey actually started for me - I started playing with ChromeOS Flex, and that was when I discovered Fyde.
We’ve got device customization here, brand customization, local deployment. Of course we’ve got that de-Googling going on as well - so I think this is definitely the better pick for these older devices. They also have an enterprise offering, a kiosk offering, and of course they’ve got a list of all their partners and stuff.
Now we have FydeOS for PC, which is the version that we are going to be installing - and as you can see, there are a few different versions depending upon your CPU generation and whether it’s Intel or AMD - so in this particular video I’m going to be installing this on this old Intel MacBook Air, of course.
So I’m going to be installing the Intel Legacy version. There is also a version specifically for VMware, if you want to have a play with this without wiping a whole computer just to install it. Just to see what it’s all about - so there’s that as well.
There’s FydeOS For You - now these are builds that are actually specific to certain types of hardware, so particularly Microsoft Surface, their range of tablets. Of course windows 10 will be end of life very soon, and they’re kind of targeting it as a replacement for that - and this edition just basically supports some of the touchscreen functionality and stuff like that that comes with the Surface - and also some End Of Life devices as well - some Chinese Chromebook type things: your Pinebooks and Honor stuff, things like that. But also, interestingly enough, a couple of old models of Chromebook, which are no longer supported as well - so the Chromebook Pixel 2015 and the 2013, which are quite high-end, or certainly were quite high-end Chromebooks in their day.
Now unsupported by ChromeOS, but you can install FydeOS on those and still get your security updates and stuff - so that’s very cool to see - and of course, coming full circle right back to where FydeOS started back in the day when it was FlintOS, they still support these SBCs - so particularly the Raspberry Pis so you can install it on there as your main Linux-based operating system if, you know, Raspbian or whatever else doesn’t do it for you. But that’s not what we’re going to be covering in this video. The focus in this video as always for this channel is going to be kind of older hardware and specifically this older Intel MacBook Air - so how do we actually get this thing installed?
So to get this installed, as you might expect, if you have installed any Linux distribution in the past or indeed any kind of fairly modern operating system, you’ll need a USB flash drive - so I’ve just got this very basic USB3 thing here that I’ve had for years and used in quite a lot of my videos.
It needs to be at least 8 gigabytes because FydeOS, as you might expect from a modern Linux distro, is quite large - and you’ll also need to identify which version you need to download - so, thankfully, there is a very helpful page here to help out in identifying the generation of hardware that you have in your machine - which is called “Choose The Right FydeOS for PC variant.” I will link to this down in the description of course, along with anything else that I mention in this video - and it just talks about why they’ve created different variants, just because basically they want to streamline their Linux kernel builds and stuff, essentially is what it boils down to.
And they have some applications here that you can run - so CPU-Z, Speccy, and HWInfo, which you can run on your machine to determine which kind of generation of hardware you have in there - and they’ve also got, you know, which you know, code names for the different generations of Intel CPUs and stuff.
Now, there is something very, very important to consider here, which they do mention, which is NVIDIA graphics card support: they do not support Nvidia graphics cards as per, of course, the underlying ChromeOS or ChromiumOS - so if you have a machine that has Intel integrated graphics and an Nvidia GPU, the Nvidia GPU will not work in FydeOS and in some setups it might actually cause instability and the operating system to not boot at all - so if you have a gaming laptop which has a discreet Nvidia GPU, which can be disabled, you can do that in the BIOS or there is a slightly more fiddly tutorial to disable that via GRUB. Now I won’t be covering that in this video because I’m installing this on this old MacBook Air - it’s an entirely Intel system with Intel HD graphics, so that makes our life very, very easy. But that is something to be aware of - and with that in mind, if we go back to the download page, there is the Intel Legacy version, and it’s just a case of clicking on that and downloading it - and that’s that job done.
So of course you can use Rufus or one of the many other imaging things, BalenaEtcher, anything like that just to get this image onto a USB flash drive - and of course, the next step will be booting it on our actual hardware…
…and here we go! FydeOS installation, take two - and yep. I will explain that very shortly - I ran into quite a major problem trying to get this installed on this specific machine earlier, but I think it’s fair for me to demonstrate that and explain it to you and also show the workaround that I came up with. I really want to kind of explore what FydeOS is all about - so I want to get this up and running despite this quite major issue.
But the other thing that I wanted to show to you as well was just how quick the installation process is: I have to say, out of all the operating systems I’ve installed over the years - let alone on the channel - I think this is probably by far the fastest installation I have ever seen - so it just boots from the USB stick, we’ve got the FydeOS logo there on the splash screen, and it just takes a couple of seconds for the touchpad and stuff to be initialized.
It’s flashing away there, so it’s probably loading drivers and things. But there we go - so we can choose UK keyboard layout - and one thing I did notice earlier, there’s an option in here for “United Kingdom, Oxford English Dictionary Spelling.” Now, you know, of course I am hugely respectful of the King’s English, but to be honest that sounds quite specialist - so we’ll just go for-
Ah! So, sound is working. That’s good. But we’ll just go for the standard English United Kingdom option here - so we have two options: we can install it or we can try it first in a live environment, just booting from the USB stick, I’m going to install it directly to the internal SSD without trying it first, and I’m just going to do a full disk installation as well, which just wipes the whole disk… and… That’s it! That’s all of your options as far as the kind of pre-install is concerned - and after a reboot it will ask us a few more questions and we will be at the desktop. But yeah, let’s see just how long this takes to install…
…and that’s it! Installation completed. What did that take? I mean, I wasn’t actually timing that, but looking at the timer on the camera, what was that? Around a minute - something like that - and that’s literally it - so we can shut it down now: it says power off your device first, then remove the installation media so I shall do that.
Shut it down, and this will sit here flashing for a couple of seconds. That’s the screen back light gone off - so I can safely remove this and we can boot up into FydeOS for the very first time!
So for some reason we need to select our language again - I’m not quite sure why but there we go, again I’m going to go with United Kingdom - as tempting as the Oxford English Dictionary spelling is, we’ll go for the standard UK option and UK again - and it didn’t make the noise that time. Okay.
Now, this is the major issue that I ran into that I mentioned before, wifi - so if I click on this, the wifi adapter is working to some extent: I can see the the MAC address of the adapter here - if I just click on that - but it doesn’t actually list any networks, and if I go into the manual option and enter my SSID and password that way, it doesn’t connect. Now it’s because this particular model of MacBook Air has a Broadcom wireless chipset in it, and it uses proprietary firmware, which of course isn’t isn’t provided as part of FydeOS.
The interesting thing is that I installed ChromeOS Flex on this the other day, and the wifi worked absolutely fine, straight out of the box, no problems whatsoever - and I went down a bit of a rabbit hole over the past day or so, just desperately trying to get wifi working in FydeOS on this machine - and yeah, I couldn’t, I tried openFyde, which is the open source version of FydeOS that gives you a bit more access, you know, access to the kind of underlying Linuxy stuff - which is all locked down in here, of course as part of that kind of security stuff that we saw them touting on the website - and in the end I just admitted defeat - so yeah. Don’t take this video as a recommendation of FydeOS on this particular machine. I just wanted to see what it was all about.
But we’ve got this far, so here’s my solution: Yeah, I’m going to tether it to my phone - so, yeah, just so we can at least get an internet connection. Of course, I could use a USB wifi adapter or a USB ethernet adapter. But yeah, let’s just unlock this, plug that in. Go down to here…
…I don’t want USB D- Oh no. Wrong option.
Come on Rees, get yourself together, right. Charging via USB.
USB tethering. Verify that it’s you…
…and we can shove this to one side.
Hooray for workarounds!
There we go - so that’s now connected via ethernet as far as FydeOS is concerned, I know, it’s a terrible, terrible workaround - and the trouble is you can’t even replace the the wifi card in these MacBook Airs because of course it’s Apple and it uses a proprietary connector. Yeah, there you go. Anyway, so yeah, we’ll just go through and accept all of this privacy stuff, and this is where it kind of differs from ChromeOS because you can use an account: you can sign up for a FydeOS account or you can use your Google account, but there’s also an option down here for “Use Local Account” and it will warn you and basically say, oh, you can’t synchronize your settings across multiple devices.
But is that really that useful? Probably not for my purposes - so what we’ll do is we’ll continue and use the local account and it’s just a case of choosing a username and password.
…and here we can change the touchpad scrolling direction. I have no idea which direction it currently is, so that’s completely useless. Yeah, display and text size looks perfectly fine and light or dark theme, I’m going to leave it on the default light theme, although I tend to be a dark theme user generally.
We don’t want the customer experience improvement plan thing, so we’ll turn that off because we’re just tinkering here - and here it is, the FydeOS desktop - and as you can see, the very first thing that we’re being prompted to do, if I can get that notification back, is to activate the Android subsystem.
So if we can click on there and activate this we might as well - and what this allows us to do is to install Android applications on FydeOS on this actual machine here, which is supported by ChromeOS but only on a very limited set of pre-approved devices. Whereas with this, we can basically just go ahead and install all of our Android apps on pretty much any machine we like, which is really cool.
…and there we go, look at that, so if you’re an Android user, you will no doubt recognize this: this is the Android System Settings app, I guess. Very cool.
So we’ll have a play with that in a moment but the first thing I want to do is just a very quick performance test, of course, one of the issues I ran into running Ventura on this machine was that performance was absolutely horrific, mainly because of that Intel graphics chipset and the lack of RAM so let’s go to a very quick YouTube test.
“I just picked up three Apple G4 laptops, and they’re all in pretty rough shape, so join me as we plug them directly into -“
So yeah, I’ve just been watching some YouTube, one of my favorite channels here, good old Sean from Action Retro, and, all working perfectly fine, I’ve upped the quality to 1080p and it is silky smooth, perfectly watchable, and also in full screen mode as well - so a perfectly viable YouTube watching machine at the very least - so I guess that’s a good start.
Okay, so one thing that I did keep coming up against when I was looking for information about that wifi chipset was also the built-in webcam on this machine being a bit awkward and using proprietary drivers as you might expect, and, yep, as you can see, in the built-in camera application, the camera is indeed not working - so if you wanted to use FydeOS on a MacBook Air for you know, Zoom calls or Teams calls or whatever, it’s not going to be a viable option because like I say, you can’t actually get into the underlying Linuxy stuff and actually load the drivers for it.
So this is kind of one of the unique and interesting offerings of FydeOS and it’s their own App Store, which is really cool to see - and of course, we can go in and install OpenGApps, which is basically the collection of Android apps - “Add App” - stuff like Gmail and that kind of thing - so we can actually use the official Google services under the Android environment on FydeOS, so that sounds quite interesting. Can we open the app here?
Yeah, we’ll agree with that, I’m sure that’s fine. Click through. It’s an experimental procedure, unexpected expected errors may occur, may cause your Android subsystem to crash - and we’ve got the option here to uninstall as well - so whatever, we’ll just go through and install that.
Yeah. Configure installation options, developer mode of FydeOS must be enabled and the protection feature needs to be manually disabled. Okay.
So I did find this earlier - “Enable Developer mode: enabling developer mode is an irreversible operation. If you wish to disable developer mode, you must reinstall FydeOS, resulting in all data being wiped. Please back up your data and proceed at your own risk” - so we will enable that and restart…
…and we’re back, and the other thing that it mentioned was this rootFS verification, which of course is that built-in feature that protects the system files from modifications - so yeah, we need to press Ctrl Alt and T to open a terminal, which doesn’t work. Is that Command Alt and T on a Mac? Yep. Okay. Fair enough, it’s a Mac keyboard - and this brings up a terminal, I did have a play with this earlier actually, and it’s very, very limited, but there you go - so we need to type “shell”.
Where is that?
“Shell”, we need root access…
Wha! Danger!
…and then we need to run this command.
“Successfully disabled rootFS verification, a reboot is required. Would you like to reboot now?”
Yes, I would. Again.
Right. Let’s try this again - so OpenGApps, install, “this will install and configure OpenGApps to your FydeOS device” so you can configure installation options. I’m not going to bother with that. Are you sure? To begin installation… Okay - and that’s actually working this time, so yeah, that’s fair enough.
I had to disable that extra security stuff and enable developer mode - it’s all documented on the website. Quite interested to see how this works.
Ha - and we have to reboot again! Would you believe that this was Linux-based? Ugh. Obviously taking a leaf out of Microsoft’s book with all of these reboots but anyway, I’m sure we’ll get there in the end.
Yeah, not an ideal setup, but anyway. Look, we’ve got the Play Store there at the bottom - so what happens if I click on that?
Oh, this is very exciting. Of course, I need to sign into my Google account…
Uh.
Okay, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to get caught up on my Japanese Duolingo - as you can see, I have a 1,775 day streak to maintain - so I thought I’d log in and do a quick lesson, but yeah, there’s nothing here! Usually the lessons are supposed to be kind of here and they’re not loading for some reason. So that’s a shame, I guess I’ll have to do that on my phone later on.
I must say I do like the integration here - I do really like how the Android apps have their own icons on the taskbar thing at the bottom here, the dock or whatever you want to call it - and you can actually pin those as well.
But unfortunately I’m struggling to find anything that actually works: Netflix is also not working, of course, that would’ve been absolutely ideal on this machine. But yeah, that’s…
Again, the splash screen seems to come up and then nothing, so I am not quite sure what’s going on there. I do have an internet connection.
Ah, okay - so this is pretty cool: this is Google Keep, which I use for taking very basic notes and things and it synchronizes across my Google account, I can access it in a browser and stuff, and this is actually working pretty nicely: it’s detected that it’s running on a landscape display, and I can go through my various notes - I’m going to have to blur some of these out because there is some personal information and stuff. But yeah, I’ve got my measurements and my shopping lists and…
…whatever that is?
Google Drive - again, it’s all working quite nicely. I’ve just installed this through the Play Store, as per the other stuff. I’ve got some of my video thumbnails and stuff on here. I use it to transfer them to my phone so I can post them on Instagram as you do, and hopefully I should be able to download this. Do I want to allow access to files - and that downloads, and you can actually go into the FydeOS file browser, I believe…
Ah, so it actually goes into the main download folder on the machine itself - so yeah, we have that image file downloaded there, so quite nice integration as well between the FydeOS desktop and the Google apps. But anyway, I think that’s enough playing around with Android stuff. Let’s see what else we can find.
So I’m just having a bit of a poke around the FydeOS App Store here. Just seeing what apps we have and look at this: there’s quite a mighty selection of apps here - so erm, there’s Duolingo again - but I thought I’d click on some of these and see what they’re all about. Discord, you know, that would be nice, a nice fully integrated Discord desktop app, but that’s not what it is at all: it’s just a link to the website - so yeah. Okay.
Shall we try YouTube? Is that an app?
That is also not what I would say you know, meets the traditional definition of an app. Again, that’s just a link to the website, so some very kind of ChromeOS vibes here.
Visual Studio Code - surely?
vscode.dev. That’s some kind of online version of Visual Studio code. Well, that’s quite disappointing, isn’t it? Because I heard you could actually install native Linux applications on FydeOS - so there’s an option in here to set up the Linux development environment. Now, I must say, I actually thought that this meant that you could install the apps directly kind of natively on FydeOS, as it is a Linux-based operating system itself. But this looks very similar to ChromeOS in that basically what it does is create a virtual machine. Yeah. Downloading the virtual machine, starting the virtual machine, and it’s created a 10 gigabyte hard drive image for that to use as well.
Ah, cool - so this is a terminal, as you can probably see, and it’s very important to note that this is very different to the terminal that we saw earlier, which was the actual kind of main system terminal for the underlying operating system. This is for the Linux virtual machine that we’ve just installed.
So yeah, we’ve got a bit of Linuxception going on here: we’ve got a Linux-based operating system running Linux in a virtual machine for some bizarre reason, but there we go - so we can close that and hopefully if we go back into the store - how on earth do we get to the - I’m sure there’s a way to install Linux stuff?
Vim!
I’m going to have to remember how to exit this now. Of course, I know I’m a pro!
Apparently, according to FydeOS’s own instructions on installing Linux stuff, you can just install bog-standard .deb packages so I thought I would go and download LibreOffice ‘cause that’s going to be actually potentially very useful.
Oh look, we have our Linux files and our Android files now showing up in the file manager. That’s quite cool. The file explorer, whatever you want to call it. There’s our package - so does this… Okay, that just opens as a - I’ve got the .debs in there. Look at all of this. I just want to install LibreOffice please!
Dear oh dear, where’s apt when you need it?
“Install app with Linux. The Linux application will be available within your terminal and may also show an icon in your launcher” - so let’s install that.
“Error while installing.” What’s this? “An error occurred. Click on the notification for details.”
Unmet dependencies… depends on LibreOffice at 25… That’s the problem here, you see - so I need to what do I need to do? Extract this, I think?
[A few minutes later…]
Hold onto your butts!
So we have a “Linux Apps” group, I guess it’s called in the launcher here. We can see all of the applications there, that’s Calc. Oh! The splash screen did flash up very quickly - I guess there’s some kind of missing dependency? Hmm, I don’t. Not very intuitive at all, is it?
Yeah - so as far as basic stuff like word processing is concerned, we do have Google Docs, obviously, which you can go to in a web browser as you might expect. But there’s not really anything over and above ChromeOS’s offering - particularly as FydeOS kind of touts itself as this offline de-Googlyfied version.
Perhaps the ability to install some kind of basic office package might be quite useful? Maybe I’m missing something? I don’t know, but I think I’ve seen all I need to see.
So, genuine, honest, first impressions of FydeOS from someone who keeps hearing a lot about it, but hadn’t actually used it until this very specific experience that you’ve seen in this video - and I guess the first thing to address is the elephant in the room, of course, that wifi. Massive, massive showstopper of an issue on this particular machine - and the really bizarre thing is that I have installed ChromeOS Flex on this very same machine, which is the version of ChromeOS that Google release for free that you can install on any hardware that you like - and the wifi worked perfectly fine outta the box. It went straight through the installation process, connected to the wifi no problems at all - and FydeOS is based on that: it uses ChromeOS as a base so at some point they’ve removed that driver. I think because this Broadcom chipset uses a proprietary firmware and they’re trying to avoid copyright issues, maybe, not quite sure.
I did jump through quite a lot of hoops to try to get that to work, but I will say if you do want to try FydeOS on any particular piece of hardware and you do run into an issue with a specific piece of hardware not working, whether it be audio, wifi or, or whatever else, just give upon the whole thing and walk away, you don’t have enough access to the underlying operating system to be able to enable kernel modules and stuff like that, like you usually would in any other Linux distribution - so that is a massive downside as far as I’m concerned. Of course, that also applies to ChromeOS as well. There are open source versions, of course there’s ChromiumOS and there’s openFyde as well, and you do have a bit more access to the underlying operating system but even then, I did try installing openFyde on this and still couldn’t get the wifi to work.
Moving on to the Android side of things, I must say that was quite nice: the integration was quite well done, and I was actually generally impressed with what they were trying to achieve.
Now I should add that that is also in ChromeOS, but only on a limited selection of a pre-approved blessed Google Chromebook devices - so unless you own one of those devices if you want to run Android applications on a ChromeOS-based operating system, I guess FydeOS is definitely worth a look although, as you saw, I did run into some problems with some of those apps as well, which is a real shame - they just didn’t seem to quite load properly. Not quite sure if that was some kind of display driver issue or some kind of DRM issue maybe, or something like that. But yeah, the out of the box experience, certainly for less technical users, I think it certainly leaves a lot to be desired - and again, on the Linux side of things, it certainly seems to me that FydeOS is kind of being targeted as something a bit more than ChromeOS, kind of a level above ChromeOS without having the complexity of a full-blown Linux distribution.
So you would think that the process for installing Linux desktop applications would be a bit more streamlined, but as you saw from my experiences trying to get LibreOffice up and running, it just didn’t work, I installed the .deb packages as per the very limited instructions on the website, and it just seemed to crash out immediately.
Yeah, I guess I’m completely stuck there, which is a real shame because it would be nice to be able to install LibreOffice and VLC and other kind of Linux desktop stuff just for normal day-to-day users.
So I suppose what we want are some final conclusions on FydeOS - and I guess how it fits into the market between ChromeOS, which of course is very, very limited and locked down, and a proper full fledged Linux distribution - and I must say:
I have no idea! I don’t get this operating system at all. I’m probably doing something wrong - perhaps there are some FydeOS fans in the audience who can set me straight down in the comments. Perhaps I’ve missed something? But yeah, if you want to set up an older device like this for a less technical user in your life perhaps, just for some very basic web browsing, and YouTubing, email, that kind of thing, I don’t really see what the benefit is over ChromeOS Flex. I mean, yeah, you don’t need to be logged into a Google account to use it, but if you’re watching YouTube and checking Gmail and using Google Docs and whatever you’re going to be logged into a Google account anyway, so that’s not really an advantage.
As far as more technical users are concerned - people who might want to install those Linux applications or Android development, perhaps - it’s just going to be far too limited compared to a proper Linux distribution.
Perhaps I’m just missing the point? Perhaps I’m doing something wrong? It is quite likely I will say and I’ll be the first to admit that - so please do let me know down in the comments if I have missed something. But, yeah, based on my first impressions, I certainly won’t be going ahead with FydeOS on this machine, and I don’t think I’ll be checking it out on any of my other old hardware either.
There are certainly better options out there: whether that be Ubuntu or Linux Mint or Fedora, or you know, insert name of your favorite Linux distribution here.
So there you go! Big thanks as always to my supporters on Patreon, Ko-Fi, and of course my YouTube channel members as well. They get videos a little bit early and also ad-free.
That’s all I have for you for this video, so thank you ever so much for watching. If you enjoyed the video, or found it useful, please do give it a thumbs up - and also if you want to see more of this kind of stuff, please do subscribe to the channel. Thanks again, and hopefully I’ll see you in the next one.
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Episode Links:
Yawning Angel: https://www.youtube.com/@YawningAngelRetro
MichaelMJD Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPv1aP59ctc
FydeOS: https://fydeos.io
ChromeOS Flex: https://chromeos.google/intl/en_uk/products/chromeos-flex
Choose FydeOS Variant: https://fydeos.io/help/knowledge-base/installation-guides/fydeos-for-pc/fydeos-for-pc-variant
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