Budgie does integrate with the GNOME stack, so there is not only the familiar minimalism of Chrome OS, but the power of GNOME underneath. This is a singular desktop environment created to almost perfectly mimic the Chrome OS experience. In this case, it’s what’s on top that counts… that being the Budgie desktop (Figure 1).

The developers of Solus promise a “no scope-creep” platform that will provide a modern desktop-focused Linux distribution. Solus started out as Evolve OS and is, to date, one of the finest Linux distributions to take a swing at the Chrome OS platform. Here are my top contenders for this title. Which of these do the best job of mimicking Chrome OS and which manage to retain all that which makes Linux an outstanding platform? You get the ease of use found with ChromeOS and the added power of the full-blown Linux platform.īut if you’re looking to get such elegant simplicity with the added power, where do you turn? A handful of Linux distributions have popped up over the last few years that do an outstanding job of re-creating ChromeOS.

In theory, it’s a perfect amalgamation of simplicity and power. With that in mind, it makes perfect sense that a handful of Chrome OS-like Linux distributions would appear. To get around that, there are approximations available that can be installed on off-the-shelf hardware that recreate the Chrome OS experience. However, because Chrome OS is a proprietary solution, owned by Google, you cannot simply download the platform and install it on common x86/64 hardware. Across the landscape of the PC-verse, it doesn’t get much easier than ChromeOS. Beyond price, one of the reasons for the incredible popularity of the Chromebook is its simplicity. So the Chromebook hung around and eventually became one of the hottest selling devices on the market.

Thing is, said real work (from an end-user perspective) tends to be 90 percent browser based. Maybe the little laptops that could would hang around for a brief period and, once the novelty of the price tag wore off, they’d go away to make room for the devices that do the real work. When the Chromebook first arrived on the scene, most people thought they’d go the way of the netbook.

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