A whirlwind of operating systems

We all knew that it was coming. Microsoft has officially stopped selling its Windows 10 Operating system.

Microsoft Stopped Selling Windows 10, But You Can Find It Elsewhere

My home office, such that it is, is mostly powered by a computer that came with Windows 10 pre-installed. I honestly never really felt that human-computer connection with Windows 10 and the machine became more of a business function. When Windows 11 came along, I jumped and it became a fun computer again. My only complaint is that I don’t use the Edge browser much and yet Microsoft somehow finds loopholes that make it launch in response to particular actions.

I have an older computer that came with Window 7 installed. For me, it was the perfect example of how you should never buy a computer with minimum specifications. It had a very powerful Intel i7 processor but only 4GB of RAM. It never ran Windows 7 all that efficiently. I had to learn to be patient and, if you know me, you know that I’m not a patient person.

Eventually, it became an experimental computer and it has had a number of different operating systems installed on it. They were from the Linux side of the house – Ubuntu, Lubuntu, and Linux Mint were the most recent distributions that got installed.

No matter what I did, it struggled with only having that 4GB at times. If I was just browsing the web, there was no problem at all..

Today, it was kind of cold outside; just the type of day to do some playing around. As I really thought about it, I really do everything in a browser anyway. It was time to play around with an operating system that was just a browser – and I’d read all kinds of things about it – ChromeOS Flex.

Like most operating systems, the instructions to download and install are pretty straight forward – download the installer to an external USB key, boot with the key in it and install the operating system, and away you go. Google even make it simple by providing a browser extension that makes things easy.

I wish that I could say that things went smoothly but I can’t.

I downloaded the installation file four times and each time, the verification of the installation image failed. I was going to give up when I thought of an alternative. Instead of installing the Stable version of Chrome OS Flex, my next download was the Developer version. After all, this was just going to be something to play around with.

This time, things went smoothly. Installation was quick and efficient and when it was installed, all the extensions and settings from my actual Chromebook synched nicely.

I’ve been using my new ChromeOS Flex computer all afternoon and I’m quite impressed with the results. So, this Windows 7 box which was upgraded and then moved to various versions of Linux is now running ChromeOS Flex.

I know that I’m fickle with these things but it is looking good.

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