Remember Project Campfire? Back in 2019, Google was working on a plan to dual boot Windows alongside Chrome OS on Chromebooks. They shelved the plans and got busy with adding Linux to Chrome OS.
In the last few weeks, the Windows + Chrome OS talk has resumed with a new Parallels partnership. However, it is still unclear how this new integration will look like.
Amid these discussions and speculations, Google has resumed work on their Campfire project.
Project Campfire on ‘Eve’
A few code change requests that we spotted in the Chromium Gerrit repository talks about Campfire on Eve.
Eve is the code name for Google Pixelbook.
“eve: Add Alternate OS mode to eve: Add defines necessary for the alternate mode to kick in.” (Source: Gerrit)
“Campfire: HID for Eve sensors Alt-OS mode: hid-i2c device created, but sensor driver still failing initiatlization.” (Source: Gerrit)
“ec_commands: EC in alternate OS mode constant: Add i2c address the host must use to access the EC when using hid over i2c. The EC presents itself as a i2c device that understand HID messages.” (Source: Gerrit)
Some Thoughts on Chrome OS
It is indeed exciting to see the plans to dual boot Windows alongside Chrome OS back online. I am sure this will make a lot of advanced Chromebook users happy.
However, all these Linux apps and Windows support, and the load that puts on Chrome OS (the operating system and the development process), is that going to be useful to the general audience?
Think about kids who use Chromebooks at schools and colleges. Are they going to benefit from this change?
I am dropping links to two articles here, one that I wrote here on Chrome Story and another by JR Raphael at ComputerWorld.
I would love to hear what you think.
As a school we only would like to run 1 a 2 legacy windows apps on chromebooks, in a transparant fasion. no need for windows.
What about licenses ? WIll Microsoft allow people to run Windows apps without it?
I would rather Google spent the time and effort on merginging ChromeOS with Android into a single unified Operating System.
I have recently bought an Asus (8th-Gen Intel KBL-U Processor 3865U) Chromebox and find both Linux Cli and Play Store a gimmick.
I like cloud “software as a service” and was undertaking this before ChromeOS existed on a Lubuntu MiniPC, I actually bought a Asus Chromebit to replace my MiniPC.
Do you think they will risk Android’s popularity to do something like this? Or are you expecting Chrome OS to become more Android.
Google Fuschia Operating System exists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia
Apple use the same BSD Code Base for iOS and MacOS and by 2025 there will be more convergence with all the hardware being ARM CPU. One has to innovate to stay ahead.
Well, that’s true. It could be because they want to run it as a side experiment first, without messing with Android?