forget what you know about Chromebooks this is a gaming laptop now steam is
finally coming to Chromebooks baby and that means that you and all of your
Chromebook friends can finally join the elite League of Gamers or does it we
tried the steam Alpha and it's cool but it might actually be Chrome itself that
isn't ready for gaming let me explain why after our sponsor build Redux build
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way the thing that makes Chromebooks great is also what makes them awful for
gamers a laser focus on Simplicity you
can do browser things and maybe run a couple of Android apps but that's about
it sure in 2018 Google added a Linux
implementation called crostini that allows you to use pretty much any
desktop environment you'd want on your Chromebook but that's not an improvement
to Chrome OS you can do that on any computer but with the introduction of
native steam gaming this 11-year-old OS
much like an 11-year-old human looks like it will be doing a lot of growing
and changing in the coming years so how does steam on Chromebooks work well
since it's an alpha you'll have to switch to the dev channel change a few
flags and type a couple lines into the terminal and boom you're up and running
assuming of course you have a supported Chromebook we have
two the Acer Chromebook spin 713 and the
ASUS Chromebook CX9 so why these two
well they are among the six supported devices that can run this Alpha Yes you
heard correctly just six 11th gen Intel Chromebooks are supported for the alpha
support should expand as this rolls out but for now like the Food Network you
can get a taste vicariously through our video yum tasty first up let's talk
about gaming performance we were hoping compare Steam on Chrome OS to these same
machines running Windows by swapping the m.2 ssds but uh yeah no they won't even
boot up turns out these Chromebooks use core boot instead of UEFI meaning we'd
have to flash firmware onto them but since these are un loan from their
respective manufacturers we couldn't do that that means a one toone comparison
on the same laptop will have to wait until steam is available on Chrome OS
Flex the version of the OS you can install on any machine for now what we
can do is compare the steam to running Steam games in crostini on the same
machine now remember it's an alpha there
are a bunch of issues like no dx12 games
weird performance and scaling at non-native resolutions and a Kanye West
level of General instability so while you should take these results with a
pinch of salt if you're chomping at the bit to pee some G's on your cbook here's
what you can expect our limited benching gave us some strange results you could
say they were a little bananas LTT
store.com halflife loss Coast worked swimmingly with very slight gains in the
alpha over the Linux implementation but when we look at the Tallow principle
well things get interesting in Christini the game was unplayable scoring between
0 and three frames per second but when it ran through the alpha well look at
that that's a playable game but curiously it performed substantially
better on our lower spec I5 Chromebook a strange Trend we noticed in all of our
benchmarks despite the i7 equipped CX9 possessing more execution unit than the
GPU on the I5 we think it's a driver issue on the Intel side of things
because it persisted in both Christini and the alpha but we were unable to nail
down exactly what was happening in other Alpha weirdness we tried to Benchmark
shadow of the Tomb Raider but that just stopped working altogether after an OS
update that's what an Alpha's like folks
now the bugs are to be expected but the thing that shakes my belief that gaming
could succeed on chromos is that PC gaming often requires tinkering and
Chrome OS is by definition a limited OS
for example file management is horrendously obfuscated you can't tell
where your files are located in relation to other folders or even navigate to
your steam game files you can see the file structure by using steam's file
browser but you can't do anything with it if Google wants to take gaming
seriously they need to make it easier for people to troubleshoot and manage
their device you know it's like medium level tinkering Chrome OS has this
massive Chasm between the limited things typical users can do and the unlimited
possibilities available to developers but what about Gamers it's like you get
the choice between a tricycle or a unicycle I need a middle ground where
can I do things like install a mod or tweak Graphics or power management
settings without needing Dev level knowledge of the OS you can't just power
wash your problems away when you have a quarter terabyte of content to
redownload but let's talk about why Google is bringing steam to Chrome OS at
all back in 2013 Google took a stab at making Chromebooks premium with the
Chrome book pixel a laptop that was just a couple hundred shy of directly
competing with the MacBook Pro and it was a flop reviewers liked the hardware
but no one wanted Chrome OS so Google tried again and then again and again and
after nearly a decade I think that Google has finally realized that if they
want to sell a premium Chromebook they need to sell the idea of a premium OS
and gaming is part of that idea especially for the next generation of
Chromebook buyers you see Google has been invading schools all over the world
leading to scores of children being brought up on Google's OS and as they
switch from their school provided laptops to their own personal devices
Google is hoping they don't want to jump ship by making Chrome OS a compelling
package as a sole personal computer Google would love for you to switch but
they're trying to get your kids to stay and gaming will be a core part of that
retention plan wait a second how does stadia fit into all this
aha you forgot about stadia didn't you in classic Google fashion it seems like
the left hand doesn't really know what the right hand is doing because bringing
steam to Chromebook seems like it's going to harm stadia's growth I mean
sure local gaming and game streaming are different but stadia is Google's gaming
brand and it seems like they're fine to just kind of leave it in the wings
rather than make any effort to integrate it into Chrome OS in my opinion that
would be a more logical move stadia as a cloud-based service is more in line with
chrome os's vision of a cloud-based future whereas traditional PC gaming
that is being introduced by this steam Alpha is kind of antithetical to how
Chrome OS has always worked oh this one
died how appropriate and there are other reasons
I don't want a game on a Chromebook anyway the OS sucks at translating
trackpad inputs to Accurate Mouse movement window management is slow and
frustrating and the design language has a general lack of information density
and I can't change any of it while I certainly welcome the idea of
playing games I already own on my Chromebook for this to work properly
Google needs to really commit to making gaming a good experience and that means
that Chrome OS will have to become something it's never been that might be
good for gamers but bad for people who are happy with Chrome's lightweight
Simplicity it's a balance that will be hard to find but Google I think you
could do it so long as you don't abandon
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out the one where lonus struggles to buy his son a Chromebook against lonus as
will we make him do these things for content