Can ChromeOS Flex Actually Revive an Old Laptop?

by Acidity [a.k.a. ItsT3K]

Recently I picked up two old ThinkPads at a hamfest with the intent to re-purpose them as little Linux laptops.  And, as a definitely sane and normal person, I decided to throw ChromeOS Flex on one of them.  One of the things that led me to do this was the fact that you can now run Linux applications on it.  This seemed very promising.

First off, I won't bullshit.  Linux on ChromeOS isn't the Linux base of the OS, which disappoints me.  Rather, it's just a thin VM that runs Debian Linux inside ChromeOS.  This means that if it runs on Debian, it should run on ChromeOS.... riiiiiight?  Presumably yes, and as all of the programs I usually use seem to run perfectly fine, I mean hell, I'm writing this very article in LibreOffice running on that very ChromeOS Flex install.

But this would not be a 2600 article without some complaining!  So first off, here are the bad things:

• It requires a Google account - which is obvious as it's ChromeOS.  But it makes it even worse that you cannot use the Linux Development Environment in guest mode.  Meaning the Google account is mandatory!
• Graphics are a hit and miss - more graphically intensive websites under Firefox ESR were laggy at best and slideshow speeds at worse.  GIMP, on the other hand, was a bit more usable.  Though graphical effects (namely distortion based ones) were sluggish, they still rendered in the image just fine.  (Note:  As I'm typing this I'm noticing a few slight graphical bugs with my cursor, but this could just be the old graphics chip.)
• Performance takes a hit - this is to be expected, it's a virtual machine for damn sake.  But I decided to benchmark the one thing ChromeOS is good at, web browsing!  And using Speedometer 3.0 (browserbench.org/Speedometer3.0), I got to see how much of a hit performance took:
  

     Firefox ESR under Linux on ChromeOS : 1.94 / 140 
  Chrome under ChromeOS on ChromeOS Flex : 5.33 / 140
  

  It was a notable hit too.

Anyways, enough bitching.

Can it revive an old laptop like Google claims it will?  Kinda yeah, it makes it a lot more usable than Windows ever would.  But it's no more usable on this ThinkPad X230 Tablet than Debian itself would be.