I tried Chrome OS Flex on an ancient laptop

I like to tinker with trying different OS's on my computers. I keep Windows on my main machines. I have an ancient Dell Studio dual core laptop that I used to test things. I have upgraded it over the years with a 500 GB WD SSD and a dual band WiFi card to replace the original 2.4 GHz only card.

I installed Linux Mint earlier this summer. That went OK. I have Linux on 2010 vintage desktop and two Raspberry Pi micro PC's so I was familiar with it. The install went OK but my WiFi did not work at first. I had to install a Realtek driver from the command line after connecting the PC to Ethernet to get it on the Internet. The machine performed OK, better than Windows 10 that I was running before, but I still thought it booted a little slow and was a bit slow overall.

I have been meaning to try Chrome OS Flex on this PC. I had held off last year because it was not listed in the list of compatible PC's.This week I decided I would try it anyway and downloaded the ISO file and used Rufus to create a bootable USB drive. I booted off the USB drive and used the "try it first" feature to run it off the USB stick. It was slow of course and I seemed to have trouble connecting with the internet although WiFi seemed to be connecting OK.

So I went ahead with the installation and it completed in about 10 minutes without a hitch. It found my WiFi card and connected to the internet. I have never owned a Chromebook so it took me a while to navigate around. The performance was impressive. I logged into my Google account and found my files on Google Drive. Chrome of course is the default browser. I found I could not connect to my network storage device that I plug into the USB port on my ASUS router. Chrome OS is supposed to support accessing network SMB drives but I guess the server has to be running SMB 3.0 or higher for Chrome OS to find it. I have not been able to connect to two other Windows PC's on the network either. You are supposed to be able to run Linux as a service from inside Chrome OS but that choice was grayed out on my PC.

Another negative is that it does not appear easy to access email accounts other than Gmail. The might be another email app I can download other than the built in Gmail but I have not had time to find one.

My initial impression is that Chrome OS Flex is a good choice for an older PC that cannot handle modern Windows and a good alternative for Linux if you do not need the power and versatility of Linux.