I had a few older mini PC's lying around in the office that I wasn't doing anything with, so decided to to try out this operating system from Google which has been open sourced for installing on older hardware. GoogleOS Flex
I have used Chromebooks in the past and for simple use cases they are very handy, especially if you spend most of time in a browser. It has some limitations depending on the hardware you have, like the unit I picked didn't support the Linux Virtual machine sub-system as it only had an Intel J4105 Celeron processor - which is not exactly cutting edge.
It does however run the Plex Web app. very smoothly and at this unit was to go under the TV for streaming - it was fine.
The installation process is straight forward as you basically burn the downloaded ISO file from Google onto a USB stick using something like Balena Echer or the Linux dd CLI command following these instructions.
Once done, boot using the USB drive, and. select install. You will need a Google account, but you can create one on the fly if you don't have one.
Once installed and up and running my little mini performed wonderfully and was more than capable of running Netflix, Plex client, Disney etc.
If you have a powerful enough machine you can install the Linux sub-system and install a whole host of Linux apps on the machine as well, which makes it a far more powerful machine.
Here are some links to YouTube videos on installing and running ChromeOS Flex and also another very interesting version called FydeOS which offers Android supported applications as well.
FydeOS - based on ChromiumOS Installation
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