ChromeOS

ChromeOS (sometimes styled as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS) is an operating system designed and developed by Google. It is derived from the open-source ChromiumOS operating system (which itself is derived from Gentoo Linux), and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user interface.

Google announced the project in July 2009, initially describing it as an operating system where applications and user data would reside in the cloud. ChromeOS was used primarily to run web applications.

ChromeOS supports progressive web applications, Android apps from Google Play and Linux applications.

In 2006, Jeff Nelson, a Google employee, created the concept of what would become ChromeOS, initially codenamed "Google OS" as a Linux distribution focused on speed. Early Google OS versions used Firefox as Chrome had not been released, though it switched to Chrome sometime in 2007 due to internal betas being passed around Google.^{[better source needed]}

To ascertain marketing requirements, developers relied on informal metrics, including monitoring the usage patterns of 200 machines used by Google employees. Developers also noted their own usage patterns.

Google requested that its hardware partners use solid-state drives "for performance and reliability reasons" as well as the lower capacity requirements inherent in an operating system that accesses applications and most user data on remote servers. In November 2009, Matthew Papakipos, engineering director for the ChromeOS, announced that ChromeOS would only support solid-state storage (i.e. not mechanical hard-disks), and noted that ChromeOS only required one-sixtieth as much drive space as Windows 7. Ten years later, in 2019, the recovery images Google provided for ChromeOS were still only between 1 and 3 GB in size.

On November 19, 2009, Google released ChromeOS's source code as the ChromiumOS project. At a November 19, 2009 news conference, Sundar Pichai–at the time Google's vice president overseeing Chrome–demonstrated an early version of the operating system. He previewed a desktop which looked very similar to the desktop Chrome browser, and in addition to the regular browser tabs also had application tabs, which take less space and can be pinned for easier access. At the conference, the operating system booted up in seven seconds, a time Google said it would work to reduce. Additionally, Chris Kenyon, vice president of OEM services at Canonical Ltd, announced that Canonical was under contract to contribute engineering resources to the project with the intent to build on existing open-source components and tools where feasible.

Canonical was an early engineering partner on the project, and initially ChromiumOS could only be built on an Ubuntu system. In February 2010, the ChromiumOS development team switched to Gentoo Linux because Gentoo's package management system Portage was more flexible. The ChromiumOS build environment is no longer restricted to any particular distribution, but installation and quick-start guides use Debian's (and thus also Ubuntu's) apt syntax.