Every independent adult has at least one cat ancient laptop, which is impossible to sell for reasonable money, and it is a pity to throw away. I have an Acer Aspire One with AMD C50 processor and a gigabyte of RAM. The notebook is so slow that even a rather “light” Linux with XFCE can hardly run on it. After a long and painful search for an operating system capable of running on this machine without lags, I heard about the CloudReady project, which, as its creators promised, “can breathe a second life into old hardware”. Well, let’s give it a try, – I decided. Today’s post is devoted to how these “trials” went.
Up to a certain point, the CloudReady operating system developed as an independent project, but in 2020, independence came to an end: Google Corporation absorbed the Neverware company that developed this platform. It was declared that for existing users nothing will change – the system will work as before.
The main idea behind CloudReady was to turn outdated and low-power x86-based laptops into Chromebooks, which themselves have a rather modest hardware configuration. The basis for development was a free modification of Google’s Chrome OS called Chromium OS, which in turn is based on GNU/Linux and distributed under the GPL license. Since the system is “cloud-based”, i.e. it uses mainly SAAS web applications and thus transfers part of the load from the computer itself to the Internet, it is assumed that it should work quite fast even on very old hardware. That’s exactly what I decided to test by putting CloudReady on my Acer Aspire One 522.
Still, the merger with Google did not go in Neverware’s favor. First, it turned out that in its latest versions CloudReady completely switched to 64-bit architecture (why would I need x64 on a necrobook with a gig of RAM and an ancient AMD processor?). Secondly, the hardware requirements have also increased quite a bit, and my ancient notebook is not among the supported notebook models.
General impressions
The user interface of CloudReady is very laconic: at the bottom of the screen there is a panel similar to the dock in macOS, where only the Chromium browser icon is placed by default. In its right part there is a system clock, a battery indicator and Wi-Fi signal level indicator; hovering the mouse over this area opens a menu. Network, sound, Bluetooth and screen brightness controls are concentrated in it – the button to turn off the computer is also located here.
The button in the left part of the panel gives access to the search bar – if you enter a query here, the system will search local files, and if it doesn’t find anything, the Chromium window will open with the results of Google search on this query.
If you scroll the screen a little lower, you will see the list of available applications – Camera, Browser, Files file manager, ScreenCapture, Google Web Store and Settings window.
The range of possible settings is also quite modest. You can change the Desktop wallpaper, change the network connection settings, Bluetooth, change the current account or customize the interface design. In general, the Settings section is very similar to the settings window of the Google Chrome browser – both in appearance and in its essence.
Surprisingly, CloudReady really worked quite fast on my laptop, while all the alternatives tried earlier were slowing down a lot. The slowdowns were especially noticeable when trying to open some “heavy” site in the browser. Here Chromium works very fast, and surfing the Internet does not cause any negative emotions.
The only problem is that except for this Chromium in CloudReady, by and large, there is nothing in CloudReady – the entire operating system is built around the browser.
You can only use web applications, most of which are taken from the Google ecosystem – they are available in the Web Store. These include, of course, Google Docs, Gmail, Google Drive, Zoom, the online version of Microsoft Office, and the web versions of popular messengers like Telegram and WhatsApp, as well as some other programs. The listed set is quite enough for most tasks – but all this works exactly as long as you are connected to the Internet. If you go somewhere in the middle of nowhere, where the network catches only at the top of the tallest birch tree, your newly-made “chromebook” will immediately turn into a pumpkin.
In offline mode, only the Files file manager works fully functional, with the help of which you can open for viewing some movie saved on disk. The range of available games is also limited to online toys: for some people this does not play a significant role, but for others it may become a problem, since it is impossible to install regular Linux games on the machine.
