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Google may add Windows 10 dual-boot option to Chromebooks
Google appears to be working on dual-boot support for Chromebooks. XDA-Developers has discovered that Google has been working to support an "alt OS mode" for its Pixelbook laptop for months now. Dubbed "Campfire," an obvious nod to Apple's own Boot Camp feature, Google's dual-boot is rumored to support Windows 10 on Chromebooks.
XDA-Developers claims Google is attempting to pass Microsoft's hardware certification for Windows 10 to allow its Pixelbook to officially run the alternative operating system. References to Microsoft's Windows Hardware Certification Kit have appeared in development builds of Chrome OS, and Google's Campfire work might extend to other new Chromebooks in the future.
Dual-boot support is said to be arriving on the Pixelbook soon, as Google engineers are pushing through multiple changes for Chrome OS to support the new feature.
That makes Google's recent attack ad a little funnier.
Also at Engadget, The Register, 9to5Google, Tom's Hardware, and CNET.
See also: Why cheap Chromebooks running Windows will benefit Google, not you
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Google's Fuchsia OS Adds Emulator for Debian Linux Applications
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday August 14 2018, @12:30PM
Bingo!
I suspect its some kind of submarine marketing thing. For "most people almost all the time" windows is merely a slow and expensive boot loader for the web UIs they actually use.
So sure, the new feature is if you want, you can go windows OS dual boot and get 2 hours of battery life instead of 10 hours, and boot in five minutes instead of five seconds, and deal with endless security bug patches, all to boot win10 to click on "chrome" icon, or just hit the power switch on chromeOS and be online and working hassle free.
I have a chromebook and so does my wife; for her the only difference from a win10 box is its much better and she doesn't have to click on 'chrome' every time she boots. For me, once in awhile maybe 5% of the time I have to connect to an Apache Guacamole Project HTML5 to anything gateway and remotely do "something" using rdesktop to a virtual PC. My wife used to program PBXes using rdesktop from a mac at home into a windows desktop at her employer; worked pretty well indeed for many years.
If you want to see something weird, listen to endless calls of "I can't do embedded development on chromebook" then get a cheap raspi and plug a ESP8266 gadget into it, then SSH into the pi which connects to the virtual USB serial port on the ESP8266... If you don't WANT to run windows, its usually not really all that hard, but the internet is full of complaints. Getting rid of windows is pretty much like exercising; everyone who wants to, just does it, but the people who "kinda sorta" do a lot of rationalizing about impossibility.