u/plankunits

Hey everyone,

I finally made the jump to ChromeOS’s next-gen Linux environment, Baguette.

To do this, I completely deleted Linux from my settings and turned it back on. The newly created VM now comes default with a pure, container-less VM architecture running Debian 13 (Trixie) right out of the box. An update from Bookworm is currently in the works for the future.

The biggest change you will notice immediately is how much RAM is freed up:

No LXD Container: The old Crostini setup wasted roughly 800 MB to 1.1 GB of RAM just idling because of heavy background container daemons. Baguette sits at just 200 MB to 300 MB at idle. That instantly hands over 700 MB+ of RAM back to your Chrome browser tabs. If you are running an 8 GB Chromebook definitely consider the change.
Smart Resource Balancing: It uses modern cgroups v2 and dynamic memory ballooning. It shares RAM gracefully with Chrome OS and throttles background tasks before your system panics or crashes from an Out-of-Memory error.
Direct KVM Access: Since the middleman container layer is gone, you can run nested virtualization smoothly. Running Docker, Podman, and Kubernetes clusters works natively without permission hacks.
Zero-Lag GPU Sharing: UI artifacting, graphical flickering, and window glitches are completely gone. Flatpaks and modern GUI apps render flawlessly.
Faster Disk I/O: It uses a single, direct virtual disk mapping. Package installations (npm install, apt, etc.) and code compiling are significantly faster.
Better System Sleep: Closing the laptop lid no longer causes the Linux network routing to freeze or crash.

The Bad:

No UI App Installers: You can no longer double-click a .deb file in the ChromeOS Files app to install software. You have to use the terminal now (though this feature was being phased out regardless of the container-less change).
No Multi-Containers: The #crostini-multi-container flag is completely deprecated.

more info: https://developers.google.com/chromeos/app-development/develop/news

Having used ChromeOS for three years, I love its strengths despite its notable flaws. The lack of a genuine desktop environment, coupled with a heavy reliance on Virtual Machines for Android and Linux, leads to performance bottlenecks and high resource usage. While Android 14 apps historically lacked desktop optimization, the transition to native Android 17 on Googlebook is a promising development in the right direction. By eliminating the VM requirement, this resolves integration issues—such as Matter support and cross-device services—while introducing a broader feature set than what ChromeOS currently offers.

To compete with macOS and Windows, Google must address Android desktop OS limitations. While macOS and windows allow unrestricted tool installation with full system access, Android's core architecture is restrictive. The core issue is that Android apps are containerized, preventing them from integrating with external applications or system processes. Google doesn't have a general application problem; it has a desktop application problem. Although Android 17 has made strides by making apps more desktop-friendly, achieving true system-level integration is still an issue. For example, Googlebook would be unable to do essential professional tasks like managing disk partitions, running npm or gradle, performing system imaging and backups, or installing database servers etc. This will be one of the significant limitations Googlebook faces.

While you might say that Google might bring Linux to the Android desktop to enable these functions, this approach doesn't provide a competitive edge, as these features are already standard on both macOS and Windows.

Termux serves as a good solution for what Google might achieve with Googlebook. However, I don't think Google will permit native Linux application support on Android; instead, they will likely use the Linux-on-VM strategy in the name of security, which inherently limits the execution of various desktop-class tools due to ongoing restrictive architecture. That's what Google needs to solve with the new OS to make it a true desktop OS

I switched to Baguette (ChromeOS Containerless Linux)

Google(or Googlebook) has desktopOS problem