Steam on a Chromebook works better than I expected

engadget.com:

For about as long as Chrome OS has existed, gaming has been one of its most notable Achilles' heels. Most Chromebooks have lower-power hardware, and the OS is built on web technology, so playing AAA titles found on Windows has simply not been an option. The rise of cloud-based gaming services like Google's own Stadia have helped the situation, but perhaps the biggest advance in Chromebook gaming came in late March, when Google announced that Valve's Steam platform was in an early alpha phase on Chrome OS. Just as you can on Windows, Mac and Linux, this lets you download and install games from the vast Steam catalog. As a Chromebook fan who also loves a good game, I had to give this a shot.

So Google provided me with one of the seven Chromebooks that can run Steam, an ASUS Chromebook CX9 with Intel's 11th-generation Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage space. These are hefty specs for a Chromebook, but Google specified that Steam required a device with at least a Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM. While Steam may eventually work with lower-powered devices, it's clear that many Chromebooks simply won't be able to cut it. But if you do have the right hardware, the Steam experience is pretty good, so long as you keep your expectations in check.

I didn’t have any problems getting Steam installed, but it’s a lot more complicated than setting it up on a Windows computer. You'll need to switch your Chromebook to the Dev channel, so don't do this on a machine you rely on for daily use. After that, you'll need to enable a specific flag in Chrome and type a few commands into the Chrome OS Crosh terminal. Once that's done, Steam will download to your machine, at which point you can login and start downloading games.

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