Google shelves feature that would let Chromebooks dual-boot Windows 10

By Dan Thorp-Lancaster
published

Google has poured water on "Project Campfire," a feature that would have allowed Chromebooks to dual-boot Windows 10.

What you need to know

  • Google has deprecated "Project Campfire," according to comments and code removals in Chromium.
  • The feature, which was first spotted in development last year, would have allowed Chromebooks to dual-boot Windows 10.
  • Google was previously spotted working on getting Windows 10 certification for its flagship Pixelbook (opens in new tab).

Google appears to have ended work on "Project Campfire," a feature that would have allowed Chromebooks to dual-boot other operating systems, such as Windows 10 and Linux. As first reported by About Chromebooks (via 9to5Google), Google recently marked AltOS, as the feature was known, as deprecated in comments and code removals.

From what little was seen of Project Campfire in Google's prior code commits, it appeared the feature would have worked much like Apple's Boot Camp. Multiple operating systems could be installed on a Chromebook, with the device offering up the ability to boot into any one of them after installation. Prior to Campfire's outing, Google was even spotted attempting to receive Windows 10 certification for its flagship Pixelbook.

However, as About Chromebooks points out, most of the work on Campfire was done between September and December of 2018, and then things went quiet. Google has also never acknowledged the feature publicly, so it's not entirely surprising to see that it's being deprecated. It appears it was just an experiment.

At least for now, any hopes of running Windows 10 on Chromebook hardware have been dashed.

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It's on the expensive end of things for a Chromebook, but the Pixelbook represents Google's best foot forward when it comes to running Chrome OS on a laptop.

Cheap PC accessories we love

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Dan Thorp-Lancaster
Dan Thorp-Lancaster

Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the former Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central, Android Central, and iMore as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter @DthorpL and Instagram @heyitsdtl. 

11 Comments
  • bhauhauahuahuauahau bauhauahuahuah bahauhauahahua
  • Is this just something for the average consumer to have the option for both? Or is there something in the Chromebook firmware that prevents someone from setting up a dual boot option?
  • And squirrell. Scroogle never seems to have any sort of staying power on any of their projects. Of course they probably realized that putting Windows on the chrombooks is the only thing making them useful.
  • Considering most Chromebooks are underpowered Windows experience would have been awful.
  • My Pixelbook has an i5, 8G RAM, and 256G SSD. Seems pretty windows PCy to me. There are a lot of underpowered Chromebooks, but there are a lot of 'underpowered' Windows PCs as well that work adequately for many.
  • Honestly most normal chromebooks probably lack the adequate space to do it.
  • Not to mention the eMMC storage often used by Chromebooks. Windows would be slow to the point where it wouldn't be worth it. There are definitely high quality Chromebooks that could handle with ease but most don't have enough storage and/or the type of storage they use is way too slow for Windows.
  • @SvenJ I have to ask... how much did you pay for your Pixelbook?
  • It can take a bit of work, but you can run windows pretty well on a chromebook already. Check out the /r/chrultrabook subreddit. I didn’t want to take my surface overseas on my last trip so I bought a dell chrombook 11. It had a celeron and 4gb of ram. Space was a little cramped on my 16gb ssd, but adding in an sd card helped. It ran really well. Got me on the web and I had Office so I could do my homework.
  • Hardly suprising to be honest.
  • Not at all surprising. It seems to fall into the category of "never give a sucker an even break". This was completely predictable when Nadella gave up his best bargaining chip of having a mobile telephony option. Silly management decision.