For reasons not known at this point, there is reason to believe that work on the long-dead attempt to bring Windows dual-boot to Chrome OS has been revived. Detected by Chrome Story, work is clearly being done on Project Campfire (Google’s internal naming for the dual boot setup that was never released to the public) on the ‘Eve’ baseboard – AKA the original Pixelbook.
Below I will list the seven commits that have appeared since yesterday and you can decide for yourself what they mean. From the looks of it all, it’s clearly working to add some hardware elements to the Windows-on-Chromebooks mix, but that is not really what is interesting. Instead, it is more thought provoking to ask the question why this is done at all. After closing the entire project in June of 2019, why is a new, fresh attempt underway to do something with Project Campfire?
Recent promises for Project Campfire
That part is initially unclear. All of these promises are made by one individual, so maybe the whole thing is just a pet project or something that needs to be sorted out for the upcoming arrival of Windows apps on Chromebooks via Parallels. However, it does not feel that the second theory contains a lot of water, because the Parallels container is really responsible for software / hardware integration between the two separate operating systems. In much the same way, Android and Linux run on Chromebooks with no need for anything like that, so I’m not sure anything of a true dual boot setup Google would do here would help in any way.
So why then? Why are we seeing Project Campfire get attention? For now, we can not say. However, we will keep a close eye on it. I personally think that the container method for delivering Windows apps on a necessary basis through the Parallels container is 100% the right way to go for G Suite users who just need a few Windows apps to make the transition to complete Chrome OS. If you have to go through a shutdown and restart every time you need one Windows application, that sounds honestly clunky and scary and not something that Google would be too excited to deliver. We will let you know as we learn more.
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