# Installing OBS on New Chromebook



## dubya (Jun 13, 2022)

Hello all,

I have been using obs and learning to use but had some limitations on an older laptop. I recently purchased a HP Chromebook x360 with the hopes of installing OBS. 
Is there a way to install this on Chromebook?

Thanks in advance.


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## dubya (Jun 14, 2022)

Does anyone have recommendations on this or is it useless?


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## Harold (Jun 14, 2022)

The use of OBS on chromebooks is not supported. The hardware is too lacking and the operating system is too locked down.


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## dubya (Jun 14, 2022)

Thanks for the response.


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## Llaallaa7712 (Oct 16, 2022)

SO, i know this is a long dead thread, but i wanted to prove to myself that this works. so i did. im not sure why you thought it wouldnt be capable. an x360 at minimum should be rocking a 9th to 10th gen i3 which is just fine to fiddle with and screen record on obs lol. SO for the how. go to your settings. enable the linux development environment. install obs through command line after updating your distro of course. stg it works. good luck if you have any questions please lemme know. heres an easy link to follow. not the exact steps i used but itll work either way. good luck! https://www.myshorttips.com/2022/07/how-to-run-obs-studio-for-streaming.html (obligatory disclaimer, not my article lol


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## Llaallaa7712 (Oct 16, 2022)

ALSO, wanted to clarify. if you are using an older piece of hardware or a more "bottom shelf" variety of chromebook with an atom processor or the like. GF it just wont work. sorry and ggs. P.S.: im not a forum guy so forgive my awful formulation of thought. hope its legible LOL


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## dodgepong (Oct 20, 2022)

If your solution to "Run OBS on a Chromebook" is "install Linux on your Chromebook" then you're running OBS on a Chromebook, but you're not running OBS on ChromeOS.

The bigger blocker to getting OBS running on regular ChromeOS is more due to how locked-down ChromeOS is as an operating system (e.g. it currently has no capabilities that allow users to capture their screen). As long as that remains the case, we have no interest in supporting the platform.


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## 0x808080 (Dec 15, 2022)

Lots of ChromeOS misinformation in this thread.  Llaallaa7712 is correct in every thing they said - props to them for getting it to work!

ChromeOS itself is a linux based distribution with a Desktop Manager that features primarily a Browser experience.  On higher end devices a linux VM capability called Crostini is the layer Llaallaa7712 mentioned that you can turn on to enable a linux environment that is capable of running terminal and GUI programs.  This is a "first class citizen" of ChromeOS and not some kind of hack or workaround.  So they were, in fact, running OBS on ChromeOS.  

Games, productivity applications, and programming workloads (to name a few use cases) work just fine through this layer and it is highly configurable and extensible.

In the future we may see more "gaming" ChromeOS devices as a lot of investments are currently being made in this area and there is already a beta version you can try today of "Steam on ChromeOS" available on some higher end devices.  I would not be surprised if this question gets asked again in the future.

Interestingly people often misattribute a lack of functionality to ChromeOS devices due to their original design.  Although the full suite of capabilities is usually limited only to high end devices if you take the HP Elite Dragonfly Chromebook as an example as an "Enterprise device it can run:
* web pages in the native Chrome Browser
* android apps with first class support and google play services support out of the box
* linux cli and gui applications
* windows via parallels 

This is quite the feature set and I am not aware of any other kind of device that can do all of these things out of the box and without any significant configuration.

Finally, ChromeOS has a screenshot and screen recording capability available out of the box and has for some time.


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