It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking a Chromebook is “simple” and is only suitable for kids at school, not serious work. Yet, ChromeOS has grown into a rather mature operating system, and there are plenty of features that can supercharge your productivity or expand your options hidden under the surface of that user-friendly interface.
Virtual desks (multiple workspaces)
One of the most important features I use on my MacBook is the ability to quickly switch between different virtual desktops. Something you can do by just holding down control and tapping the left or right arrow keys. So imagine my delight when I found that ChromeOS has exactly the same feature, and it works pretty much the same too.
You can create up to eight virtual desktops. To create a new “Desk” as it’s known in Chrome OS’ world, simply press the shortcut button on the top row of the keyboard that looks like [ ]]]]. It’s usually to the left of the screen capture key. This will bring up this Desk overview.
You can use your mouse pointer to add more desks with the “+” button, change the order of the desks by dragging them left or right. You can also delete desks by clicking the “X” that appears when you hover over one.
While working, to switch between these desks, hold the Launcher button and tap “[” or “]”. These are the left or right bracket keys. Now you can rapidly change between different desks and app sets, which drastically improves productivity on a single-screen device. I love it!
Advanced clipboard history
My job would be pretty much impossible without the ability to copy and paste stuff—it’s one of the greatest features ever invented on computers by far! But, why stop at the simplest form of copying and pasting? With Chrome OS, you get something called an “Advanced” clipboard, and it could change the way you use your computer completely.
How it works (and you don’t have to do anything special to activate this) is that you simply copy things as normal. Items like text or images that you would usually paste somewhere simply get added to the clipboard as you go.
Then when you’re ready to paste something, press Launcher + v and the advanced clipboard appears.
All you have to do is click on the item you want to paste from the list, and it will appear wherever your cursor currently is. You can also delete items from your clipboard history by clicking the “X” that appears when you hover over an item. This has saved me so much time that I don’t know how I lived without it. I use a Mac as my daily driver, and macOS only got this feature very recently with macOS 26 Tahoe!
Emoji / GIF picker built-in
I don’t know about you, but I use tons of GIFs and emojis when I’m using my phone, where you can easily access them from a mobile screen keyboard, but what about on a Chromebook? It turns out the smart folks at Google thought of this, and you can access a built-in emoji and GIF picker by simply pressing Launcher + Shift + Space. Assuming you’re in some sort of app where you can paste text or image, you should see this pop up.
All you have to do is search for and click on the emoji or GIF you want, and it will be pasted instantly.
If it’s not already obvious, you do need an active internet connection to search for and paste GIFs.
Running Linux apps
Chrome OS is based on Linux, though at some point in the future Google plans to merge it with Android, which is also based on Linux. Yes, when you look under the facade of most things in the world of computers, it’s apparently Linux all the way down!
However, that doesn’t mean you can just run Linux apps natively on ChromeOS without any special effort. Luckily, today’s ChromeOS allows you the option of activating this ability. After that, you can run pretty much any Linux app you want. All you have to do is follow our guide on how to install Linux apps on a Chromebook, and you’ll be up and running in no time.
That said, there are some limitations here. Since these apps run on a virtual machine, they are isolated from each other and from your Chrome OS and Android apps. Second, some features, like GPU hardware acceleration, don’t work out of the box and need some extra digging under the hood. Even if you manage to activate it, the results may also not be reliable or performant. However, this is still a great feature and allows you to run desktop versions of some apps instead of the web version, because there is no offline app for Chrome OS, but one exists for Linux.
- Operating System
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ChromeOS
- CPU
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Intel Core i3-N305
- GPU
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Integrated Intel UHD Graphics
- RAM
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8GB DDR5 RAM
- Storage
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128GB SSD
- Display (Size, Resolution)
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14-inch 1080p
