Googlebooks have a Linux app problem that even budget Chromebooks solved years ago

Google may promote Googlebooks as the evolution of its Chromebooks, but the limitations of an Android-based interface are already peeking through. While Googlebooks easily runs Android apps, the early crop of laptop devices lacks proper support for Linux apps, a crucial feature ChromeOS has supported for years.

ChromeOS lets you enable a “Linux development environment” in Settings, which sets up a container for installing Debian packages and running them straight from the app drawer. However, while digging around in Googlebook OS, members of the Android Authority team discovered that they couldn’t replicate the same straightforward way of installing Linux apps as they could on a Chromebook. Furthermore, even though there are plenty of new support pages for Googlebooks talking about their new features, there’s limited information on how to install or run Linux apps.

Instead, you get access to Android’s Linux Terminal app, and the only way to install or access Linux apps is through a command-line interface (CLI). Apps installed through the Terminal don’t even appear in the app drawer and can only be launched through the CLI. That means you must either learn necessary commands by heart or spend time Googling (or asking an AI) about the steps to follow every time you want to access a proper desktop-grade app.

Google confirmed this limitation with installing and running Linux apps to 9to5Google. It noted that the Terminal app “lets you run a Debian Linux environment on your device,” but “for this initial release of Googlebook, GUI apps aren’t the main focus.”

While you can launch apps with Terminal, some early adopters also report hiccups with running these apps. For instance, one Reddit user says that GIMP, a popular open-source image editing tool, often stops accepting mouse input. This may be because the device uses an Intel Googlebook with an x86-64 CPU rather than ARM, leading to compatibility issues.

Along with Linux apps, Googlebooks are reportedly also struggling with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) — the backbone of apps on ChromeOS. Certain PWAs aren’t fully supported on Googlebook OS, possibly because they conflict with an existing Android app—even if the Android app has limitations or fewer features than the desktop or web version.

We’re keeping an eye on the development and will share an update when that changes.