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

Credit: Richard Priday / Android Authority

TL;DR Googlebook laptops reportedly don’t have the same user-friendly approach to installing and running Linux apps as Chromebooks.

You must install Linux apps on Googlebook through Android’s Terminal, and the apps don’t even show in the app drawer.

Google has acknowledged the drawback and says GUI Linux apps are not the main focus currently.

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 …