14 DAY TRIAL // Google working on bringing dual-boot support to Chromebooks is a project that first made the rounds back in 2018 when the company was said to be exploring other operating systems like Linux and Windows for its own devices.
As the development work advanced, more details reached the web, so we eventually found out that Google was trying to bring Windows 10 to Chromebooks as part of an effort called Project Campfire.
While this was an ambitious idea that would have turned Chromebooks into devices fully focused on productivity, something particularly important for the education market where Google is investing aggressively, it looks like the plan has since been abandoned.
Reddit use crosfrog discovered comments and code removals indicating that Project Campfire is dead for good, as Google has apparently given up on the idea of bringing Windows 10 to Chromebooks.
AboutChromebooks writes that the project has likely been abandoned in late 2018, as no progress has been made on Project Campfire since then.
The storage footprint
As for the reasons Google no longer wants to bring Windows 10 to Chromebooks, it’s believed they are more or less related to the storage footprint Microsoft’s operating system has on a device.
Windows 10 would require at least 40GB of storage on any Chromebook to run smoothly, and this makes it impossible for Google to bring the operating system to the majority of devices currently running Chrome OS. Given they run a web-based platform, Chromebooks typically come with very low storage, like 32GB or even 16GB for the cheapest models.
Needless to say, we shouldn’t expect Google to confirm that Project Campfire is dead, mostly because this was a secret project anyway, so the company never acknowledged its existence. But even if the Windows 10 dream is dead, Google is very likely to look into other ways of improving Chrome OS and make it a better rival to Windows 10.