Chrome OS 91 was causing problems for some Chromebook users and now the update has been pulled – that was version 91.0.4472.147. But not, reportedly, before causing changes behind the scenes that are now causing even more issues for end-users.
What does this mean for end-users?
Specifically, it is now being reported that the rollback didn’t go smoothly across all features. Now, the Linux installer, which checks that the latest version is installed before running, won’t run for some users. More directly, now that Google has pushed the ‘latest’ version back to 91.0.4472.114, Linux can’t be used. The feature, when checking the version number, is waiting on version 91.0.4472.147 to arrive to start working.
For users on the Chromebook platform, the problem effectively ends Linux app support until Google gets around to fixing things. And, for users that have managed to scrape through with Linux intact, the issue means that they probably shouldn’t powerwash or reset their Chrome OS gadgets. So, if those users do encounter other problems but absolutely need Linux, they’re effectively stuck.
Why was this Chromebook update pulled?
The reason Google pulled the original Chrome OS 91 update, to begin with, compounds the severity of the latest issue for the Chromebook platform. Namely, that’s because the Chrome OS 91.0.4472.147 changes were impacting performance. As noted in earlier reports, Chromebooks on built on a number of boards were noticing an uptick in unusual, unwanted CPU usage.
That usage was, in turn causing lag and freezing for end-users. And that’s hardly surprising since as much as 100-percent of the CPU was in use in some cases. That left effectively no resources for anything else.
There wasn’t any other apparent fix for that earlier issue either. Powerwashing, disabling extensions, and taking other steps which would typically fix the problem proved useless, forcing users to wait on Google to fix things. And that’s a wait that will unfortunately continue since Google’s fix has caused a secondary issue for Linux app users.