Unity3D is running natively on my Chromebook and I couldn’t be happier!
After months, years even, of dreaming of developing Android (and other platforms) games and software on Google hardware natively, it’s finally here. For the uninitiated, this is a huge deal in the tech community, even if it is a bit of a sleeper story compared to how that came to be. You see, Google recently updated all compatible hardware with some major under the hood updates, including the ability to run Linux natively, in its own neat little sandbox, where it can frolic and play and be Linux and do Linux things.
For years, Chromebook owners and Google acolytes the world over have seen the one thing Mac users can do that we couldn’t manage to fandangle together, however roughly: native development. Our software ecosystem might not be the most feature-rich collection of software (a gross understatement), but we had the ability to handle quite a bit of heavy lifting before getting the fine work performed on better software ecosystems like Windows or Mac or Linux. But the reaffirmation from Google that Android and all related OSes they developed were Linux forks, once upon a time, and ran the Linux kernel under the hood, was something we direly needed. And despite thousands of seemingly empty promises from hundreds of manufacturers and Kickstarter-propped wannabe entrepreneurs in the past, they’ve actually delivered.
