Finally, the Lenovo Chromebook Duet 5 gets ChromeOS 119

As an ongoing update fiasco, there have been few in the Chromebook world that have been this difficult to solve for the ChromeOS team. I noticed some abnormalities back at the end of October, and things just continued to get worse for the Duet 5 until the team figured out what was actually going on. Even then, however, it wasn’t clear what could be done to fix the issue and how things would progress.

After a couple of weeks, the problem was identified and a couple weeks after that, a solution looked to be in the works. Again, these things don’t always move quickly, so we’ve had no way of knowing when or if the Duet 5 would finally get updated alongside all other Chromebooks, and my guess was we might see things level out at ChromeOS 120 early in January of 2024.

The fix is here and so is ChromeOS 119 for the Duet 5

But we were elated to hear from a reader this morning that ChromeOS 119 has officially been rolled out for the Duet 5. Finally! All of you who have the Duet 5 or bought one as a gift can breathe a collective sigh of relief that not only is the problem rectified, the update is actually out and available for download right now. Just go to your Settings > About ChromeOS > Check for updates and after clicking the button, ChromeOS 119 should begin the install process.

As you can see, yesterday afternoon saw the arrival of the full fix for the Duet 5. Recovery images for USB install weren’t initially available, but by this morning, those images are there as well. If you are stuck on the “Something went wrong” screen, you can follow these instructions to create a recovery image and apply it to your Duet 5. Just make sure to create a fresh recovery USB since the image is brand new.

For anyone that’s stuck at the bootloop or the “Something went wrong” screen, we have an option available for you. If you use the Chromebook Recovery Utility we’ve temporarily added the ability to download a recovery image for the “Beta” channel for “homestar” devices. In order to get this you need to go to the “Show Advanced Settings” in the tool and choose the “Beta” channel.

This will get you on the R120 “beta” channel (15662.35.0) and get you the new firmware containing the mitigation. This should get people booting again, though you’ll be on beta channel.

If you don’t want to be on beta channel then you’ll need to hang tight a little longer until the R119 recovery images are published. I’ll post again here when that happens.

via the Google Issue Tracker

I applaud the ChromeOS team for taking the time to get this right, but also moving quite quickly to solve a pretty hairy issue. Things like this are bound to come up with all the ChromeOS hardware out there now, and I hope you are as happy as I am with the way the ChromeOS team stepped up and took care of business.