Since its debut more than four years ago, (yeah, it has been four years) Linux on ChromeOS has made some significant improvements and added some major value to the Chrome operating system as a whole. While not a full-blown Linux desktop environment, the Crostini container gives users access to powerful Linux packages that can’t be installed on ChromeOS. Linux on ChromeOS now has direct access to the GPU and USB devices and you can share folders and external drives directly with the Linux environment.
If you know your way around the Linux terminal and you have a capable device, there’s very little that cannot be accomplished on a Chromebook. The one, glaring omission from the ChromeOS Linux container remains to be a point of confusion for myself and many other Chromebook users. Despite having access to USB devices and external storage, Linux on ChromeOS has yet to support the use of a camera. I’m not referring to an external webcam. I mean cameras, period. If you install a simple webcam package such as Cheese, it simply cannot see your device’s webcam.
Four years ago, this was a serious shortcoming for those that used chat apps like Skype or Signal. As a matter of fact, the first person to submit a bug report about adding camera support to Crostini was, in fact, trying to use Skype for Linux. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be done back then and it is still a limitation. While Skype has landed a web version, there are still plenty of Linux applications and users for that matter that could benefit from having camera access. In November of 2018, Google’s developers acknowledged that missing feature but also pointed out that it wasn’t currently on their roadmap.
we’re working on audio support already (issue 781398). camera support isn’t on the roadmap atm though, and prob will be a few releases before we look into it. Camera will probably be more work as i don’t think we have any way of virtualizing or muxing streams (like we can with audio).
CRBug tracker
Fast forward to 2022 and this bug report/feature request is still open and has been triaged on more than one occasion. Now, that’s not to say that ChromeOS is definitely getting camera access in Linux but the fact that the bug report hasn’t been closed is promising. Over the weekend, the issue was reassigned to a new owner and it appears that the feature request is being handled in Google’s private bug tracker which means that we can see the progress.
That said, I have a very strong feeling that ChromeOS developers are giving this feature some attention. It’s still listed as a priority 3 which is the lowest priority given to an issue in the bug tracker but it’s been four years and the issue is still open. Given the fact that you can now play Steam games on ChromeOS, tools such as OBS are a necessity for streamers, and camera access needs to be a thing. We’ll keep an eye on this one and let you know when anything changes. You can follow the issue on the bug tracker here and star it to be alerted when there are any updates.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.