Operating systems have to strike a balance between supporting older technologies, and avoiding unnecessary bloat from accumulated components over the decades. Which is why developers like Microsoft or Apple may eventually dump support for legacy hardware, since hardly anyone uses it.
The thing is, some peopledostill need legacy hardware, and ChromeOS still has excellent support for older display technology that I think every other OS should provide with the same level of ease.
ChromeOS Offers Some Interesting Legacy Display Adjustments
If you connect an external display to a Chromebook or Chromebox (whether a monitor or a TV) you’ll see special image adjustment controls that let you fine-tune exactly how that image is displayed when it comes to the position and stretch of the picture. So, if you connect to an external display and the image is cut off, or not centered properly, ChromeOS lets you quickly fix the issue.
Even better, you may use the arrow keys and the shift button to intuitively move or resize the picture, without even having to look away from the screen. It’s simple, but that’s what makes it such a good feature. There’s a lot of variability in the displays you might have to connect to at school, at work, or if you travel across the country, or world. Not all of them are going to play nice, or have built-in controls to fix the issue.
In my opinion, having this baked into the OS display front and center is a big win both for usability and broader compatibility.
These Features Still Matter for Analog Displays
When connecting to a digital display using HDMI, DisplayPort, or either of those connections over USB-C, you’re unlikely to ever need this feature. Even then, the display itself probably has a setting you can quickly tweak to ensure the image displays in the correct position and size.
However, with some analog connections to, for example, a projector using VGA, or to a television using a composite or S-Video adapter, there might be no obvious way to correct things if the display just doesn’t want to sit in the right spot, or is too big or small to fit.
Admittedly, not many people need to use these older displays, but this does seem like the sort of basic display control you want at the OS-level.
Third-Party Apps Can Still Do It (Sort Of)
Speaking of the OS-level, third-party display utilities that come with GPUs from (for example) NVIDIA,dohave display position and size. However, these didn’t help me at all when connecting my various laptops to a CRT TV, since the OS itself didn’t want to play ball with the aspect ratio and resolution, despite these being correct on paper.
So it’s not that I’m claiming there aren’t similar solutions for other operating systems, but I think having this baked into the display utility itself rather than relying on a third-party solution is better. Besides, neither of my Windows systems nor my Mac could get the picture right using some of my analogue displays, no matter what utility i used.
ChromeOS is based on Linux, and so I was wondering how I would correct overscan or underscan on an analogue display under Linux. I didn’t have a Linux system at hand as of this writing to test, but when I looked up how to do it my eyes immediately glazed over the obligatory terminal commands. That’s if you’re lucky, because apparently the modern Wayland desktop environment doesn’t even let you do that, leaving the past firmly behind.
ChromeOS Now Fills an Interesting Niche
I got a Chromebook for work purposes, since I’ve been tasked with writing about the world of ChromeOS. As someone who has every type of computer I could need already, I didn’t actually need one of these. However, now I’ve discovered a niche for this device that literally no other computer I own can fill.
Acer Chromebook Plus 516 (CB516-1H)
A Chromebook Plus with a 16-inch display, a keyboard with a numpad, and an Intel Core i3 processor.
Because I just so happened to start my journey into legacy media and displays, I’d run into all sorts of issues. The Chromebook was my last resort and I had no reason to think it would be any different to my Mac or Windows computers, but it was.
It’s a little ironic that Linux, macOS, and Windows, which have existed throughout the heydays of these (now) legacy displays, would have dropped easy compatibility with them or relegated the necessary features to third-party software. When ChromeOS has just the right thing for it, despite being created for a world where technically those screens are obsolete.
Personally, I think the other major players in the desktop OS space should take note, and maybe bake a similar feature into their respective display utilities, instead of adding yet another AI feature no one wants.
