He has been covering tech news and reviewing devices since joining Android Police as a news writer in 2019. Manuel Vonau is Android Police's Google Editor, with expertise in Android, Chrome, and other Google products - the very core of Android Police’s content. With Google working on bringing Steam to Chromebooks as part of a new virtual Linux machine, we might not even have to rely on Parallels at all for gaming, though. However, while Parallels works with some Windows titles on macOS, it appears that it isn’t built for gaming at all on Chrome OS, at least not at the moment, with its strict business focus: I couldn’t even get KOTOR to start in the first place after installing it. Given that KOTOR runs just fine as an Android app on my Chromebook, I was curious to see if it would run just as well in a virtual Windows environment. I went with one of my all-time favorites: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I just had to try and see if Parallels is strong enough to run a few less-taxing games. It’s similar to how Linux apps work on Chrome OS, so having the same level of native integration for Parallels would be great. On macOS, it’s a feature that allows you to use Windows programs as though they were part of macOS, without any of the rest of the Windows UI visible. What bugs me the most about Parallels is that it currently doesn’t support Coherence Mode on Chrome OS. You can share any directory you want with Windows (including Google Drive) by right-clicking it or you can simply drag and drop individual files onto the Parallels window. It’s much easier to go the other way around, though.

To work around this, you’ll have to copy and paste individual files across the two systems or move files from OneDrive over to Documents, Pictures, Downloads, Movies, Music, or Desktop - these are the only folders that sync from Windows to Chrome OS. At the moment, it’s not possible to choose custom folders to share from Windows with Chrome OS, meaning there’s no way to get the OneDrive folder from your Windows environment to show up under Chrome OS. Speaking of OneDrive, it’s great to finally have offline copies of my files available without tedious workarounds, but the solution still isn’t perfect. While I’m getting by with the online version for bookkeeping, using the full-fledged Microsoft Excel helps me take full advantage of all the little scripts and options I’ve built into my spreadsheet, like links to PDF receipts I’ve saved to my OneDrive storage.

The same goes for proper Microsoft Excel support.

Parallels desktop chromebook