A new tweak has made its way to the Canary iteration of ChromeOS: the ability to switch to the Material You design for the operating system. If officially released, this design would add a nice layer of consistency to the Google ecosystem, especially since it’s sublime.
If ChromeOS is an operating system that improves over time, there is still a lot of work for Google to make it a versatile and above all attractive OS. A challenge to overcome that advances, since Material You could well make its next arrival on ChromeOS. Journalist Arif Bacchus from XDA Developers was able to activate the design and test it.
Material You on ChromeOS: what it changes
Google’s desktop interface looks even more like the Pixel Experience than before. The most visible change is in the quick settings, at the bottom right of the screen. The volume and brightness sliders have thickened to be easier to use, which is reminiscent of the changes made with the arrival of Windows 11 on PCs. The quick settings go from a round bubble to real pill-shaped tiles as you can have on smartphones running Android 12. What to add more information (name of the Wi-Fi network, device connected in Bluetooth, etc. ).
Another welcome modification: the automatic synchronization of the colors of the interface with those of the wallpaper, as Windows does, but also Monet, the function arrived with Android 12 which tends to be democratized on smartphones. For the moment, it does not work completely. The quick settings sliders change color, for example, whether in light or dark mode.
Also, notifications are now entirely separate from quick settings, again like they are on Windows 11. That’s pretty good, since Android apps installed on ChromeOS tend to send out a lot of notifications.
How to activate this new design (in beta) on ChromeOS?
For the moment, Google has not confirmed the arrival of this design on its operating system, but the rumors have nevertheless multiplied. Arif Bacchus was able to access this modern design via the ChromeOS Canary channel: this is the beta program of the OS that can be used on a Chromebook. If Google is working well on Material You, that doesn’t mean it will ever officially come out.
For the moment, you can test Material You by going to the address: chrome://flags in the Chrome browser. Then you have to look for the flag qs-revamp and activate it. A restart will probably be necessary to finalize the activation of the new design.
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