For about as long as Chrome OS has existed, gaming has been one of its most notable Achilles' heels. Most Chromebooks have lower-power hardware, and the OS is built on web technology, so playing AAA titles found on Windows has simply not been an option. The rise of cloud-based gaming services like Google's own Stadia have helped the situation, but perhaps the biggest advance in Chromebook gaming came in late March, when Google announced that Valve's Steam platform was in an early alpha phase on Chrome OS. Just as you can on Windows, Mac and Linux, this lets you download and install games from the vast Steam catalog. As a Chromebook fan who also loves a good game, I had to give this a shot.

So Google provided me with one of the seven Chromebooks that can run Steam, an ASUS Chromebook CX9 with Intel's 11th-generation Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage space. These are hefty specs for a Chromebook, but Google specified that Steam required a device with at least a Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM. While Steam may eventually work with lower-powered devices, it's clear that many Chromebooks simply won't be able to cut it. But if you do have the right hardware, the Steam experience is pretty good, so long as you keep your expectations in check.

I didn’t have any problems getting Steam installed, but it’s a lot more complicated than setting it up on a Windows computer. You'll need to switch your Chromebook to the Dev channel, so don't do this on a machine you rely on for daily use. After that, you'll need to enable a specific flag in Chrome and type a few commands into the Chrome OS Crosh terminal. Once that's done, Steam will download to your machine, at which point you can login and start downloading games.

Right off the bat, any game that is supported in Steam for Linux can be installed without any compatibility issues. As I'm a massive Half-Life fan, the first two games I tried out were Valve's own Half-Life 2 and Portal 2 — two old games that don't require powerful hardware. Both, unsurprisingly, played like a charm. There were rare frame rate drops, but the experience felt identical to playing them on Windows or on a Mac.

At the complete opposite end of the spectrum, I decided to get crazy and install 2018's God of War, originally released for the PS4 and ported to Windows in January of this year. It was a totally unplayable slideshow. That's no surprise, though, as God of War calls for either NVIDIA's GTX 960 or AMD's R9 290X graphics cards with 4GB of memory. The Chromebook's integrated Intel Iris X graphics aren't in the same league. This is no real knock on the Chromebook, though, because a Windows machine with the same specs wouldn't be able to run God of War, either. I was mostly surprised that I was able to install it at all.

To install games like God of War, or any other titles that don’t have a native Linux version, you’ll need to turn on the experimental Steam Play compatibility tools. Once I did that, though, I could install just about any game I came across. Obviously, demanding games like God of War aren't going to work, but there are still tons of titles in the Steam library that are worth checking out. Both Hades and Cuphead ran flawlessly, and Fallout 4 worked pretty well too. It wasn’t as smooth as the other games I tried, but the first few hours were definitely playable.

The main catch is that the first time you run games using compatibility tools, they’re extremely slow to load. Steam has to "process Vulkan shaders" for a lot of titles, and this can take five to ten minutes or more on some games (like Fallout 4). Fortunately, this only happens the first time you launch a particular title.

Most of the games I tried were from Google's own list of recommended titles that had been tested on Chrome OS, and those experiences were almost all solid. The one game my Chromebook couldn't quite keep up with was The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Google recommended playing that one with graphics on low, and said that only Chromebooks with an i7 processor would work. Even then, frame rates and control responsiveness was poor enough that I didn't want to play after a few minutes.

While Google and Valve will certainly improve the Steam experience from this early alpha, it's fair to say that Chrome OS will never be the place to play cutting-edge games. Chromebooks just aren't built with that kind of hardware.

But, Steam's library is vast, and there are thousands of titles across any genre that you can think of. Bringing that catalog to Chrome OS is a huge step forward for those who love games but don't necessarily need to play Cyberpunk 2077 with settings on high. Whether it's for replaying older classics like Portal 2 or trying newer releases like Hades, Steam for Chrome OS vastly expands the gaming you can do on a Chromebook. And if you really want to play The Witcher 3 or God of War, a streaming service like NVIDIA's GeForce Now can plug the gap. So far, the alpha build of Steam for Chrome OS is promising, and I hope that Google and Valve can make it work on more Chromebooks before long.

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MindFuel is pleased to announce it has received a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Promo Science grant in the amount of $600,000 over three years. The NSERC funding helps MindFuel support and engage Canadian youth in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) innovation.

Indonesia will reimpose a domestic sales requirement on palm oil, the government said on Friday, a day after the world's biggest producer of the key edible oil reversed a ban on its export. President Joko Widodo's government has made several reversals on palm oil policy since November. The late-April export ban, an attempt to control high domestic cooking oil prices, shocked global edible oil markets and angered farmers as their product prices fell.

Concerned that JPMorgan Chase & Co might be starting to lose its profit advantage over competitors, analysts and investors are lining up questions for long-time CEO Jamie Dimon and other executives appearing at the bank's first investor conference in two years on Monday. The meeting was scheduled after JPMorgan stunned investors in January by revealing that 2022 costs would increase by $6 billion, or 8%, without forecasting fully offsetting revenue gains or persuasive arguments that new business investments will eventually pay off. In April the bank again surprised investors by how much excess capital had been lost in the first quarter to unrealized losses on its bond portfolio and market risk even as it anticipated higher capital requirements from regulators.

Canada on Thursday said it plans to ban the use of China's Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and ZTE Corp 5G gear to protect national security, joining the rest of the so-called Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network. "We intend to exclude Huawei and ZTE from our 5G networks," Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne told reporters in Ottawa. Champagne added that companies will be required to remove their 5G gear by June, 2024, would not be reimbursed.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Twitter is stepping up its fight against misinformation with a new policy cracking down on posts that spread potentially dangerous false stories. The change is part of a broader effort to promote accurate information during times of conflict or crisis. Starting Thursday, the platform will no longer automatically recommend or emphasize posts that make misleading claims about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including material that mischaracterizes conditions in conflict zones

Lumiera Health Inc. (TSXV: NHP) (the "Company" or "Lumiera "), a company specializing in the development and commercialization of natural health products, is pleased to announce the results of its annual general and special meeting of shareholders (the "Meeting"), which was held May 19, 2022 by webcast. All of the nominees listed in the Company's management information circular dated April 14, 2022, were elected as directors.

TORONTO — Aretha Greatrix had to do a double take last month, when she got a text message and email thanking her for renewing her subscription to OutTV. The Edmonton filmmaker signed up for an annual subscription to the specialty streaming service years ago to watch "RuPaul's Drag Race," but swore she had cancelled it by the time the auto renew message arrived. She was mistaken. "I was thinking, 'you mean I've had it the whole time?'... and not only that but now I'm paying for another year," she

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Google search engine collects data on users who think they can be anonymous if they use a "private browsing" mode, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed on Thursday, filing an amended privacy lawsuit against the Alphabet Inc unit. Texas, Indiana, Washington State and the District of Columbia filed separate suits against Google in January in state courts over what they called deceptive location-tracking practices that invade users' privacy. Paxton's filing adds Google's Incognito mode to the lawsuit filed in January.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Alabama coach Nick Saban called out Texas A&M on Wednesday night for “buying” players in its top-ranked recruiting class with name, image and likeness deals, saying Crimson Tide football players earned more than $3 million last year “the right way.” “I know the consequence is going to be difficult for the people who are spending tons of money to get players,” Saban said while speaking at an event in Birmingham, Alabama, to promote the World Games being held there in July.

The stock market's brutal year neared a grim milestone as the S&P 500's slide on Friday threatened to leave it in a bear market for the first time since March 2020, fueled by worries over sky high inflation, a hawkish Federal Reserve and future economic growth. The benchmark S&P 500 index fell below 3837.248 during Friday's session, a decline that on an intraday basis put it more than 20% below its Jan. 3 record closing high. If history is any guide, a bear market would mean more pain could be in store for investors.

El Salvador's big bet on bitcoin, which the Central American nation has been buying since September, has soured in recent weeks as a cryptocurrency rout shaved over a third of the value of the government's holdings, Reuters calculations show. Under populist President Nayib Bukele, a vocal cheerleader for the currency, El Salvador went all-in on bitcoin, not just becoming the world's first country to adopt it as a legal tender but also sketching out plans for a volcano-powered crypto mining hub and plans to issue the first sovereign bond linked to the coin. With global borrowing costs on the rise and a big debt repayment on the horizon, El Salvador has other fiscal headaches than the impact of the currency's swoon.

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