Google's new desktop 'Aluminium OS' operating system has reportedly leaked

Google's new desktop operating system has been leaked ahead of its official debut, with 9to5Google spotting recordings of Aluminum OS running on an HP Elite Dragonfly 13.5 Chromebook. The screen recordings were found on a bug report on the Chromium Issue Tracker, with the operating system reportedly running on x86 architecture.

Aluminum OS, like other operating systems, features a centralized taskbar at the bottom of the screen. In the recording above, you can see icons for various Google apps, including Chrome, Gmail, YouTube, and Gemini AI. There's also a status bar at the top right of the screen, with a layout similar to that on mobile and tablet devices, showing notification icons, Wi-Fi signal strength, battery level, and the time.

Running smoothly on x86 architecture, presumably, Google's Gemini AI features and open-source models will run locally on processors with NPUs. Aluminum OS is effectively an extension of ChromeOS and Android 16's desktop mode for PC, with this leak showing the UI and some split-screen multitasking. Check out the second video below.

One interesting feature we see is Chrome updating via the Play Store, which doesn't close the browser (as it does on ChromeOS) but instead displays an 'updating' screen. Although we don't have any word on a potential release date or Window, this leak confirms that Google is testing its new operating system on existing Chromebook hardware, which means performance should scale across a wide range of hardware.

That said, at the Snapdragon Summit 2025, Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano R. Amon and Google Senior Vice President of Devices & Services Rick Osterloh announced that both companies were developing a new line of Android PCs for the AI era. Assuming these new devices run Aluminum OS, we might see the first batch of products hit the market later this year.