[6] Chromium's architecture is three-tiered, consisting of "three major components": ChromiumOS was first made available in compiled form by hobbyists.

The most popular version, entitled "ChromiumOS Flow", was created by Liam McLoughlin, a then 17-year-old college student in Liverpool, England, posting under the name "Hexxeh".

McLoughlin's build boots from a USB memory stick and included features that Google engineers had not yet implemented, such as support for the Java programming language.

He announced "ChromiumOS Lime" in December 2010,[9] and in January 2011, released "Luigi", an application designed to "jailbreak"/"root" the Google Cr-48 "Mario" prototype hardware and install a generic BIOS.

[15] In 2015, New York City-based Neverware produced a ChromiumOS fork called CloudReady aimed at the educational market, with the intention of extending the life of older PCs and laptops.

[27][28] In late 2015, a team headed by Dylan Callahan released a beta ChromiumOS port to the Raspberry Pi 2 single-board computer.

[30] In June 2011, ISYS Technologies, based in Salt Lake City, sued Google in a Utah district court, claiming rights to the name "Chromium" and, by default, Chromebook and Chromebox.