Google Chrome OS reveal party
It’s been a while since Google first announced its foray into the desktop OS market, but today is the launch party, and the open source project is free to download. If the above video, in all its treacly glory, isn’t enough of an indication, Chrome OS may already be obsolete.
The new OS is a lightweight Linux based operating system targeting low end computer systems such as netbooks running both X86 desktop and ARM based mobile CPUs. It’s designed from the ground up to run inside the Chrome browser, right down to the hardware level. In fact, the official version doesn’t even support hard drives, requiring SSDs (solid state drives), and being browser based, Google admits it’s for doing ‘web stuff’. If you want it to do anything else, run a ‘real OS’.
That’s why I don’t think I can really care too much about Chrome OS. When netbooks first appeared on the market, having a lightweight web-centric OS might have made some sense. Windows XP was the default OS, and although it worked well enough, it was showing its age. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen better hardware specs, and now many inexpensive machines in the netbook (and ‘thin and light’) categories ship with Windows 7. This combined with (in some cases) battery life meeting or even surpassing the 10 hour mark makes having a very portable, easy to use, on all day computer a reality for an increasing number of people.
I’ve tried ‘light’ OSes on my own netbooks, and even though my favourite ‘webby’ OS Moblin is interesting, I found too many instances where I wanted to do something that wasn’t cloud based, requiring me to switch over. This happened frequently enough that I realized that running a second, limited OS was actually more limiting than just running a real operating system and being done with it. All the cloudy stuff is easily accessible from Windows (as it is from OS X), so why was I wasting my time with dual booting, when I can just close the lid and going into sleep mode?
This reveal party isn’t a release party, beyond the open source code, which MIGHT yield some interesting results. Don’t get me wrong. Once a build is available, I’ll definitely give it a whirl. However, even though Chrome OS isn’t even in beta yet, I feel like it’s the coolest thing from 2008.
[…] Google Chrome OS reveal party http://www.rgbfilter.com/?p=2411 – view page – cached It’s been a while since Google first announced its foray into the desktop OS market, but today is the launch party, and the open source project is free to download. If the above video, in all its… Read moreIt’s been a while since Google first announced its foray into the desktop OS market, but today is the launch party, and the open source project is free to download. If the above video, in all its treacly glory, isn’t enough of an indication, Chrome OS may already be obsolete. Read less […]