Chrome OS Reaction
Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009
The range of computer operating systems has greatly expanded in the last decade. You can now find Linux—the same operating system that runs Ubuntu desktops and Google’s web servers—running on phones, routers, televisions, DVR’s…even gas station terminals. Likewise, a smaller, but mostly complete, version of Mac OS X is running not just on plain ol' Macs, but on iPhones and iPod Touches.
In all of these cases though—even if you have to hack your system and become a terrorist in the eyes of Apple—you can generally access the standard Unix environment underneath. You can install ssh on your iPhone or Android phone and treat it like a real (small) Unix server. You can run WordPress on your Pre! The shocking thing here is the size, right? This little-bitty gadget can run a real, grown-up operating system.
Admittedly, I lack the chops to actually look at the Chromium code & figure out if I'm just a sucker for Google’s hype about what a radical departure Chrome OS is. But if you go and watch a few of the Chrome OS YouTube videos, what’s suprising is not just that it’s an operating system built to boot straight to a browser. There are several “netbook” flavors of Linux that more or less try to do that now. What’s surprising is that this is really all there is! The system beneath the browser is completely different from your standard Linux system and it’s not accessible to the user at all.
In other words, those tiny little Android phones have more in common with your traditional desktop PC than with a laptop running Chrome OS.
So it’s a very interesting project & I can completely imagine recommending such a system to friends and family in a year’s time. But it is a bit disappointing to me personally. I would love to have a cheaper laptop I haul around with me specifically for the web and for writing. But sorry, I will not do my writing in Google Docs just yet. So such a computer would need three things: a browser, Vim and LaTeX (ok, LaTeX would require two other apps as well, I guess: a terminal and a PDF viewer…and access to your file system!). All of this could work just fine on a standard netbook, except the tradeoffs in keyboard and monitor size just ruin it for me. Once I start looking at normal-sized laptops, I find the sub-$1000, non-Apple options unappealing. The hardware is creaky, gaudy and cheap. I hate Windows, and I'm not all that thrilled with GNOME or KDE (Linux is just fine: I just dislike the standard Linux GUIs) and, from what I hear at least, Ubuntu is still pretty quirky with things like power management, which is really important on a laptop.
So Chrome OS seemed like it might be just right. It'd be a free OS built for laptops. It'd be based on Linux, but designed just for web use. No GNOME or KDE. But surely, I hoped, there'd be some basic, fast window manager behind the scenes where you could drop into a normal Linux environment. But no such luck: it looks like Chrome OS is actually just what they promised. Which is pretty cool. But still not exactly I was hoping for. It’s all open source though, so perhaps Chromium OS will lead to different distributions that offer a blend of more traditional desktop OS functionality as well.