[ubuntu-uk] Chrome OS

[etali]

Albert Vilella wrote:
> I am very excited about this. For what I've read, Google and Canonical
> are trying to make sure it will work flawlessly on specific netbook
> models. It's a similar model to the Android way of working the details
> for every specific smartphone model. I've seen some criticisms around
> Android for non being OSS-friendly enough but, to be honest, compared
> to the iPhone lock-in model, Android and Chrome OS is the best
> competition we can hope for.
>
> Any comments?
>
>   
I'm not convinced by Chrome OS.  I don't want to use a computer I don't 
have control over and I don't want my data "in the cloud".

Then again, I'm the only person in my immediate circle of friends who 
has a primary email address that is hosted on their own mail server and 
downloads their mail via a real mail client, everyone else uses Google 
Mail, Yahoo or Hotmail via a webmail interface.  Personally I can't 
stand browser based anything - I have a real usenet and email client, 
dedicated IM and IRC clients, ftp apps, a twitter client, etc. When I'm 
forced to use browser based versions of those it drives me crazy.

Not to mention doing any serious work on it.  How do you edit PDFs?  Do 
any serious programming work?  Test things in a virtual machine?  Play 
games that need installing?  Those are all things that my netbook can do 
fairly well.  Why would I want to pay for another device that is just a 
really bad netbook?

I might have considered a Chrome OS device as an alternative to 
accessing the web on my phone or PDA, but I'm sure that the press 
conference said they were aiming for a device slightly larger than 
netbooks (because people complained that the standard netbook size was 
too small to be useable).  So it's limited to (in my opinion) near 
uselessness AND too big to carry around as an extra device?  No thanks.  
My netbook may take longer to boot, but at least it's capable of running 
powerful applications, and I have full control over what's installed to 
it, when it's updated, and where all my data lives.

Those are just my thoughts.  I'm probably not in the target audience for 
the thing, but I suspect even casual users would get frustrated with the 
limitations of Chrome OS pretty quickly.