Life with Chromium OS, good or tasteless!!

Written on November 20th, 2009 at 23:48 pm by shredder12

So, after all the rumours of Google's Chrome OS being released in a week, Google has finally announced that it is open-sourcing the project as Chromium OS and the final release will take about a year. That's about the developers, what about the users? This OS is very different from the one's being used as of now, for here, everything is on the cloud cluster; no third party apps; won't work offline; and yes, everything is done on a browser. Wondering what it would be like to leave your regular computers and work on Chromium OS? let me help you out!

In order to find out whether users will like chrome or not I asked some of my friends and colleagues about what they like in the Operating Systems they use:

Windows users: Looks great, Games, software requirements etc

Apple Users: Again Looks great, its Class(don't know what that means!), great softwares etc

Linuxers: Freedom for everything (Duh-uh), highly configurable, runs on old machines and a lot more.

Now, lets see what all Google's Chromium OS aims to provide.

All User data on the cloud cluster
In order to make applications secure, no third party apps allowed
Needs Internet
Free and Open source. Impressive! :)
Various security levels to ensure system protection.
No malwares, viruses etc (lets hope :P)
Definitely faster boots (since there is nothing on the system)
And last but not the least, since all apps will be web based apps, it requires a browser for everything.

Let us take the example of a regular linuxer, consider me ;). I use Linux most of the time, windows just for games. I like listening to music, blogging, watching movies and you know! :) I can do all of these on Chrome OS but I might not have 24x7 access to Internet and I don't want my computer to be a piece of junk without the Internet.

In order to make things secure, they won't allow third party apps. So, that means I am bound to some google tagged applications. I don't mind their apps but if I don't get to use my fav apps then it is not a good option for me.

They have achieved 7 seconds of boot time till now, seems impressive. Lets consider the latest linux distros Fedora or Ubuntu, with many applications installed their boot time is around 20 secs. I won't mind 13 seconds unless I am in real hurry where Chromium's fast booting is the best option.

So its seems its not of much use to a guy like me. Don't come to any conclusion so soon, lets see what else Google's Chromium OS can offer

Since most of the data is on their servers, we don't have to worry about data loss, recovery or deleted files etc.
As far as their security team is concerned, no Virus or malware problems, sounds pretty good.
Amazing booting speed, so if you just want to check mails then booting chromium OS will be just like opening a web browser(a little slower actually).
Since we are not installing any additional 3rd party apps on the computer, the system will maintain a consistent performance for a long time unlike regular OSs which become rusty and slow after constant use.
According to their security overview Chromium checks for malwares or some misconfiguration on every boot and if an error is found an update is requested and it is fixed after a reboot. A great way to keep the system in a healthy state.

And Finally I think that Google's Chromium OS might not be able to replace the current Operating Systems but still is a really good option for businessmen, officials and for those who travel a lot and want their data to be safe and accessible from anywhere, what place better than Google :).

5 Comments

Rishabh Mahajan (not verified)

November 21st, 2009 02:12 am

Hi You have an interesting topic here about the long awaited and, quite hyped too - The Chromium OS. The use of the new OS will definitely be restricted to just internet based apps and mostly Google apps. It will surely be beneficial to those who seek to check mails and do the internet stuffs. But some how i feel that the conventional internet based stuffs like surfing and e-mailing is very easily available on almost all the phones. Even business people would prefer to use their hand held device for the conventional purposes rather than carrying with them a mobile laptop, howsoever small it may be (netbooks). I feel there wont be much use of another OS over here. Also, even if they have managed to reduce the boot time to a record 7 sec, i guess they left the time required to 1) take out the laptop from the bag or whatever you have (min. 5 sec.); 2) Boot it (Record low - 7 sec); 3) Connect the internet device like a USB modem or a Data Card (approx. 5 sec) and then connect to the internet (5 Sec). Total = 22 sec. While in a Smart phone with net access, the time from when you took out you phone from your pocket to mail retrieval might take as low as 10 sec. Lots of other issues also you mentioned is also apt.

Linux Monkey (not verified)

November 21st, 2009 07:10 am

Hey you missed out one important point i.e when you about some OS drivers are important piece of software and sadly in this case the chrome OS will supposedly support only a limited set of hardware and rest of the burden of making it work for other hardware is thrown on the open source community. I always thought it would be better if he had targeted only netbooks because this kind of OS's are perfectly suited for netbooks and also nobody like it when his system is useless without internet.

vivek (not verified)

November 21st, 2009 01:30 pm

Dependence on Internet is a big disadvantage about ChromeOS. =>Your netbook will be a useless box with no internet connectivity. =>Speed of the internet will also affect your multitasking capabilities. =>Considering about cloud-based storage, If you need to acces your very important files & there's no connectivity then you are helpless! =>Its also a threat to privacy, however secure the system may be, there will always be hardcore nerds who could eventually find a way to your private stuff. =>About boot-time, there are Linux distros. like ubuntu, fedora etc. which have achieved a boot-time of 20 seconds with all the applications you need preloaded! a difference of 13 seconds wont matter much.

LasX (not verified)

November 22nd, 2009 03:38 am

I think that google will make a revolution of Operating systems, but not soon ! there is a lot of cons in Chrome OS: - a big handicap without internet connection. - user data will be in a "safe" place but where ??? - what is the type of systems hosting the cloud applications. - it smells like a future monopoly by google. - only for netbooks ? ok I'll be waiting, but on my fedora...

Akshat Goel (not verified)

November 23rd, 2009 11:44 am

Everything is fine with Chrome OS if you are looking at supplementing (not replacing) your existing system with the new OS. It will take time (if at all possible) for chrome OS to fully take over your system. Moreover, if Google is trying to couple their chrome OS only with google apps (where is silverlight???), then that would be a gr8 setback on its acceptance.