Don't laugh. I know people who use Windows this way.

[theweaselking]

Google Chrome OS: An "operating system" whose sole purpose is to support a web browser.

Comments

[triplemare.livejournal.com]

It's very, I dunno,...Snowcrashian, Tek Wars or even ShadowRunish. Anywhere the sole purpose of any computer seems to be to drop out of RL into the virtual information world.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

This is bad? As His Weaselly Majesty said, a lot of people use Windows like that. Plus, when you consider that Chrome OS is targeted at netbooks and other ultra-light, always-connected computers...

i should have 2 cups afore I comment on blogs, really I should

[triplemare.livejournal.com]

I never said (or meant to imply) that it was bad. Just that as an idea, it's been done in multiple sci-fi stories already. On the whole, I think it's nifty for those folks who do use their computer mostly to access the web, etc.

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

I read Snow Crash about once a year, and having done so, I'm currently in my "WHERE'S THE ENDING STEPHENSON? THAT IS A CLIMAX NOT A DENOUEMONT" mode.

[matgb]

I read it for the first time last month. And yeah, ending not there is a bit of a problem.

Good, but a bit...

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

He always does that. Act III is always lucky if it gets 2% of the book.

[mhoye.livejournal.com]

09:32 < mhoye> Hey, woo. New Google OS in the works.
09:33 < mhoye> Forces of... LINUX ON THE DESKTOP!
09:33 < mhoye> Forces of... THIN CLIENTS!
09:33 < mhoye> Unite to form... um...
09:33 < mhoye> Wait.
09:33 < ted> the announcement says it's aimed at netbooks
09:33 < ted> which makes me wonder what the difference is from android
09:33 < mhoye> No, wait. Something awesome is supposed to happen there in that last step.
09:34 < mhoye> But I can't think of what it would be.
09:34 < ted> hah

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

Top applications I use on Windows:

• Firefox (tons of stuff, especially with the plugin ecology)
• Google Chrome (primary gmail client)
• Safari (secondary gmail client)
• PuTTY (work, IRC)
• iTunes (could be replaced by Pandora or Last.fm or di.fm probably)
• Notepad++ (being replaced by emacs slowly)
• MU* client (being replaced by PuTTY slowly).

So, guilty as charged.

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

Except for using Firefox as a secondary to Opera, using vi and nail via SSH to BSD and Linux machines instead of Notepad and a GUI MUA, and not running iTunes because I had too many browser tabs open to spare the RAM, that's very close to how I use Windows. (I do install Cygwin/X when I have to use a Windows machine, so I can run GUI apps from other rmachines in the house, and that does give me a local tcsh and vi just in case ...)

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

As a picky point, that's Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm), not Notepad - the name is pretty much a marketing move. N++ has regex searching and context highlighting, which I yearn for (and are part of why I'm slowly trying to migrate to emacs, which is what I use PuTTY for).


Done being unreasonably defensive now. ^^;;

[anivair.livejournal.com]

Honestly, most people use the computer for internet access and office suite stuff (which google has) and maybe for hosting pictures (which google has) ... I can't think of much your average user does on a computer that google doesn't do online. It won't be the right OS for me, but I was never going to m ove away from linux anyway.

But maybe it will get people off windows. Who needs a clunky OS whose only job is getting spyware and viruses when you can have a machine that just takes you to the net?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Chrome really is a redesign from the ground up, and a lot of the design decisions are good ones. What I'd *really* like is for Google to put some work into porting Firefox over to Chrome - get proper add-in functionality going, convert the most useful of the add-ons, publish a useful API, and, for REAL magic that would make me swap immediately and never go back, find a way to make firefox extensions work in Chrome (without just running Firefox inside the tab).

I also want a pony.

[matgb]

I installed Ubuntu last week. It has apps pre-installed I've actually used.

The games section. They can run in the background before I browse. 90% of my paid work is online these days, I suspect this will keep my old desktop in use for a few more years as a backup, etc.

[itlandm.livejournal.com]

This would have made more sense if Chrome was actually Linux-compatible, instead of Windows-only.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Why?

It's not Linux. Or, at least, not entirely so. It's an OS designed to run Chrome and basically nothing else.

Windows as Thin Client

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

*shrug* For a long time, I used Windows in almost that way (it also supported Excel and either Netterm (telnet) or PuTTy (SSH)). Files were on the file server; everything I did that wasn't in the browser or Excel was done in Linux or BSD via telnet/SSH or X. And most of the time Excel wasn't running.

Oh. Wait. I forgot. I'm still using Windows to run Excel. It's just that now I do it over VNC from a Mac. At some point I'll get around to checking degrees of Excel file format compatability of native Mac spreadsheets ...

Re: Windows as Thin Client

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

You know that *excel itself* runs on OSX, right?

Also: OpenOffice is 100% compatible with excel, and runs on Macs.

Re: Windows as Thin Client

[sandchigger.livejournal.com]

You can also import the vast majority of your Excel work to GoogleDocs, unless you're working with huge spreadsheets or spreadsheets that access spreadsheets that access spreadsheets.

[ryusen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, unless my personal bandwidth becomes colossal to the point i can use Lightroom and Photoshop "int he cloud," that's not happening for me

[harper-knight.livejournal.com]

You have to admit it'd be nice though.

[andrewducker]

And yeah, 95% of the time I'm on my home PC I'm either reading mail, browsing or chatting. Therefore a PC that just did those things would be fine for me most of the time, and if they made it cheap/light enough I'd be very happy...

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure how they're going to differentiate themselves though. Doing so on speed/memory is going to be tricky, I'd imagine.

[netdef.livejournal.com]

What might be cool is if they allow you to burn the full Chrome OS/Browser with your shortcuts pre-set onto a bootable CD/DVD.

It would be the ultimate private browser . . . not to mention completely impervious to security vulnerabilities - at least to your computer. What you DO online that might make tracks would be totally up to you.

Oh wait, I can already do that with Ubuntu, oh and with Windows XP using PartPE (if I don't mind the really long boot times.)

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

My favourite part of that whole article:
"And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work."

BWAHAHAHA!!!