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Author Topic: Chrome OS  (Read 1299 times)

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Shinra

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Chrome OS
« on: July 08, 2009, 10:17:47 AM »

Everyone called me crazy two years ago when I suggested this was going to happen eventually, but sho'nuff, Google is entering the OS market. An open source OS that will initially be designed with netbooks in mind. Whether this will end up being real competition for Microsoft is anyone's guess - the media is already portraying this as Google saying "bring it on" to MS, but aren't netbooks more of a *nix market to begin with? Even in the desktop and laptop market, it would take some mighty easy to work with code to get the developer support behind it that the existing juggernaut already has - I could see this competing pretty well with Mac OS, though.
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Catloaf

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Re: Chrome OS
« Reply #1 on: July 08, 2009, 10:24:20 AM »

I could see this competing pretty well with Linux, though.
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Shinra

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Re: Chrome OS
« Reply #2 on: July 08, 2009, 10:56:34 AM »

I could see this competing pretty well with Linux, though.

Google has brand recognition and is centralized - this is something most distributions of linux don't have. This means people are going to try it simply because it's a google product, and it is more likely to come pre-loaded on computers at retail outlets. Google is going to blow Linux out of the water in the desktop market. I really think their competition here is going to be Mac OS, which enjoys the same benefits and an honestly similair crowd of net-savvy yuppies who don't care much for more complicated operating systems.
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yyler

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Re: Chrome OS
« Reply #3 on: July 08, 2009, 10:58:57 AM »

To some extent Chrome OS is probably based on some kind of nix kernel, which makes the fact that they probably will blow Linux to dust even more funny.
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Thad

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Re: Chrome OS
« Reply #4 on: July 08, 2009, 10:21:54 PM »

Oh look guys, it's that link from the very first sentence in the thread that none of you apparently actually read.

Quote from: TFA
The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.

So, erm, given that it IS Linux, talking about how it's going to destroy Linux is kind of fucking stupid.

Odds are pretty good that Google's going to put out a pretty slick product here.  Given that, there are two possibilities: either the code will be proprietary, or it will be open.  (Of course, it's quite possible that it will be a little of both, like OSX.)  If it's open, then the benefit to the rest of the Linux distros is direct and obvious: more code for the other devs to play with and develop.  If it's closed, it's still going to have a positive effect in that it's going to make the devs up their game.  (Again, OSX is an example of both -- see KDE adopting the open WebKit (itself based on KDE's KHTML) while imitating the closed Aqua.)

According to the article, it IS in fact going to be open-source -- presumably the whole shebang, top-to-bottom.  Now, could one of you please explain to me this hypothetical situation you have dreamed up where a quality new Linux distribution with money and name recognition behind it, with the code released back to the Linux community, is in some way a bad thing for Linux?  Open source :THATWAY:.

(Best-case scenario from my perspective is that Google gives us a speedy, compact, modern windowing system to replace X.  THAT has been a long time coming.)
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Thad

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Re: Chrome OS
« Reply #5 on: July 13, 2009, 05:02:37 PM »

...anyhow.  As for what's ACTUALLY going to happen, that's anybody's guess.  The netbook market's entirely too new to be predictable.  People like the familiarity of MS, but the release of Windows 7 is going to give Linux a cost advantage (MS pretty much gives away XP on netbooks, but don't expect that trend to continue).  That already makes Linux more attractive, and putting a name like Google behind it may assuage fear of the unfamiliar.

OTOH, it's what, a year off?  That's plenty of time for Windows 7 to get a foothold in the netbook market.  Or Apple to enter it -- it bears noting that the "Google is competing with Apple" argument doesn't really hold water in a market where Apple is not actually competing.

But that segues into the next thing, which is that we've all automatically started talking about what this is going to mean on the desktop when in fact we may not see Chrome OS running on the desktop for years yet.  (In any official, supported capacity, anyway.  Hackers will have it running on desktop boxes as soon as the source or binaries are available, whichever comes first.)

As far as what its immediate impact would be on desktop release, I'm going to assume it would immediately have a mainstream market that other Linuxes don't have but wouldn't match Apple -- though again, leveraging lower costs would give people pause, especially if the economy still sucks by the time it's released (again, we could be talking years down the road here).  And Google's got the cache to hire UI guys to make a product as pretty and easy-to-use as OSX and sell it on cheaper hardware.

Whether Google is actually CONCERNED with the conventional program space is a whole other matter, and really the crux of this whole thing.  Google's at the center of what appears to be a transition from local apps to online apps -- now, people have predicted the shift before and been spectacularly wrong, but there's one pivotal service that HAS shifted into the Web app space: E-Mail.  I'm a guy who took ten years to understand why people would EXCLUSIVELY use Webmail (of course I understood the advantage of being able to access your stuff from any computer, but I still prefer to load everything up in Thunderbird when I got home for its speed and functionality), but GMail does everything you'd expect a local client to do and it's pretty and fast besides.

Of course, past that it gets a little dicey.  I'm sure there are people out there who use Google Docs, but I can't say I've ever actually met any.  I don't see MS Office or Photoshop going away any time soon, and that's before you get into really specialized and esoteric shit like  the legacy apps firmly ingrained into corporate culture.

...Plenty more to say on this subject but I've gotta run.
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Beat Bandit

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Re: Chrome OS
« Reply #6 on: June 17, 2010, 06:06:22 PM »

You figure they'd make the text match the ads even a little.
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TA

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Re: Chrome OS
« Reply #7 on: June 17, 2010, 07:22:38 PM »

Been a while since this thread.

Has anything really happened with Chrome OS, or has Android kind of subsumed it?  Haven't really been following.
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Bongo Bill

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Re: Chrome OS
« Reply #8 on: June 17, 2010, 07:33:51 PM »

There's concerns that Android and Chrome OS might be serving the same market a bit, but the center of the Chrome OS project is Chromium itself, which has obviously advanced quite a bit. I've been paying sporadic attention to the features it's been getting, which have been mostly focused on making web applications look and feel as much as possible like native applications.
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