Universezero wrote:Aside from processing power, what merits does the OS itself has? How would Chrome OS stack up against Windows 7/OS X/Linux on the same machine? That is to say, is the whole cloud thing better than a standard OS?
The only real merits I can think of revolve around its portability. The full boot time is around 10 seconds, and the login, sleep, and wake-up times are near-instantaneous. There is an easily accessible "guest login" mode which sandboxes the guest and deletes cookies, browsing history, downloads, etc., when he logs off (in most OS's, you have to set up some kind of kiosk software to get this kind of partitioning). And in the long term, if a large body of people use Chrome OS, the physical computer you use no longer matters -- every setting, bookmark, app, etc., will be available to you just as it would be on your very own machine when you log in using your Google account.
And heck, chatting on Google Talk (and other protocols provided by web apps, although my trust in those is limited) was painless. Video chat and phone calls through gmail were very straight-forward and functional, even with the Cr48's shitty hardware.
The main drawback associated with these merits is that customizability is nearly non-existent. You can pick some themes which will be visible in the tab bar and the "new tab" window and change your keyboard layout, but that's about as many choices as you get. Chrome OS is based on Linux, but you have no access to a shell. Lord knows what kinds of services are running in the background whose only consequences are additional security holes (I can't even check without port-scanning it from a different machine... which I'm surprised I haven't done yet; I'll post here again with the details of that). They even explicitly removed file browsing capabilities: the "file:///" URI is disabled in the browser, and for the sake of attachments you're
chrooted into a download directory.
There is a small selection of web-based development tools (such as Kodingen(.com)), but they're all in beta, severely limit your licensing options, and can't grant you any kind of peace of mind about the code's availability at any given moment. The best it has for text editing is some simplistic notepad web apps (if not Google Docs, but MS Word clones are hardly plaintext editors). And there is neither availability of nor even capability for secure remote logins (e.g. via ssh); only a fool would trust an ssh client provided by a web app, and a VPN client web app is self-defeating.
(Although there is this Chrome console thing whose use I have yet to figure out. The only thing I've found out about it is that it is
not a POSIX-compliant shell. I fear I'll have to learn something about Chrome (the browser) development in order to get any serious functionality out of it.)
I'll repeat my previous conclusion:
"I can see how it'd be fine for a typical cluser (web browsing, chat, videos, flash games, Google Docs, Picasa, etc.), but as a power user I consider my usage extremely restricted."