I realise that this is of little interest to most of you but I’m having a play with ChromeOS. I have it running on a virtual machine on my Dell laptop. It’s a bit slow but that is going to be because of the VM rather than the OS itself and certainly not due to the lack of bandwidth. Also every now and again it crashes, notionally due to lack of memory.
Initial impressions are good though it’s not perfect. For example in order to try out the online music app it asks you for your credit card info even though the app is free. Apple does this which I hate. I have subsequently found that you can bypass the Apple credit card capture page by not filling any of the fields and clicking “next”. Google won’t let you get away with this which I don’t like.
I have to fill out this form in order for Google to tell me whether the music streaming is “available in my country”. A simple “googling” tells me it is only available in the good ole US of A so it is a bit of a waste of my time and certainly irritating that a global organisation such as Google would have a product that was restricted to that country.
Next I tried the image editor and was a little disappointed to see it had pretty limited editing tools – crop, autofix, contrast and brightness. I need to be able to resize for the web as well as crop. Still it was easy to find a photo to edit. I just stuck one in Google Drive and hey presto it was there online. I use IRFanview on the laptop which doesn’t seem to be available for ChromeOS. There do seem to be lots of photo editing apps in the chrome Web Store though so that is probably ok.
I have a good feeling about ChromeOS. At £229 a Chromebook is not expensive to try out though I do have an issue with having too many gadgets at any one time. I want to play with ChromeOS, Windows8 and Windows8 running on a Nokia Lumia 920 over 4G. It isn’t manageable though to have so many gadgets, especially as you have to sign up for a 24 month 4G contract with EE to lay your hands on the Lumia. My friend Kory raves about the Samsung Chromebook though doesn’t recommend it as a primary system yet.
The general Google ecosystem really is heading in the right direction. I’m building up to a bit of a post about the Google versus Microsoft battle for the desktop with a specific slant on Unified Communications. It will have to wait for another day though. It needs more time.
So long…
4 replies on “ChromeOS – quick play”
“I realise that this is of little interest to most of you…” ???
It’s why some/most of us are here!!!
Squashed trumpets have their place but ChromeOS is better 🙂
Good read Trefor, always good to see people supporting the opensource community.
With the ChromeOS its a stepping stone to greater things which people need to support.
HmmmUK – it’s a balance. A CTO once came to me and said his favourite blog posts were those talking about the Timico cake baking competitions:)
RaspberryPi media server post coming soon.
I wouldn’t trust Google whatsoever.
I see the point in virtualised desktops for corporates but these should be either run on servers in house or outsourced to a company like your own not to American mega corporations whose main business is targeted advertising.
There was, quite rightly uproar about Phorm.
While Google may not be planning on such moves at the moment there is nothing to stop them in the future targeting advertising based on the activities and content created on the OS.
For example, after having a bad customer service experience with your car insurer you are writing a letter in Google Docs and by the side appears links for car insurers and/or solicitors, would you really be comfortable with that?
The chances are you probably gave permission for such things in the EULA you ‘signed’ when you started the machine for the first time.