I’ve just watched the Google Chrome OS video demo below with interest. As Michael pointed out yesterday Google Chrome OS will be a lightweight, webcentric operating system that will provide a platform for Google’s web browser:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANMrzw7JFzA
Now although I use Windows 7 on all my machines, I can definitely imagine a world where I used a Google Chrome OS PC as my main computer, as my needs are quite simple. I now work full-time at home and I’ve kept a log of all the services and applications I’ve used today:
- Browser: Google Chrome.
- Email: Gmail
- MP3 Player: iTunes
- IM Client: MSN Messenger, Google Talk
- Calendar: Google Calender
- Task Management: reqall
- RSS Reader: Google Reader
- HTML Editor: Notepad++
- FTP Client: Filezilla
- Spreadsheet: Microsoft Excel
- WordProcessing: Microsoft Word
- Other apps: Lightscreen
Nearly every app on that list is either online based, or could be easily substituted by an online service (Excel and Word). The only application that might pose problems getting appropriate support in Google Chrome OS is iTunes. I only use iTunes thought because I have an iPhone and I’m fairly confident that in the future I would be happy switching my iPhone 3GS for a Android based phone which would solve this problem.
Where I think I would struggle with using Google Chrome OS is on my media centers, which are running Windows 7 Media Center which I love and although there are good free media center applications out there like XBMC, none provide the functionality or are as easy to setup as Windows 7 Media Center (although I know some LinuxMCE users will disagree with me!).
Could you survive with a minimal free OS?
[poll id="2"]
