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A lot of people at the moment are immensely intrigued by Google Chrome OS. I won’t hide that I am one of them. Google promises a much needed shift in the way small computers work. Problems like software updates, backups, installation, maintenance, viruses, have plagued the world for too long: a shift is way overdue. To me, however, the change about to happen shows us what many people have refused to believe for a long time: KDE and GNOME shot each other dead. I write this knowing full well that I am going to make a lot of people angry. This might be the first time a writer receives very angry responses from both camps — KDE and GNOME’s users might actually (finally?) join arms and fight just to show everybody how wrong I am! Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.
Mr. Mobily is pushing his favorite way of application management again; app bundles. The imagery cooked up in the article is interesting, but I think the basic premises underlying it are severely flawed.
Starting with the You are Google and you want to provide the operating system for the next generation of users, the ones who didn’t start with Excel and Word, but with Facebook and Flickr.
This seems to assume that there is a generation that only knows how to work with web apps. I think it is reasonable to assume that this magical Facebook/Flicker generation also knows how to leave the browser environment to use the local power of the computer. I think the division in fat client and thin client users is artificial. This idea that there is a complete new group out there who will be completely content with a glorified web enabled calculator is just too hopeful. Why go for only a screwdriver if you can have a complete tool shed? (I'm specifically excluding Dr. Who here! ;)
Painful, because I am intimately sure (although I can’t prove it) that if GNU/Linux had one set of desktop libraries, one desktop environment, one set of standard for playing audio and so on, we would have those libraries in Google Chrome OS.
Mr. Mobily speculates that Google didn't go with a traditional desktop environment, because we have two of them and somehow having KDE and Gnome libraries makes it impossible to just choose one of them and present that as a unified interface. Just picking one also makes application management easier. Even without app bundles. Mr. Mobily also tells us that another reason is the broken state of Pulseaudio... Never mind that Pulseaudio is brand spanking new and is slowly maturing into a solid solution for desktop audio.
The way I see it, Google's design choices have nothing to do with Mr. Mobily's perceived messy state of the Gnome/KDE split. Google's choice to create a bootable, self-healing browser is directly motivated by the desire to make the web the only venue for end users to access computing resources. Google's bread and butter is targeted advertising through realtime data-mining. To maximize profits, Google needs as many people as possible to be online and viewing pages with Google's advertising machinery embedded. What better way than to cut off the possibility to do local computing?
Just "force" everybody online through a Google controlled device and reap huge profits by serving ads out the wazoo and relentlessly data-mine the "private" files of your Google Account users. That is why the UI has been reduced to a web-browser with no local capabilities, except cached web applications. A full desktop gives the users the option of shielding certain parts of their lives from Google. Chrome OS + Google Web Apps guarantees that people will use Google one way or another to search, view and create documents, and all that information will reside online. Even if one makes offline copies on the SSD, the master was made online, so Google is in a position to know what is in it.
This hope that Google will allow local "fat client" apps to be installed on Chrome OS and that they will facilitate this by creating a wonderful new application management system is naive. Google doesn't gain from fat client computing. The notion that Android does support this isn't entirely correct either. The applications are executed locally, but from my anecdotal experience these apps are still very tethered to the online Android market. Case in point: MyBackup Pro. There was a newer version in the market and promptly my "local" version refused to run and demanded I upgrade to the newer version. Such an app cannot be called local.
I think Mr. Mobily might be in for a nasty surprise if he thinks Google will create a "FOSS Mac OS X". Chromium OS may be free software, but Chromium OS is not Chrome OS. The difference between what might in future be possible with Chromium OS (derivatives) and what eventually is possible with the official Chrome OS could (and probably will) be night and day. I suspect that Chrome OS and Google branded Chrome OS devices will be as locked down and restricted as Google branded Android phones are today. I think Chrome OS might be a severe setback for the FOSS desktop, not a boon. What good is having the source if anything useful is locked behind the servers of a controlling company.
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Starting with the You are Google and you want to provide the operating system for the next generation of users, the ones who didn’t start with Excel and Word, but with Facebook and Flickr.
This seems to assume that there is a generation that only knows how to work with web apps. I think it is reasonable to assume that this magical Facebook/Flicker generation also knows how to leave the browser environment to use the local power of the computer. I think the division in fat client and thin client users is artificial. This idea that there is a complete new group out there who will be completely content with a glorified web enabled calculator is just too hopeful. Why go for only a screwdriver if you can have a complete tool shed? (I'm specifically excluding Dr. Who here! ;)
Painful, because I am intimately sure (although I can’t prove it) that if GNU/Linux had one set of desktop libraries, one desktop environment, one set of standard for playing audio and so on, we would have those libraries in Google Chrome OS.
Mr. Mobily speculates that Google didn't go with a traditional desktop environment, because we have two of them and somehow having KDE and Gnome libraries makes it impossible to just choose one of them and present that as a unified interface. Just picking one also makes application management easier. Even without app bundles. Mr. Mobily also tells us that another reason is the broken state of Pulseaudio... Never mind that Pulseaudio is brand spanking new and is slowly maturing into a solid solution for desktop audio.
The way I see it, Google's design choices have nothing to do with Mr. Mobily's perceived messy state of the Gnome/KDE split. Google's choice to create a bootable, self-healing browser is directly motivated by the desire to make the web the only venue for end users to access computing resources. Google's bread and butter is targeted advertising through realtime data-mining. To maximize profits, Google needs as many people as possible to be online and viewing pages with Google's advertising machinery embedded. What better way than to cut off the possibility to do local computing?
Just "force" everybody online through a Google controlled device and reap huge profits by serving ads out the wazoo and relentlessly data-mine the "private" files of your Google Account users. That is why the UI has been reduced to a web-browser with no local capabilities, except cached web applications. A full desktop gives the users the option of shielding certain parts of their lives from Google. Chrome OS + Google Web Apps guarantees that people will use Google one way or another to search, view and create documents, and all that information will reside online. Even if one makes offline copies on the SSD, the master was made online, so Google is in a position to know what is in it.
This hope that Google will allow local "fat client" apps to be installed on Chrome OS and that they will facilitate this by creating a wonderful new application management system is naive. Google doesn't gain from fat client computing. The notion that Android does support this isn't entirely correct either. The applications are executed locally, but from my anecdotal experience these apps are still very tethered to the online Android market. Case in point: MyBackup Pro. There was a newer version in the market and promptly my "local" version refused to run and demanded I upgrade to the newer version. Such an app cannot be called local.
I think Mr. Mobily might be in for a nasty surprise if he thinks Google will create a "FOSS Mac OS X". Chromium OS may be free software, but Chromium OS is not Chrome OS. The difference between what might in future be possible with Chromium OS (derivatives) and what eventually is possible with the official Chrome OS could (and probably will) be night and day. I suspect that Chrome OS and Google branded Chrome OS devices will be as locked down and restricted as Google branded Android phones are today. I think Chrome OS might be a severe setback for the FOSS desktop, not a boon. What good is having the source if anything useful is locked behind the servers of a controlling company.