A kongoni developer’s view on chrome-OS

I wasn’t planning to blog about this, I tend to skip whatever is trending in the blogosphere and besides – the views of one distro developer on another distro are likely be seen as somewhat skewed, but I was discussing the announcement of google’s chromeOS with a friend and explained how I see the news – and how I see it impacting on kongoni. The same could be said for almost any distribution really, but I spoke about kongoni because that’s the one I’m intimately familiar with.

She asked me to please blog it so she can share my view more widely, and I hereby oblige her. The below is just a cut-and-paste from the message I sent her so it’s not fully edited or perfected, but it does I think convey some of my feelings on this.

Now without further introductory ado:

As for chromeOS – been reading up … well it’s just another linux distro – the one difference is the google name – and the approach of basically building it to run nothing but a super-fast browser.

Well… the original netbook guys were on almost exactly the same page (remember the first EEEpc ? ) – it didn’t work out in the market though. People wanted netbooks to be cheap notebooks and expected features that those simplified interfaces didn’t have.

This led to linux taking a knock in the netbook market, despite having been first in. For what netbooks were, it was perfect, and XP sucks.
In fact, this effect ruined netbooks – what we now call netbooks really ARE just cheaper notebooks, and getting less cheap all the time because they have to keep making them more powerful.

The tiny device meant to be a mobile augmentation to a full computer didn’t take off as planned – bad marketing I think, ASUS didn’t have the capital left to market it the right way.

Google however, are masters at left-field marketing, masters at getting people to think in new ways and really good at stealing microsofts customers… this could actually be the linux that makes it big. I do hope so.

Kongoni would never have been that gnu/linux. Kongoni is a power-user’s system and in fact is probably more appealing to mac power users than windows power users (mac is built on a BSD base while Kongoni is heavily inspired by BSD – both thus giving you a BSD like OS underneath a pretty desktop – though the desktops are not very similar techs [but I think Kongoni's desktop is seriously sexy, have a look at the screenshots])

Either way – I hope chromeOS does take off – anything to reduce microsofts monopoly – and this isn’t trading one monopolist for another. ChromeOS is free software, anybody can improve it, rebuild it, modify it, create a derivative… slavery ended.

Of course, once people switch to a gnu/linux – ANY gnu/linux they do get better, and better, later they do want to try others out – want more power and less handholding… that’s when kongoni will be waiting