Cool

Something to boot into when Windows gets broken...

Don't hold back, tell us what you *really* feel ;-)

That being said, you're probably right. This sounds eerily close to Mr. Chair-Throwers pitch for Windows 1.0.

http://www.goyk.com/video.asp?path=947 (Windows Media Player required, methinks)

Clock, Notepad, Control Panel - yup, same concept. No worries, MS lawyers will probably put them out of our misery before long.

Meh

Ted's moaning about gOS would sound a lot more convincing if it weren't for his earlier decision to ignore the netbook market with the half-assed attempt at trolling that was his "weaktops" article. I can't help but wonder whether the column title is more a judgement on Ted's efforts themselves rather than the topics he writes about....

Linux desktops are great

Unless you need some particular exclusive Windows software title, Linux desktops are great. Millions of satisfied users are a testament to that.

It's funny you know ...

But I'm sat next to a half dead laptop with a knackered CD drive that works when it wants.

It's been passed to my sister from my mum; the broken CD isn't an issue really (except for one major caveat to come) as my sister only browses the web with it.

So, I'm all set to install Linux with no window manager and just a browser which will keep her completely happy. Of course the knackered CD drive does present a bit of a problem unless I can find my old Debian net-install floppies (and they still work).

The only other option would be the boot from network option in the BIOS which will be a pain in the arse to get going, but I doubt it's impossible as I'm tapping away now on an iMac - which runs Unix, which means it's feasible.

I'm not sure what my conclusion is exactly other than that the author is simultaneously right and wrong on all fronts and my current dilema straddles every point made!

A browser only machine does suit some people and others need a stack with C compilers and the like to do things; which can be found on nice shiny expensive, but extraordinarily good value for money Apples which sometimes do a lot of things that Windows machines can only dream of without jumping through a lot of tiresome hoops.

I think the lesson is that we should all live in peace and harmony and accept that we don't all fit the same mould.

"GLIBC and shit" - I'm still laughing now. Not in the 'at' sense either but 'with'. Has the author thought about writing university courses?

Trolls writing articles on The Register??? Since when?

First we learn that everyone wants Windows, no matter the price. Then there is contradicting mention that large portion of Netbooks (which is increasing portion of PC market in general) actually use variants of Linux without users crying for being incompatible. In the end author is laughing at gOS marketing blurb like it is any different then one from any other OS vendor. So, you don't like booting to browser? Well, as a programmer I wouldn't use it either at least for 3 reasons (and even if I found OS really suck badly, I don't see any reason for such offensive troll article. But hey, we are in the era of short screaming Twitter-like messages):

a) Time spent on Web by average user seems to getting close to 100%, so booting right into browser is not so bad idea in my book. Not everyone is programmer or professional MS Office addicted user with Exchange Server organizing his life. Author is obviously too old for concept of people doing everything on the Web (Office + Mail + Messaging + Entertainment). But youngsters are really increasingly operating this way; they are not amazed by new collection of card games in Windows (You know, these are on the Web too).

b) This OS is created mainly for Netbooks (at least I hope so) and Netbooks are pretty useless for running anything else then Web browser.

c) Only thing that author actually likes (XP dual-boot) is most stupid thing in this scheme: Windows simply shouldn't be installed on Atom-like devices. I saw many of them, and AntiVirus, AdAware... is killing already zero performance of these machines. As I said, if you are Exchange-Server-jailed user then you have to do it, otherwise use Linux and Firefox.

Dear Santa, ....

For Christmas I would like :

An O/S that isn't expensive, slow or eats RAM like wasps on a jam pot. (so probably not Windows), is so easy to install and use that my Mam could do it (so Linux is out), and has a superb GUI, plenty of software available and doesn't shout "fashion victim" to every one who sees it (ok, the Mac scores 1 out of 3).

if I could find an O/S with Microsofts software base, a Mac interface, and Unix speed, then I'd download it. Obviously your elves will be coding it,so in line with your previous policy I will be able to get it free of charge.

Merry Christmas.

Steven

P.S. I have based my 2009/10 sales projections upon your ability to provide said O/S.

Failure on your part to do so will result in legal action against you, or in the event that I can not contact you or your associates, the country purporting to represent you (Goodbye Lapland)

Weak

"I can't help but wonder whether the column title is more a judgement on Ted's efforts themselves rather than the topics he writes about...."

It's starting to look that way.

"Still, this doesn't stop some asshat from re-introducing a Linux PC every couple of years, hoping that the price point has become a more powerful motivator than, oh, I don't know, functionality."

So 'nix lacks functionality? Use of 'asshat' notwithstanding, I remember when blatant trolling was rewarded with a ban, as opposed to being hired as a contributor.

Kill the column?

Ermm, why would El Reg do that? Methinks Ted is a fabulous addition to the stable. If I want soft reporting, I will go to the Reuters site. For unmitigated bile, I come here.

Paris, just because.

temperature gauge?

"....WalMart ... neglected to renew the order after about six months, citing “tepid customer response.”..."

i'm confused. i'm used to seeing customer response described as 'lukewarm'. is 'tepid' very slightly hotter or very slightly colder than this?

Missing the point

Ted, I think you're missing the point slightly.

This OS seems to be designed to run next to Windows, Linux, whatever - on a small netbook or laptop. The idea being that you can do some of the things that you do frequently (checking mail, internet etc) without booting the main OS every time. Think of it as an equivalent to the "Instant On" facility offered by some laptops with a very stripped down Linux distro buried in the BIOS.

Difference here is that you can install this on any laptop, and if the stripped-down (browser) functionality doesn't press your buttons, you can boot to the main OS with one mouseclick.

I think it's a winner - I will certainly download it when/if it becomes available, to dual-boot on my WinXP lappie.

fantastic idea

I think this gOS is a fantastic idea - this author is either trolling for arguments or completely misses the point. Press power and you only have to wait a couple of seconds to do a quick email check, adjust a Google document, update your blog, or surf the net without having to wait a couple of minutes for Windows and any startup apps to fill your RAM. Need Word, Photoshop, or WoW? Click the Windows button and THEN go through the wait of loading a full OS, but ONLY when you need to. I love it and will be installing on my laptop as soon as it's released. Who knows if the implementation will be any good or not, but the idea is great!

Missed by a mile

I will grant that the Everex TC2502 was a market flop. But not because it was a bad product. I have two of them -- 1 as a data server, another as the home video server. The hardware and the software was ok for their intended purpose. The blue smock crowd is just too used to Windows.

As to the cloud OS idea. What's wrong with it? This is the OS that should be on a lot of nettops. But gOS, Splashtop and Google need to coordinate. You still need to be able to work on your machine off grid in a Google Gears fashion and update once logged back on. The idea is sound.

Fact the concept is so sound that IBM/Canonical/Virtual Bridge are selling this same idea to corporations.

ouch.......

So reg when did you take up un starred swearing, network manager f**k me? Incidentally I agree, maybe ms could allow you to use the browser while booting though maybe I am biased making this post from my android phone

"...Marc Anderessen's Dream in a Bill Gates World"?!

Oh, dear G@d, if you exist, please kill me now.

...troll troll again?

As far as I can tell, this is El Reg publishing another linux baiting article to gather hits. And why not? As for failing, I'm seeing these Linux UMPCs everywhere and The Wife's dad was complaining to me the other day, that he couldn't find anywhere that sold the Windows version of that eeeeeeeePC thingy.

The obvious icon for a bit of a fanboy like me.

Arsetard

Ted is talking out of his arse again, most of the people I know with netbooks, and myself included, spend the entire time in the web browser. Open the lid, there's Firefox, shut the lid and it turns off. I don't even want to know what OS it is using, but I think you can guess it isn't Windows.

Re: missing the point

Missing the point indeed: if you want that browser up fast so badly that you'd gladly have a whole OS on the hard drive for it... just set that laptop to hibernate (suspend to hard drive) instead of turning it off. There, it wasn't hard. And it needs less space on the hard drive than a Linux partition too. Starts faster than booting any flavour of Linux these days too.

And on the same idea, let's bury the "yeah, but it's supposed to be a second OS" excuse too.

1. You don't need a second OS to fast-start to your browser. See above.

2. Joe Average doesn't want to learn two OS's and configure Firefox and its extensions twice, to do the same job. Joe Average isn't the kind of nerd for which learning a new OS is cool and gives him a topic at his local LUG. Joe Average just wants to get the job done, and if possible never have to learn anything new. He'll just want to learn one set of skills, once, if he can't avoid it completely, and keep re-using it ever after. And if Joe even uses computers in a casual talk, it won't be about the finer points of Gentoo vs Ubuntu, but the (strangely) more socially acceptable nowadays "OMG, computers are hard, I'm not like those nerds who do nothing but learn to configure stuff."

(Yes, depending on your circle of listeners, you may actually get bonus social points for pretending to be computer-illiterate, or outright stupid. For some people it's hard work to seem or stay that incompetent with computers.)

3. The dismissive generalizations like "bah, they only need a browser and email" we like to do about casual computer users are invariably false. Yes, someone might spend 80% of their time in a browser, but then they'll want to edit the Excel or Powerpoint presentation they were going to a client for in the first place. (And while Linux does have OOo as a nice alternative, Google's web-based ones aren't even close.)

4. So basically to get any actual work done, you have to pay for two OS's? Because pay you will, one way or another. E.g., if you're not going to _pirate_ Windows, buying such an idiocy with gOS pre-installed means you pay a few bucks for the OEM version of gOS... and then get to buy Windows at retail price. That saving was passed to you as a loss.

Why not just stick with one OS which can do both browsing and everything else? Even if it has to be Linux. Heck, I'm writing this in Opera on a SUSE 10.0 Linux box, so I'm not fundamentally opposed to it or anything. But it'll still be a full OS, not an idiocy which boots up the browser.

And at least with a Linux box you can keep your fingers crossed and hope that someone might actually learn to use it, and stick with it. But shipping a cripped browser-machine is just begging for Joe Average to buy the only OS he knows about: Windows. Or, even more likely, just return the useless thing.

So basically the whole idea of a stripped-down OS that runs only the browser seems like a perfect fit for a column called "Fail And You." In fact, it's so bloody stupid that it would deserve an "Epic Fail And You".

@Mage

" XP Boot time 32 second on over 6 year old Laptop.

Similar on 3 year old laptop running intrepid Ibex Ubuntu.

If you need quicker than that you are a Crackberry Addict."

Bahahaha ... my Blackberry 8300 takes about 3 *minutes* to boot up. Then again, a Blackberry is the kind of device that is rarely rebooted, or turned off. However, the BB fills that "gotta read mah e-mail real fast" market pretty well. In fact, it turns it more into a "*ding* you got mail (in your mobile)" phenomenon instead.

Aargh NetworkManager

After having used it's for about 5 seconds in Fedora 10, it's about as much fail as Vista not allowing me to use NTP to fix the clock because the clock was wrong.

Drop to runlevel 3 to install some stuff you don't want X and a bunch of other shizz running for? Bye bye wireless network! Goddamnit now I can't download the stuff I was trying to install! Argh goddamn POS

Anyone seriously shipping NetworkManager in a commercial product needs their head read^H^Hmoved.

Please

Less articles by the under 14s. Thanks.

Totall disagree

You are stuck in a 80s-90s paradigm.

The future is cloud services delivering to any device including mobiles.

<title>

@AListair:

20% more is an order of magnitude... base 5.

@John Watts:

I agree about Macs' value-for-money, especially for programmers. With the (free!) Dev Tools, you have an OS that is difficult to crash, immune to most viruses/spyware, an IDE for C/C++/Obj-C and Java with API documentation, a full Unix CLI, Apache, CVS, support for Python/Perl/Tcl/X11/Kerberos/etc.

As for selling machines with Linux installed, why not ship them with Wine included? That would run most of the apps you have, and there are free or (relatively) cheap alternatives to the ones you don't.

I love you, Ted.

Can you and Orlowski take on the music industry sometime together, please?

I like these articles because...

...even though so many commentards suspect the articles are at least half-troll, they....just....can't....resist....commenting....like the 'tards that they are.

and yes i know i am commenting too, thank you very muchly.

articles 6/10; comments 9/10

Dance monkeys, dance.

There hasn't been a column that provoked such hilariously drooling and ill informed commentage* since the sad demise of Otto Z Stern**.

All aboard the ROFLCopter.

*Made up words (net neologism) FTW!

** Hint hint

I lol'd

I found the article rather humorous, although I have to say that the idea of an OS that boots up quickly will probably be useful for people like me, who have a fairly low-end laptop that came pre-loaded with Vista.

I don't think that Cloud should be used as the only OS on the entire computer though, it'd be a bit pointless, methinks.

Brilliant

Reg, keep these articles coming.

On gOS: their piggybacking on Google's name has irritated me for some time. And as for the "instant boot" clowns - I'll stick to sleep/suspend mode on my laptop, thanks. E-mail checking I have a phone for.