gOS, the brain trust behind the failed $200 Linux-based “gPC” at WalMart, has seen fit to throw the dice one more time, introducing an operating system called Cloud that lets your computer boot into a browser. I, for one, welcome this innovation. I've always been a fan of neutering the most versatile machine in human history, …
I'm a little divided here. On one hand im quite happy to wait 3 minutes for my 8 year old Debian iMac to boot, and i can play games and write docs and surf the web (albeit a little slowly). Boot times are not really an issue for me, so from this perspective gOS doesnt sell (also tried gOS 3 and TBH didnt like it much due to lack of offline features.
On the other hand as an ex-sys admin, this is closer to perfection for rolling out in a work environment (with the proper proxy setup to block facebook etc so some productivity can be made). When i first started being a sys-admin everyone had dumb terminals at my work. Any problems were either server/mainframe problems (very rare) or a dumb terminal had died. Was the work of 2 minutes to swap out a dumb terminal a log a support call for a relplacement before getting back to some hard work playing Dune 2 over the serial cable with my colleague. These days sys-admins actually have to do some work and spend half their time fixing things caused by stupid users doing stupid things with their computers.
So, bring back Netstations, or better still VT100 dumb terminals so people at work become productive again.
Disclaimer: Written at work on Windows with a hard drive full of games......
The article is, overall, right. Not about Linux never being able to get market share, and Windows dominating forever... but, gos, Linpus, etc., these custom-for-one-machine Linuxes are rather poor, I'm very unsure why they didn't just use a stock distro. Just put Ubuntu or something on there and be done with it, like Dell is doing on the MIni 9. This negates the issues of the Linux distro being all stripped, and their being no apps for it -- there's apps to do nearly everything under Ubuntu as under Windows, plus some Ubuntu apps I haven't seen a good Windows equivalent to.
So the people are just gagging for windows ? Listen, the customer will take windows, and like it, because the customer has no choice. But many non-technical people hate using their PCs because of Windows. All those viruses, annoying pop up dialogs, and bundled nagware are enough to make the poor user pull his/her hair out.
Most non-technical people are unaware that don't, in fact, need MS, Word , Excel or any of that stuff to get their work done. Ted is unaware of it too, apparently. Most people just want to produce documents in peace, and they can do that fine with gOS.
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