SJ Cuthbertson

I got around to downloading the ISO of gOS the other day, and had a look. It started up AOK, and reasonably quickly for a liveCD (especially given I’m still running on just 512kB 512MB RAM), which is reassuring given that it’s basically just Ubuntu under the hood. I wasn’t massively enamoured of the look-n-feel, partly because I suspect the graphics were not one of the things on the to-do list for their first release (well, that’s probably a good thing!). But it was also my first encounter with Enlightenment desktop – although difficult to place, it didn’t really feel as nice as KWin, Compiz or Beryl; but the OS X-like app-launcher bar at the bottom was something I might try to replicate in my Kubuntu installation. I think it might have been due to the GNOMEyness as well. Basically, it works and feels OK, IF you’re more used to Ubuntu than Kubuntu

Of course, what’s really interesting about gOS as an OS (rather than simply as a component of the now-famous $200 Wal-Mart system) is it’s total reliance on web applications, specifically Google ones. I was a bit disappointed, to be honest, with how little they’ve integrated these into the experience – the icons that relate to web rather than hard-drive based apps (all except for media player and config utils, IIRC) simply open a bog-standard Firefox window at that page, rather than integrating as if it were a desktop app. Anybody could do this – sure, it’d take a little tweaking in places, but for me, it’s far easier to have one FF window open right from the start of my session, with all the apps/pages I use the most in a bookmarks toolbar, and just go from there. Being Linux, all the other aspects of it could be fairly easily recreated by apt-get downloading the relevant things, so gOS is certainly not going to be replacing my Kubuntu partition any time soon. It’s a brilliant concept, and just right for a dirt-cheap PC bundle that should, hopefully, increase mainstream awareness of Linux in the US – but poorly executed.

One thing I will say for it – Firefox sure loads fast. Possibly just because it has no extensions – but I think it loads even faster than a clean install would on my machine. Anybody know what they’ve tweaked?