Linux is big business these days, and gOS has the ear of trendsetting PC maker Everex and also a spot on Walmart's shelves running Everex's $199 desktop. The units quickly sold out among limited supply.
So here I am, caught in the hype and blogging from one of our D600's running gOS. (At least until I couldn't add a picture to my post without Firefox crashing. Now I'm back on my trusty IBM Thinkpad T23)
I'll say one thing: gOS is damn pretty. Our mostly novice clientale agreed: I setup a Dell D600 running gOS on our 32" LCD in the showroom and encouraged customers to play around with it and give me feedback -- overwhelmingly people said this was a good looking OS.
Pretty right?
Anyone familiar with Macs will appreciate the graphical icons for launching programs. gOS has made launching Firefox, Gmail, YouTube and a plethora of Google powered tools easy enough.
But it's whats under the hood that matters most: Until gOS makes computers more user friendly then the alternatives from Microsoft and Apple it has little practical utility for the average user.
I've struggled to make gOS work with WMV and Quicktime files, and it's performance on HD Video is horrendous. It's fine surfing the web, and perhaps tweaks can be done, but this is not a machine the average video or graphic design professional would feel comfortable on. I haven't done this much command line work since getting Duke Nukem 3D to recognize my 24.4 baud modem -- and the vast majority of computer users don't know the command line from the CMOS battery.
For the average user, this is a recipe for disaster.
Software is installed via the Synaptic package manager, sort of like an add/remove programs that attempts to make it impossible for the average user to install malicious software. But it took me at least 20 minutes of Googling and learning before I was able to use the package manager to download VLC media player. The process for changing the package manager to "universal" mode (where I could get 3rd party software like VLC) was far from straightforward and the complexity for non-Linux familiar users (even advanced users like myself) is a turnoff.
I can't see any average user who just likes to send email, check news, listen to iTunes
(my Mom and Dad for example) having the wherewithal and patience to use
a gOS running machine. That's unfortunate, because ideally these are
the activities a Linux running $199 machine should excel at.
The built in music player is a straight iTunes clone, it's good --
but it's not iTunes and thus no iTunes store. Ironically, this limits another Web 2.0 project Pandora Internet Radio, as Pandora and iTunes in sync makes finding and stealing buying new music very easy.
Stability is much worse than Firefox 2 on my XP Pro running Thinkpad. Firefox 2 has its hiccups when tested to its limits --10+ tabs open with secure log-ins, half-typed emails, IMs, etc --, and I couldn't get the TypePad picture manager to run -- a major problem. Still, IE 7 in Vista and XP crashes as much as Firefox, and Firefox's restore feature (working as well as ever on gOS) is far and away better than what IE offers.
So far I've been able to manage to do pretty much what the average user would want on this machine: watch YouTube, import and download music, watch WMV and MPEG movies, send email, type up documents and spreadsheets.
But that's after a lot of time and effort. Flash wasn't working properly upon initial boot, same with WMV and MPEG files. It wasn't until some command line work that I got Flash working (and the Flash driven YouTube world). Then another 20 minutes learning the Synaptic package manager got me VLC Media player and support for WMV and MPEG files. So now I've got it how I want it.
It's telling though that I couldn't get the gOS machine to even upload photos to the blog properly. This is a roadblock that I'll probably figure out given some time -- but this is a roadblock the average user will never figure out -- sending them back to Walmart with receipt in hand.
gOS is a huge step in the right direction. Open Source tech like Linux has always drawn from the massive creative talent pool of Internet users -- it will be up to them to package and tweak gOS into a real MS and Apple alternative.
For now it's just another face in the crowd -- albeit a pretty one.
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