Google Announces Chrome OS, For Release Mid-2010 1089
Zaiff Urgulbunger writes "After years of speculation, Google has announced Google Chrome OS, which should be available mid-2010. Initially targeting netbooks, its main selling points are speed, simplicity and security — which kind of implies that the current No.1 OS doesn't deliver in these areas! The Chrome OS will run on both x86 and ARM architectures, uses a Linux kernel with a new windowing system. According to Google, 'For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.' Google says that this new OS is separate from Android, as the latter was designed for mobile phones and set-top boxes, whereas Chrome OS is designed 'for people who spend most of their time on the web.'" The New York Times' coverage is worth reading, and there are stories popping up all over the web.
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:5, Informative)
While there is no mention of a kernal, it does appear to use a Linux kernel:
"The Chrome OS will run on both x86 and ARM architectures, uses a Linux kernel with a new windowing system." :-P
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:5, Informative)
From the horse's mouth [blogspot.com]:
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:5, Informative)
Even with just a browser, you need multiple windows. When an AJAX command tells the browser to pop up a new window, the browser uses the native windowing system to pop up a new window. You also need windows for multiple browser instances, tabs, menus, and other fun stuff. It's not turtles all the way down.
Re:Uh huh. (Score:5, Informative)
This recession is a good time to strike (Score:5, Informative)
Deep pockets versus deeper pockets. Google's market cap is $125b and Microsoft's is $200b. Not long ago, the gap was larger. Falling PC sales have taken a bite out of Microsoft's revenue. They recently had their first down quarter in their history.
Microsoft still makes 4X the money Google does, though. In 2008, Microsoft earned $17b in net income compared to Google's $4b. Now, $4b is nothing to dismiss, especially when you're using and writing entirely free and open source software, but still, if Google has deep pockets, Microsoft's are even deeper.
See: MSFT [google.com] and GOOG [google.com]
.
Google is probably the only company in the world that can generate excitement about a new OS, and making an open platform will encourage software developers to write apps for it. Hasn't that been one of the big complaints, the lack of software for Linux?
Many have tried taking down Microsoft. All have failed. Perhaps Google is finally the David to slay Microsoft's Goliath. Perhaps not. Exciting times, these are.
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Please let there be no X! (Score:3, Informative)
You seem to be one of those people that irrationally hate X without any good reason. Care to elaborate?
Re:Fast web OS needed! (Score:2, Informative)
I haven't tested it, but moblin seems to be close to what you want already, you just need a netbook...
http://moblin.org/ [moblin.org]
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:3, Informative)
Google has recently been active in directfb [directfb.org].
http://directfb.org/index.php?path=Projects%2F%2B%2BDFB [directfb.org]
++DFB
++DFB is an advanced version of DFB++
It's an incompatible fork with fundamental changes.
Applications no longer deal with interface pointers. The classes wrapping around interfaces are used a container for an interface pointer, providing garbage collection the "direct" way 8-)
Good grief.
Re:Chrome is the new Emacs? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Huh? (Double HUH?) (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:5, Informative)
Considering Leopard on Intel is UNIX certified, the latest version of OS X is as much Unix as AIX, Irix, or Solaris is.
Re:The web is NOT the OS (Score:3, Informative)
And now you can do it in Python with Pyjamas [pyjs.org].
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Uh huh. (Score:5, Informative)
"Another window manager just dilutes the current pool....."
It isn't 'another window manager', it's a new windowing system. Don't think X11+KDE/Gnome, think Apple CGL+Quartz.
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The web is NOT the OS (Score:3, Informative)
These days it seems absurd to talk about running Photoshop or AutoCAD through a web browser... But in another dozen years it may make perfect sense.
I don't think you have to wait a dozen years... I'm sure that none of these options are equal to the full power of Photoshop right now, but with the direction things are going, it could happen before too many years go by: http://lifehacker.com/5307419/five-best-online-image-editors [lifehacker.com]
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:1, Informative)
The problem isn't that you called out a troll, it's that you're clearly a douche.
Re:Web apps should be treated like desktop apps (Score:3, Informative)
I would like to use Gmail just like I'm using any dekstop application.
Use the Chrome browser.
Go to GMail.
Click the page menu (top right)
"Create application shortcuts..."
Google wants you to use web apps as if they're normal desktop apps. When you launch these shortcuts, Chrome will skin the window to look more like an app and less like a browser.
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Uh huh. (Score:5, Informative)
You do realize that X memmaps the video memory into its memory space? This gives it some rather crazy numbers for RAM usage even when it's running thin. Especially with modern cards having 512MB of video mem or more.
Otherwise I do not disagree with your general statements. :-)
Re:Uh huh. (Score:2, Informative)
I think he means "OK" in that it's currently running on a smartphone that you can go out and buy today, and has sold about a million units so far.
Re:Please let there be no X! (Score:5, Informative)
Actually the network transparency is what I really don't like in X. I don't get why it is in there. I would argue most people don't need it. Either because they are running servers without any X or simple desktops. While there certainly are cases where remote desktop access is useful, I really think other solutions like VNC are far superior to X there.
The network transparency costs practically nothing when running local apps (it uses shared memory) and, despite your apparent inability to have ever used X11's network transparency, a lot of us, do, all the time. I use it every single day. Right now I am sitting in front of a machine that has windows from applications running on four different machines, all of which seamlessly integrate into the desktop so that, unless you happen to know which applications are running where, you'd think they were all local apps. I've used VNC. It's not a good solution compared to X11's elegant network transparency. Just because you don't happen to use it doesn't mean there aren't a great many people who do use it regularly.
Re:X is pretty dang good (Score:3, Informative)
Cause it's getting old and dodgy, and with the newer video cards, a lot of X can be dumped off into the card?
Look at GWT. You won't code HTML and Javascript (Score:4, Informative)
Really. Take a look at it.
GWT DatePicker [google.com]
See the example and the code.
No HTML or Javascript whatsoever. Only CSS needed for styling.
Re:Uh huh. (Score:3, Informative)
most things on Linux UI are X-based which means most communication is serialized through a single socket and much information is stored redundantly in the app and the X-server.
You say "single socket" as if all of the X clients were contending for a resource. Every connection accepted by a server (any server) creates a new file descriptor in that process. There's no more a problem with a "single socket" in X11 than there is in any other server.
Moreover, unless all of your applications are running over the network, they're almost certainly using shared memory rather than file IO (through the socket) for display. Your entire characterization of X11 shows how little you know about how it works.
Hell there's dedicated VGA mode for games in existing Linux.
What, you mean framebuffer? Yes, it exists, but it's extremely slow. If there are games that use it, I still wouldn't characterize it as being "for games". OpenGL under X11 is definitely the preferred setup for accelerated video.
Re:Uh huh. (Score:4, Informative)
You say "single socket" as if all of the X clients were contending for a resource. Every connection accepted by a server (any server) creates a new file descriptor in that process. There's no more a problem with a "single socket" in X11 than there is in any other server.
Moreover, unless all of your applications are running over the network, they're almost certainly using shared memory rather than file IO (through the socket) for display. Your entire characterization of X11 shows how little you know about how it works.
This is just details, the fact of the matter is that Microsoft, Apple, and even Be had much faster methods of accessing video hardware and displaying things on the screen. Whether or not it's constrained to a single socket, it's constrained to a socket model and thus the filesystem IO interface. The network transparency would be wonderful if we still had our graphics hardware in separate boxes from our servers, but Google is making a desktop system. DRI/DRM are not really broad enough for modern graphics hardware, anyway. If Google is clever, they'll use their muscle to start from scratch, providing a sane opengl accelerated driver model, like Apple. X's architecture is probably at the peak performance-wise of what the open source community can make it do.
What, you mean framebuffer? Yes, it exists, but it's extremely slow. If there are games that use it, I still wouldn't characterize it as being "for games". OpenGL under X11 is definitely the preferred setup for accelerated video.
It's better, but it's not WDDM... this is just the best of what's currently available. Any graphical application from video playback to 3d will always perform better on Windows than Linux on the same hardware. It doesn't matter whether you're using OpenGL or Direct X, they just have a proper display model for the desktop. The last thing the linux community needs is people trying to pull X into another decade, making it now almost 30 years out of date.
Re:X is pretty dang good (Score:5, Informative)
Tell me, what kind of backwards logic makes the X server be the display and the X client be the application?
Logic that accounts for two facts; that computers can have multiple users, and that they can be networked. SSH lets you run arbitrary command-line applications on remote machines. To do that with arbitrary graphical applications - emphasis on "arbitrary", i.e. not re-writing every graphical app as a GUI client & back-end server - you need something on the local machine to which the remote machine can send display commands, and for proper integration with graphical apps running on the local machine, ideally that same something should be catering for both. So.. you run a display server, and anything that wants to display graphics - locally or otherwise - connects to it. Simple.
Like a lot of things in the *NIX world, it stops seeming backwards when you discard a few assumptions: that a computer is only used by one person (or that everyone who uses it is happy to share the same account), and that a keyboard, monitor and mouse will always be plugged in. These assumptions have kept Windows out of many a server room for years.
However, the difficulties of writing user-friendly software outside the "comfort zone" these assumptions provide have kept Linux out of many a living room for just as long. It's not impossible, though, and the situation is improving rapidly.
Re:Uh huh. (Score:2, Informative)
** I've written many apps with Xlib. The underlying ideas/primitives that X uses for graphics ops are obsolete so doing anything "cool" (and sometimes useful!) requires using crufty extensions rather than calling routines that are a "natural" part of the system.
Understand that extensions are a natural part of the system. The X11 protocol was designed with the support for extensions from day one. A lot of the original X people knew that a lot of core X was woefully inadequate or behind the times from the very beginning. People knew that text handling in X was crap. People knew that core X rendering was extremely limited the day it was released.
The unfortunate story of the X extension system has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with commercial politics. The idea of X from a political standpoint, was a miserable failure.
The fact that text in X wasn't really even improved that much until the turn of the century, nearly 15 years, is a testament to that.
I'd like to something fresh that builds on the concept of using modern graphics hardware to do all the heavy lifting for the GUI instead of clever CPU-intensive hacks on top of Xlib**.
Thjs comment sounds like you came out of a time warp from 5 years ago.
A lot of this is done. Features like the RENDER extension can be implemented with hardware acceleration in the X server, and in fact they are in many cases. That is what things like EXA and UXA are for. AIGLX was implemented to allow acceleration of eyecandy that requires server support.
Things aren't perfect, mainly due to the realities of non-technical implementation issues including the fact that hardware vendors either can't (NVIDIA) or won't (Via) play ball and that volunteers that aren't employed by Intel or Redhat are mainly interested in scratching their own itches.
I don't see Google changing this fundamental property in any regard, by the way. While they might make some interesting things for certain hardware they're interested in, and I welcome that, they are simply not going to change the status quo for support. A graphics utopia that makes everyone happy is impossible. Who cares?
Re:Uh huh. (Score:2, Informative)
This is just details, the fact of the matter is that Microsoft, Apple, and even Be had much faster methods of accessing video hardware and displaying things on the screen.
Unless you have numbers to back it up, that is an assertion, and not "the fact of the matter". Many benchmarks have shown that OpenGL on Linux is faster than Windows in some configurations. I can't say "most", since I don't have numbers either, but objective benchmarks of both native OpenGL applications and even applications running under Wine do show that X11 is not only acceptable, but faster than Windows. Do you have anything to back up your assertions, or are you just spouting off about your subjective experience that the GNU desktop software feels slow? The latter is something a lot of people complain about, but it's not actually X11's fault.
Whether or not it's constrained to a single socket, it's constrained to a socket model and thus the filesystem IO interface.
1: You completely missed what I said. Locally run processes don't use the sockets; they use shared memory.
2: While file IO and socket IO both use read() and write(), there's no "filesystem" layer involved in socket IO.
3: There's nothing actually wrong with socket IO, even if it were being used. Which it's not.
DRI/DRM are not really broad enough for modern graphics hardware, anyway.
Again, do you have any idea why not, or are you just repeating complaints that you've heard other people make? Did they have any details about why DRI wouldn't be a suitable design?
Any graphical application from video playback to 3d will always perform better on Windows than Linux on the same hardware.
That is far from true. I won't say that X11 is always faster than Windows, and I don't have enough data to say that it's usually faster than Windows, but there are many benchmarks that show that it is sometimes after than Windows. Your belief sounds like it's founded on "common knowledge" rather than actual measurements. You're way off base.