Life In The Cloud: Are We Ready For Nothing But The Web?

I’ve been experimenting with the Chromium OS over the weekend. If you’re not familiar, Chromium is the open source development version of Google’s Chrome operating system, which ships on these new-fangled Chromebooks.

After several abortive attempts, I finally got Chromium Lime running on my Dell Mini 1018, and just about everything works fine. It’s super fast, and for the first time I can use the pansy little netbook without feeling constrained by its low-power hardware.

The most noteworthy point is that I barely even notice I’m running a different operating system. I use the Chrome browser on my primary Windows machine, and 99% of my computing time is spent on the web anyway – for both work and leisure.

It’s enough to convince me that, for day-to-day duties at least, a Chromebook is really all I would ever need in my life. WordPress, Gmail, Google Docs, FreshBooks, PayPal – all the tools I rely on for work are web-based. And I’m sure many of you folk are in a similar boat.

Chromebooks clearly aren’t going to replace Macs and PCs – especially for developers, designers, photographers and the like. But for the growing demographic who live, work and play on the web, I suspect Google is on to a winning concept here.

Chromebooks from Samsung and Acer are finally on the market. I, for one, will be watching how this story unfolds with keen interest.

What do you think? Is the Chromebook going to be a hit? Could you survive with a cloud-based operating system?

There’s surely a vast spectrum of opinion on this issue – share your thoughts with us in the comment section below.

_{Image credit: Cloud computing concept from Bigstockphoto.}

Tags:

• browsers
• email
• open source