Google to release Linux based ChromeOS

The blogosphere is aflame with news that Google finally decided to go after Microsoft and release it's own Linux based Operating System targeted at netbooks: ChromeOS. The frenzy was started by a post on the official Google blog were Sundar Pichai announced the new OS. But is it really a new OS? I don't think so!

Not a new OS!

When you look at the post in more detail a few interesting things do emerge. First ChromeOS will be based on the Linux kernel, so it is certainly not a completely new OS. What will make this different from your average Linux distribution is the graphics subsystem. Google will replace the X system used by most Linux distributions by something new and more lightweight. I can understand why Google would do that, as although X offers a lot of features and has improved tremendously in recent years it is still consuming a lot of resources, not something you want on a netbook. This is hardly new however! Google had already replaced X with it's own graphical subsystem in the Android OS targeted at smartphones. From what we know there are not many differences between ChromeOS and Android beside the size of the target devices. Note that ChromeOS will probably not use Android's graphic subsystem unless it is improved, as it is currently not suited to large screen devices and does not support 2D/3D acceleration.

Applications

ChromeOS will include the Chrome web browser and maybe little else. What the post on the Google blog seems to imply is that the OS will be optimized for web applications, and that if you want to develop for ChromeOS you will actually have to build a web application. This has the advantage that your application will run on all the platforms which the Chrome web browser supports, but it has the disadvantage of limiting access to the netbook's hardware. It would be very difficult to code a media player or video editor this way, and maybe that is why Google ChromeOS will initially target netbooks that are not meant for heavy duty tasks that require direct access to the computer hardware.

Not only for X86

Google announced that ChromeOS would run on X86 and ARM processors. This is a logical choice if you consider that most current netbooks use the x86 based atom processor, but that a lot of smartbooks will use ARM based chips. Again this is not new as Android already ran on both ARM and x86 based chips.

Why did Google do this?

That question is easy to answer: because Windows is too expensive! You will notice that the announcement of ChromeOS happened very little time after Microsoft released the pricing structure of Windows 7. Googles makes money when people use the web and it's search engine. This requires pervasive computing: a computer in the kitchen to look up recipes, a computer in the living room, a netbook for each of the children etc... To get pervasive computing the devices need to be cheap, preferably sub $200. If Microsoft is charging more than $100 for Windows 7, this is never going to happen. Google needs a free (as in beer) OS that will run it's web applications and that it can promote heavily. Linux was of course the perfect choice as the core of this new OS, but Google needed a better brand!

Conclusion

In short, ChromeOS is only a version of the Linux based Android OS with a new graphic subsystem and optimized for running Google Chrome on big screen devices. This is not really a new OS, just a new way to run a web browser without having to fork out for a full OS. ChromeOS is also a brand that Google can push to get devices in the hands of consumers and ultimately on it's search engine. It is good to see Linux being adopted though, and it will maybe put an end to the "Microsoft tax" problem. I would have liked to see the "Linux brand" pushed a bit more in Google's marketing however, as this is what ChromeOS is: Linux with a fancy new graphics subsystem.