Chromium OS First Impression: The 90's Set-top Box of 2010?

An Operating System. Supposedly.

As most of you are aware I am a huge Google fan but…

If Google’s Chrome browser went to the office Christmas party and had a one night stand with Linux behind the bar, then Chromium OS would be the resultant bastard child.

Unfortunately for this particular bastard child it would share none of the looks, speed or intelligence which makes either of its parents great.  In the chromosomal world of this coupling all of the good genes have been invited to a party and headed off to get pissed and enjoy themselves, leaving only the crud of the genetic pool to great baby Chromium.

Normally I take a great deal of geeky pleasure in testing a new operating system so today I enthusiastically followed Jorge Sierras quick post about how to run Google Chrome OS from a USB drive, edited my bios settings to allow booting from USB and in next to no time was looking a a big blue login screen. That was where the fun and excitement stopped.

Chromium (or Chrome OS) is supposed to be an operating system for connected folk. In fact about all you can do with the operating system is be online. Want to do something offline? Forget it, better go back to your Windows or Mac laptop, Chrome OS is not for you baby!

So being the connected chappy that I am I was surprised when asked to log in with my Google account but wasn’t presented with a place to enter the network password for my Wi-Fi.

I had to log in with the default username (chronos – no password) and then go about finding out where the network settings were. After clicking enable wi-fi a few times it still wouldn’t connect and never asked my for my password even though my wi-fi light was glowing happily away at the front of my laptop.

In the end I was forced to whip out an ethernet cable and connect that way (irony or what?).

Windows 95?

Inside the operating system wasn’t much of a better experience. The UI felt slow and very underdeveloped (although the browser itself was fast but that’s to be expected, it’s Chrome after all) and moving through the options menu felt like I was back in Windows 95 or NT.

To be fair, part of the slowness I felt could have been attributable to the fact that I was running the Chromium from a USB key but I have run other linux distros (and that’s what Chromium is under the hood) from USB keys before, as well as tested a lot of portable apps and none of them felt quite this slow.

It wasn’t terribly slow, just slow. Hard to quantify although as I said earlier the browser felt snappy enough actually surfing.

Chromium comes with a few “preinstalled” applications which are actually all shortcuts to web based apps such as Gmail, Pandora etc. There is actually nothing installed in the operating system. I suppose if living exclusively online is your thing then this won’t bother you but my love/hate affair with the cloud is well known and I don’t really want an operating system that is practically useless if  you don’t have access to web.

Everything about Chromium feels unfinished and even not particularly well thought out. It’s as if the guys at Google had a collective brain fart, decided to prototype an operating system, gave up a fifth of the way through the prototype to go for beers and decided to release it when they came back a full six sheets to wind.

Just won't open!

Take saving an image you find on the web as an example.

I visited the gallery on this blog and attempted to save an image. In order to find my saved image I had to go to the downloads section of Chrome where I could see that it was downloaded. Clicking on the link to display the file or open the folder didn’t work.

It didn’t matter how many times I clicked that link, it wouldn’t open and to top it off, the preview image didn’t display either.

Now, for someone like me that is not the end all of trying to access the file. The more tech savvy of you are aware that in most (all?) browsers you can get to the file system of the computer.

Browsing files

In Chromium this can be achieved by typing “file://” and hitting enter in the address bar. This results in a listing of directories and files much the same as you get when you visit an open directory on the web in your browser.

If you are familiar with Linux it’s easy to find the file image you’ve saved, once you’re prepared to click on “mnt” and then find “chronos” all the way to the “downloads” folder. Easy simple. No seriously, everyone will be doing it soon so you might as well get used to it!

Chromium isn’t finished. Not by a long shot. It’s shitty even for a Linux distribution of the incredibly lame ‘made by a 1st time learner’ variety. It has no file explorer, the interface is crap, finding saved files is a nightmare and even simple things like logging on and off or even just properly shutting down your machine are lacking UI menus and buttons.

Chromium may have a place in internet cafes and libraries where a locked down environment without much functionality is required, but even there it may have problems. Printing is not supported at the moment and for those of you intending to use it at home you can forget about hooking up your portable hard drive or that nice mouse you’ve got.

If you have a laptop or even a netbook and you install Chromium then you are cutting the functionality and usefulness of that device by about 50% (90% for a decent laptop) and that’s a best case scenario. If you do eventually buy a device that is Chromium only then I’d consider getting your head examined because there are better things to spend money on, like a descent coffee machine while you save for a real laptop that can actually do things beyond just surf the web.

Back in the 90′s we had set top boxes for your TV that allowed you access the internet and had about as much functionality as Chromium. They were a gimmick. Cheap, cheerful and useless.

Do we really want to go back to that?