Chromium Interlude

Almost there - Pic by blogSpotter

by blogSpotter

We’re deeply into Christmas season and I’m hearing the songs of Johnny Mathis, Andy Williams, Perry Como and everyone else associated with this mellow, chestnut-roasted season.   A version of Hell would be where you have to listen to these forever and always, all through the year.  I’ll put away my inner Scrooge to remark on the weather..Dallas has had a freaky warm spell with temps in the high 70’s for the first week of December -- odd but I’m OK with it.  

This week, I did a geek thing (imagine that!).   I was intrigued by the sleek $299 Samsung Chromebook I saw at Best Buy.  I decided to “try before I buy” and installed the Chromium OS on a 4GB USB stick.  If I were less lazy I’d look up the web link for the install process -- just Google it.  I have a 2009 Acer Aspire netbook which runs Windows 7.  It ran like a whiz when it was new, but I fear it’s developed the dreaded “Windows-sclerosis”.  That’s a condition where viruses, trojans, obsolete files, bloated software and other things bring your system to a crawl.  It happens to systems in the 3 to 5 year age bracket.  I'm sure that a more vigilant me could prevent this.

Anyhow, I decided Mr. Aspire would be the perfect candidate for Chromification. That is exactly what I did to it.  As a matter of fact, I’m preparing this blog on my Acer “Chrome Book”.  I have some impressions to share both PRO and CON...

PRO’s

1. It boots in 30 seconds... the only thing faster would be an “instant-on” iPad.
2. It has a clean, pretty, minimal interface.   As a Windows Vista critic once said, an OS should mainly get the hell out of the way...   Chromium does that admirably.
3. If you’re not doing intense photo editing or gaming (I’m not) -- Chromium comes with everything you need for web-surfing, blogging, shopping, emailing and Facebooking. I’m typing this blog with Office-compatible Google docs.
4. It does system updates without fuss or fanfare.  Chromium (for the most part, see CONs) doesn’t require the user to have a Masters in Computer Science.

CON’s

1. This Chrome Vanilla release has a fairly serious glitch -- it won’t play Adobe Flash videos. If you try, the provider (eg, Netflix) will tell you that you don’t have the latest Flash Player.  If you click to download it, Chromebook intervenes to tell you that you already have it.  
2. Chromium can’t disguise or escape its Linux roots.  It gives cryptic, weird messages on some things if you go off the “happy path”.  
3. I tried to download Firefox browser -- it happily downloaded a file whose type I didn’t recognize.  It now sits in my Download folder like a mysterious comp sci artifact.    Both Windows and Mac know that I’m lazy, in a hurry and don’t want to learn anything about unpacking a tar file.  When I say “install” that’s it -- I want it to automagically install.  

So where does that leave me?   For blogging and trivial stuff, I’m fine.  I can zap around to any site... This certainly won’t be an entertainment machine until Adobe flash gets figured out.  

The visuals are nice -- I have an undersea wallpaper and a tropical fish sign-on icon.  If Google can figure out some of the above-mentioned problems, this could be a big seller.  At $299, the Chromebook is at least $100 less than the next cheapest anything (tablet, phone, computer).  I never thought I’d see a flavor of Linux that breaks through the circle of Geek but Chromium almost does.   I’ll keep watching this to see what it might do next.     

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