Heard at SCALE 6x: The Everex Cloudbook will ship with a much improved version of gOS
I've been as critical of gOS as anybody, maybe even more so. The Ubuntu-derived OS that first ran the $199 Everex desktop offering that sold through Wal-Mart and a few others was a distribution that was far from ready for prime time, as they say.
At the ZaReason booth, the company, which sells Everex in addition to Ubuntu-friendly desktops and laptops, had an Everex Cloudbook running. Sure it's small, but the screen looks great.
The gOS desktop was as green as ever, but something looked different. Earl Malmrose, the CTO of ZaReason told me that the version of gOS on the Cloudbook includes the GNOME desktop and all the GNOME tools. It's still green in hue, still has that toolbar across the bottom for all the Web 2.0 applications that gOS is built around, but with GNOME instead of Enlightenment, doing any kind of configuration will be much, much easier.
I don't know who's whose idea this is, but whoever it is, we're thinking alike.
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Surely "whose idea"?
Highlighting a new Web 3.0 innovation: an AJAXy PEBKAC indicator, for when a spellchecker just isn't enough.... :)
No, really, Who Is this Mr. Idea, anyway?
If they are using Gnome... wouldn't that be Ubuntu and not gOS?
Surely not. "who's idea" is grammatically correct.
@Pete
It's gOS with GNOME. The screen's still green, it still emphasizes Web 2.0 apps, it still has that toolbar on the bottom of the screen with all those icons you can click to start Google Docs, Wikipedia, Gmail, etc. (though I recommend NOT using the doc and instead starting everything from the toolbar in Firefox).
So it looks the same but has all the configuration power of GNOME to go along with it.
I've heard a whole lot of talk about how great Enlightenment is, and my only experience with it is through gOS version 1, in which Enlightment not only used more memory than GNOME, it was also slower.
@pedant
Thanks for the correction! It's "whose," all right.
For those interested, here's a link to the CloudBook Forum: http://forums.cloudbooklounge.com/
Having worked on gOS myself, I can say that they are infact switching to Ubuntu...so it's really just a green out-of-the-box Ubuntu. Don't waste your time...
As far as people saying Gnome is faster than E17...LMFAO. Not even close. I have them both installed here and I can tell you from working with both, that E17 is light-years faster.
Going for Gnome instead of enlightement is a big improvement. You can capitalise on tons of tutorial made by Ubuntu corp/fans.
The next big step is when Google Gear is mature enough & all google apps will be upgraded to this platform/software. This would allows online apps to be run offline.
For computers with the specs of the Everex, GNOME will run extremely well, and it makes no sense to hobble gOS, which suffered from a woeful lack of tools and documentation in its first incarnation.
If nothing ever goes wrong or needs to be adjusted, fine, but most people will run into trouble of one sort or another, and that's where having all the GNOME tools will come in handy.
Re: Google Gears -- the offline functionality will be great when it finally arrives. I give gOS credit for being out in front of this. Still, the fact is that anybody, on any OS, can make full use of the Web 2.0 apps that gOS features. And when you're running gOS, you realize pretty quickly that the toolbar at the bottom of the screen is not really necessary. It helps tremendously in marketing -- buyers see the familiar icons and know what the computer can do. But once you get to using gOS, it's better to start up Firefox and do everything from the toolbar or favorites.
And with GNOME, gOS looked great on the Cloudbook's little screen, which is suprisingly crisp.
http://gosforums.org