Pour an Ounce for Dead Homies
While that pernicious media machine announces Google’s now-vaporous Chrome OS as a Microsoft killer, I would assume it will do more as an X-Windows killer. I suppose it all depends on how good the replacement windowing system is, and how open the system is to some kind of third-party development.
If Qt and maybe GTK will ultimately target the new windowing system, we’re looking at a mini-revolution on our hands, maybe in a year or two.
Of course, I think the resistance (mostly inertia) to all this will be significant. But at least it’s an option. If most of these ingredients come together, I would expect at least one kind of bleeding-edge distribution like Arch will make the switch.
I would assume Shuttleworth would love to give X the ol’ heave-ho from Ubuntu if its replacement was sane to compile, maintain, and improve.
I’m especially bitter on the compilation front, as I’ve wasted countless hours trying to build X from scratch. For the lulz, I suppose, but it doesn’t matter: I’ve successfully built several Linux kernels, which do quite a bit more critical and complex things than draw windows on the screen. And, aside from using an incompatible compiler or something, I’ve never had a build error.
That aside, from a netbook perspective this all seems like a good idea. Cut a few abstractions off the graphics system (network transparency, etc.), make drivers easy to develop, and give Google Apps the lead role it now deserves.
I mean, seriously, take a look at Google Apps if you haven’t seen it in a year. The spreadsheet allows for matrix formulae, linear programming, conditional formatting, sane charting, import from Office, and even has a neat little integration to Google Finance where you can look up live and historic stock prices using a direct formula. This is serious stuff, like in some ways superior to Excel.
There are still acrobatics it can’t do: macros appear to be absent, you can’t color borders, I don’t think you can disable gridlines (this seems pointless but can really be pretty when done right), and named references seem clumsy. But, I would say I could even use this for the vast majority of my work.
And what I couldn’t use it for directly, I could modify really to the benefit of simplicity. My big management information spreadsheet that I’ve effectively based my whole job on here would be totally incompatible, but it’s an outside case.
I’m pretty much planning on using it for several purposes, mainly to avoid needing to install Office on every computer I touch. It even works in IE 6.