Netbook operating system

So a little while ago, I bought an ASUS eee pc 1005px for studying. It really turned out to be a neat little device. It looks great, is quiet, but reasonably powerful (in netbook terms), yet very light and has excellent battery life. The trackpad and keyboard feel very good and I even prefer them over those on my notebook. I instantly fell in love with it.

There was just on big problem: Windows 7

Image via Wikipedia

Honestly, I think 7 was a major upgrade to previous Windows versions on desktops. But whoever had the idea that it also belongs on netbooks is a fucking moron. It's sluggish and slow and takes ages to boot. Who wants that? On a mobile device such as a netbook, I want a fast operating system tailored to operate on it. It need not offer fancy graphical effects and much in terms of software apart from a webbrowser, word processing and social applications such as an email client and instant messaging.


So I went on to search the perfect netbook operating system. Let me tell you straight ahead: I did not find it. But I found some interesting options and one that was already remarkably close to it.

Image by Andrew Currie via FlickrThe first thing I tried was Ubuntu maverick merkaat netbook remix with it's then just recently released Unity interface. This wasn't the first time I used Ubuntu and I was familiar with previous versions, so my expectations were high (given I think Ubuntu is a really nice OS). Boy, this was a major let-down.

They really made a big fuzz about this new interface, praising the new vertical application dock you see on the image to the left and proclaimed that Ubuntu Unity was perfect for netbooks. What I found was that the dock is slow and awkward to handle. What's worse is that there is no way to customize it at all (the gnome panel on the top is locked,too) and you can not hide it. I mean, are you kidding me? Netbooks typically only provide a screen resolution of 1024x786. On pretty much every website I got horizontal scroll bars with this thing. It's just silly. I really can't figure out how they though this would work and didn't spot this very obvious flaw beforehand (actually, I guess they never bothered to boot Ubuntu maverick on a netbook).

I then switched over to the tradintional gnome desktop and heavily modified it to my needs. That seemed to be a fairly good solution, but I just ended up with a normal Ubuntu and nothing specifically made for netbooks.

Image by Andrew Currie via Flickr

So after a while of using Ubuntu, I wen back to searching. I found MeeGo, an OS made for mobile devices, that offered different interfaces for mobile phones, netbooks and more. It is really a nice system and I did actually like it. It looks very different from traditional systems, very much suited for netbooks (or tablets), has social networking integrated into it, as well as instant messaging etc.

The problem was that it didn't run properly on my netbook and the wireless refused to work. MeeGo is still fairly young and it seems my device just isn't fully supported yet. I will keep an eye on future releases and maybe if they turn out to work properly, I will definitely give it a (longer) try. For now, there were just way too many bugs for me to keep it.

I also found out about the upcoming google chrome OS and the whole idea of a cloud operating system sounded really nice to me. While searching the web for more information, I stumbled across jolicloud, which is just that.

Image via Wikipedia

Jolicloud is based on Ubuntu and used a modified version of Ubuntu's netbook remix in earlier versions. The current version, though, features a very unique interface, written in html5. Yes, hml5. It actually runs in a google chrome window. It's stunningly fast, slim and really perfect for netbooks. You get a nice appstore, a social stream (that I don't find very useful at the moment, for you can only see what apps people like and nothing else), an overlay for the file system that has cloud storages build into it (though in the preview version I use, these are still very buggy. Hopefully, the soon to be released final version will fix that) and access to a settings tab.

What's  really interesting is that many apps from the store are basically just links to websites that open in new chrome windows without any of the chrome interface visible. Unlike google chrome OS, though, you are not only limited to such applications, but can also choose from locally installed ones, such as open office. Your login is shared over all devices you run jolicloud on and apps will be synchronized between them automatically.

Unlike MeeGo, or Ubuntu netbook remix, jolicloud does not restrict you a lot. If you need to, you have access to all of the underlying ubuntu functionality, which I found really useful.

So yeah, I am right now very much in love with jolicloud and am looking forward to future version (as I mentioned, version 1.1 is soon to be released) and would encourage everyone to take a look. If you happen to know of any other promising OS for netbooks, drop me a message.