I’m writing this in the browser as I tend to do, though instead of running Windows or OSX, I’m using Jolicloud on my netbook. I’ve had it loaded previously, but since I hacked the system with a new wireless card (to hackintosh) it failed to work without a wired connected, severely limiting my desire to use it. Recently though Jolicloud released a more public beta and I loaded it up yesterday from Windows 7 and Jolicloud took care of everything …
A few system updates later (seems every OS has that post load) I’m really pleased with how Jolicloud runs. The metaphor is a bit different than most operating systems – for starters, you need to have a live connection to do most everything. This is great for most things, but something to really consider if you travel around as you won’t be able to do much without finding your way online.
Jolicloud runs over ubuntu from what I can tell, and while it’s linux all the geeky stuff is hidden away behind a simple interface that’s essentially just a launcher. The “apps” you load are all single window browser apps via Mozilla Prism. Just like running prism on a standard pc or Fluid on your mac, these apps look like apps when you use your task switcher, but also have the limits of just being in the browser. A few examples of minor limits are no easy way to see you’ve got new mail with Gmail or ?alerts from twitter. These are hardly deal breakers, but certainly adjustments you need to make.
I’ve encountered a few bugs (this is pre-release) which will hopefully be resolved in time for the full release.
- The first is that Prism is not maintaining my login from Firefox to the Prsim web app. I’m thinking this should work as it’s running from the same base, though perhaps I am misunderstanding how Prism utilizes the Firefox system.
- A more serious issue is that it’s impossible to use Facebook Connect to login to various sites. When I’ve clicked to use it Firefox loads from Prism and instead of redirecting back to Prism, the page load dies. This one neds to be fixed so things are considerably more fluid
Jolicloud is really a slick system. I’d definitely recommend checking it out for someone less geeky and using one of the linux based netbooks. Coming from Windows, there are going to be some adjustments (no real offline apps), but for casual computing it’s a great system.