I’ve mentioned previously that we’ve got a Dell Mini 10 netbook. To be honest, it doesn’t get as much use as it did a few years ago when we lived in St. Louis and our desktop computer(s) were on a different floor. Once we moved to Swisher, and now back to St. Louis again, the desktop is only a room away from the living room, so there isn’t much of a need to have a laptop constantly running…let alone the fact that we both have Android smartphones now, where it’s even faster to look something up quickly if it’s needed.
Thus, I get to “play” with the netbook a bit more than I used to. I find Windows XP to be extremely slow on the system: slow to boot, slow to open programs, slow to do just about anything. Therefore, I’ve toyed with a few different alternative operating systems. Because Ubuntu 11.10 appears to have some serious issues with the graphics chip on the netbook, I decided to give Jolicloud a try.
Jolicloud is based on Ubuntu, incidentally, but runs quite a bit differently. It’s designed to do everything within a browser as much as possible, though it is capable of having stand-alone programs installed as well. In the desktop screen pictured above, most of those programs are opened within the Chromium web browser. You can listen to music, edit documents, use maps, check your status updates, and browse the internet just as you can from any other computer. The benefit here, though, is that the netbook is much more responsive because all it’s effectively doing is loading a web browser.
I guess the main downside is that it really requires an internet connection of some type, so if you aren’t on wifi anywhere, you can’t use the OS (to do anything productive, at least). But hey, where does that happen anymore, anyway?
I’ve referred to cloud computing in the past. Like many things, I think it works remarkably well, but you just have to know what you’re getting into before you boot the system. Know what the strengths and weaknesses are before even trying to go that route. You can’t expect to run Photoshop using low-powered devices that are designed to only operate within a web browser. At the same time, though, you can get away with cheaper hardware with remarkably fast boot times and functionality. So yes, a trade-off.
I’m enjoying it for now, though. It’s always fun to install a new operating system and see what it can or can’t do. At the very least, it gets me to use the netbook more often. Still a good piece of hardware that has a few more years left in it due to software like Jolicloud.