Is this the new Chrome O/S making an arrival via Acer Aspire?
According to DailyTech, the first Chrome OS Netbooks are on their way, and to be expected as soon as next month, presumably December 2010. Does that mean that the Google Chrome operating system (O/S) will come bundled with only certain brands of PC’s, such as Acer, and the Acer Aspire One, depicted above? I don’t have an alternative solution, not initially. It certainly would be nice to switch between operating systems with the same ease that one can choose between browsers, while continuing to use the same physical hardware.
At the moment, I can combine Windows 7 with any of IE8, Firefox or Chrome with the greatest of ease. It remains for the imagination to see a future where I can just as easily change the O/S, e.g. start with Windows 7 and Google Chrome browser, then select Google Chrome O/S while retaining Google Chrome Browser. Finally, imagine running the Chrome O/S using either IE 8.0 or Opera browsers!
And please put aside any questions along the lines of, “But WHY would anyone want to do such a thing?” I confess, I have no answer for that at the moment.
Photo Credit: Acer Aspire One with Chrome O/S via DailyTech
Ellie Asks Why 
This inspired me to check out Chrome OS a bit. What you gain is a nicer way to use the internet. What you lose is any ability to run any app locally. I think of video editing, where having that video on a hard drive and editing it locally is the only way to go. But maybe it’s not the only way to go, and strategic caching of the right part of the application and data in the browser will work? All I know is that right now we don’t have the bandwidth or the apps to make this model work. Which is only to say that being a first adopter is never easy, and maybe the whole world will work as Chrome OS envisions … in five years.
Meanwhile, for me, now, it’d be useless.
As for running multiple OSes at the same time, that’s doable today. Download VirtualBox (free) and follow their directions to install a version of Ubuntu Linux (free) and go to town. For a while I ran Windows on my Mac, which I did simply because I had some PC software I wanted to run, some web pages I wanted to browse with IE, etc.
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