FROM THE IGLOO

After building and playing with Chrome OS for the last little while and looking through a lot of the reviews that have been posted there’s little left to say. But the one thing that that they are doing that I really like is that they are segmenting out the users information from the operating system. In Chrome OS they are doing this by putting the users data into the cloud and making the file system holding the OS as read only. In practice I’ve been doing something similar for over ten years for a number of different reasons.

On my computer there are always two disks installed, one that holds the OS and one that holds my user data. I like the segmentation because it lets me pave my OS without having to worry about loosing my data beforehand in the event that something goes sideways with my computer. Now while the data can be moved around getting a Windows based OS to behave like it’s on a read only file system is a difficult task. Thankfully there’s Deep Freeze to protect the operating system once it’s installed and configured to my liking.

It will be interesting to see what Google actually releases as a final product in a year when the devices start to show up with the OS installed, and it’s also going to be interesting to see what the adoption rate for people living full time in the cloud will be.