Review: jolicloud 1.1

I have heard several trusted sources (on TWIG, Android Central, etc) referring to Jolicloud. One even said Google should quit wasting resources on ChromeOS and just rebadge a tweaked Jolicloud.

I downloaded the .torrent and installed it in a virtualbox instance.

Initial thoughts:

• 698MB? Really? Maybe my basis for comparison is wonky since I've been using small linuxen for a few years, but 698MB for a netbook OS seems excessive.
• Torrent d/l is cool, but doesn't really seem to fit the target demographic.
• live version is a bit wonky; can't do many things.
• hangs for long periods in virtualbox: "initializing virtualbox driver" for several minutes during the install. Less of a problem once installed.
• requires 2.4GB minimum to install. Yikes.
• the integration with my.jolicloud.com is interesting
• the integration with facebook is frightening. I do NOT like this trend.
• requires a net connection - everything is in the cloud as the name suggests
• updates happened automagically. See screenshot below:

Didn't crop some of the screenshots, sorry. In case you're wondering the desktop behind the VM is the fluxbox window manager on xubuntu linux bones.

This type of greatly-simplified interface in the shot above was widely panned a few years ago when it was tried on Xandros:



Reminds me of how everyone mocked the tablet form factor until Saint Steve blessed the iPad. BTW, here's an iPad joke:

Q: how do you know if someone has an iPad?
A: they'll tell you.

True, and annoying.

This is what my little Eee notebook looks like these days. It's running Puppy 5.1.1, weighing in at ~130MB: