gOS: The Ubuntu giant killer?

The history of computing is one of giants being toppled. Remember DEC and Wang? No? Well, that says a lot. 

A giant is in the process of being toppled right now. Arguably, Microsoft is thrashing about in death throes as the era of personal computing ends.

At the moment, Ubuntu is the giant of the Linux world. If giants are always being toppled, and if you read any of the social networking sites such as Digg, you might get the impression that gOS is just about to do that. Is it true? Is gOS an Ubuntu killer?

Let’s take a look at the newest beta release—”3.0 Gadgets Beta“—to find out. 

What is gOS?

First, let’s be clear about what gOS is. But finding this out is harder than it sounds. Just two sentences appear on the gOS “About” webpage and, perhaps wrongly, this gave me the impression of people who don’t want to reveal too much. However, in the Press Releases section, they’re a little more open:

gOS is a new open source startup dedicated to bringing Linux mainstream. Its new Linux-based operating system, called gOS, is beautifully designed to use Google, MySpace and other “Web 2.0” apps. In November 2007, gOS launched a $199 desktop, the gPC into Wal-Mart with Everex. In the first two weeks, the Everex gPC sold out of Wal-Mart. 

Wikipedia has more details, but it’s clear this is a company with ambition. Not only that but it has what we here in England call gumption (look it up in your dictionary)—it’s getting results at a commercial level, which is more than can be said for many comercially-oriented distributions of Linux, most of which have been struggling to do so for years. 

But what you actually get if you install gOS is Ubuntu. It isn’t that gOS takes Ubuntu 8.04.1 as a base, in the same way Ubuntu takes Debian as a base. gOS takes Ubuntu and repurposes it, applying a different visual style and a handful of apps, mostly concerned with Google functionality. But underneath it’s Ubuntu 8.04.1. Here’s the contents of /etc/lsb-base on an gOS 3.0 Beta installation:

gos@livecd:~$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=8.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=hardy
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 8.04.1"

It’s like taking a Ford car, repainting it, adding in a new air freshener, and calling it the Foobar 3000.

If I were being cruel I would say that gOS 3.0 Beta is simply Ubuntu with a customized desktop and a Google fixation. But that doesn’t do it justice because the additions really do make for a different kind of experience. 

However, a brief peek at the /etc/apt/sources.list file shows that gOS even uses the same-old Ubuntu servers too. Do they have permission to do this? After all, this is effectively one commercial enterprise configuring its product to leech bandwidth from another commercial enterprise. It’s like AOL giving out AT&T’s tech support phone number.

The Applications, Preferences and Administration menus are almost exactly the same as Ubuntu 8.04, although they all spring-off a gOS Start-like button at the top left of the screen. The relevant applications look, feel and operate exactly the same, aside from a questionable green/grey visual theme, of which more later. Evolution is perhaps wisely eschewed in favor of Thunderbird, however, and both Rhythmbox and Totem have gone, to be replaced by the venerable Mplayer. Additionally, Wine is a standard feature.  

There’s nothing wrong with this kind of appropriation, of course. That’s what open source is about. At least gOS hasn’t gone down the path of taking open source apps and renaming them, like some commercial releases of Ubuntu do (wherein Firefox is renamed “Foobar Internet Suite“, and so on).

And the benefit of an “appropriation approach” is that you know exactly how to operate gOS—all your mad Ubuntu skillz will work just fine. 

The desktop

As gOS boots you’re treated to an explosion of greens and grays. The GRUB menu uses a wallpaper with the gOS logo behind, and Usplash shows a customized gOS progress indicator. I must admit that I liked this, and even found it vaguely uplifting, if only because Ubuntu’s choice of browns and oranges tend to be dreary. (I sometimes often wonder if Ubuntu’s visual design team has been infiltrated by goths.) 

When the desktop appears, the wallpaper is green, and the window decorations a rather murky green/grey mixture, with the close/minimize/maximize buttons on the left, as with Mac OS. No other themes are installed, so short of using Synaptic to grab some more theme packages, you’re stuck with it. 

In many ways, the gOS desktop reminds me of SUSE Linux releases from about four or five years ago, which had a similar love of green and grey. All that’s missing is the gecko icon. This impression is reinforced by the fonts, which are almost universally set at a tiny 8pt (SUSE Linux used to struggle to detect a monitor’s DPI settings, leaving the fonts sometimes too small to be readable).

gOS uses GNOME, with a single top panel, and a Mac OS-like dock at the bottom (wbar). The dock is simply an application launch toolbar with OS X-like “zoom” animation effects when you mouse-over icons. Applications minimize to a standard GNOME Window List applet on the panel at the top of the screen. Perhaps annoyingly, the dock doesn’t even indicate which apps are running—there’s no orb or pointer underneath each icon, as with OS X, or other Linux dock-emulation projects, such as AWM. Additionally, the dock is entirely unaware of what’s already running—if you click the Gmail button when an instance of Gmail is already running, a new one will start.

Applications

Several dock buttons are provided by default: Firefox, Gmail, Google Calendars, Google Docs, YouTube, Pigdin, Skype, and OpenOffice Writer, Calc and Impress. The Google buttons use Mozilla Prism (version 0.8), which is effectively Firefox without the toolbars. The Google application webpages simply appear in a program window frame on the desktop. This works surprisingly well—I’m typing this review in Google Docs in a Prism window, and it feels natural and intuitive. Newbie users might even be unaware that they’re running an online application, which I guess is the point. 

Additionally, a shortcut on the gOS menu links to the Google Gears installation page, a Firefox add-on which should let you use the Google Docs applications offline (and, eventually, the Google Mail app too). Unfortunately, no instructions are provided, and I couldn’t get this working in my tests (I got it installed but it refused to sync, with the progress bar stuck at 0%).

The downsides of Prism is that it’s not clear how to configure the applications—I couldn’t find a way to enable live spellchecking in the Google Docs application, for example, which should be possible because it is essentially Firefox. Right-clicking on the user interface appeared to be captured by the AJAX magic of the Google apps themselves. 

When Prism apps minimize to the top panel, they use the standard Prism icon, rather than those of the Google applications. This is a little annoying because it makes “at a glance” spotting of minimized apps hard and you have to read the text alongside. 

The YouTube button didn’t work in my tests, so I couldn’t find out what it offered. The other Google apps worked fine.

Widgets

The big new feature of this release of gOS is the Google Widgets, several of which are crammed onto the desktop at the right-hand side, just like Windows Vista (in fact, too many are activated out of the box—several overlapped on my 1280×800 screen, making for a cluttered appearance).

On the MacBook I used to test gOS, I saw a batery power widget, a weather globe widget, a Google calendar widget, a calculator, and a pot plant. Gadgets can be added by clicking the applet in the notification area on the top panel. (This icon appears to be, confusingly, a Windows logo.)

Desktop effects (Compiz) are not activated by default, even though I ran gOS on a notebook with an Intel graphics chip for which drivers are open source. So there isn’t really any excuse NOT to activate them. However, if you attempt to activate effects manually (right-click the desktop, click Change Desktop Background, and then click the Visual Effects tab), you’ll get a scary warning that Compiz isn’t installed. I don’t know what’s going on here. At a guess I suspect visual effects somehow screw-around with the widgets but I didn’t test this to find out.

It’s perhaps worth pointing out that gOS comes with a handful of proprietary apps installed by default—Adobe Flash player, for example, and Skype. Picasa is also installed, continuing the Google obsession, although Google Earth and Google Desktop aren’t. Multimedia codecs are also installed courtesy of Mplayer, and I wonder how gOS is dealing with the patenting implications of distributing codecs. Ubuntu leaves the decision up to the user.

Verdict

There’s a lot to like in this release of gOS, but Ubuntu fans have nothing to be worried about. This ain’t gonna topple the world’s favorite Linux anytime soon. Indeed, it’s not in gOS’ interest to do that. And I don’t really think that’s the intention anyway. The gOS guys seem to have OEM partnerships in mind. This is pretty smart, but it’s just one small component of Ubuntu’s plans for world domination. 

I really liked the Google/web 2.0 integration of gOS, and it works surprisingly well. I must confess that I had expected to hate it. But I wonder why there isn’t an existing Ubuntu-sponsored project to meet the same ends. This is such an obvious avenue to travel down that it’s surprising only gOS is doing so.

But gOS may well be 5-10 years ahead of its time. At the beginning of this review I mentioned that Microsoft’s demise is because the era of personal computing is coming to an end. This is true, but while personal computing is dying, it isn’t dead yet. gOS looks to a future of shared computing, rather than personal computing, but the guys behind it ought to remember that being too early with a technology can be as bad as being too late. Timing is everything.  

In summing-up on a practical level, I’d say that if gOS has a fault it’s that it’s a little rough-and-ready. It feels clumsy. Some of this might be down to the beta status of the release I looked at, but I don’t think that explains all of it. There’s a feeling of disparate things being thrown together (a disease that has blighted many up-and-coming Linux distros).

Ubuntu excels in sheer attention to detail, and this was something new that it brought to the world of Linux that accounted for its success. Some of that attention would be welcome here. 

You can download the public beta of gOS yourself and try it out. I advise you to do so. I don’t think most of us will switch to it anytime soon, but it’s an interesting future echo of the way things might be in a few years’ time.

(C) 2008 Keir Thomas. You may reproduce the above on your blog provided that an author credit is given and a link to www.ubuntukungfu.com is clearly shown.
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My name is Keir Thomas and I write books about Ubuntu.