Most important question: can I run Lineage on it, or will this be the start of a departure of Google allowing OEM unlock on Android?
Googlebook
671–680 of 1001 posts
Re: Googlebook
#672Would prefer a 'Google Linux'—a native desktop OS with a unified UI philosophy, similar to a macOS experience but built on a standard Linux foundation. Instead of ChromeOS or Android as the base, treat them as subsystems for compatibility. The real 'next big thing' would be integrating an engine like Gemini with OS-level hooks (similar to the OpenClaw approach) so agents can manipulate app windows and state directly.…
They would never build something so open.
Re: Googlebook
#673Would prefer a 'Google Linux'—a native desktop OS with a unified UI philosophy, similar to a macOS experience but built on a standard Linux foundation. Instead of ChromeOS or Android as the base, treat them as subsystems for compatibility. The real 'next big thing' would be integrating an engine like Gemini with OS-level hooks (similar to the OpenClaw approach) so agents can manipulate app windows and state directly.…
I don't know, but they do let you run Linux in a VM already on Chromebook. Hopefully that will continue.
Re: Googlebook
#674what a stupid name
Re: Googlebook
#675Would prefer a 'Google Linux'—a native desktop OS with a unified UI philosophy, similar to a macOS experience but built on a standard Linux foundation. Instead of ChromeOS or Android as the base, treat them as subsystems for compatibility. The real 'next big thing' would be integrating an engine like Gemini with OS-level hooks (similar to the OpenClaw approach) so agents can manipulate app windows and state directly.…
I can't see how this would be meaningfully different from ChromeOS. Google cannot force GNOME and KDE to stop clashing, there's no opportunity to "unify" the UI philosophy of Linux any better than the current efforts do. And upstream Linux has no big selling point for most users - the people that do care about that stuff will typically avoid Google's distro altogether.
If you want an upstream Linux kernel with folders of markdown prompts and virtualized ChromeOS/Android containers, just use Linux. You don't need to wait for Google to build that experience for you.
Re: Googlebook
#676So, I'm only slightly trying to be a smartass here, but... Who is this for? They are marketing what is ostensibly a computer for people who seem to not want to use a computer in scenarios that I don't think even exist. Beyond that, this is a laptop that is running a really shitty, 'apps only, no you cannot do anything useful with this' operating system. I have an awful lot of complaints about MacOS's relatively restr…
> So, I'm only slightly trying to be a smartass here, but... Who is this for?
The primary difference between a Chromebook and a Googlebook appears to be the ability to run LLM's locally.
The requirements were spelt out at Google I/O. They boil down to a 40 TOPS NPU and a minimum of 16GB of memory. They appear to be trying to match Apple's M series memory bandwidth using software compression. ChromeOS didn't need an NPU and specified a minimum of 4GB of memory. Aluminium OS looks to have the same relationship with its LLM as a Chromebook did with Google Chrome, and needs the hardware to power it.
If they pull it off you will get GPT-4 performance, running locally.
As for who this is for: your guess is as good as mine. But if their replacement for crostini works (crostini is so hopelessly unreliable it felt like it never got out of beta, so it's a big if), even the minimum specs would be a very good Linux laptop.
Re: Googlebook
#677It was super disorienting for me to see the cursor pointing different directions depending on which direction it was moving.
I wonder if 1) it's actually going to be like that and not just an aesthetic for the ad, and 2) if I would ever get used to a cursor working that way.
Re: Googlebook
#678Is this an April 1st thing?
Re: Googlebook
#679Gross. This is just more proof that corporations simply don't know how to market AI. Everything is an ad for an ad at this point. The very first thing they show this new machine doing is helping people shop for clothes using AI. No one is doing that, these people don't exist. No matter how hard corporate America wishes they did. This is why AI doesn't sell. This is why companies like Microsoft and Dell are pulling ba…
Huh, I shopped for clothes using AI today. Not super relevant to the Googlebook ad, but in case the perspective is interesting to you: I'm quite tall (194cm) but not very wide, so I usually struggle with buying clothes online. I used AI to scrape a bunch of clothing stores to see whether they sold a men's shirt with an LT or slim fit size, in stock, and matching a particular vibe.
> I used AI to scrape a bunch of clothing stores
I wonder if for the next period websites will really try hard to prevent scraping (already happening, in some industries very pervasive, i.e. its impossible to get accurate quote for power) until they realize they can sell much more to people using agents.
Or everything just going to race to the bottom like a manufacturer or distributor since it's so easy to find everything anything you need. Kinda already happening with saas companies loosing value while infrastructure is soaring.
Re: Googlebook
#680No spec, no price. Who are the marketing people coming up with these shitty announcements?