Joli OS 1.2 first impressions

In brief, I like it but there are some issues and enhancements that would be very nice...
I have been wanting a "mobile" OS to run on my netbook (Asus T101-MT) for about 4 mos now.

Personal adventure which lead to Joli OS:
I really like the concept of this OS. I tried chromium OS about 1.5 yrs ago in its infancy and I thought it was ok but this gives some wrapper around what that was at the time. I haven't tried chromium OS since then so it may be better now. I also tried meego (before nokia went suicidal) and it had too little useable content for my needs. I tried using Ubuntu 10.04 netbook remix and I actually liked it a little for this except that Unity didn't really seemed to be designed with multi-touch or even touchscreen for that matter. The application buttons on the left expected a more continual mouse movement instead of jumping. Therefore, I found myself having to drag my finger across them to get to the application i needed instead of just touching. I ended up installing ubuntu 10.04 with all the t101-mt fixins prescribed on ubuntu's website and it worked well enough. Had to make a panel icon for inverting the screen though since this doesn't have an accelerometer. I was ok with that until I ended up updating to 11.04 recently and the same issue plagues unity. It really doesn't seem like it came very far from what it was. I also tried installing android x86 but it didn't end up installing at all. Didn't investigate too much though.

What is good about it?
Stable - It has not crashed on me yet and it seems to be resilient against my attempts to do stupid things
Web Apps - Despite its infancy, it has may applications (even if a good portion of them are just links) I won't declare web apps to be the future but I think they are a good change of pace and will have their place. You can also create your own web-apps (http links).
Social media - Beyond the identi.ca, twitter, and facebook apps, you can "follow" other joli users. That is, you can see what apps they have favorited.

What could be improved?
terminal - Don't mistake the google terminal for terminal. You have to press alt+F1 (or was it F2) to get a real terminal . I found this trying to switch to a virtual terminal. There is only one virtual terminal I found and it is alt+ctrl+F2. alt+ctrl+F1 is the X session instead of 7.
connections - while it shows a few, there could be many more on here. I have added probably 10 account types and only 3 show up.
application grouping / ordering / folders - there is the little field at the top you can type in for launching applications but I would like a more customizable interface. This is too iphone-esque to me. I have the same complaint about android "applications" application. Something like androids "Super App Manager" would be nicer.
notifications - are there any? Should be able to customize them for gmail, facebook, etc. I am trying to avoid using chromium web-apps for the time being as long as I can find it for joli OS as that just seems to defeat the purpose to me.
Stuff that is just broken:
proxy - I have filed a support ticket with jolicloud for this.
virtual keyboard - just gotta have this nowadays. Especially if you expect to see this on tablets ever.


I just hope someone actually reads this. :)

1 comments:

Cait said...

Found you on Twitter. :) I wrote a Blogger review on Joli just yesterday.

Check out cellwriter for a virtual keyboard. It's not as good as the one included in Windows 7, but it's the best solution I've found so far.

Also check out easystroke for finger gestures.

As for the terminal problem, this drove me nuts too. I just added a launcher for it to the top gnome panel.

Cheers.

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