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. :)