What! Google is releasing a new Chrome OS. Wow! Hold on there…. Read carefully, it’s just another Linux distro, maybe with a new UI. But just read what’s is written on the blog…

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Emphasis mine. What about apps that already work on other standard compliant browsers? I bet they will work too. I read that post and it made me smile; no it made me laugh. Talk about marketing hype. Come on, it’s just the Chrome browser ported on to Linux, probably using GTK+ or something else. But branding it as another OS, sheesh! At the very least Google could have called it a Chrome distro.

Well the general move everywhere is away from the desktop to full online apps, so it doesn’t come as a surprise to me. In fact, after ranting about web-applications taking over the desktop just yesterday this almost makes me feel vindicated! 😀