Jolicloud Alpha 2 Review

In the near future many personal devices are going to be solely operating over the internet. Operating systems will soon only become internet browsers, as everything you require will be available online (an example would be using Google Docs instead of Microsoft Word, Gmail instead of Outlook). Even Microsoft is planning on releasing free online-only versions of Office. Jolicloud is the first “Cloud” concept I’ve tried, but I will admit that we still have a long ways to go.

I was pretty excited when I first heard about Jolicloud. I signed up for the beta and just recently received an invitation to their Alpha testing. They obviously have some pretty good UI designers, however that is not enough to bring it all together.

Jolicloud runs off of Ubuntu Remix, which is a version of Ubuntu optimized for netbooks. The interface is sleek and the installation of new Apps* is extremely simple.

What’s important to note is that their Apps* are basically bookmarks. Jolicloud does nothing but install bookmarks to your interface, and upon clicking any of the bookmarks, just simply launches an internet browser. You can see where it was trying to be a Cloud OS, but the part it fails at is being minimalistic. From what I can tell, most of Ubuntu Remix is still in place making the experience must slower than it could be.

What’s even more useless is their “Social Notifications” tab. It would make sense to have Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, etc updates in there, but instead, just says what Apps your other Jolicloud friends have installed. It’s the same as getting alerted every time one of your friends adds a bookmark to Firefox. What is the point?

As a matter in fact, why wouldn’t you just use Ubuntu Remix instead? It’s not hard to add bookmarks to your favorite pages. Why install an Operating System that has a much smaller user base than Ubuntu, when it basically is Ubuntu?

I’m going to stick with the development of Jolicloud, but for the time being I wouldn’t recommend even trying it out. When it comes to a true Cloud OS, it looks like Good OS Cloud is going to be one of the first out.

Update: I posted a question on Jolicloud’s facebook group about if the apps are simply bookmarks. A day later, my question was deleted. Maybe I’m onto something?