I gave Chromium OS a try because I wanted the fast, light performance of Bodhi Linux without the bugs, optimised for browsing with Chrome. Chromium OS is not the answer. What I didn’t realise is that Chromium OS is not intended for regular use - it’s a testing platform for features being developed for the official Chrome OS that ships on Chromebooks. Even hearing that, I wasn’t ready for it to be so sorely lacking.

I was using the ‘lime’ pre-built disk image from Hexxeh for simplicity and to ensure maximum hardware support.

First, the positive: at first glance, Chromium OS is a dream. I had none of the problems with aspect ratio that apparently can occur with many Linux distros on EeePCs, and wifi worked right out of the box, also a common issue with Linux on EeePCs - Bodhi and Ubuntu both had to be set up plugged into ethernet, to download a patch for EeePC wifi.

The interface is the cleanest I’ve ever seen, with everything you normally see on a desktop stripped away to leave just a Chrome icon, clock, google account icon and wifi indicator. Everything runs inside Chrome, including system settings and terminal, and desktop appearance is dealt with in the same menu as the Chrome theme. The downside of this clean interface is that many features rely on keyboard shortcuts - installing Chromium OS from the boot disc requires opening terminal, which can only be accessed by pressing ctrl-alt-T. I wouldn’t have known this if I hadn’t found a guide to it online.

Chromium OS isn’t as polite as Ubuntu when it comes to installation, with no option to install as a separate partition to leave the existing OS intact, so if you’re going to install it to the hard drive you’ll have to sort out the partitions yourself.

The biggest problem by far with Chromium OS is that it doesn’t work out of the box with Flash. This makes it unusable to me, as I expect my netbook to be as good for leisure as it is for work. Flash features aside, even when focusing on basic browsing tasks, Chrome caved in on me and stopped displaying web pages, bizarrely showing a reversed and enlarged version of the desktop icons in the lower right hand corner.

Flash can be installed, along with other useful things, but not in the conventional fashion through the flash site as Chromium claims to already have it installed. There is a fix, but it’s complicated, and I’m not comfortable putting the effort in.