While an alternative desktop and notebook PC operating system is great news, I have concerns about Google Chrome OS, and that is the availability of device drivers such as display and sound card or chip drivers, printer, scanner, mobile phone, some audio and video player, WiFi-USB dongles and other device drivers for Chrome OS.

Almost all of these devices come with a CD containing the Windows drivers and fewer with, with device drivers for Mac OS platforms and most reasonably tech-savvy users can follow the instructions and intuitively install the device drivers with the aid of wizards available especially with Windows 95 and later versions.

And if the CD is unavailable, which often is the case since many users think them inconsequential and misplace or discard them, it's no problem to search for and download them off the Internet, an install them.

One of my hobbies is upgrading old PCs or helping friends to do so and I can safely say that I could find the drivers for its display cards, sound cards, printers, scanners and so on off the Internet over 99% of the time.

However, it was quite a different story with Linux, where there were much fewer device drivers even with versions available up to two years ago and even if they are available, installing them usually had to be done through the command line using a series of long and rather complex command strings, which was a rather daunting for those unfamiliar with Unix commands and sometimes even if one is familiar with them, the installation process may not work due to other issues in the Linux kernel (core) or its dependencies, which would require programming knowledge to fix.

While recent Linux “distributions” as they are called come with wizards to install software and drivers,  the number of available Linux drivers is still fewer than those for Windows and even for Mac OS.

So while Chrome OS is Linux-based and will most probably be supported by a huge developer community, much like Linux has today, still the lack of drivers for the many devices we connect to desktop or notebook PCs these days could prove to be a major deterrent to its mass adoption, especially on the desktop.

One of the reasons for the lack of device drivers for Linux is due to the GNU General Public Licence governing it, which requires all of its source codes be made publicly available so others can modify them but that's deterred device manufactures from divulging proprietary information about their products, since unlike with a proprietary operating system who can be bound by non-disclosure agreements, with open source Linux, there's nobody for device manufacturers to sign a don-disclosure agreement with.

Well Chrome OS may be different and my concerns may be unfounded but we'll only know for sure only after it's released.

How well it meets these needs will significantly affect people's decision to use it or to stick with Windows.