OStatic

Following Google's announcement of its Chrome OS, which will arrive in late 2010 and is headed for netbooks, most reactions around the web are positive. There are some who say it has an ice cube's chance in Hell of succeeding, some who say it could be a geeks-only phenomenon, and we've provided our assessment of the mixed chances that Chrome OS has. There's no question that it is attracting interest from hardware developers and others, though. As a blog post from Google and IDG News Service report, Hewlett-Packard (the number one PC maker), Acer and Asus--all big players in the netbook arena--are among early Chrome OS partners.?

Today, Hewlett-Packard--the world's number one PC vendor--has announced a new line of notebook computers called ProBooks, with one shown here. The systems fall into the prosumer space (professional/consumer) and are bigger and more fully stocked than most netbooks. Notably, HP is offering SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 as an operating system choice on the ProBooks, in addition to Windows Vista and XP. HP's arch-rival Dell is also continuing to ship portable computers with Linux installed, and is seeing many users satisfied with Linux. Can Linux remain a fixture on portable systems?