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Dev boots a PC from Google Drive cloud storage — a storage-less laptop becomes a truly cloud-native computer (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 4 months ago by gedaliyah to c/technology

65 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Ersei, the developer behind this so-called Cloud Native Computer, says the project was primarily a “silly” pursuit. There is also a problem with booting from Google Drive currently being very slow. However, the dev also boasts that “the possibilities are endless” and would welcome any companies or individuals who wish to get in contact and discuss commercializing this project or something related to it.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 4 months ago (2 children)

This is different (and far less practical than Apple's approach). This one doesn't download the OS and store it, it pulls the files from Google drive every time they're accessed, so it's incredibly slow by comparison, but is technically running from the cloud. The Apple one downloads everything it needs and stores it, then pulls from that local copy.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

So it's like PXE booting without a permanent local disk. If you have enough RAM, that's probably fine.

Or is it only downloading the kernel and loading literally everything else over the net with no RAM cache? If so, that's terrifying.

[–] cley_faye 5 points 4 months ago

I'd argue it's a bit worse than PXE booting, since they talk about having the actual bootloader on a USB stick, whereas the same thing could have been done by having the boot process remote too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Yeah I believe it's loading everything over the net. I haven't looked super closely into it. I'm not sure what, if any, practical applications there are for this. Seems like it's just a fun impractical project. I'm here for it. But you're right about it being terrifying lol.