New
#40
You are able to download the Chromium OS source code, put your own Linux packages in, and compile it for your system now if you want, but when it comes out to the public Chrome OS will only be available on designated netbooks and no "installed" applications will be allowed.
The reason why it will only be on designated netbooks is because of the optimized boot path firmware. Google wants these netbooks to cold boot in less than 5 seconds. The only way to do that is to have control on everything... down to the hardware. Choosing the best wireless card, graphics card, etc in Linux for power management / performance is important also.
In a sense this is like what Apple does with OSX on Macs, but instead of restricting the end-user to put OSX on Apple-branded computers only, Chromium OS can be put on any hardware for free but only Google "approved" netbooks will have that optimized firmware/drivers and be fully supported by Google.
As far as applications... everything will be web-based... so Google Docs, Google Mail, Google Talk, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Only HTML, CSS, JS and Flash/Silverlight/Java and server-based languages like ASP.NET, PHP, and CFM. There will be native-like applications later with Native Client (NaCl) but that won't be for a while until they can work out the portability, and security model. There will be a build in probably open source (maybe based off VLC?) media player in the Chrome web browser when Chrome OS ships. There will also be a web application "marketplace" here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore