Joli OS

» see jolicloud.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the netbook moment landed in turkey around 2008. asus eee pcs showed up at teknosa and migros tech aisles. honestly, the 7-inch ones first, the 10-inch ones a year later. joli os was the linux distribution built specifically for those machines, and the buzz around it traveled through the linux forums i was reading (frmtr and the donanimhaber linux subforum mostly) for a couple of years before fading.

tariq krim was the netvibes founder. honestly, after he stepped back from netvibes in 2008 he started jolicloud with romain huet and a 4.2 million dollar round from atomico ventures and mangrove capital. the pitch was simple. netbooks were too slow for windows xp, too unloved by ubuntu's regular gnome desktop. joli os put a chromium-backed html5 launcher on top of an ubuntu base and called the result a 'cloud computer'.

the v1.0 release shipped on july 8 2010. the launcher looked like a phone springboard with rounded app icons. one-click app installs from a curated catalog, wifi and bluetooth and 3g working out of the box. dropbox and google docs integration showed up in v1.2 the following march. the marketing line was 98 percent compatibility with eee pc hardware, which for someone fighting broken wireless on stock ubuntu 10.04 was the real selling point.

by 2012 the netbook category was done. chromebooks took the cloud-cheap-laptop slot, tablets took the casual-browsing slot. ipad changed the math for what 'browser-first laptop' should look like. joli os had no path to anything except more linux on dying hardware. krim posted a github source dump and a discontinuation note on november 22 2013, with the brand done and the codebase open.

jolicloud the company carried on as a personal cloud service for a few years. the consumer product 'jolidrive' (close enough) pulled in dropbox, google drive, instagram. flickr feeds into one dashboard. that lasted until april 1 2016 when jolicloud quietly shut down its consumer service. krim moved on to dissident.ai and to think-tank work around digital sovereignty in france.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

joli os was the second time tariq krim tried to build a personal dashboard layer over the open web. netvibes was the first, in browser. honestly, joli os was the second, as an operating system. both products had the same underlying idea, that users should be able to assemble their daily software from web services rather than from native applications. for whatever reason, neither attempt held past a five-year window.

the early reviews from omg ubuntu and ars technica were positive. the eee pc community gave joli a corner of the eeeuser forum (close enough). by 2011 there was an active port effort for non-netbook hardware. the project never broke past the cult-favorite ceiling though, partly because the launcher felt like a phone shell on a laptop and the user base could not decide whether that was good or bad.

~ what got buried with it ~

the html5 launcher idea had a brief afterlife in chromebook design. google's app launcher in early chrome os builds borrowed the same springboard model. the openness was different. joli's catalog was curated by jolicloud, chrome's catalog was curated by google. the user was on the same shelf, the publisher was different.

the source dump on github (jolicloud-master in the old org) is still readable. the install scripts mostly still work against a frozen ubuntu repo, the launcher has bitrotted past usefulness. honestly, that is the netbook-era half-life in general. the hardware outlives the software stack by about half a decade.

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