I liked it here, at my desk… safe.

2 years later and I still prefer using desktop software but have slowly made my data accessible to me anywhere over the Internet. I manage my email through a desktop client but it’s also all stored online (Gmail, Hotmail), my bookmarks are all kept in del.icio.us, I use FeedDemon which synchronises my feeds to NewsGator online, my documents are stored in a couple places including Live Mesh and Office Live and all my photos are backed up. I have almost a dozen social network profiles and 5 different email accounts.

In fact the only thing that I hadn’t moved online was my actual desktop itself. After trying out the tech preview of Live Mesh my interest became aroused in the whole subject as I wanted something more fully featured.

I managed to find almost a dozen online desktops and gave every single one a trial as I determined which provided the best experience. I’ve managed to narrow the list down to three.

Desktoptwo

This was possibly the fastest desktop I tried; menu’s opened as snappily as on my PC and icons and windows could be dragged and moved smoothly.

The interface is similar to Windows so you’ll have no trouble navigating around the desktop for the first time. A number of programs are provided such as RSS reader, email, media player, Address book, IM and web browser.

The biggest failing of Desktop2 is that there is no office suite. Not Google Docs, not Zoho, nothing. Also only 1 gigabyte of storage is allocated for free accounts and advertising is displayed on the desktop. It’s not too bad but it does get fairly annoying with time.

OoDesk

It’s still a little buggy (eg: windows will sit in a "loading" state forever) but still pretty impressive. It follows the Windows interface to the point of having an XP style "start" menu. There really are a lot of application provided and the ability to add plenty more if you wish. It has a good "explorer" style file management system and sharing capabilities.

G.ho.st

G.ho.st has become my favourite online desktop and the one I would most recommend. It’s not the fastest, best looking or most stable, but it manages to provide the compromise between all three plus adding in a lot of functionality and does the best job of integrating with online identities and web apps.

There are just so many little things about G.ho.st which make it so much more of a pleasure to use like clicking and dragging to select a number of icons and customizing the desktop. Little things, but ones that a lot of online desktops simply don’t have.

You will also get 5 gigabytes of online storage and 3 gigabytes for email. Invite more people to sign up and receive an additional gigabyte for every person who joins. It has two office suites; Google Docs and Zoho, I prefer Docs as its a little speedier although Zoho gives a lot more functionality.

I like G.ho.st because you can really make it feel like your own workspace, and for me that’s most of the appeal of working on a PC.

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All except Ulteo, to be precise, which hovered at the edge of my attention with their OpenOfficeOnline-Beta, for example. Now they’re back with a piece of software called “Virtual Desktop“, which can be confusing judging from the name, or at least I expected something different from it. But it turned out to be another solution to run Linux-software seamlessly in a windows environment, just like the recently extremely popular andLinux (In fact, both are based on the same core, coLinux, a portation of a Unix-kernel to windows). But since Ulteo’s Virtual Desktop uses less disk space in comparison to andLinux’ full-featured ubuntu (2,5-4,5 GB), I decided to give it a try.

Installation was quick, and since I already had an Ulteo-Account (which is not required unless you wanna sync your local data to your online desktop), I didn’t encounter anything unusual at all.

Starting the Ulteo Application inside Windows took quite a bit though, which is not to my liking – I guess it’s anywhere near twice the boot time of the kernel and Desktop Environment, and the memory usage was quite corresponding, which was not to my liking at all.

The amount of included application is allright, it features the newest Firefox and Thunderbird (of course), as well as OpenOffice and my all-time-reason-for-Linux, Amarok (which will soon enough be no reason for Linux anymore, since Amarok 2.0 is bound to happen on Windows as well) in version 1.3.9 – which brings me to the question, why they didn’t include the current Fast Forward release 1.4.9.1, and furthermore to the point of installing own applications, which seems impossible for the time being. I couldn’t figure out how to do it in the launcher, and the website speaks nothing of it.

The sight of the Konquerer hovering above the Windows Explorer was quite appealing though, and it helps to weaken the borders between the windows and the unix world even further, which is – at least in my world – a good thing.

Next time I’ll try andLinux though, regardless of the ~5GB installation of a full-fledged (K)Ubuntu.

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