When Google finally showed off their new OS yesterday there was a lot of skepticism about working in the cloud, offline applications and many other thoughts and concerns. The good news is that if you don't want to read others hands on impressions you can now download and install the OS yourself. A couple of things to note, firstly the download will only work in a VM environment, second, this is pre-beta software so expect crashes, bumps and a rough experience.

Folks are wondering *why* Chrome exists. The answer, when you realize it, is rather obvious - for some devices (especially netbooks) a full-blown Linux distribution is still too big (even Kubuntu Netbook Remix, the flyweight champ of niche Linux distros, is bigger than Chrome OS).

Update: Google Chrome OS hands-on can be found here.