added elementaryos and dell xps reviews

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+<p>Dell's XPS Developer Edition laptop family has produced some of the best Linux "ultrabooks" in recent memory. The company's Developer Edition moniker refers specifically to the <a href="https://pilot.search.dell.com/ubuntu%20xps%2013#products">XPS models</a> that ship with Ubuntu Linux installed instead of Windows. </p>
+<p>This month, November 2018, marks the six year anniversary of the first Ubuntu-based version of the Dell XPS 13.</p>
+<p>To see where Project Sputnik is at after six years, Dell sent Ars the latest model of the XPS 13, the 13in version, which received a serious overhaul earlier this year (see Ars' <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/review-improved-dell-xps-13-laptop-holds-its-own-against-other-ultrabooks/">earlier review</a> for more details). While Dell bumped the the hardware specs, revamped the thermal system and introduced a new rose and white version, the big news in the latest Developer Edition, which began shipping earlier this year, is the upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04.</p>
+<p>It's true that Linux users did have a wait bit, but it was more Ubuntu's release schedule than Dell's that caused the delay. The Windows version of the XPS 13 (model 9370) arrived before the release of Ubuntu 18.04, the latest long term support release from Canonical. Since its debut in 2012, the XPS Developer Edition line has always tracked Canonical's LTS releases. That means that even the XPS DE released in February of this year still shipped Ubuntu 16.04. While I've never had a problem upgrading to the latest Ubuntu release on any of the three XPSes I've tested over the years, nothing beyond 16.04 has ever been supported by Dell.</p>
+<p>The latest release of the XPS 13 Developer Edition model 9370 changes that. The latest and greatest hardware now features full support for Ubuntu 18.04, which is no small feat considering that the move from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 means a completely new desktop, GNOME 3, a major revamp of underlying technologies (more modern GTK libraries), and a new very different user interface to contend with. On the hardware side there's quite a bit of newer tech in the XPS 13, including USB C and Thunderbolt, all of which now work under Ubuntu without a hitch.</p>
+<p>After a few weeks living with the XPS 13, I'm happy to say that, with a few small exceptions, Dell has pulled off the transition to Ubuntu 18.04 with remarkable aplomb.</p>
+<p>Some might argue that Linux has reached a stage where it tends to work out of the box on almost any hardware. But, while the situation is certainly better than it once was, my experience has been that it's rare to buy a brand new laptop and get everything working right away. Stick with last year's model and you'll likely be fine, but with new hardware there almost always seems to be an edge case, a trackpad that's missing drivers in all but the latest kernel (which might not be available immediately in your distro of choice, unless that happens to be Arch Linux), some application that lacks good support for HiDPI screens, or other small glitches. Nothing deal breaking, but always something annoying. </p>
+<p>It's true that most of the hardware I've installed Linux on in the last few years has not had any show stopping problems, but there's typically some problems that require a bit of research to solve when they turn out to be solvable, or some patience when the solution turns out to be waiting for upstream updates to be released.</p>
+<p>If you depend on Linux to get your work done every day, that's just not acceptable, which is where Dell's official Linux support becomes not just nice to have, but a necessity. You don't want to be tracking down hardware drivers or trying to figure out the best Xrandr settings for your display when you have work to get done and deadlines to meet.</p>
+<p>If you want a Linux rig that "just works", weighs under 3lbs, and has the battery life you need to work most of the day power-cable free, the XPS 13 is the laptop you've been looking for. The upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 means you'll also have the latest and greatest tools that Ubuntu has to offer, including much-improved support for Snap packages, which is a game changer for anyone sticking with the LTS base system.</p>
+<h2>Hardware</h2>
+<p>The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition has always been an exceptionally well built, great-looking piece of hardware. The revamped version is no exception and the new new white and rose-gold version, while not my style exactly, looks pretty slick. On the rose-and-white model, the palm rest area and space around the keyboard are covered with a very nice fiberglass-like weave that gives it a bit of texture and makes for a little bit softer edge that's easier on my wrists than the last model I used.</p>
+
+[image="dellxps-top.jpg" caption="The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition"]
+
+<p>I was hesitant to take a white laptop out and about for fear of sending Dell back a gray-brown laptop, but in the six weeks I've been using it, it hasn't picked up a single spot of dirt or a mark that didn't easily disappear with the quick swipe of a rag.</p>
+<p>The Infinity Edge display on the XPS 13 comes in two flavors -- 3840 x 2160 touchscreen 4k or an FHD non-touch option. There's a roughly $200 difference between the two, but the big catch, as far as I could tell on the Dell website, is that the 16GB RAM model is only available with the HiDPI screen. Since most developers are going to want the max RAM possible, that pretty much means you're going to get the HiDPI display.</p>
+
+[image="dellxps-front.jpg" caption="Ubuntu on the XPS 13's HiDPI screen"]
+
+<p>There's two things to note about the 4K display (which is what came with the model I tested). First, it's wonderfully bright and sharp. Ubuntu's GNOME interface works well at this resolution, but keep in mind there's there's no half scaling -- it's 2x or 1X. KDE supports arbitrary scaling, which might make Kubuntu a compelling option for some users. The downside to the HiDPI screen is that battery life isn't a good as the FHD non-touch version, and, if you're buying it with the idea of running some other distro, well, do your research, not every desktop/distro combo is going to work well with this display (I happen to really like LXQT these days, but even the Lubuntu version did not play well with the HiDPI screen out of the box). </p>
+<p>The 16GB model comes equipped with a 8th Generation Intel Core i7-8550U Processor (8M Cache, up to 4.0 GHz, 4 cores) and has the onboard Intel UHD Graphics 620. There are two Thunderbolt 3 ports, and Dell has made it possible to use four-lane PCI connections, which means in theory you could add an external graphics card for a better gaming experience. At least that's possible with the Windows version, I did not test how well this works under Ubuntu because I am not a gamer and this is a serious <em>developer</em> laptop, no playing games here. I did throw some video rendering tasks at it, (using Blender) and the XPS 13 cranked through them with impressive ease. </p>
+<p>Despite the new case color, not everything on XPS 13 comes up roses. There's still that webcam. Yes it's still at the bottom of the screen, aimed up your nose. At this point is seems safe to assume Dell isn't changing it. I found some nice white electrical tape at my local hardware store and stuck it over the camera and had no further problems with it. If you're going to do any teleconferencing or the like, the $20 you spend on an external USB webcam will not be wasted. </p>
+<p>On the upside, some of the earlier models of the XPS 13 I tested had a tendency to produce a high pitched whine in some situations. If you read users' complaints around the web you'll get a mix of theories, the most likely being coil whine. Whatever it was, I have not noticed it with this model. </p>
+<p>Aside from the aforementioned Thunderbolt ports, you'll find that, like a certain other laptop maker, the latest version of the XPS 13 ditches USB A in favor of a USB Type C port. Technically the XPS 13 has three USB type C ports, two of which are Thunderbolt 3 enabled, the other is USB 3.1. </p>
+<p>While I understand this move somewhat -- USB C is the future and I want my laptop to last a few years, which means I want at least one USB C port; and you aren't getting that 4mm edge with USB A ports in there -- from a purely practical standpoint I find it irritating. The USB C future still feels a long way off. I have plenty of devices that are USB A and I'm not going to be replacing perfectly capable accessories just because hardware ports are disappearing. Dell does helpfully include a USB C to A dongle, but really, I did not need yet another dongle.</p>
+<p>Other ports include a microSD card reader, headset jack, and Noble lock slot. The included power supply remains small enough that toting it around does not significantly alter the weight of your bag. Just remember to throw in that USB C to A dongle as well. And the USB A to Ethernet dongle if you're hoping to use the internet from a hotel room. It's not really criticism of Dell so much as the industry at large, but the potential daisy chain of dongles necessary to connect modern ultrabooks to any technology older than six months is quickly approaching the ridiculous.</p>
+<h2>Ubuntu 18.04 on the XPS</h2>
+<p>What's not approaching the ridiculous is Ubuntu 18.04, this is perhaps the best mainstream version of Linux ever released. Coupled with Dell's hardware and support, Ubuntu 18.04 makes for an outstanding desktop experience that will, for many developers, trump both Windows and macOS.</p>
+<p>That said, it's worth noting that if you're coming from Ubuntu 16.04 or earlier, for example upgrading from a previous XPS model, you're in for something of a shock. The Ubuntu that ships with the latest XPS 13 is significantly different from the moment you first turn it on -- there’s a new desktop, a new lock screen, some new default apps and of course a new kernel under the hood. For a full review of everything that's new, see Ars' <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/05/ubuntu-18-04-the-return-of-a-familiar-interface-marks-the-best-ubuntu-in-years/">earlier review</a>.</p>
+
+[image="dellxps-default1804desk.jpg" caption="The new Welcome to Ubuntu guide in 18.04"]
+
+<p>To help users transition from previous releases to this one, Canonical has a little "first-run" app called "Welcome to Ubuntu", which Dell includes as well. The app does a good job of highlighting some of the most used new features and points out where things are in GNOME.</p>
+<p>The Developer slant to the XPS 13 DE starts to show as soon as you configure Ubuntu and book to the desktop for the first time. Regular Ubuntu users will note that Dell has included quite a few things out of the box that Ubuntu does not such as both the Chrome and Chromium web browsers and the very nice Dellrecovery tool that allows you to create an image of your XPS as it arrived. If you plan to do any distro experimenting, I strongly suggest you create a backup image with Dell's extra repos and tools before you do anything else.</p>
+<p>One bit of hardware support I immediately noticed is missing out of the box is support for two-finger clicks for right-click. From what I can tell this is a shortcoming of GNOME, not Dell. Still, it would be nice for Dell to include the GNOME Tweaks tool by default since it allows for customization options that the GNOME devs have seen fit to remove from GNOME proper. You could of course also enable two-finger right clicks and some other tweaks using included tools like <code>xinput</code>.</p>
+<p>One of the big things you get with Ubuntu 18.04 is much-improved support for Snap applications. It's a little bit of an oversimplification, but a Snap application is an app packaged in a container, which ships separately from Ubuntu itself. That doesn't sound all that great, but what it allows you to do is stay up to date with releases of the Snap application, without needing to worry about updating Ubuntu itself. </p>
+<p>Snaps are useful as a way to keep up to date with desktop apps that may be developing faster than Ubuntu's package maintainers can package them. For example, I used both Darktable and Gimp as Snaps to be able to have the latest releases of both, which are sometimes a bit of head of what's in Ubuntu's repositories.</p>
+
+[image="dell-snaps-inappcenter.png" caption="Install Skype as a Snap package in Ubuntu 18.04"]
+
+<p>Snaps are also useful for developers because Snaps contain all their own dependencies. This means it's easy, for instance, to run a Snap app that requires a specific version of Python, without worrying about that conflicting with the system-wide version of Python. Developers wanting the latest version of any number of tools would do well to look at Canonical's <a href="https://snapcraft.io/">Snapcraft store</a>, where you'll find Snaps for developer necessities like Docker, LXD and PostgreSQL, as well as the latest version of nearly every language you can think of, from Go to Javascript, even .NET if you've got one of "those" jobs. </p>
+<h2>Conclusion</h2>
+<p>While the update to 18.04 is a welcome one, and there are a couple of bones thrown to developers, it feels a little bit like Dell is moving away from the developer angle to a more mainstream Linux laptop. I think that's a good thing.</p>
+<p>Previous releases shipped with a quite a few developer tools pre-installed, Virtualbox, some extra programming languages, and there were a couple of Dell-developed devops tools called Cloud Launcher and Profile Tool, which could be easily installed, but neither seemed to get much traction with developers. </p>
+<p>Aside from the extra web browsers though, there's nothing particularly developer-oriented about the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition. Aside from the marketing. And I think that's a good thing. I appreciate that Dell chooses to err on the side of not enough rather than throwing in a bunch of IDEs or tools that not every developer is going to want. Part of the reason Linux is so popular with developers is that it allows everyone to work in their own way using whatever toolset they happen to like out the vast array of tools available in the open source world.</p>
+<p>Rather than worrying about some custom tools developers aren't going to use anyway, Dell's efforts have instead gone where it should: into getting Linux working with the hardware. In other words Dell gets out of your way. That's not to belittle the effort Dell has made here, which is considerable, rather I think at this point Dell should drop the developer pretense and call this the XPS 13 Linux Edition.</p>
+<p>And that is probably the best thing about the XPS 13 Developer Edition. It provides a solid platform from which you can build up your workflow and tools to suit your tastes, whether you're a developer or just want a solid laptop with an operating system that stays out of your way and lets you do what you want to do.</p>
+<p>The Good
+<em> Light weight hardware with a brilliant screen
+</em> Solid performance
+<em> Ubuntu 18.04
+</em> No bloatware
+The Bad
+<em> No USB Type A ports. 
+</em> Max 16GB of RAM feels limited for a "Developer" machine
+The Ugly
+* The webcam. Still.</p>
diff --git a/dellxps-review.txt b/dellxps-review.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3c7c746
--- /dev/null
+++ b/dellxps-review.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,83 @@
+Dell's XPS Developer Edition laptop family has produced some of the best Linux "ultrabooks" in recent memory. The company's Developer Edition moniker refers specifically to the [XPS models](https://pilot.search.dell.com/ubuntu%20xps%2013#products) that ship with Ubuntu Linux installed instead of Windows. 
+
+This month, November 2018, marks the six year anniversary of the first Ubuntu-based version of the Dell XPS 13.
+
+To see where Project Sputnik is at after six years, Dell sent Ars the latest model of the XPS 13, the 13in version, which received a serious overhaul earlier this year (see Ars' [earlier review](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/review-improved-dell-xps-13-laptop-holds-its-own-against-other-ultrabooks/) for more details). While Dell bumped the the hardware specs, revamped the thermal system and introduced a new rose and white version, the big news in the latest Developer Edition, which began shipping earlier this year, is the upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04.
+
+It's true that Linux users did have a wait bit, but it was more Ubuntu's release schedule than Dell's that caused the delay. The Windows version of the XPS 13 (model 9370) arrived before the release of Ubuntu 18.04, the latest long term support release from Canonical. Since its debut in 2012, the XPS Developer Edition line has always tracked Canonical's LTS releases. That means that even the XPS DE released in February of this year still shipped Ubuntu 16.04. While I've never had a problem upgrading to the latest Ubuntu release on any of the three XPSes I've tested over the years, nothing beyond 16.04 has ever been supported by Dell.
+
+The latest release of the XPS 13 Developer Edition model 9370 changes that. The latest and greatest hardware now features full support for Ubuntu 18.04, which is no small feat considering that the move from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 means a completely new desktop, GNOME 3, a major revamp of underlying technologies (more modern GTK libraries), and a new very different user interface to contend with. On the hardware side there's quite a bit of newer tech in the XPS 13, including USB C and Thunderbolt, all of which now work under Ubuntu without a hitch.
+
+After a few weeks living with the XPS 13, I'm happy to say that, with a few small exceptions, Dell has pulled off the transition to Ubuntu 18.04 with remarkable aplomb.
+
+Some might argue that Linux has reached a stage where it tends to work out of the box on almost any hardware. But, while the situation is certainly better than it once was, my experience has been that it's rare to buy a brand new laptop and get everything working right away. Stick with last year's model and you'll likely be fine, but with new hardware there almost always seems to be an edge case, a trackpad that's missing drivers in all but the latest kernel (which might not be available immediately in your distro of choice, unless that happens to be Arch Linux), some application that lacks good support for HiDPI screens, or other small glitches. Nothing deal breaking, but always something annoying. 
+
+It's true that most of the hardware I've installed Linux on in the last few years has not had any show stopping problems, but there's typically some problems that require a bit of research to solve when they turn out to be solvable, or some patience when the solution turns out to be waiting for upstream updates to be released.
+
+If you depend on Linux to get your work done every day, that's just not acceptable, which is where Dell's official Linux support becomes not just nice to have, but a necessity. You don't want to be tracking down hardware drivers or trying to figure out the best Xrandr settings for your display when you have work to get done and deadlines to meet.
+
+If you want a Linux rig that "just works", weighs under 3lbs, and has the battery life you need to work most of the day power-cable free, the XPS 13 is the laptop you've been looking for. The upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 means you'll also have the latest and greatest tools that Ubuntu has to offer, including much-improved support for Snap packages, which is a game changer for anyone sticking with the LTS base system.
+
+## Hardware
+
+The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition has always been an exceptionally well built, great-looking piece of hardware. The revamped version is no exception and the new new white and rose-gold version, while not my style exactly, looks pretty slick. On the rose-and-white model, the palm rest area and space around the keyboard are covered with a very nice fiberglass-like weave that gives it a bit of texture and makes for a little bit softer edge that's easier on my wrists than the last model I used.
+
+I was hesitant to take a white laptop out and about for fear of sending Dell back a gray-brown laptop, but in the six weeks I've been using it, it hasn't picked up a single spot of dirt or a mark that didn't easily disappear with the quick swipe of a rag.
+
+The Infinity Edge display on the XPS 13 comes in two flavors -- 3840 x 2160 touchscreen 4k or an FHD non-touch option. There's a roughly $200 difference between the two, but the big catch, as far as I could tell on the Dell website, is that the 16GB RAM model is only available with the HiDPI screen. Since most developers are going to want the max RAM possible, that pretty much means you're going to get the HiDPI display.
+
+There's two things to note about the 4K display (which is what came with the model I tested). First, it's wonderfully bright and sharp. Ubuntu's GNOME interface works well at this resolution, but keep in mind there's there's no half scaling -- it's 2x or 1X. KDE supports arbitrary scaling, which might make Kubuntu a compelling option for some users. The downside to the HiDPI screen is that battery life isn't a good as the FHD non-touch version, and, if you're buying it with the idea of running some other distro, well, do your research, not every desktop/distro combo is going to work well with this display (I happen to really like LXQT these days, but even the Lubuntu version did not play well with the HiDPI screen out of the box). 
+
+The 16GB model comes equipped with a 8th Generation Intel Core i7-8550U Processor (8M Cache, up to 4.0 GHz, 4 cores) and has the onboard Intel UHD Graphics 620. There are two Thunderbolt 3 ports, and Dell has made it possible to use four-lane PCI connections, which means in theory you could add an external graphics card for a better gaming experience. At least that's possible with the Windows version, I did not test how well this works under Ubuntu because I am not a gamer and this is a serious *developer* laptop, no playing games here. I did throw some video rendering tasks at it, (using Blender) and the XPS 13 cranked through them with impressive ease. 
+
+Despite the new case color, not everything on XPS 13 comes up roses. There's still that webcam. Yes it's still at the bottom of the screen, aimed up your nose. At this point is seems safe to assume Dell isn't changing it. I found some nice white electrical tape at my local hardware store and stuck it over the camera and had no further problems with it. If you're going to do any teleconferencing or the like, the $20 you spend on an external USB webcam will not be wasted. 
+
+On the upside, some of the earlier models of the XPS 13 I tested had a tendency to produce a high pitched whine in some situations. If you read users' complaints around the web you'll get a mix of theories, the most likely being coil whine. Whatever it was, I have not noticed it with this model. 
+
+Aside from the aforementioned Thunderbolt ports, you'll find that, like a certain other laptop maker, the latest version of the XPS 13 ditches USB A in favor of a USB Type C port. Technically the XPS 13 has three USB type C ports, two of which are Thunderbolt 3 enabled, the other is USB 3.1. 
+
+While I understand this move somewhat -- USB C is the future and I want my laptop to last a few years, which means I want at least one USB C port; and you aren't getting that 4mm edge with USB A ports in there -- from a purely practical standpoint I find it irritating. The USB C future still feels a long way off. I have plenty of devices that are USB A and I'm not going to be replacing perfectly capable accessories just because hardware ports are disappearing. Dell does helpfully include a USB C to A dongle, but really, I did not need yet another dongle.
+
+Other ports include a microSD card reader, headset jack, and Noble lock slot. The included power supply remains small enough that toting it around does not significantly alter the weight of your bag. Just remember to throw in that USB C to A dongle as well. And the USB A to Ethernet dongle if you're hoping to use the internet from a hotel room. It's not really criticism of Dell so much as the industry at large, but the potential daisy chain of dongles necessary to connect modern ultrabooks to any technology older than six months is quickly approaching the ridiculous.
+
+## Ubuntu 18.04 on the XPS
+
+What's not approaching the ridiculous is Ubuntu 18.04, this is perhaps the best mainstream version of Linux ever released. Coupled with Dell's hardware and support, Ubuntu 18.04 makes for an outstanding desktop experience that will, for many developers, trump both Windows and macOS.
+
+That said, it's worth noting that if you're coming from Ubuntu 16.04 or earlier, for example upgrading from a previous XPS model, you're in for something of a shock. The Ubuntu that ships with the latest XPS 13 is significantly different from the moment you first turn it on -- there’s a new desktop, a new lock screen, some new default apps and of course a new kernel under the hood. For a full review of everything that's new, see Ars' [earlier review](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/05/ubuntu-18-04-the-return-of-a-familiar-interface-marks-the-best-ubuntu-in-years/).
+
+To help users transition from previous releases to this one, Canonical has a little "first-run" app called "Welcome to Ubuntu", which Dell includes as well. The app does a good job of highlighting some of the most used new features and points out where things are in GNOME.
+
+The Developer slant to the XPS 13 DE starts to show as soon as you configure Ubuntu and book to the desktop for the first time. Regular Ubuntu users will note that Dell has included quite a few things out of the box that Ubuntu does not such as both the Chrome and Chromium web browsers and the very nice Dellrecovery tool that allows you to create an image of your XPS as it arrived. If you plan to do any distro experimenting, I strongly suggest you create a backup image with Dell's extra repos and tools before you do anything else.
+
+One bit of hardware support I immediately noticed is missing out of the box is support for two-finger clicks for right-click. From what I can tell this is a shortcoming of GNOME, not Dell. Still, it would be nice for Dell to include the GNOME Tweaks tool by default since it allows for customization options that the GNOME devs have seen fit to remove from GNOME proper. You could of course also enable two-finger right clicks and some other tweaks using included tools like `xinput`.
+
+One of the big things you get with Ubuntu 18.04 is much-improved support for Snap applications. It's a little bit of an oversimplification, but a Snap application is an app packaged in a container, which ships separately from Ubuntu itself. That doesn't sound all that great, but what it allows you to do is stay up to date with releases of the Snap application, without needing to worry about updating Ubuntu itself. 
+
+Snaps are useful as a way to keep up to date with desktop apps that may be developing faster than Ubuntu's package maintainers can package them. For example, I used both Darktable and Gimp as Snaps to be able to have the latest releases of both, which are sometimes a bit of head of what's in Ubuntu's repositories.
+
+Snaps are also useful for developers because Snaps contain all their own dependencies. This means it's easy, for instance, to run a Snap app that requires a specific version of Python, without worrying about that conflicting with the system-wide version of Python. Developers wanting the latest version of any number of tools would do well to look at Canonical's [Snapcraft store](https://snapcraft.io/), where you'll find Snaps for developer necessities like Docker, LXD and PostgreSQL, as well as the latest version of nearly every language you can think of, from Go to Javascript, even .NET if you've got one of "those" jobs. 
+
+## Conclusion
+
+While the update to 18.04 is a welcome one, and there are a couple of bones thrown to developers, it feels a little bit like Dell is moving away from the developer angle to a more mainstream Linux laptop. I think that's a good thing.
+
+Previous releases shipped with a quite a few developer tools pre-installed, Virtualbox, some extra programming languages, and there were a couple of Dell-developed devops tools called Cloud Launcher and Profile Tool, which could be easily installed, but neither seemed to get much traction with developers. 
+
+Aside from the extra web browsers though, there's nothing particularly developer-oriented about the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition. Aside from the marketing. And I think that's a good thing. I appreciate that Dell chooses to err on the side of not enough rather than throwing in a bunch of IDEs or tools that not every developer is going to want. Part of the reason Linux is so popular with developers is that it allows everyone to work in their own way using whatever toolset they happen to like out the vast array of tools available in the open source world.
+
+Rather than worrying about some custom tools developers aren't going to use anyway, Dell's efforts have instead gone where it should: into getting Linux working with the hardware. In other words Dell gets out of your way. That's not to belittle the effort Dell has made here, which is considerable, rather I think at this point Dell should drop the developer pretense and call this the XPS 13 Linux Edition.
+
+And that is probably the best thing about the XPS 13 Developer Edition. It provides a solid platform from which you can build up your workflow and tools to suit your tastes, whether you're a developer or just want a solid laptop with an operating system that stays out of your way and lets you do what you want to do.
+
+
+The Good
+* Light weight hardware with a brilliant screen
+* Solid performance
+* Ubuntu 18.04
+* No bloatware
+The Bad
+* No USB Type A ports. 
+* Max 16GB of RAM feels limited for a "Developer" machine
+The Ugly
+* The webcam. Still.
diff --git a/elementaryos-review.html b/elementaryos-review.html
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6a3f51a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/elementaryos-review.html
@@ -0,0 +1,71 @@
+<p>The elementaryOS project, which bills itself as an open, privacy-respecting alternative to Windows and macOS, recently released "Juno", version 5 of its Linux-based desktop.</p>
+<p>Linux is a strange beast. You'd be hard pressed to come up with another tool so widely used, so widely deployed, so absolutely necessary to the functioning of the modern world, and yet so utterly unknown outside the tech community. </p>
+<p>Everyone is a Linux user, but almost no one knows it. </p>
+<p>From ATMs, to phones, to in flight displays, to the web server your browser got this page from, we are all using Linux every day even if we don't know it. But despite that ubiquity there's one place Linux has never really succeeded: the desktop. Windows and macOS dominate the desktop and that's unlikely to change in the near term, but if it ever does it will likely be because of projects like elementaryOS, which seeks to bring the polish of commercial desktops to the world of Linux.</p>
+<p>ElementaryOS began life over a decade ago as a set of icons. Yes, seriously. If ever there was a group of developers who started at the bottom and worked their way up to the top it's Daniel Foré and the rest of today's elementaryOS team. From a set of icons designed to improve the look of Ubuntu's then GNOME 2 desktop, the elementary project expanded to include some custom apps, including a fork of the default GNOME files app, Nautilus, called nautilus-elementary. As with most open source, the borrowing went both ways, Ubuntu's Humanity theme was a fork of elementaryOS's icon set.</p>
+<p>As the project grew to encompass ever more apps and ever more customizations for the desktop it became more cumbersome for users to install everything. Eventually there was enough momentum behind the project that Foré decided the logical thing to to was to create their own distribution. The project took Ubuntu as a base and began layering in their custom apps, and highly refined look and feel and elementaryOS was born.</p>
+<p>ElementaryOS launched with considerable fanfare thanks to its revolutionary idea of asking users to pay for it. Unfortunately for elementaryOS, a blog post about the pay-what-you-want model rubbed a lot of people in the Linux community the wrong way. Most of the kerfuffle was not about the money, it was about the wording of the post, which essentially called non-paying users thieves. </p>
+<p>When I spoke with Foré he was quick to point out how little experience the team had had with PR at the time and clearly regretted the post. It was poorly worded, but as with all things in Linux, it was something of a tempest in a teapot even at the time and it is well behind the project at this point. I bring it up not to revisit the controversy, but because the funding model elementaryOS established early on has succeeded. </p>
+<p>Today elementaryOS is a bootstrapped business with quite a few full time employees. It's not Canonical by any means, but it is self-sustaining and it has a model for how to continue sustaining itself, which is more than a lot of open source projects can say. If I were an open source project heavily dependent on contributions from Red Hat employees, I might, right about now, have a closer look at how elementaryOS's funding model works. Of course the elementaryOS model doesn't necessarily work at the scale of Red Hat, but it doesn't have to to sustain elementaryOS.</p>
+<p>And its funding model does work, so well in fact that the project has extended it to developers in its app store. There are quite a few apps out there targeting specifically the elementaryOS desktop and if you head to elementaryOS's app store you can choose to support the developers of those apps using the same pay-what-you-want system that elementaryOS uses at the distro level. Every app developer can set a price that they feel is fair, but users can ultimately decide what they want to pay, including nothing.</p>
+<h2>ElementaryOS 5 Juno</h2>
+<p>The latest release of elementaryOS is nicknamed Juno, and should be version .5, following the previous release, .4 or Loki. However since .5 implies incomplete and elementaryOS is more or less complete (in terms of stability certainly) the project is calling this release elementaryOS 5. </p>
+
+[image="eos-desktop.jpg" caption="The default look of ElementaryOS Juno"]
+
+<p>Whatever the version number may be, one thing is for sure -- there's ton of new stuff in Juno. Enough features in fact that the release notes, written by elementaryOS's Cassidy James Blaede, are an impressive John Sircusa-style <a href="https://medium.com/elementaryos/elementary-os-5-juno-is-here-471dfdedc7b3">essay</a> of some 8,000 words. If you want to know everything that's new, Blaede's notes are worth a read, if you want to know what it's like to actually use all that stuff, read on.</p>
+<p>One thing to note before we get started: Linux users wanting to try elementaryOS be forewarned, it doesn't work very well in a virtual machine. I installed it, but it was very slow. According to Foré, it's an upstream problem. GTK requires hardware acceleration for animations, which does not currently work in Virtualbox. That may change soon though. One of the big lessons Canonical has learned from collecting hardware metrics is that Ubuntu ends up in virtual machines a lot. Improvements are apparently in the works. That will help downstream distros like elementaryOS, as well as others like Linux Mint Cinnamon edition, which also doesn't run very well in a virtual machine.</p>
+<p>In the mean time though, to get an accurate sense of performance, you'll need to install elementaryOS. The Juno installer is a thinly skinned version of Ubuntu's Ubiquity Installer, which means you can easily install elementaryOS alongside your existing OS just as you would Ubuntu. The installer is perfectly functional, but it doesn't really convey elementaryOS's unique look and feel, which is why there's a new installer in the works. It's a <a href="https://blog.system76.com/post/170167029168/installer-elementary-and-popos-collaboration">collaboration</a> between elementaryOS and System76 (creators of PopOS) and will be, I assume, what you'll see installing future versions of PopOS as well. The new installer isn't ready for Juno though, so for now you'll have to make do with the Ubiquity installer.</p>
+
+[image="eos-desktop-comp.jpg" caption="Composite screenshot of some of the top bar menus in ElementaryOS Juno"]
+
+<p>I went ahead and installed elementaryOS on a separate partition to keep my existing Arch Linux installation isolated. </p>
+<p>ElementaryOS was plenty snappy on my Lenovo x240 (i5 with 8GB of RAM), but I also installed it on a brand new Dell XPS 13 where it really shined. ElementaryOS's theme, typography and icons all looked really nice on the XPS's HiDPI screen. My only gripe is that elementaryOS's scaling is either 1X or 2X, there's no in-between. My preference on the XPS would be more like 1.5X, but as far as I know only the KDE and Cinnamon desktops support incremental scaling without command line fiddling.</p>
+<p>Once you've got elementaryOS installed and you reboot, you'll be greeted by the Pantheon desktop. While Pantheon is based on GNOME, it's very much its own thing. Like GNOME, Pantheon has a top menu bar, but it functions very differently in that it's never used for application menus (something GNOME is getting rid of as well). Instead the top bar in elementaryOS is a global bar -- it never changes. The top bar shows the date and time in the middle, status notifications, a power menu, settings for audio, power, and wireless to the right and an application launcher to the left.</p>
+
+[image="eos-files.jpg" caption="The dock and Files file browser in Juno"]
+
+<p>ElementaryOS also sports a dock-style app launcher along the bottom of the screen that is, well, somewhat macOSish. ElementaryOS has taken some flack over the years for being heavily macOS-inspired and it does have some element of macOS -- the dock, a column view in Files (which KDE used to offer as well), and, perhaps more than anything else an obsession with details. ElementaryOS clearly sweats the small stuff, paying careful attention to typography, icon design, color use, shading, and so on, which ends up creating a kind of feel that's perhaps reminiscent of macOS. Having played with elementaryOS since version .2, I would say the macOS influence has been declining with every new release and I really don't see it at all in Juno, beyond the use of the dock.</p>
+<p>Another possible reason some users find elementaryOS to be macOS-like is that it lacks the level of customization many Linux desktops offer. There's really no way to change the look and feel of elementaryOS, and little way to customize the behavior of its default apps. It's a take it or leave it operating system -- you either like it or you don't, and if you don't you're better off using something else than trying to tweak elementaryOS to suit your whims.</p>
+<p>ElementaryOS is not a Linux desktop in the traditional sense. Rather it's an operating system in the same sense that Windows and macOS are.</p>
+<p>That said, you can make certain customizations without too much trouble. For example, elementaryOS puts the windows close button on the left, which, for me, messes with 25 years of muscle memory. There's no setting to change this in elementaryOS, but since GNOME is under the hood you can use <code>gsettings</code> to change the button layout. In other words, little adjustments are possible, but I'd suggest staying away from the tweak apps. </p>
+<p>Juno ships with the ability to remap the Super key. By default it brings up a list keyboard shortcuts (mostly inherited from GNOME), but you can set it to open the main menu, which, combined with the ability to immediately search by typing, turns the main menu into an application launcher as well. </p>
+<p>Juno doesn't make any sweeping changes to the basic look and feel that elementaryOS has been working with for some time. It's made some refinements and given third-party developers some much-improved guidelines and a new color palette, but most of the work in Juno has come into the compliment of tightly integrated applications that ship with elementaryOS. </p>
+<p>Unlike most GNOME-based distros, elementaryOS does not ship with the usual slew of GNOME applications. Instead you'll get elementaryOS's own versions of the same. In this release that means Files, a terminal app, Photos, Noise (music player), Code (previously known as Scratch), and then a few outside apps like the Epiphany web browser and the Geary mail client.</p>
+<p>For the most part elementaryOS's homegrown apps are quite capable, though again, there's a notable lack of customization available. The Terminal app, for instance, offers three color schemes and not much else in way of preferences. It also, by default, uses <code>ctrl-v</code> for paste and <code>ctrl-c</code> for copy, which is annoying if you're used to <code>ctrl-c</code> killing a process. Since there's no preferences for Terminal, there's no way to fix this beyond installing a more powerful terminal like rxvt-unicode.</p>
+
+[image="eos-terminal.jpg" caption="The Terminal app showing memory use with nothing open (596MB)."]
+
+<p>ElementaryOS has often been seen as a good option for new users, which is to say users not entirely comfortable with Linux. I'd say this it true to a point, but elementaryOS has appeal beyond that, or at least it would like to. Juno has seen a lot of work geared toward developers, especially the changes to AppCenter which make it easier than ever for developers to get paid for their work (more on that in a minute), but also in the tools available for developers. As mentioned above there are quite a few new toolkits under the hood, but there's also completely revamped code editor known, appropriately enough, as Code.</p>
+<p>Code is quite nice, reminiscent of GNOME's Gedit, but without the abandonware feel. As with most of elementaryOS Code doesn't have a ton of customization options, but it does have the important ones -- control over tab/space settings, code folding, automatic syntax highlighting, and a quick toggle comments feature. And unlike the Terminal, Code manages to allow for complexity through a plugin system that can add extra features. You can actually add a terminal to Code and run your tests without leaving your editor, and you can install a plugin to give you "Vim style" shortcuts, which is, well, not Vim, but does allow some Vim-like features.</p>
+
+[image="eos-code.jpg" caption="The Code app in elementaryOS."]
+
+<p>Code is a very pretty editor -- it has nice anti-aliased text and a lot of attention has been paid to the visual details -- but if you're coming from an IDE like Eclipse or powerful text editors Vim or Emacs, to be frank, Code isn't going to cut it. It may be that the gray is showing in my beard here, but I feel like the effort put into Code might have been better spent elsewhere given that IDEs and text editors seem like a problem that's already been solved several hundred times.</p>
+<p>The other homegrown elementaryOS apps take a similar approach, reinventing the wheel a little, though the results are always very nice and fit well with the rest of elementaryOS. For instance, Files is a good, if simple, file manager. But that simplicity is by design. As Blaede puts it in the release notes, elementaryOS encourages "a workflow where users access content from the related apps instead of worrying about the intricacies of moving files around their device’s storage." Files does have one feature I wish more file managers offered: a column view.</p>
+
+[image="eos-photos.jpg" caption="The Code app in elementaryOS."]
+
+<p>The Photos and Noise apps are photo and music managers respectively. Photos is very close to GNOME's Photos app, allowing for basic organization and editing of photos (including RAW files). Noise integrates well with system, allowing you to control your music from the menu bar. The default web browser is Epiphany, which, like many default web browsers, is best used to download and install a real web browser (just kidding, in elementaryOS you should use AppCenter to install a real web browser).</p>
+<p>One things you won't find in elementaryOS is an office suite. LibreOffice and more lightweight alternatives like Abiword and Gnumeric, are all available via the AppCenter, but are not part of the initial installation. </p>
+<p>The default software suite for elementaryOS does a good job of balancing simplicity and ease-of-use against powerful features, this only falls down in two places really, Code, while nice, probably isn't going to cut it for most programmers and Epiphany is pretty simplistic if you're used to Firefox or Chrome. </p>
+<p>One of the more interesting and innovative new features in this release is a picture-in-picture video feature that allows you to watch a video while doing something else. </p>
+<p>The easiest way to use picture-in-picture, is to hit the keyboard shortcut super-F, which will change your cursor into a crosshairs. Just drag the cursor over the video to clip it and elementaryOS will pull the portion of the page out and display it in its own window. The only catch is that, for web video at least, you'll need to leave the browser window open (I just sent it to another desktop). It's a pretty cool feature, but unfortunately I found it a little buggy. Twice playback stopped for no apparent reason, and resizing the window sometimes caused the "clipped" video window to disappear entirely.</p>
+
+[image="eos-pip.jpg" caption="The new picture-in-picture in elementaryOS. When it works, it's awesome."]
+
+<h2>The AppCenter</h2>
+<p>Perhaps the biggest news in elementaryOS Juno is the new and improved AppCenter, which offers some improvements to AppCenter's pay-what-you-want model. The biggest improvement is the option to try an app before you buy. </p>
+
+[image="eos-app-center.jpg" caption="The AppCenter in elementaryOS."]
+
+<p>Previously you could, as you would now, put in $0 to download an app for free. Now, however, you'll be prompted to pay for that app after you've tried it, not with some nagging reminder, but with a lack of updates. If you opt not to pay for a paid app, you won't get automatic updates. The exception is security updates, those will be automatically applied regardless of whether you paid or not. As Foré, said in an <a href="https://medium.com/elementaryos/about-appcenter-payments-daa76a1a3b59">announcement</a> earlier this year, "we will never withhold security updates based on payment status."</p>
+<p>That means you can continue to get updates for paid apps for free, you just have to re-download each one individually. It is, as Foré puts it, "a convenience tax." If you pay you get the convenience of automatic updates, if you don't pay you don't. </p>
+
+[image="eos-app-center-paying.jpg" caption="Paying for an app in the elementaryOS AppCenter."]
+
+<p>This will, no doubt, rub some people the wrong way, but elementaryOS is in uncharted waters here and is trying to build a sustainable development model in a world where most things are free. That's no easy task and there will inevitably be some pushback. It also may not work. So far developing for elementaryOS is not exactly lucrative. The project released some numbers earlier this year, <a href="https://medium.com/elementaryos/about-appcenter-payments-daa76a1a3b59">reporting</a> that it had processed $1,700 worth of payments from about 750 charges. That puts the average price of an app at $2.26. Divide that among the paid apps in the app center and unfortunately it becomes rather obvious that not only is building apps for elementaryOS not going to pay the bills, it's probably not even going to buy you coffee.</p>
+<p>Will the new model change that? That remains to be seen. It certainly makes it easier to pay for an app after you've been using it for a while, something that was impossible before. There's also a new button to send money to a developer any time you like, just look up the app in the AppCenter and scroll to the bottom and you'll find a button to send money.</p>
+<h2>Conclusion</h2>
+<p>ElementaryOS has a reputation of being a good distro for Linux newcomers. Juno continues to that legacy and is one of the easiest ways I know of to dip a toe in the Linux waters without needing to learn a whole new way of working. It's especially familiar for macOS users and makes a good choice to install on your Apple hardware, since elementaryOS ships with most of the drivers you'll need for Apple hardware, which makes it easy to install. The exception would be that shiny new the Apple hardware with the T2 chip which (as of November 2018) currently blocks Linux bootloaders.</p>
+<p>What about for developers though? Clearly with the improvements to Code, elementaryOS is aiming to provide a usable desktop that's also a good platform for development. I suspect most developers will probably want more familiar tools, but elementaryOS does make a good development platform. One thing elementaryOS does well that so many desktops these days refuse to do is get out of the way. The month I spent using Juno was not spectacularly different for me than using my usual i3, or LXQT on my wife's machine. Like the simpler, lightweight i3 and LXQT, elementaryOS does a good job of giving you the tools you need, but also, and often more importantly, it gets out of the way and lets you focus on what you need to get done.</p>
diff --git a/elementaryos-review.txt b/elementaryos-review.txt
index c117c09..3e1f92d 100644
--- a/elementaryos-review.txt
+++ b/elementaryos-review.txt
@@ -1,66 +1,87 @@
-Linux is a strange beast. You'd be hard pressed to come up with another tool so widely used, so widely deployed, so absolutely necessary to functioning of the modern world, and yet so utterly unknown. Everyone is a Linux user, but almost no one knows it. From ATMs, to phones, to in flight displays, to the web server your browser got this page from, we are all using Linux everyday even if we don't know it. 
+The elementaryOS project, which bills itself as an open, privacy-respecting alternative to Windows and macOS, recently released "Juno", version 5 of its Linux-based desktop.
 
-Despite its ubiquity, for most people there remain only two kinds of "computers": Windows and macOS.
+Linux is a strange beast. You'd be hard pressed to come up with another tool so widely used, so widely deployed, so absolutely necessary to the functioning of the modern world, and yet so utterly unknown outside the tech community. 
 
-Linux is, at best, that "other". That's a same because there's a wealth of Linux desktops out there
-If that describes you, I have a solution for you: elementaryOS.
+Everyone is a Linux user, but almost no one knows it. 
 
-ElementaryOS began life over a decade ago as a set of icons. Yes, seriously. If ever there was a group of developers who started at the bottom and worked their way up to the top its Daniel Fore and the rest of today's elementaryOS team. From a set of icons designed to improve the look of Ubuntu's then GNOME 2 desktop, the elementary project expanded to include some custom apps, including a fork of the default GNOME files app, Nautilus, called nautilus-elementary. As with most open source, the borrowing went both ways, Ubuntu's Humanity theme was a fork of elementaryOS's icon set.
+From ATMs, to phones, to in flight displays, to the web server your browser got this page from, we are all using Linux every day even if we don't know it. But despite that ubiquity there's one place Linux has never really succeeded: the desktop. Windows and macOS dominate the desktop and that's unlikely to change in the near term, but if it ever does it will likely be because of projects like elementaryOS, which seeks to bring the polish of commercial desktops to the world of Linux.
 
-As the project grew to encompass ever more apps and ever more customizations for the desktop it became more cumbersome for users to install everything. Eventually there was enough momentum behind the project that Fore decided the logical thing to to was to create their own distribution. The project took Ubuntu as a base and began layering in their custom apps, highly refined look and feel and elementaryOS was born.
+ElementaryOS began life over a decade ago as a set of icons. Yes, seriously. If ever there was a group of developers who started at the bottom and worked their way up to the top it's Daniel Foré and the rest of today's elementaryOS team. From a set of icons designed to improve the look of Ubuntu's then GNOME 2 desktop, the elementary project expanded to include some custom apps, including a fork of the default GNOME files app, Nautilus, called nautilus-elementary. As with most open source, the borrowing went both ways, Ubuntu's Humanity theme was a fork of elementaryOS's icon set.
 
-ElementaryOS launched with considerable fanfare thanks to it's revolutionary idea of asking users to pay for it. Unfortunately for elementaryOS, no one on the original team that launched 1.0 had much experience in PR, and blog post about the pay what you want model rubbed a lot of people in the community the wrong way. Most of the kerfuffle was not about the money, it the fact that an elementaryOS blog post essentially called people who did not pay for the software they used thieves. 
+As the project grew to encompass ever more apps and ever more customizations for the desktop it became more cumbersome for users to install everything. Eventually there was enough momentum behind the project that Foré decided the logical thing to to was to create their own distribution. The project took Ubuntu as a base and began layering in their custom apps, and highly refined look and feel and elementaryOS was born.
 
-When I spoke with Fore he was quick to point out how little experience the team had had with PR at the time and clearly regretted the post. It was poorly worded, but as with all things in Linux, it was something of a tempest in a teapot even at the time and it is well behind the project at this point. I bring it up not to revisit the controversy, but because the funding model ElementaryOS established early on has succeeded. 
+ElementaryOS launched with considerable fanfare thanks to its revolutionary idea of asking users to pay for it. Unfortunately for elementaryOS, a blog post about the pay-what-you-want model rubbed a lot of people in the Linux community the wrong way. Most of the kerfuffle was not about the money, it was about the wording of the post, which essentially called non-paying users thieves. 
 
-Today elementaryOS is a bootstrapped business with quite a few full time employees. It's not Canonical by any means, but it is self-sustaining and it has a model for how to continue sustaining itself, which is more than a lot of open source projects can say. If I were an open source project heavily dependant on contributions from Red Hat employees, I might, right about now, have a closer look at how elementaryOS's funding model works. Of course the elementaryOS model doesn't necessarily work at the scale of Red Hat, but it doesn't have to to sustain elementaryOS.
+When I spoke with Foré he was quick to point out how little experience the team had had with PR at the time and clearly regretted the post. It was poorly worded, but as with all things in Linux, it was something of a tempest in a teapot even at the time and it is well behind the project at this point. I bring it up not to revisit the controversy, but because the funding model elementaryOS established early on has succeeded. 
 
-And its funding model does work, so well in fact that the project has extended it to developer's in its app store. There are quite a few apps out there targeting specifically the elementaryOS desktop and if you head to elementaryOS's app store you can choose to support the developers of those apps using the same pay-what-you-want system that elementaryOS uses at the distro level. Every app developer can set a price that they feel is fair, but users can ultimately decide what they want to pay, including nothing.
+Today elementaryOS is a bootstrapped business with quite a few full time employees. It's not Canonical by any means, but it is self-sustaining and it has a model for how to continue sustaining itself, which is more than a lot of open source projects can say. If I were an open source project heavily dependent on contributions from Red Hat employees, I might, right about now, have a closer look at how elementaryOS's funding model works. Of course the elementaryOS model doesn't necessarily work at the scale of Red Hat, but it doesn't have to to sustain elementaryOS.
+
+And its funding model does work, so well in fact that the project has extended it to developers in its app store. There are quite a few apps out there targeting specifically the elementaryOS desktop and if you head to elementaryOS's app store you can choose to support the developers of those apps using the same pay-what-you-want system that elementaryOS uses at the distro level. Every app developer can set a price that they feel is fair, but users can ultimately decide what they want to pay, including nothing.
 
 ## ElementaryOS 5 Juno
 
-The latest release of ElementaryOS is nicknamed Juno, and should be version .5, following the previous release, .4 or Loki. However since .5 implies incomplete and elementaryOS is more or less complete (in terms of stability certainly) the project is calling this release elementaryOS 5. 
+The latest release of elementaryOS is nicknamed Juno, and should be version .5, following the previous release, .4 or Loki. However since .5 implies incomplete and elementaryOS is more or less complete (in terms of stability certainly) the project is calling this release elementaryOS 5. 
+
+Whatever the version number may be, one thing is for sure -- there's ton of new stuff in Juno. Enough features in fact that the release notes, written by elementaryOS's Cassidy James Blaede, are an impressive John Sircusa-style [essay](https://medium.com/elementaryos/elementary-os-5-juno-is-here-471dfdedc7b3) of some 8,000 words. If you want to know everything that's new, Blaede's notes are worth a read, if you want to know what it's like to actually use all that stuff, read on.
+
+One thing to note before we get started: Linux users wanting to try elementaryOS be forewarned, it doesn't work very well in a virtual machine. I installed it, but it was very slow. According to Foré, it's an upstream problem. GTK requires hardware acceleration for animations, which does not currently work in Virtualbox. That may change soon though. One of the big lessons Canonical has learned from collecting hardware metrics is that Ubuntu ends up in virtual machines a lot. Improvements are apparently in the works. That will help downstream distros like elementaryOS, as well as others like Linux Mint Cinnamon edition, which also doesn't run very well in a virtual machine.
+
+In the mean time though, to get an accurate sense of performance, you'll need to install elementaryOS. The Juno installer is a thinly skinned version of Ubuntu's Ubiquity Installer, which means you can easily install elementaryOS alongside your existing OS just as you would Ubuntu. The installer is perfectly functional, but it doesn't really convey elementaryOS's unique look and feel, which is why there's a new installer in the works. It's a [collaboration](https://blog.system76.com/post/170167029168/installer-elementary-and-popos-collaboration) between elementaryOS and System76 (creators of PopOS) and will be, I assume, what you'll see installing future versions of PopOS as well. The new installer isn't ready for Juno though, so for now you'll have to make do with the Ubiquity installer.
 
-Whatever the version number may be, one thing is for sure there's ton of new stuff in Juno. Enough features in fact that the release notes, written by elementaryOS's Cassidy James Blaede, are an impressive John Sircusa-style essay of some 8,000 words. If you want to know everything that's new, Blaede's notes are worth a read, if you want to know what it's like to actually use all that stuff, read on.
+I went ahead and installed elementaryOS on a separate partition to keep my existing Arch Linux installation isolated. 
 
-One thing to note before we get started: Linux users wanting to try elementaryOS be forewarned, it doesn't work very well in a virtual machine. According to Fore, it's an upstream problem. One of the big lessons Canonical has learned from its recent data collection tk is that Ubuntu users need better virtual machine support, which is now in the works. That will help downstream distros like elementaryOS and Mint Cinnamon edition, which also doesn't run very well in a virtual machine. In the mean time though, testing elementaryOS means installing it.
+ElementaryOS was plenty snappy on my Lenovo x240 (i5 with 8GB of RAM), but I also installed it on a brand new Dell XPS 13 where it really shined. ElementaryOS's theme, typography and icons all looked really nice on the XPS's HiDPI screen. My only gripe is that elementaryOS's scaling is either 1X or 2X, there's no in-between. My preference on the XPS would be more like 1.5X, but as far as I know only the KDE and Cinnamon desktops support incremental scaling without command line fiddling.
 
-The elementaryOS installer is brand new in this release and very well done. Previously elementary relied on Ubuntu's Ubiquity Installer, which, while it works, failed to do one important thing that the new installer does well -- set elementaryOS's unique tone, look and feel of elementary right from the start. The new installer is a collaboration between elementaryOS and System76 (creators of PopOS) and will be, I assume, what you'll see installing PopOS as well. 
+Once you've got elementaryOS installed and you reboot, you'll be greeted by the Pantheon desktop. While Pantheon is based on GNOME, it's very much its own thing. Like GNOME, Pantheon has a top menu bar, but it functions very differently in that it's never used for application menus (something GNOME is getting rid of as well). Instead the top bar in elementaryOS is a global bar -- it never changes. The top bar shows the date and time in the middle, status notifications, a power menu, settings for audio, power, and wireless to the right and an application launcher to the left.
 
-The installer will walk you through the process of installing elementaryOS alongside your existing Linux distro (or, presumably, Windows and macOS, though I didn't test this). I went ahead and installed it on a separate partition to keep my existing Arch Linux installation isolated. ElementaryOS was plenty snappy on my Lenovo x240 (i5 with 8GB of RAM), but I also installed it on a brand new Dell XPS 13 where it really shined. ElementaryOS's theme, typography and icons all look really nice on the XPS's HiDPI screen.
+ElementaryOS also sports a dock-style app launcher along the bottom of the screen that is, well, somewhat macOSish. ElementaryOS has taken some flack over the years for being heavily macOS-inspired and it does have some element of macOS -- the dock, a column view in Files (which KDE used to offer as well), and, perhaps more than anything else an obsession with details. ElementaryOS clearly sweats the small stuff, paying careful attention to typography, icon design, color use, shading, and so on, which ends up creating a kind of feel that's perhaps reminiscent of macOS. Having played with elementaryOS since version .2, I would say the macOS influence has been declining with every new release and I really don't see it at all in Juno, beyond the use of the dock.
 
-Once you've got elementaryOS installed you'll be greeted by the Pantheon desktop, which, while GNOME-based, is very much its own thing. Like GNOME is has a top bar, but that's about where the similarities end. The top toolbar shows the date and time, status notifications, a power menu, settings for audio, power, and wireless, as well as an application launcher. ElementaryOS also sports a dock-style app launcher along the bottom of the screen. 
+Another possible reason some users find elementaryOS to be macOS-like is that it lacks the level of customization many Linux desktops offer. There's really no way to change the look and feel of elementaryOS, and little way to customize the behavior of its default apps. It's a take it or leave it operating system -- you either like it or you don't, and if you don't you're better off using something else than trying to tweak elementaryOS to suit your whims.
 
-In fact, elementaryOS has taken some flack over the years for being heavily macOS-inspired. But in Juno I'd say that's less true than previous versions. ElementaryOS clearly sweats the small stuff, paying careful attention to typography, icon design, color use, shading, and so on, which is I think why it gets the macOS comparisons.
+ElementaryOS is not a Linux desktop in the traditional sense. Rather it's an operating system in the same sense that Windows and macOS are.
 
-Another possible reason some users find it to be macOS like is its lack of customization options. There's really no way to change the look and feel of elementaryOS and little way to customize the apps. It's a take it or leave it operating system -- you either like it or you don't, and if you don't you're better off using something else than trying to tweak it. 
+That said, you can make certain customizations without too much trouble. For example, elementaryOS puts the windows close button on the left, which, for me, messes with 25 years of muscle memory. There's no setting to change this in elementaryOS, but since GNOME is under the hood you can use `gsettings` to change the button layout. In other words, little adjustments are possible, but I'd suggest staying away from the tweak apps. 
 
-That said, you can make certain customizations without too much trouble. For example, elementaryOS puts the windows close button on the left, which messes with my 25 years of muscle memory. There's no setting to change this in elementaryOS, but since GNOME is under the hood you can use `gsettings` to change the button layout. In other words, little tweaks are possible, but I'd suggest staying away from the tweak apps. 
+Juno ships with the ability to remap the Super key. By default it brings up a list keyboard shortcuts (mostly inherited from GNOME), but you can set it to open the main menu, which, combined with the ability to immediately search by typing, turns the main menu into an application launcher as well. 
 
 Juno doesn't make any sweeping changes to the basic look and feel that elementaryOS has been working with for some time. It's made some refinements and given third-party developers some much-improved guidelines and a new color palette, but most of the work in Juno has come into the compliment of tightly integrated applications that ship with elementaryOS. 
 
-Unlike most GNOME-based distros, elementaryOS does not ship with the usual slew of GNOME applications. Instead you'll get elementaryOS's own versions of the same. In this release that means Files, a terminal app, Photos, Code (previously known as Scratch), and then a few outside apps like the epiphany web browser, tk and tk.
+Unlike most GNOME-based distros, elementaryOS does not ship with the usual slew of GNOME applications. Instead you'll get elementaryOS's own versions of the same. In this release that means Files, a terminal app, Photos, Noise (music player), Code (previously known as Scratch), and then a few outside apps like the Epiphany web browser and the Geary mail client.
 
+For the most part elementaryOS's homegrown apps are quite capable, though again, there's a notable lack of customization available. The Terminal app, for instance, offers three color schemes and not much else in way of preferences. It also, by default, uses `ctrl-v` for paste and `ctrl-c` for copy, which is annoying if you're used to `ctrl-c` killing a process. Since there's no preferences for Terminal, there's no way to fix this beyond installing a more powerful terminal like rxvt-unicode.
 
+ElementaryOS has often been seen as a good option for new users, which is to say users not entirely comfortable with Linux. I'd say this it true to a point, but elementaryOS has appeal beyond that, or at least it would like to. Juno has seen a lot of work geared toward developers, especially the changes to AppCenter which make it easier than ever for developers to get paid for their work (more on that in a minute), but also in the tools available for developers. As mentioned above there are quite a few new toolkits under the hood, but there's also completely revamped code editor known, appropriately enough, as Code.
 
-One thing that surprised me about Juno was the attention to keyboard shortcuts. My desktop of choice is i3 because it's very lightweight and I can do everything with the keyboard, while elementaryOS is not lightweight (compared to i3), it does offer a wealth of keyboard customization options. I was able to duplicate all the keys I use in i3 in elementaryOS.
+Code is quite nice, reminiscent of GNOME's Gedit, but without the abandonware feel. As with most of elementaryOS Code doesn't have a ton of customization options, but it does have the important ones -- control over tab/space settings, code folding, automatic syntax highlighting, and a quick toggle comments feature. And unlike the Terminal, Code manages to allow for complexity through a plugin system that can add extra features. You can actually add a terminal to Code and run your tests without leaving your editor, and you can install a plugin to give you "Vim style" shortcuts, which is, well, not Vim, but does allow some Vim-like features.
 
-## The AppCenter
+Code is a very pretty editor -- it has nice anti-aliased text and a lot of attention has been paid to the visual details -- but if you're coming from an IDE like Eclipse or powerful text editors Vim or Emacs, to be frank, Code isn't going to cut it. It may be that the gray is showing in my beard here, but I feel like the effort put into Code might have been better spent elsewhere given that IDEs and text editors seem like a problem that's already been solved several hundred times.
+
+The other homegrown elementaryOS apps take a similar approach, reinventing the wheel a little, though the results are always very nice and fit well with the rest of elementaryOS. For instance, Files is a good, if simple, file manager. But that simplicity is by design. As Blaede puts it in the release notes, elementaryOS encourages "a workflow where users access content from the related apps instead of worrying about the intricacies of moving files around their device’s storage." Files does have one feature I wish more file managers offered: a column view.
 
-## Rough Edges
+The Photos and Noise apps are photo and music managers respectively. Photos is very close to GNOME's Photos app, allowing for basic organization and editing of photos (including RAW files). Noise integrates well with system, allowing you to control your music from the menu bar. The default web browser is Epiphany, which, like many default web browsers, is best used to download and install a real web browser (just kidding, in elementaryOS you should use AppCenter to install a real web browser).
 
-AppCenter shortcomings, no Gimp
-no customizations
+One things you won't find in elementaryOS is an office suite. LibreOffice and more lightweight alternatives like Abiword and Gnumeric, are all available via the AppCenter, but are not part of the initial installation. 
 
+The default software suite for elementaryOS does a good job of balancing simplicity and ease-of-use against powerful features, this only falls down in two places really, Code, while nice, probably isn't going to cut it for most programmers and Epiphany is pretty simplistic if you're used to Firefox or Chrome. 
 
+One of the more interesting and innovative new features in this release is a picture-in-picture video feature that allows you to watch a video while doing something else. 
 
+The easiest way to use picture-in-picture, is to hit the keyboard shortcut super-F, which will change your cursor into a crosshairs. Just drag the cursor over the video to clip it and elementaryOS will pull the portion of the page out and display it in its own window. The only catch is that, for web video at least, you'll need to leave the browser window open (I just sent it to another desktop). It's a pretty cool feature, but unfortunately I found it a little buggy. Twice playback stopped for no apparent reason, and resizing the window sometimes caused the "clipped" video window to disappear entirely.
 
+## The AppCenter
 
+Perhaps the biggest news in elementaryOS Juno is the new and improved AppCenter, which offers some improvements to AppCenter's pay-what-you-want model. The biggest improvement is the option to try an app before you buy. 
 
+Previously you could, as you would now, put in $0 to download an app for free. Now, however, you'll be prompted to pay for that app after you've tried it, not with some nagging reminder, but with a lack of updates. If you opt not to pay for a paid app, you won't get automatic updates. The exception is security updates, those will be automatically applied regardless of whether you paid or not. As Foré, said in an [announcement](https://medium.com/elementaryos/about-appcenter-payments-daa76a1a3b59) earlier this year, "we will never withhold security updates based on payment status."
 
+That means you can continue to get updates for paid apps for free, you just have to re-download each one individually. It is, as Foré puts it, "a convenience tax." If you pay you get the convenience of automatic updates, if you don't pay you don't. 
 
+This will, no doubt, rub some people the wrong way, but elementaryOS is in uncharted waters here and is trying to build a sustainable development model in a world where most things are free. That's no easy task and there will inevitably be some pushback. It also may not work. So far developing for elementaryOS is not exactly lucrative. The project released some numbers earlier this year, reporting that it had processed $1,700 worth of payments from about 750 charges. That puts the average price of an app at $2.26. Divide that among the paid apps in the app center and unfortunately it becomes rather obvious that not only is building apps for elementaryOS not going to pay the bills, it's probably not even going to buy you coffee.
 
+Will the new model change that? That remains to be seen. It certainly makes it easier to pay for an app after you've been using it for a while, something that was impossible before. There's also a new button to send money to a developer any time you like, just look up the app in the AppCenter and scroll to the bottom and you'll find a button to send money.
 
+## Conclusion
 
+ElementaryOS has a reputation of being a good distro for Linux newcomers. Juno continues to that legacy and is one of the easiest ways I know of to dip a toe in the Linux waters without needing to learn a whole new way of working. It's especially familiar for macOS users and makes a good choice to install on your Apple hardware since elementaryOS also ships with a lot of drivers for Apple hardware, which makes it easy to install. The exception would be that shiny new the Apple hardware with the T2 chip which (as of November 2018) currently blocks Linux bootloaders.
 
-ElementaryOS also ships with a lot of Apple hardware drivers, which makes it a pretty good option to install on Apple hardware. As long as the Apple hardware doesn't have that new T2 chip which (as of November 11, 2018), which currently blocks Linux bootloaders.
+What about for developers though? Clearly with the improvements to Code, elementaryOS is aiming to provide a usable desktop that's also a good platform for development. One thing elementaryOS does well that so many desktops these days refuse to do is get out of the way. The month I spent using Juno was not spectacularly different for me than using my usual i3 or the LXQT on my wife's machine. Like the simpler, lightweight i3 and LXQT, elementaryOS does a good job of giving you the tools you need, but also, often more importantly, keeping out of the way and letting you focus on what you need to get done.