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diff --git a/published/dellxps-review.html b/published/dellxps-review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bfdee79 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/dellxps-review.html @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +<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/published/dellxps-review.txt b/published/dellxps-review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3c7c746 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/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/published/elementaryos-review.html b/published/elementaryos-review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6a3f51a --- /dev/null +++ b/published/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/published/elementaryos-review.txt b/published/elementaryos-review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3e1f92d --- /dev/null +++ b/published/elementaryos-review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,87 @@ +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. + +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. + +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 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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +I went ahead and installed elementaryOS 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 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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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, 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. + +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. + +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. + +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). + +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. + +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. diff --git a/published/free-software-notes.txt b/published/free-software-notes.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1f17928 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/free-software-notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1,255 @@ + + +Creative commons gets a lot of recognition, but when you say "creative commons" what do you mean? There's so many different licenses it's hard to know. Whereas with open source you know you have the right to copy, the right to etc + + + +I help VCs with open source, most companies have a mixed model. AMA recommendations system, for a time A was the only company that had that recommendation system and so they couldn't open source it, but no everyone has that so you might as well open source it, then you get community based improvements. + +The GPL if creating a hook, but there's no requirement to support open source. + +The GPL is there to protect that. There are economic reasons that choose the licesnce. BSD is a good licence for creating a standard, works with propreitary software, easy to compile. GPL +Busybox, embedded companies added it to their products, they added 100 commands. They were each other's biggest competitor, but they could work together on busybox. Users tend to become development partners. + +There was, before open source, a reasonably large history of educational use only software, distributed. + +The central myths of American business revolve around hard-nosed businessmen chasing better bottom lines and extolling the virtues of selfishness. Free software belies these myths, or at least operates outside them to a considerable degree. The largest single contributors to projects across GitHub are Perens' assessment of the economic paradigm of open source + +I couldn't help but be struck by the parallels to ecology. Open source as a whole has often been called an ecosystem, but it seems that, as with nature, there are ecosystems within ecosystems. Considering an open source project as an ecosystem means thinking in terms of generosity. + + +It may be that free software is more of an ecosystem. + + + + +A good example of exactly that is what might be the original open source success story -- the Apache web server. +Instead Beanbooks the software suffered a fate that may well await Redis and MondoDB -- neglect and obscurity. + + +## What does work + +The Apache web server grew out of the Apache Group, which later became the Apache Foundation we know today. The Group came before the software. At the time (1994-5) working on open source software was something of a novelty. The founders of the Apache Group knew that to wrangle code contributions from volunteers spread across the globe without an organizational ties would be difficult. This was the first problem they [set out to solve](http://mockus.us/papers/apache.pdf), and the solution at the time was the Apache Group. + +Only after the community structure had been established did the developers move on to writing code. + +As System76's experience with Beanbooks illustrates, this lesson -- that the community is more important than the code -- is one that open source software projects . + +Apache went on to become the poster child of successful open source software projects, eventually becoming the most widely used server on the web, displacing Microsoft's IIS to the point that today it's a mere footnote in the evolution of web servers. gg + + + + +These licenses are not open source at all. In fact, these licenses are the reason open source software licenses exist. + +The first attempts to define free software, and give it a coherent legal structure, came about because companies were taking software, using it and not giving anything back to the creators. Yes, the reasons MongoDB, Redis and others give for not sticking with open source, are the same reasons that drove Richard Stallman to create copyleft licensing in the first place. + + + +edis has recently created something called the “Commons Clause”, which takes the Apache license and makes it a non-Open-Source license. And they still call it the Apache license. This is a problem. Someone creating yet another non-Open-Source paradigm is not a problem, if they do it correctly. + +Redis doesn’t deny that it’s not an Open Source license any longer once their clause is added. + +It’s a bad idea to add a any text whatsoever to an Open Source license, and still call that license by it’s old name. Once the Commons Clause is added, it’s no longer the Apache license, and calling it so confuses people about what is Open Source and what isn’t. Hopefully that’s not meant deliberately. Now stop it. Take the license and the clause together, and title it the Redis license or another name of your choice that doesn’t confuse people that it’s an Open Source license. “Commons” is the name of an Apache project, so that is probably a bad choice for the name of the overall license. + +You’ll note that I worked on the Business Source License with MariaDB. They paid a day’s consulting fee. I made it very clear that they were not to tell people it was Open Source, and I made changes that made the license less ambiguous and confusing than their previous version. Please follow that example. + + + + + + + + + + + +It's worth asking, given it's success as a company thus far, what is Redis worried about? What is MongoDB worried about? + +There is an elephant in the cloud. The elephant's name is Amazon AWS. + +You might be wondering, how is this different than say the license that governs Microsoft Windows? Well, you can look at the code. You can even modify it. It seems to fit the letter of the law, but it only seems that way. If there are restrictions on what you can build, then what you have is not open source software. the Redis tk license is the definition of a proprietary license -- it restricts what you can do with the code. + + + + +It's hard for MongoDB to compete with a service that offers MongoDB and every other infrastructure tool on the internet. License of the sort that MongoDB is suggesting would allow their software to be called open source, but limit how that software could be sold. + + + + + +For MongoDB this isn't a rhetorical question. + +Redis, MongoDB, Confluent and others have changed from open source licenses to proprietary licenses in recent months. The new licenses limit what you can do with the software, making it no longer open source software. + +Every good story starts with conflict. + + +Redis and MongoDB claim that open source licenses, specifically the GPL, are making it possible for other companies to take their ideas, wrap them in a cloud service and sell them without contributing anything back to the source project. + + + + + + + +The differences in the license: "My sense is that it's not philosophical... we're going to iterate until we get it right." + +There has been only one official release of the license, "We've been continually evolving the license, updating the language" + +Monitizing open source with support contracts has never been a great business model". Critics of this statement might point to Red Hat, but then for every Red Hat there are countless examples of those for whom this model did not work out. Ever heard of Yellow Dog linux? + +On why the SSPL: "I think we can do better... I want to see more investment in open source products. VC's intesting in open source products. + +On other's with MongoDB's model: "MongoDB is unique. I would like us to not be unique." + +Legally the AGPL covers us, but the SSPL clarifies that in language that will hopefully discourage the bad actors. + +Did you know about AWS DocumentDB before the license change. At first he said no comment, then he said no we did not. But if it wasn't Amazon, it would be someone. + + + +""" + + +""" + +Database guru Mark Callaghan put it this way: "I can speak from experience that 'new license' == 'must speak to lawyers'. They tend to be busy and figuring out a new license takes a long time." In other words, you've just created a legal problem, when before all you were trying to solve was a technical one. It's simply not worth the bother. + +Redis Labs modules making them no longer free and open source, GNU/Linux distributions such as Debian and Fedora are no longer able to ship Redis Labs' versions of the affected modules to their users. + +As a result, we have begun working together to create a set of module repositories forked from prior to the license change. We will maintain changes to these modules under their original open-source licenses, applying only free and open fixes and updates." + +They're looking for help with this project. + +The Common Clause sub-license forbids you from selling software it covers. It also states you may not host or offer consulting or support services as "a product or service whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the software." This is expressly designed to prevent cloud companies from profiting by using the licensed programs. + +As Redis Labs' co-founder and CTO Yiftach Shoolman said in an email, the company did this "for two reasons -- to limit the monetization of these advanced capabilities by cloud service providers like AWS and to help enterprise developers whose companies do not work with AGPL licenses." + +Be that as it + +Recently several open source projects have run into what they see as a serious problem. Free software + + +MongoDB is building a “better database for the next generation of applications,” co-founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz told TechCrunch. We aimed to “build something that makes developers way more productive.” + + + + +Still, there is something to bear in mind + +one that perhaps even the givers did not understand the significance of, but it was a gift nonetheless. + +There is almost nothing in our daily lives that Free Software has not made possible and which would not disappear if that gift had never been given. + + +That might seem like overstating the case somewhat, but consider for a moment what is built on free software and what would disappear without it. Ninety-eight percent of servers of the internet run Linux, an OS kernel, a piece of Free Software which is built on hundreds, possibly thousands of other bits of code, all free software. + + + +Agree. Private enterprise has been profiting on open-source, mostly without giving back, for as long as we’ve had open source. That’s not new. It’s literally how the GPL came about. + +data portability will be the next big issue with users of cloud computing. Use MongoDB and you can move your data to any cloud provider that offers MongoDB. Use Amazon DocumentDB and you are now married to Amazon in the most Catholic of ways. There is a MongoDB API, but because of the license changes that API is pinned to a specific version of MongoDB. In other words you can get your data out, but it might not be a form that's easy to get into MongoDB running on say, Digitalocean or Azure or Google. + +The way to avoid this provider lockin is the make sure you chose cloud provider services that stick with mainstream open source projects as a base, perhaps adding whatever user-friendly management on top of that, but under the hood your data is stored in an open source software package. Postgresql make a good example here. Half a dozen cloud providers offer managed Postgresql in some form. If I spin up an AWS tk DB instance of postgres and two years from now decide that's no longer the best option for my company, I can dump that data out, move it to any cloud provider -- or my own bare metal server -- and import it back into a postgres database without a hitch. + +Cloud providers vary in how much they seem okay with this data portability from AWS's more or less pure disdain to Azoure and Google which have turned not competeing with their customers and supporting open standards into something of an pitch. + +--- + +Carl at system76 + +The usefulness of open source is that you can connect it anything. + +beanbooks, + +I'm epathetic to their cause, but there should a way to do that without wrecking OSD. + +Our concern was that someone would wrap up the software and we would lose all that investment. We wanted patent protection for a few years. It ended up hurting us, hurting the platform and we shouldn't have had those concerns, we should have AGPLed from the beinnning. If it was good enught hat godaddy wanted it, + +You have to be good enough and stay ahead without needing a licence to protect you. If you can't stay ahead, the license won't help. + +Licenses that are more restrictive. You have to move fast and compete. + +If generosity isn't built into open source it isn't going to work. + +MS has the same problem with piracy, solutions to that led to open source. you don't have to use unlicensed ms software. + +If you come up with a solution for one thing, you try to protect the brand, OSI doesn't like that, but it's easier than touching the software. Mongo always comes with the Mongo trademark. o + +The best conversation is an open minded conversation between OSI and mongo. + +Open hardware is quiet a bit different, there's less copying of specific designs. It's less of an issue than backend code which has no face at all. + +There is always a risk of being commodity. It depends on the bottom line, who can more efficiently deliver that infrastructure. + +Differentiation is not what you've done today, but how rapidly you can advance. -- not quote: You have a head start, but where are you going. -- the only way to be successful is to stay ahead, I don't think the license has anything to do with it. + +--- + +Bruce Perens: + +In The Cathedral and the Bazaar [16], Eric Raymond attempted to explain Open Source as a gift economy, a phenomenon of computer programmers having the leisure to do creative work not connected to their employment, and an artistic motivation to have their work appreciated. Raymond explains excellently how programmers behave within their own private subculture. The motivations he explored dominated during the genesis of Open Source and continue to be effective within a critically important group of Open Source contributors today. + +Raymond edited The Cathedral and the Bazaar, then a year old, to replace the words Free Software with Open Source. + +Neither Microsoft software nor Linux and Open Source can help you differentiate your business for long, because they are available to everyone. They differentiate against each other, they just don't differentiate your business. One or the other can save you money or make you more efficient, but in general they don't make your business more attractive to your customer. + +The companies that join Open Source collaborations are seeking to use the software in a non-differentiating, cost-center role. It's not important to these companies that Open Source does not in itself produce a profit. Their profit-centers are things other than software, and software is for them an enabling technology. In order to continue to operate their profit-centers, they must make some investment in their cost centers. In the case of differentiating software, they have little choice but to make use of the in-house or contract development paradigm, because they need to prevent their differentiators from falling into the hands of their competitors. For their non-differentiators, they have the choice of the retail or Open Source paradigms. But which is more efficient? + + +Eric Raymond proposed that the volunteer's motivation is mainly intangible, and that a particularly important motivator is participation in a community of respect in which developers are recognized by their peers for the quality and innovation in their work. The FLOSS study surveyed Open Source developers regarding their motivation, found that many of them are motivated by technical curiosity and the desire to learn. I feel that their motivation is similar to that of an artist: just as a painter wants people to appreciate his paintings, a programmer wants to have users who appreciate his software. + + +--- + +Free software was the gift that made the world as we know it possible. It was an astounding gift to give, one that perhaps even the givers did not understand the significance of, but it was a gift nonetheless. + +There is almost nothing in our daily lives that Free Software has not made possible and which would not disappear if that gift had never been given. + +Free Software did not have to happen, arguably it should not have happened. The historical forces aligned against it were significant. And it did not happen randomly, it grew out of particular people, with particular beliefs, and today, in this world built on free software, we have lost sight of those beliefs, and if we do not regain our vision of them, our understanding of where Free Software came from, where it is leading us, and how we can keep it going, we risk losing all that we have built. + +That might seem like overstating the case somewhat, but consider for a moment what is built on free software and what would disappear without it. Ninety-eight percent of servers of the internet run Linux, an OS kernel, a piece of Free Software which is built on hundreds, possibly thousands of other bits of code, all free software. + + + +This notion of free software as a commons though requires some clarification lest someone trot out the tired old "tragedy of the commons" analysis, which has, in most fields of analysis, been long since abandoned. + +The notion that free softwareo + +The “Commons Clause” is a nonfree license because it forbids selling copies of the program, and even running the program as part of implementing any commercial service. Adding insult to injury, it also twists the words “commons” and “sell.” + +We urge people to reject programs under this license and to develop free replacements. Where a previous version was available as free software, continuing development of that version is an option. + + + + +“The Lord God in a particular way desired that the earth be common possession of all, and produce fruit for all; but greed produced property rights” + +In fact this hostility of the church to the private property, sustained by the franciscans (led for example by Duns Scoto and William of Occam) , was oposed by the scholastics, with Thomas Aquinas using the argument using by Aristotle in the “Politics”: +“What is common to a very large number of people gets minimal care. For all are especially concerned with their own things, and less with the common ones, or only to the extent that they concern one” + +It seems to me that Mr. Garrett Hardin attributed to himself the “Tragedy of the Commons” but this is a very old argument in societies where the market forces has detroyed the real communities, and the view of the world is that of individual people grabbing as much as possible of the common pie, as was the case in the ancient Greece + + +There are thousands of text and quotes around the injustice of private property (or property rights), for example San Ambrosius in the IV century said: +“The Lord God in a particular way desired that the earth be common possession of all, and produce fruit for all; but greed produced property rights” + +In fact this hostility of the church to the private property, sustained by the franciscans (led for example by Duns Scoto and William of Occam) , was oposed by the scholastics, with Thomas Aquinas using the argument using by Aristotle in the “Politics”: +“What is common to a very large number of people gets minimal care. For all are especially concerned with their own things, and less with the common ones, or only to the extent that they concern one” + +It seems to me that Mr. Garrett Hardin attributed to himself the “Tragedy of the Commons” but this is a very old argument in societies where the market forces has detroyed the real communities, and the view of the world is that of individual people grabbing as much as possible of the common pie, as was the case in the ancient Greece + + +In this layer, however, both community and resource boundaries are multiplied. Every single community that forms around specific instances or projects +of free software counts as a different commons, with its particular (even though +in some cases similar) rules, boundaries and systems of governance. In other +words, each group of people who not only use a certain free software, but also +help to support or develop it (in the expanded sense outlined previously), can be +seen as a commons in itself. + +Also bear in mind that there is no reason for free software occupies the position it does. + +The historical forces aligned against it were significant. And it did not happen randomly, it grew out of particular people, with particular beliefs, and today, in this world built on free software, we have lost sight of those beliefs, and if we do not regain our vision of them, our understanding of where Free Software came from, where it is leading us, and how we can keep it going, we risk losing all that we have built. + diff --git a/published/free-software.txt b/published/free-software.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8c11bb5 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/free-software.txt @@ -0,0 +1,125 @@ +Free and open source software enables the world as we know it. From web servers to kiosks to the big data algorithms mining your Facebook feed, nearly every computer system you interact with runs, at least in part, on free software. Free software has given rise to a galaxy of startups and enabled the [largest software acquisition](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/10/ibm-buys-red-hat-with-eye-on-cloud-dominance/) in the history of the world. + +Free software is a gift. It's the gift that made the world as we know it possible. It's an astounding gift to give. So astounding in fact that it made businesses unaccustomed to this kind of generosity uncomfortable. They weren't unwilling to use free software, it was too radical and by extension, too political. It had to be renamed "open source." + +Once that happened open source software took over the world. + +Recently though there's been a disturbance in the open source force. + +Redis Labs, MongoDB, and Confluent all changed their software licenses in recent months, moving away from open source licenses to more restrictive terms that limit what can be done with the software, making it no longer open source software. + +The problem, argue Redis Labs, MongoDB and others, is hosted software services. Also known as, "the cloud." Also known as Amazon AWS. + +## Cloud Burst + +MongoDB the company is built around the open source "NoSQL" database of the same name. MongoDB's database is useful for storing unstructured data, for example images, which it can handle just as well as it handles more traditional data types. Data is stored in JSON-like documents rather than the columns and rows of a relational database. Since there's no structured tables there's no "structured query language" for working with the data, hence the term "NoSQL." + +MongoDB is not the only NoSQL database out there, but it's one of the most widely used. According to industry aggregator, DB Engines, MongoDB is the [fifth most popular database](https://db-engines.com/en/ranking), with everyone from Google to Code Academy to Foursquare using MongoDB. + +MongoDB is also leading the charge to create a new kind of open source license, which CTO Eliot Horowitz believes is necessary to protect open source software businesses as computing moves into the new world of the cloud. + +The cloud, argue Horowitz and others, requires the open source community to re-think and possibly update open source licenses to "deal with new challenges in a new environment." The challenges are, essentially, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, which are all capable of taking open source software, wrapping it up as a service and reselling it. The problem with AWS or Azure wrapping up MongoDB and offering it as part of a software as a service (SaaS), is that it then competes with MongoDB's own cloud-based SaaS -- MongoDB Atlas. What's threatened then is not MongoDB's source code, but MongoDB's own SaaS derived from that source code, and which is the company's chief source of revenue. + +To combat the potential threat to its bottom line, MongoDB has moved from the Gnu Public License (GPL) to what it calls the Server Side Public License, or SSPL. The SSPL says, in essence, you can do anything you want with this software, except use it to build something that competes with MongoDB Atlas. + +MongoDB has submitted the SSPL to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the organization that oversees and approves new open source licenses, but the approval process is still in the early review stages. That said, judging by discussion on the mailing lists, and the wording of the license, the SSPL is unlikely to ever be approved by the OSI, at least as it's currently written. + +Part of MongoDB's problem is that it's not the first open source business to run into this situation. In fact, part of this problem -- companies taking software, using it as they please and contributing nothing back -- is the reason open source software exists at all. + +Open source licenses vary, but the gist is generally, you can take this code and do what you want with it, but you can’t make the code proprietary, and if you use it in another project, then that project can’t be proprietary either. These licenses were written this way to prevent companies from taking open source code, using it in their own code and not sharing any of it back to the original project. + +Horowitz argues that wrapping a piece of code in a SaaS offering is the modern equivalent of using it in an application. + +It is a novel argument, but it's in defense of a very old problem that goes well beyond licensing. It's a problem that goes all the back to the beginning of free software -- how do you make money off software if you give it away for free? + +One traditional answer has been that you sell services around your open source software. But for Horowitz that's not good enough. "Monetizing open source with support contracts has never been a great business model," he tells Ars. Red Hat would likely disagree, but Horowitz believes that more protective licenses would bring more venture capital investment and spawn more software businesses based on the open model MongoDB has used. "We're unique," he says, "I want us to be less unique." + +He may be correct. A more protective license could induce more venture capital investment because there's (arguably) a greater likelihood of return on their investment. But if that capital did come, it wouldn't be investing in open source because that kind of restriction on the software means it no longer fits the definition of open source. + +Quite a few open source advocates have already made the counter argument that the current set of licenses are fine, it's the business models that need work. + +Bruce Perens, co-author of the original [open source definition](https://opensource.org/docs/osd), says the SSPL is incompatible with the OSI's open source definition number nine, which says that the "license must not restrict other software." Since the SSPL forces any SaaS software that is aggregated with the covered software, but not a derivative of it, to nevertheless be open source, it fails this test. "I wrote number nine into the OSD to prohibit exactly this sort of conduct," says Perens, "the text is really clear." + +MongoDB is not the only one complaining that the cloud is raining on its profits. + +Redis Labs, another data storage company, was the first to sound the alarm about cloud providers threatening its business and may have the better solution. Redis Labs initially changed its license to include something called the Common Clause sub-license, which forbids anyone from selling any software it covers. Software licensed with the Common Clause is not, by anyone's definition, open source, which the company Labs acknowledged. It has never described those portions of its software as open source. + +As this article was wrapping up Redis Labs made yet another licensing change, in essence dropping all pretense of being open source software and adopting a homegrown proprietary license for some of its modules. To be clear, most of Redis is governed by the Apache 2.0 License, but some modules are not, namely RedisJSON, RedisSearch, RedisGraph, RedisML and RedisBloom. + +The license that applies to these modules says that while users can view and modify the code, use it in their applications, it restricts which types of applications they can build. With this new license you are not free to build anything you want. You cannot build database products, a caching engine, a processing engine, a search engine, an indexing engine or any kinds of ML or AI derived serving engine. You cannot in other words use Redis Labs' code to compete with Redis Labs. This violates one of the core tenants of open source licensing -- that there be no restrictions on derivative software. + +This is the same sort of protection MongoDB also wants, but MongoDB wants to retain the open source label. + +Unfortunately for MongoDB it doesn't make sense to simultaneously say that you are open source, and that only you should profit from your open source software. There *is* a business model where than does make sense: proprietary software. + +## Lessons from history + +Why does MongoDB want to be open source at all? After all there is no shortage of very successful proprietary software, so why not embrace that path and move on? + +Horowitz tells me he believes "that open source results in better systems software, especially databases," going on to cite security and community as advantages of remaining open source. While he's right about both of those things, those are often cited as reasons to use open source software, more eyes on the software means fewer bugs, in theory anyway. + +But looking at the working of the OSD, it's clear that Horowitz is missing one key component that's built into to every open source license -- generosity. Open source does not limit what you can do with the software, ever. And that may well be the reason for its success. Generosity of this kind is how you get community, the cornerstone on which any successful open source project is built. By allowing the widest possible range of users to use your software you get the biggest possible community. More eyes on bugs, more people fixing them. That community is what turns into momentum. That momentum becomes market share. Market share sometimes becomes profit, but that's not a promise of open source. + +As Bruce Perens puts it, "we have to draw a line between open source... and the right to make money with open source. The open source definition allows, but does not support your right to make money. We're not going to change the rules because you can make money better that way." + +Just because you build it and they come, does not mean massive profit. + +In fact, if you build it and they come and then you take it away, it might be worse than if you'd never built it. + +Redis Labs' move away from open source comes after it reaped all the benefits of open source -- community support, wide adoption and code contributions from a widespread sources. To put it bluntly, Redis Labs angered the community. + +When free software developers get mad, they get forking, and there is indeed a fork of Redis, [GoodFORM](https://goodformcode.com/). GoodFORM takes the re-licensed Redis modules as they were prior to the license change, and will maintain them for Debian, Fedora and other Linux distros that cannot ship proprietary software. + +The unintended consequence of Redis Labs' new license is that anyone wanting to use a full and open source version of Redis will have to use GoodFORM, not Redis. + +Individual developers might not much care, but large companies looking to use open source software aren't so cavalier. For them it usually comes down to a choice, either use clearly open source software with an OSI approved license, or call the lawyers. And no one ever wants to call the lawyers just to install a piece of software. + +Perens tells Ars that this was one of the key motivations behind the intimal open source definition (originally written for the Debian project). "The open source definition means that you shouldn't need a lawyer just to be a user," says Perns. "And one of the ways we do that is minimizing the legal load." + +Redis Labs' new license puts companies in the position of needing a lawyer, and GoodFORM becomes the more logical choice. This also may hint at why MongoDB wants to remain open source. + +Other open source projects which have changed to closed source licenses have not fared well. The Xfree86 project was the defacto standard for running X Windows for most of the 1990s, up through the early 2000s. In 2004 Xfree86 began shipping code that the Free Software Foundation felt was counter to the GPL. The downstream operating systems using Xfree86 decided that was unacceptable and a fork, X.org, was born. Today X.org occupies the place Xfree86 once did and Xfree86 is abandoned. + +Other examples are easy to find, LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice, MariaDB came out of license changes in MySQL, Wireshark came out of Ethereal, the list goes on, but the key thing to note is not just that the forks happened, but that they took with them the developers, the community, the momentum that sustains open source software over the long haul. Lose the goodwill of the open source community and it can be vicious in exacting its revenge. It's also efficient in doing so, Xfree86 was effectively dead six months after X.org began, OpenOffice disappeared into irrelevancy similarly quickly. + +The overwhelming lesson of open source history is that once you are open source, it's very unlikely you will change that and survive. + +## What makes open source work: generosity + +If open source history teaches that there is no going back, it's worth considering why. + +After years of using Quickbooks to appease accountants, I got fed up with it. I looked around for some open source accounting software and stumbled across something that fit my needs, [Beanbooks](https://beansbooks.com/opencode), a little project spun out of Linux computer manufacturer System76. + +System76's Beanbooks is a perfect example of what Perens sees as an ideal open source software scenario. In <cite>The emerging economic paradigm of Open Source</cite> Perens argues that a company's non-differentiating software is its best scenario for open source software. That is, open source the infrastructure of the business, not the core. + +To put it another way, Beanbooks was not System76's profit center, but it is an enabling technology for System76's profit center -- building Linux-based computers. + +However, despite being a perfect candidate for an open source license, Beanbooks is not open source. Why? + +System76 sells a hosted version of [Beanbooks](https://beansbooks.com/opencode), a SaaS, and at the time the company was worried that a larger company would come along, take the GPL code, essentially clone Beanbooks and get all the profit from System76's investment. + +System76 founder Carl Richell says he can empathize with MongoDB and Redis Labs, but he has already been down the worry-about-someone-stealing-your-code-for-competing-SaaS road and regrets it. "Our concern was that someone would wrap up the software and we would lose all our investment." He says System76 wanted something like patent protection for a few years, but that "ended up hurting us, hurting the platform, and we shouldn't have had those concerns." + +While the SaaS version of Beanbooks looks to be fine, the available code does not get updates and is, from a free software perspective, fairly useless. The Github page is a ghost town. There's no development, no community. + +Beanbooks the service carries on, but it does so without a community contributing ideas, code and everything else vibrant open source projects have. Richell thinks Beanbooks might have avoided its fate if it had a GPL or similar license from the beginning. + +"If it was good enough that someone wanted it that's great," says Richell. The key to success for Ritchell isn't the open source software, it's the innovation. "Differentiation is not what you've done today, but how rapidly you can advance," he says. As the software developer you have a head start, and, hopefully, a vision of where you are going, those are your differentiators, to use Perens' terms. + +"The only way to be successful is to stay ahead," says Richell, "I don't think the license has anything to do with it." + +## What the future looks like + +Everyone loves an underdog, and Redis Labs and MongoDB want to portray themselves as the open source underdogs waging a heroic battle against the forces of evil in the form of AWS. But are they? + +Redis Labs and MongoDB both look like very healthy companies. Redis Labs just raised $60 million dollars in funding and, based on the companies doing the funding, looks poised for a successful IPO. MongoDB's IPO last year was, by all accounts, a huge success. It's stock IPOed at $24 and has steadily climbed ever since then. Today it trades at at around $100 a share. Just before this article went to press one of MongoDB's biggest users, Lyft, did defect to Amazon, but after a slight stock drop, MongoDB's stock was right back up where it was before Lyft defected. + +Neither company is hurting. At least not yet. The fallout from their license changes remains to be seen, but given that much of the development of MongoDB comes from employees, it will likely be fine regardless of whether it's open source or not. The fate of either is unimportant to the fate of the larger open source paradigm. + +The open source paradigm doesn't work for everyone. As Perens put it in a conversation we had as I was wrapping this up, "you can use any license you want as long as you don't call it open source, that's your freedom. But we have certain rights that come with open source it doesn't make sense to give these up to protect a business model." + +Through all the conversations I had with developers and founders, one line kept coming back to me. System76 founder Carl Richell told me: "if generosity isn't built into open source, it isn't going to work." + +Generosity in this case is the right to use the software for any purpose. + +This has always been the basic litmus test for new open licenses -- is the license limiting the generosity of the software? What got open source where it is today is that it could be used anywhere, with anything. Need to combine open source and proprietary software? No problem. Need to re-write that open source library so it can interface with your proprietary code? No problem. Want to take that open source library, wrap it up as a service and sell it? No problem. Because in the end, that's what open source is: freedom through generosity. And as Perens points out, that's what it is even when that model doesn't work for a particular business. diff --git a/published/vivaldi2.html b/published/vivaldi2.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..36181e5 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/vivaldi2.html @@ -0,0 +1,62 @@ +<p>The Web browser is likely the most important piece of software on your hardware, whatever that hardware may be. Indeed whenever a new bit of hardware arrives, should it lack a way to browse the web, invariably one of the first things enthusiasts will do is figure out a way to run a web browser on it.</p> +<p>Despite their ubiquity though there is very little difference between web browsers. Most people it seems, get by with whatever was installed by default. And no wonder. Modern browsers, Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera are largely indistinguishable both in appearance and features -- why bother with one over the other?</p> +<p>But this uniformity is a choice. It's the result of a particular approach to software development. The prevailing wisdom of the moment is that web browsers should be like children of the Victorian age: seen and not heard. Or in the case of browsers, neither seen nor heard. </p> +<p>Fortunately for those of us who'd like something different, something we can bend to <em>our</em> will rather than the other way around, there is an alternative. It's called Vivaldi and it recently hit the 2.0 milestone.</p> +<p>You can download the latest version of Vivaldi from the <a href="https://vivaldi.com/download/">Vivaldi site</a> or install it through the app store or package manager of your OS.</p> +<p>Perhaps the most shocking thing about this release is that it's merely 2.0. That's a throwback to an earlier time when version numbers had meaning, and a major number increment meant that something major had happened. </p> +<p>The version number here does mean something, but it's also perhaps a tad misleading. Under the hood Vivaldi tracks Chromium updates and, like Chrome and Firefox, issues minor updates every six weeks or so. That means some of the features I'll be discussing trickled in over time, rather than all arriving in one monolithic 2.0 release. It also means that under the hood Vivaldi 2.0 uses Chromium 69.</p> +<p>But first, a confession. I'm probably a bit biased. I've been using Vivaldi daily since the pre-release versions first hit the web and at this point it's difficult to imagine going back to another browser that doesn't have a way to stack tabs, view two (or more) tabs side by side, take notes with full page screenshots, control my search suggestion privacy settings, or browse the web without ever taking my fingers off the keyboard, all standard features in Vivaldi.</p> +<p>If you'd like to go beyond the vanilla browsing experience offered by the big name browser makers, if you'd like to customize your browser in myriad ways and have more control over your browsing experience, Vivaldi 2.0 is well worth trying.</p> +<h2>Vivaldi 2.0</h2> +[image="vivaldi-stock.jpg" caption="Grab the latest version of Vivaldi and this is the first things you'll see."] +[image="vivaldi-stock-color.jpg" caption="The default Vivaldi theme matches the top bar color to the color of the site you're on. As with everything else in Vivaldi, you can change this in the settings panel."] +<p>Vivaldi 2.0 has several headline-grabbing new features, but the most welcome is undoubtedly be the new syncing feature.</p> +<p>Vivaldi 2.0 can synchronize your bookmarks, passwords, autofill data, typed URLs, notes, remote sessions and some, though not all, of your settings between installs. </p> +<p>Syncing data is no small undertaking since it requires a server-side component as well as the in-browser UI. Because of its focus on data privacy, Vivaldi opted to build its own sync tools and did so in such a way that your data is encrypted end-to-end (provided you set a password, which you should). Vivaldi stores, but has no way to read your data, and it isn't sending any data to third-party servers at all. Everything is in-house.</p> +<p>While I don't actually have a use for sync until there's a mobile version, I've been testing Vivaldi's syncing features for over a month now, syncing everything between my machine and my wife's machine, and have yet to experience any hiccups or problems. It just works.</p> +[image="vivaldi-sync.jpg" caption="Vivaldi's new Syncing feature and settings"] +<p>Vivaldi CEO, and co-creator of the once-great Opera, Jon von Tetzchner tells Ars that sync will be evolving quickly from here, hopefully soon including the ability to sync more settings, history, web panels, themes and more.</p> +<p>As welcome as sync is, there's something a little bittersweet about it since it makes a mobile version of Vivaldi even more desirable. Thus far that doesn't exist. Publicly anyway, von Tetzchner tells Ars that the mobile version does exist, but isn't ready for prime time yet. He did not give me any kind of time frame, but I think it's safe to say that a mobile version of Vivaldi is a very high priority.</p> +<p>In the mean time there are quite a few other improvements in Vivaldi 2.0 that make it an even more powerful tool. One that I haven't seen Vivaldi tout much is how much faster Vivaldi 2.0 is than it was back in the 1.0 days. According to von Tetzchner some of the speed boost is a result of Chromium improvements, and some of it is related to a significant Chromium change that came along last year, which forced Vivaldi's engineers to refactor a considerable amount of code, speeding up the browser in the process.</p> +<p>Whatever the case, Vivaldi 2.0 is noticeably faster than 1.0, both in terms of UI and page load speeds. In my testing, this improvement is most noticeable if you have a lot of tabs open, as well as a lot of bookmarks and notes (as an aside, if you do have a lot of tabs open, periodically right-click the active tab and select "Hibernate Background Tabs", this will stop background tabs from eating up memory. In my testing this can free up as much as 500MB of RAM. Ah, JavaScript, what would RAM makers do without you?).</p> +<p>This is the third time I've covered Vivaldi for Ars, so before I dig into some of the nice refinements in 2.0, I wanted to briefly revisit those previous reviews. In my <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/even-at-1-0-vivaldi-closes-in-on-the-cure-for-the-common-browser/">review of Vivaldi 1.0</a> I criticized Vivaldi for a few missing features, notably that there was no syncing between computers, no mobile version, no way to dock the developer tools panel, and no way to customize buttons in the URL bar.</p> +<p>I'm happy to report that Vivaldi 2.0 has solved all these problem, plus a slew of smaller ones I mentioned in that piece, except of course for the lack of a mobile version. </p> +<p>After sync and the speed improvements Vivaldi 2.0's feature list becomes a browser tinkerer's wonderland. Vivaldi's MO has always been to keep refining, and fine tuning existing features, and this release is no exception. There are so many new options, added little features and tweaks that it's tough to know where to start. I highly recommend checking out the <a href="https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-2-0-your-browser-matters/">Vivaldi blog</a> for more details, and the complete list of <a href="https://vivaldi.com/changelog-vivaldi-1-15-to-2-0/">everything that's new in 2.0</a>.</p> +<p>My favorite feature in this release is in Vivaldi's Tab Tiling feature. One of Vivaldi's most innovative features, tab tiling allows you to view several tabs in a single window that's split into little subwindows (nerds: think tmux in your browser). As someone who does a tremendous amount of online research, especially comparing things, this feature is what made Vivaldi my default browser years ago and I can't imagine browsing the web without it.</p> +<p>In Vivaldi 2.0 you can now resize each tiled tab's window by dragging that tile’s border. Even better, your customized layout persists through restarts and loading of saved sessions. </p> +[image="vivaldi-tab-tiles.jpg" caption="An example of how tab tiles can be useful. On the left is a map of bus routes, on the right is the street view of what I'll see when I get off the bus."] +<p>Another standout feature among the hundreds of improvements in 2.0 is support for "floating" Web Panels. Web Panels are the small windows holding various menus, or even webpages if you like, that live as buttons in Vivaldi's sidebar. Push the button and the panel expands. By default panels include bookmarks, notes, history, and downloads. In previous releases when a panel opened it resized the main window to fit both on screen. In the day and age of responsive design that sometimes meant the webpage you were viewing suddenly changed, and even if it didn't, resizing the page could be annoying.</p> +<p>Resizing the page is still the default, but with Vivaldi 2.0 there's a new setting to enable "floating" panels. Turn that on and panels will not resize the main window, they'll overlay it, floating on top of the content. That does mean they'll cover any content in your main window, but since the purpose of opening the panel is to interact with it, covering other content is rarely a problem. There's also a setting to auto-close the panel so that when you're done with the panel it will get out of your way again.</p> +[image="vivaldi-panel-resize.jpg" caption="This is the old behavior, the main browser window is resized to accommodate the panel."] +[image="vivaldi-panel-float.jpg" caption="Same window, same panel, but now in floating mode. Main window content is unchanged, panel float above it."] +<p>I said covering content is "rarely" a problem, but the truth is there are times when floating mode works better, and times when resizing the main window works better. Recognizing this, Vivaldi has a keyboard shortcut available to toggle between the two. You'll have to set the keyboard shortcut, by default it's blank, but it's there if you need it. </p> +<p>Another nice new feature is the new Quick Commands support for bookmark nicknames. If you've nicknamed your bookmarks you can now pull up the Quick Commands window (press F2), type the nickname and Vivaldi will automatically open that page -- you don't even need to hit return, as soon as you type out the nickname the page opens. </p> +<p>One feature of Vivaldi I've always ignored is the Web Panel -- I've never really seen a use for it. </p> +<p>In 2.0 there's a new feature called Web Panel Suggestions which is designed to help you explore Web Panels. Click the "+" icon to add a new Web Panel and Vivaldi will suggest websites that might be useful in a panel out of the sites you visit the most. </p> +<p>I'm still not a big user of web panels, but thanks to the suggestions I have discovered that documentation sites are a good use case. For example, I have the <a href="https://devdocs.io/">devdocs</a> site as a panel and the Vivaldi help site as another. Whenever I need to look something up I open the panel, figure out what I want to know, and close it again without adding new tabs or changing the main browsing session in any way.</p> +[image="vivaldi-web-panel.jpg" caption="Looking up things in Django's documentation (via DevDocs.io) while reviewing code, a handy use for Web Panels."] +<p>This perhaps highlights something that will become very obvious the minute you start using Vivaldi: it's very customizable. Sometimes the sheer number of options can be overwhelming and if you don't spend some time digging, you can overlook very useful features.</p> +<p>For example I've been using Vivaldi for years and always been slightly irritated that releasing the Alt key opens the main menu. Because I use Alt-J and Alt-K to switch desktops, I'd always land on Vivaldi and the main menu would be open. Arguably this is an OS-level feature that I should figure out how to turn off globally since it happens in Firefox and LibreOffice as well. I happened to mention this annoyance in passing when I spoke with von Tetzchner and he emailed me a bit later to point out that Vivaldi has a setting to turn off "Alt key for Main Menu". It was there for who knows how long, I simply missed it.</p> +<h2>How to get the most of Vivaldi</h2> +<p>That highlights what's probably Vivaldi 2.0's biggest challenge -- convincing people to put in little bit of effort. As von Tetzchner tells Ars, "there is a little bit of a learning curve, but if you give it time and customize it, you'll find that Vivaldi feels really right. If there's something you don't like let us know, we're unique in how we listen to users."</p> +<p>To really get the most out of Vivaldi, you need to spend some time customizing it to your needs, and to do that, you need to know what's possible. I would strongly suggest you spend some time exploring Vivaldi's settings page to see what you can change. And of course Chrome extensions work just fine in Vivaldi, so if there is something it can't do out of the box, there's always extensions. That said I've only found the need for two extensions.</p> +<p>The first thing you should do when you install Vivaldi is open up the settings panel and have a look around. </p> +<p>To do that you can either click the gear icon at the lower left part of the screen, or click the main menu, go to Tools and then settings, or type F2 and then "sett" and hit return, or hit Alt-P, or you can visualize the settings page and it will appear. Just kidding, visualizing it doesn't work. Yet. </p> +<p>As you can see there are many different ways to do any one thing in Vivaldi. This is its gift to you, it will work however you'd like it to work. I happen to be a keyboard shortcuts fan, so I've set up Vivaldi so that nearly everything I want to do I can do without taking my fingers off the keys (I also use a plugin, Vimium to add some shortcuts Vivaldi doesn't offer out of the box). In Vivaldi 2.0 there are a few new shortcuts worth familiarizing yourself with, for example there are now predefined shortcuts for moving tabs left and right.</p> +<p>That's how I use Vivaldi, but I know other users who make extensive use of mouse gestures so that they rarely have to touch the keyboard. Polar opposite ways of working that are both possible in the same piece of software. </p> +<p>Once you start digging into the different ways of using Vivaldi you'll find a level of fine-grained control you won't find elsewhere. Consider for instance, privacy in the context of web searching. </p> +<p>Whenever you search in the address bar of other browsers, that information is, by default, sent to a third-party server, be it Google, Bing or whomever the search provider is for that browser. This means the third-party can keep track of what you search for, but it also means it can see URLs you type as well. Because you're searching in the URL bar, and the browser doesn't know if you're entering a domain name or searching, in most cases, the browser will send every URL you enter to the search engine as well. </p> +<p>Most browsers allow you to turn this feature off, but in every browser I've used the choice of whether or not to use predictive searching is binary: it's either on or off.</p> +<p>In Vivaldi you get more control than that.</p> +<p>The first thing to realize is that this behavior is off by default. Out of the box nothing you type in the address bar is sent to any third-party. Vivaldi takes your privacy much more seriously than the rest of the browsers I've tested.</p> +<p>If, however, you decide you want predictive searching, as this is known, you can turn it on in Settings >> Search. Once it's on you have some extra options to control how it works. You could, for instance, turn it off when typing in the URL bar, but enable it in the separate search box. That would mean things you type in the URL bar, e.g. URLs, would never be sent on to a third-party, but when you search in the search box you'd get suggestions. </p> +<p>You can fine tune this a bit more too. I don't want suggestions for everything I search in the URL, but I also don't like a separate search box cluttering up the URL bar. So I turn off suggestions in the URL bar, but enable them if I explicitly use a search keyword (letter really) to trigger a search from the URL bar. That way if I type "arstechnica.com", no data is sent and I get no suggestions I just go to the Ars site. But if I type "d arstechnica" I'll get suggestions from DuckDuckGo because the "d" prefix tells Vivaldi to search DuckDuckGo.</p> +[image="vivaldi-search-settings.jpg" caption="Granular control allows you to balance privacy with convenience when searching the web."] +<p>You can further refine this to restrict it to only search engines you trust to keep your data private, like DuckDuckGo, StartPage or Quant, all of which Vivaldi includes out of the box. You can also use a POST request if the search engine supports it, further limiting the data that you're leaking when you search (I have not, however, been able to make this work with anything except StartPage). There's even an option to set different default search engines for normal windows and private browsing windows (by the default the latter will use DuckDuckGo).</p> +<p>It's not new in this release, but there's another Vivaldi feature worth noting: fast forward and rewind. Fast forward is useful for any sort of paged content, as it allows you to jump to the next page, and you don't have to click the button, there's a keyboard shortcut as well. For example, search for something on Google, use spacebar to scroll down the page, and when you get to the bottom of the page, hit spacebar again and Vivaldi will automatically load the next pages of results. Rewind will do the opposite, take you back to the beginning of the your most recent browsing history for that tab.</p> +<p>You can also alter Vivaldi's interface to suit your needs, moving the tab bar to any side of the window you like, same with the URL bar, bookmarks and so on. </p> +<p>The possibilities are almost limitless. With that in mind, I'd also suggest looking over the <a href="https://forum.vivaldi.net/">user forums</a> for tips from other users, examples of how people are using Vivaldi and other suggestions. Vivaldi users are some of the active, helpful people I've encountered in the software world. If there's a way to do something with Vivaldi -- and chances are pretty good there is -- they'll know.</p> +<p>In fact, according to von Tetzchner, about half of all the features in this release come from user feedback and suggestions. To protect your privacy Vivaldi does not collect any data about how you use the browser, so if you want to have an impact on the future of Vivaldi, and you definitely can have one, you'll have to join the community and get involved.</p> +<h2>Conclusion</h2> +<p>While Vivaldi 2.0 is not perfect, its lack of a mobile version remains frustrating, and there are some other features I'd like to see, like a way to export notes, to make notes on PDF files, keyboard shortcuts for selecting tabs, and an Opera-mail style mail client -- most of which I know are on the roadmap -- this release sees the browser maturing, adding the features users want and continuing to focus on the details that make Vivaldi a power user's delight.</p> +<p>When I asked why a tech savvy user might consider switching from, say, Firefox, von Tetzchner said Vivaldi's advantage lies in its user-centric focus. "It's about the focus on you and your requirements," he says. "Other browsers are removing features, we're adding them. There's more than one way to do everything in Vivaldi. Make it yours."</p> diff --git a/published/vivaldi2.txt b/published/vivaldi2.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6859d39 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/vivaldi2.txt @@ -0,0 +1,110 @@ +The Web browser is likely the most important piece of software on your hardware, whatever that hardware may be. Indeed whenever a new bit of hardware arrives, should it lack a way to browse the web, invariably one of the first things enthusiasts will do is figure out a way to run a web browser on it. + +Despite its ubiquity there is little difference between web browsers. Most people it seems, get by with whatever was installed by default. And no wonder. Modern browsers, Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera are largely indistinguishable both in appearance and features -- why bother with one over the other? + +But this lack of choice is itself a choice. It's the result of a particular approach to software development. The prevailing wisdom of the moment is that web browsers should be like children of the Victorian age: seen and not heard. Or in the case of browsers, neither seen nor heard. + +Fortunately for those of us who'd like something different, something we can bend to *our* will rather than the other way around, there is an alternative. It's called Vivaldi and it recently hit the 2.0 milestone. + +You can download the latest version of Vivaldi from the [Vivaldi site](https://vivaldi.com/download/) or install it through your OSes' app store or package manager. + +Perhaps the most shocking thing about this release is that it's merely 2.0. That's a throwback to an earlier time when version numbers had meaning, and a major number increment meant that something major had happened. + +The version number here does mean something, but it's also perhaps a tad misleading. Under the hood Vivaldi tracks Chromium updates and, like Chrome and Firefox, issues minor updates every six weeks or so. That means some of the features I'll be discussing trickled in over time, rather than all arriving in one monolithic 2.0 release. It also means that under the hood Vivaldi 2.0 uses Chromium 69. + +But first, a confession. I'm probably a bit biased. I've been using Vivaldi daily since the pre-release versions first hit the web and at this point it's difficult to imagine going back to another browser that doesn't have a way to stack tabs, view two (or more) tabs side by side, take notes with full page screenshots, control my search suggestion privacy settings, or browse the web without ever taking my fingers off the keyboard, all standard features in Vivaldi. + +If you'd like to go beyond the vanilla browsing experience offered by the big name browser makers, if you'd like to customize your browser in myriad ways and have more control over your browsing experience, Vivaldi 2.0 is well worth trying. + +## Vivaldi 2.0 + +Vivaldi 2.0 has several headline-grabbing new features, but the most welcome is undoubtedly be the new syncing feature. + +Vivaldi 2.0 can synchronize your bookmarks, passwords, autofill data, typed URLs, notes, remote sessions and some, though not all, of your settings between installs. + +Syncing data is no small undertaking since it requires a server-side component as well as the in-browser UI. Because of it's focus on data privacy, Vivaldi opted to build its own sync tools and did so in such a way that your data is encrypted end-to-end (provided you set a password, which you should). Vivaldi stores, but has no way to read your data, and it isn't sending any data to third-party servers at all. Everything is in-house. + +While I don't actually have a use for sync until there's a mobile version, I've been testing Vivaldi's syncing features for over a month now, syncing everything between my machine and my wife's machine, and have yet to experience any hiccups or problems. It just works. + +Vivaldi CEO, and co-creator of the once-great Opera, Jon von Tetzchner tells Ars that sync will be evolving quickly from here, hopefully soon including the ability to sync more settings, history, web panels, themes and more. + +As welcome as sync is, there's something a little bittersweet about it since it makes a mobile version of Vivaldi even more desirable. Thus far that doesn't exist. Publicly anyway, von Tetzchner tells Ars that the mobile version does exist, but isn't ready for prime time yet. He did not give me any kind of time frame, but I think it's safe to say that a mobile version of Vivaldi is a very high priority. + +In the mean time there are quite a few other improvements in Vivaldi 2.0 that make it an even more powerful tool. One that I haven't seen Vivaldi tout much is how much faster Vivaldi 2.0 is than it was back in the 1.0 days. According to von Tetzchner some of the speed boost is a result of Chromium improvements, and some of it is related to a significant Chromium change that came along last year, which force Vivaldi's engineers to refactor a considerable amount of code, speeding up the browser in the process. + +Whatever the case, Vivaldi 2.0 is noticeably faster than 1.0, both in terms of UI and page load speeds. In my testing, this improvement is most noticeable if you have a lot of tabs open, as well as a lot of bookmarks and notes (as an aside, if you do have a lot of tabs open, periodically right-click the active tab and select "Hibernate Background Tabs, this will stop background tabs from eating up memory. In my testing this can free up as much as 500MB of RAM. Ah, JavaScript, what would RAM makers do without you?). + +This is the third time I've covered Vivaldi for Ars, so before I dig into some of the nice refinements in 2.0, I wanted to briefly revisiting those previous reviews. In my [review of Vivaldi 1.0](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/even-at-1-0-vivaldi-closes-in-on-the-cure-for-the-common-browser/) I criticized Vivaldi for a few missing features, notably that there was no syncing between computers, no mobile version, no way to dock the developer tools panel, and no way to customize buttons in the URL bar. + +I'm happy to report that Vivaldi 2.0 has solved all these problem, plus a slew of smaller ones I mentioned in that piece, except of course for the lack of a mobile version. + +After sync and the speed improvements Vivaldi 2.0's feature list becomes a browser tinkerer's wonderland. Vivaldi's MO has always been to keep refining, and fine tuning existing features, and this release is no exception. There are so many new options, added little features and tweaks that it's tough to know where to start. I highly recommend checking out the [Vivaldi blog](https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-2-0-your-browser-matters/) for more details, and the complete list of [everything that's new in 2.0](https://vivaldi.com/changelog-vivaldi-1-15-to-2-0/). + +My favorite feature in this release is in Vivaldi's Tab Tiling feature. One of Vivaldi's most innovative features, tab tiling allows you to viewing several tabs in a single window that's split into little subwindows (nerds: think tmux in your browser). As someone who does a tremendous amount of online research, especially comparing things, this feature is what made Vivaldi my default browser years ago and I can't imagine browsing the web without it. + +In Vivaldi 2.0 you can now resize each tiled tab's window by dragging that tile’s border. Even better, your customized layout persists through restarts and loading of saved sessions. + +Another standout feature among the hundreds of improvements in 2.0 is support for "floating" Panels. Panels are the small windows holding various menus, or even webpages if you like, that live as buttons in Vivaldi's sidebar. Push the button and panel expands. By default panels include bookmarks, notes, history, and downloads. In previous releases when a panel opened it resized the main window to fit both on screen. In the day and age of responsive design that sometimes meant the webpage you were viewing suddenly changed, and even if it didn't, resizing the page could be annoying. + +Resizing the page is still the default, but with Vivaldi 2.0 there's a new setting to enable "floating" panels. Turn that on and panels will not resize the main window, they'll overlay it, floating on top of the content. That does mean they'll cover any content in your main window, but since the purpose of opening the panel is to interact with it, covering other content is rarely a problem. There's also a setting to auto-close the panel so that when you're done with the panel it will get out of your way again. + +screen resize +screen float + +I said covering content is "rarely" a problem, but the truth is there are times when floating mode works better, and times when resizing the main window works better. Recognizing this, Vivaldi has a keyboard shortcut available to toggle between the two. You'll have to set the keyboard shortcut, by default it's blank, but it's there if you need it. + +Another nice new feature is the new Quick Commands support for bookmark nicknames. If you've nicknamed your bookmarks you can now pull up the Quick Commands window (press F2), type the nickname and Vivaldi will automatically open that page -- you don't even need to hit return, as soon as you type out the nickname the page opens. + +One feature of Vivaldi I've always ignored is the Web Panel -- I've never really seen a use for it. + +In 2.0 there's a new feature called Web Panel Suggestions which is designed to help you explore Web Panels. Click the "+" icon to add a new Web Panel and Vivaldi will suggest websites that might be useful in a panel out of the sites you visit the most. + +I'm still not a big user of web panels, but thanks to the suggestions I have discovered that documentation sites are a good use case. For example, I have the [devdocs](https://devdocs.io/) site as a panel and the Vivaldi help site as another. Whenever I need to look something up I open the panel, figure out what I want to know, and close it again without adding new tabs or changing the main browsing session in any way. + +This perhaps highlights something that will become very obvious the minute you start using Vivaldi: it's very customizable. Sometimes the sheer number of options can be overwhelming and if you don't spend some time digging, you can overlook very useful features. + +For example I've been using Vivaldi for years and always been slightly irritated that releasing the Alt key opens the main menu. Because I use Alt-J and Alt-K to switch desktops, I'd always land on Vivaldi and the main menu would be open. Arguably this is an OS-level feature that I should figure out how to turn off globally since it happens in Firefox and LibreOffice as well. I happened to mention this annoyance in passing when I spoke with von Tetzchner and he emailed me a bit later to point out that Vivaldi has a setting to turn off "Alt key for Main Menu". It was there for who knows how long, I simply missed it. + +## How to get the most of Vivaldi + +That highlights what's probably Vivaldi 2.0's biggest challenge -- convincing people to put in little bit of effort. As von Tetzchner tells Ars, "there is a little bit of a learning curve, but if you give it time and customize it, you'll find that Vivaldi feels really right. If there's something you don't like let us know, we're unique in how we listen to users." + +To really get the most out of Vivaldi, you need to spend some time customizing it to your needs, and to do that, you need to know what's possible. I would strongly suggest you spend some time exploring Vivaldi's settings page to see what you can change. And of course Chrome extensions work just fine in Vivaldi, so if there is something it can't do out of the box, there's always extensions. That said I've only found the need for two extensions. + +The first thing you should do when you install Vivaldi is open up the settings panel and have a look around. + +To do that you can either click the gear icon at the lower left part of the screen, or click the main menu, go to Tools and then settings, or type F2 and then "sett" and hit return, or hit Alt-P, or you can visualize the settings page and it will appear. Just kidding, visualizing it doesn't work. Yet. + +As you can see there are many different ways to do any one thing in Vivaldi. This is its gift to you, it will work however you'd like to work. I happen to be a keyboard shortcuts fan, so I've set up Vivaldi so that nearly everything I want to do I can do without taking my fingers off the keys (I also use a plugin, Vimium to add some shortcut Vivaldi doesn't offer out of the box). In Vivaldi 2.0 there are a few new shortcuts worth familiarizing yourself with, for example there are now predefined shortcuts for moving tabs left and right. + +That's how I use Vivaldi, but I know other users who make extensive use of mouse gestures so that they rarely have to touch the keyboard. Polar opposite ways of working that are both possible in the same piece of software. + +Once you start digging into the different ways of using Vivaldi you'll find a level of fine-grained control you won't find elsewhere. Consider for instance, privacy in the context of web searching. + +Whenever you search in the address bar of other browsers, that information is, by default, sent to a third-party server, be it Google, Bing or whomever the search provider is for that browser. This means the third-party can keep track of what you search for, but it also means it can see URLs you type as well. Because you're searching in the URL bar, and the browser doesn't know if you're entering a domain name or searching, in most cases, the browser will send every URL you enter to the search engine as well. + +Most browsers allow you to turn this feature off, but in every browser I've used the choice of whether or not to use predictive searching is binary: it's either on or off. + +In Vivaldi you get more control than that. + +The first thing to realize is that this behavior is off by default. Out of the box nothing you type in the address bar is sent to any third-party. Vivaldi takes your privacy much more seriously than the rest of the browsers I've tested. + +If, however, you decide you want predictive searching, as this is known, you can turn it on in Settings >> Search. Once it's on you have some extra options to control how it works. You could, for instance, turn it off when typing in the URL bar, but enable it in the separate search box. That would mean things you type in the URL bar, e.g. URLs, would never be sent on to a third-party, but when you search in the search box you'd get suggestions. + +You can fine tune this a bit more too. I don't want suggestions for everything I search in the URL, but I also don't like a separate search box cluttering up the URL bar. So I turn off suggestions in the URL bar, but enable them if I explicitly use a search keyword (letter really) to trigger a search from the URL bar. That way if I type "arstechnica.com", no data is sent and I get no suggestions I just go to the Ars site. But if I type "d arstechnica" I'll get suggestions from DuckDuckGo because the "d" prefix tells Vivaldi to search DuckDuckGo. + +You can further refine this to restrict it to only search engines you trust to keep your data private, like DuckDuckGo, StartPage or Quant, all of which Vivaldi includes out of the box. You can also use a POST request if the search engine supports it, further limiting the data that you're leaking when you search (I have not, however, been able to make this work with anything except StartPage). There's even an option to set different default search engines for normal windows and private browsing windows (by the default the latter will use DuckDuckGo). + +It's not new in this release, but there's another Vivaldi feature worth noting: fast forward and rewind. Fast forward is useful for any sort of paged content, as it allows you to jump to the next page, and you don't have to click the button, there's a keyboard shortcut as well. For example, search for something on Google, use spacebar to scroll down the page, and when you get to the bottom of the page, hit spacebar again and Vivaldi will automatically load the next pages of results. Rewind will do the opposite, take you back to the beginning of the your most recent browsing history for that tab. + +You can also alter Vivaldi's interface to suite your needs, moving the tab bar to any side of the window you like, same with the URL bar, bookmarks and so on. + +The possibilities are almost limitless. With that in mind, I'd also suggest looking over the [user forums](https://forum.vivaldi.net/) for tips from other users, examples of how people are using Vivaldi and other suggestions. Vivaldi users are some of the active, helpful people I've encountered in the software world. If there's a way to do something with Vivaldi -- and chances are pretty good there is -- they'll know. + +In fact, according to von Tetzchner, about half of all the features in this release come from user feedback and suggestions. To protect your privacy Vivaldi does not collect any data about how you use the browser, so if you want to have an impact on the future of Vivaldi, and you definitely can have one, you'll have to join the community and get involved. + +## Conclusion + +While Vivaldi 2.0 is not perfect, its lack of a mobile version remains frustrating, and there are some other features I'd like to see, like a way to export notes, to make notes on PDF files, keyboard shortcuts for selecting tabs, and an Opera-mail style mail client -- most of which I know are on the roadmap -- this release sees the browser maturing, adding the features users want and continuing to focus on the details that make Vivaldi a power users delight. + +When I asked why tech savvy user might consider switching from, say, Firefox, von Tetzchner said Vivaldi's advantage likes in its user-centric focus. "It's about the focus on you and your requirements," he says. "Other browsers are removing features, we're adding them. There's more than one way to do everything in Vivaldi. Make it yours." |