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diff --git a/published/oryxpro.html b/published/oryxpro.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..89db0e4 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/oryxpro.html @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +<p>Laptops preloaded with Linux aren't a rare as they used to be. In fact big name hardware companies like Dell have whole lines of laptops that ship with Ubuntu installed, and if you want to stretch things a bit you could argue that a Chromebook is a kind of Linux machine, though it takes a bit of tinkering to get actual Linux installed. Still, there's no question that the Linux user of today has a wealth of options next to the dark ages of just a few years ago when "I use Linux" was code for "I spend all my time looking for hardware drivers".</p> +<p>What remains unusual even in the midst of what looks like a growing interest in PCs shipping with Linux is companies that sell nothing else. There are a handful that do though and have for some time. From long time Linux supporters like System 76 to newer efforts from the likes of Purism, which began life with an impressive crowdfunding campaign that raised over a $1 million to create a line of sleek, Apple-inspired, but completely free software laptops.</p> +<p>If Purism is any indicator, Linux-based hardware businesses might have an actual future in a world increasingly dissatisfied with the proprietary OSes on offer. If you're a developer looking to get a laptop with more than 16GB of RAM Apple's no longer an option. The company recently updated its Macbook Pro line, but still caps RAM at 16GB. That means you can either get a PC and live with Windows 10 or you can try installing Linux and hope it works.</p> +<p>Alternately you could invest in some hardware that's been well tested and known to work with, if not every Linux distro, at least Ubuntu (and by extension, Mint and every other Ubuntu derivative). System 76 is perhaps the best known of these alternate, Linux-loving hardware vendors and for good reason -- they offer incredibly powerful Linux machines with more customization options than most manufacturers offer for any system, no matter what OS it ships with.</p> +<p>System 76 has a decent range of laptops, from the small, lightweight, battery-sipping Lemur to some mid-range options with better performance to the top end beast-like Oryx Pro.</p> +<p>After reviewing the svelte, but not necessarily top-end specced Dell XPS 13, I got curious about System 76's Oryx Pro. On paper it sounds like a desktop machine somehow packed into a laptop form factor. If money were not an object and you wanted the most of everything you could pack into an Oryx system you'd end up with a 6th Generation Intel i7-6820HK CPU, and GTX 1070 GPU, 64GB of RAM, a ridiculous 9TB worth of hard drive and either an 15.6 or 17.3 IPS. You'd end up with a desktop machine packed into a dark, brushed aluminum alloy shell that still manages to fit in your backpack. It would set you back almost $7000, but hey, with massive power comes a massive price tag.</p> +<p>If you wanted a portable video editing workstation or a gaming machine you can take with you wherever you go you'd be hard pressed to find more impressive specs from any manufacturer, let alone one that ships with Linux-compatible hardware like System 76.</p> +<p>When I mentioned to System 76 that I wanted to test the Oryx Pro and compare it to the Dell XPS as a "developer" laptop they were a little hesitant, pointing out that the two are really -- aside from both shipping with Ubuntu installed -- pretty much nothing alike. It wasn't until the Oryx Pro arrived though that I really understood just how different they are.</p> +<h2 id="the-hardware">The Hardware</h2> +<p>The Oryx Pro that System 76 sent for me to test was not the fully maxed out model, but it did have a GTX 1060 GPU, 32GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. It also had the 1080p matte IPS display. As configured it would set you back $1864. Even without the max hard drive space and nowhere near the max RAM the Oryx Pro was incredibly powerful, but that's not the first thing that jumps out at you when the Oryx Pro arrives. Once you get past the very clever, minimalist packaging the most striking thing about the Oryx Pro is holy crap this thing is massive.</p> +<p>Like most computer users these days I've been programmed to think a laptop should be just slightly thicker than my phone, weigh about the same as my paper notebook and be no larger than an 8x11 sheet of paper. There is of course no reason to expect this beyond the fact that that's the expectation marketing campaigns have created. If you chuck those expectations out the window, you end up with, yes, a much larger laptop, but also a much more capable laptop.</p> +<p>While the size of the Oryx Pro is shocking at first, especially when you pull out the Dell XPS 13 and put them next to each other, it's really not that big. Nor is it that heavy considering what you get. Weighing in at 5.5lbs for the 15.6" version, the Oryx Pro is heavy, but not back-breakingly so. It does do better in a backpack than a shoulder bag, but if that's the biggest compromise I have to make to get a portable video editing workstation, I'll take it.</p> +<p>So yes, the System 76 folks were right, the Oryx Pro doesn't stack up all that well next to the Dell XPS 13 when it comes to size, weight and svelteness. If those are your criteria then the Dell XPS is what you want. If you want power though, the Oryx Pro blows the Dell out of the water, especially when you start looking at RAM capacity, which tops out at 16GB for the XPS 13.</p> +<p>At just over an inch thick the Oryx Pro makes it clear that if you want to pack in some serious hardware you're going to have to forgo skinniness. This does, however, mean that the Oryx Pro has room for quite a few things becoming increasingly rare in laptops, like an ethernet port and an SD card slot. There's also 2 Mini DisplayPorts, an HDMI port, 2 USB 3.1 Type-C ports, 3 USB 3.0 Type-A ports and headphone and mic jacks. The GTX 1070 models also include a headphone amplifier.</p> +<p>The Oryx Pro also includes a very nice keyboard, with some much thicker keys than you'll find on most laptops these days. It's no Model M , but it's about as close as I've seen a laptop get to the kind of old-school, clacky keyboards some of us still remember fondly -- minus the clacking part, which your fellow coffee shop denizens will appreciate. The keys have a nice springiness to them and the backlight supports multicolor back lighting.</p> +<p>The Oryx Pro is not, despite its size and heft, ungainly. In fact its quite svelte and the brushed aluminum top gives it a nicely understated design. The bottom of the Oryx Pro is plastic, but the build quality of the laptop is good enough that I didn't notice much flex even lifting it one handed. Another bonus to having a slightly thicker body is that you can have real speakers that actually project sound out of the top rather than some muffled, tinny speakers stuck underneath. And the Oryx Pro's speakers are impressively good, they're even angled towards you and manage to deliver a surprising amount of bass for their size.</p> +<p>While the Oryx itself is, if not the sleekest laptop out there, at least not quite like the bricks Lenovo used to churn out, there is one downright ungainly thing about the Oryx Pro -- the power brick. The power brick is ridiculously huge, about double the size of any power brick I've ever seen. It's also worth noting that it adds nearly 2lbs to the total weight of the Oryx Pro. And you're going to want that power brick with you if you plan to work for more than a couple hours because of course, with great power comes great power consumption.</p> +<p>Exactly how much battery life you get out of the Oryx Pro will obviously vary according to what you're doing with it. I happened to have a video editing job that coincided with having the Oryx Pro so I loaded up both KDenlive and Lightworks and when crunching video, as you'd expect, battery life suffers. I still managed to get about 1.5 hours out of the battery, even running a video editor, though that dropped more when actually exporting the edit to the final MP4 file.</p> +<p>The other things you may notice if you push the Oryx Pro at all is that it has a good old fashioned fan in it and it uses it. It's not particularly loud as fans go -- my EeePC's fan is far louder -- but it is noticeable. If you frequently work in very quite spaces, like a school library, you'll notice the fan, as will anyone working around you.</p> +<p>I will admit upfront that I am not a gamer, but I did test Grand Theft Auto V and a couple other more graphics-intensive games and discovered just how impressive top end Nvidia hardware actually is. Suffice to say, if you're looking for a portable gaming machine, the Oryx Pro delivers.</p> +<p>I gave the Nvidia card a workout editing 4K video as well and it was similarly impressive, especially with 32GB of RAM at its disposal.</p> +<p>The graphics card in the Oryx Pro is powering a 1920×1080 matte, optionally IPS, display that has nice rich colors, renders pretty close to true black, and isn't so HiDPI that it has problems on Linux desktops. Did I mention it's matte? A good matte display, especially a good matte IPS display, is frankly the number one selling point of the Oryx Pro for me. I could comfortably stare at this screen all day with very little eye strain.</p> +<p>That said, if I have a complaint about the Oryx Pro it's the lack of a 4K option. A screen this good at 1080p is just begging to be that much better in 4K. I am apparently not the only one to think that. Just before this review was finished System 76 let me know that a 4K screen option would soon be available.</p> +<h2 id="software">Software</h2> +<p>The Oryx Pro ships with Ubuntu installed by default. There's an option when ordering to select the newest LTS Ubuntu release (16.04.1 as of this review) or to go ahead and go with the latest stable release (16.10 as of this review). The model I tested came with 16.04.1, but true to my ongoing experience with 16.04, I encountered a few bugs, all of which were fixed when I upgraded to 16.10.</p> +<p>None of the bugs were show stoppers, though at least one, which caused Ubuntu's HUD interface and dock to get flickering lines though it after waking from sleep sometimes, is likely the result of the graphics card and Ubuntu 16.04's somewhat older kernel. Again, upgrading to 16.10 got rid of the problem and I strongly suggest opting for the latest stable release when ordering an Oryx Pro.</p> +<p>Unlike the Dell XPS, which, with a higher pixel density display, has some problems running certain applications -- notably GIMP -- at such high DPI, every application I tested worked just fine on the Oryx Pro.</p> +<p>If, like me, Ubuntu is not your favorite distro, fear not, chances are good that the Oryx Pro will run your favorite distro without a hitch. I tested a pre-release version of Fedora 25, Ubuntu MATE, Arch with Openbox and Debian Testing with GNOME all without encountering any hardware-related problems. Officially System 76 only supports Ubuntu, but unofficially I've found their support to be helpful no matter what distro you happen to be running.</p> +<h2 id="user-experience">User Experience</h2> +<p>The Oryx Pro is a pleasure to use, the keyboard is nice, and, as mentioned above, the matte screen is wonderful. Adding a USB mouse to the package gave me a portable system -- albeit a heavy one -- fully capable of editing video at the coffee shop. I did get some looks from the generally Mac-centric crowd when I pulled out such a massive -- next to a Mac laptop anyway -- machine, but it was the power brick that elicited a "woah" comment.</p> +<p>I carried the Oryx Pro in a backpack of the old school variety when designers recognized that two straps distributes weight better than one and indeed, you'll want a backpack if you plan on toting this thing around. I would not call it heavy exactly, but suffice to say that if you carry it around all day you'll know it's there.</p> +<p>There's another thing that sometimes comes up in reviews of System 76 machines, namely that the same machine can be had for less money from another manufacturer like Clevo. It's true that System 76 purchases parts from other manufacturers, but that's really a small part of what makes the Oryx Pro a pleasant Linux experience. If saving money is your top criteria you might indeed want to check out the Clevo version that specs out roughly the same on paper. However, that will not get you a machine with the firmware, drivers and hardware components that System 76 uses to build fully Ubuntu-compatible machines (and by extension Linux more generally).</p> +<p>If you want hotkeys, touchpad, audio jacks, keyboard backlighting, suspend and all the other functions you take for granted to work out of the box with no fiddling on your part then you want to pay for the work System 76's engineers have put in.</p> +<p>In the end all hardware is a compromise, the question is, which end of the spectrum do you want to compromise on?</p> +<p>If what you value is portability and extended battery life, and you only need enough RAM to run a web browser (so, about 16GB), then the Oryx Pro might disappoint. At 7lbs (with power brick) the Oryx Pro is relatively large and heavy next to something like the Dell XPS 13, but you won't get 64GB of RAM in an XPS 13. You won't get up to 9TBs of data storage space in an XPS 13.</p> +<p>The real question is then, do you need 64GB of RAM? Do you need all the power of the Oryx Pro? If you're serious about editing video, gaming, or are compiling software on a regular basis then you'll appreciate the additional RAM and power of the Oryx Pro.</p> diff --git a/published/oryxpro.txt b/published/oryxpro.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2adcd92 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/oryxpro.txt @@ -0,0 +1,72 @@ +Laptops preloaded with Linux aren't a rare as they used to be. In fact big name hardware companies like Dell have whole lines of laptops that ship with Ubuntu installed, and if you want to stretch things a bit you could argue that a Chromebook is a kind of Linux machine, though it takes a bit of tinkering to get actual Linux installed. Still, there's no question that the Linux user of today has a wealth of options next to the dark ages of just a few years ago when "I use Linux" was code for "I spend all my time looking for hardware drivers". + +What remains unusual even in the midst of what looks like a growing interest in PCs shipping with Linux is companies that sell nothing else. There are a handful that do though and have for some time. From long time Linux supporters like System 76 to newer efforts from the likes of Purism, which began life with an impressive crowdfunding campaign that raised over a $1 million to create a line of sleek, Apple-inspired, but completely free software laptops. + +If Purism is any indicator, Linux-based hardware businesses might have an actual future in a world increasingly dissatisfied with the proprietary OSes on offer. If you're a developer looking to get a laptop with more than 16GB of RAM Apple's no longer an option. The company recently updated its Macbook Pro line, but still caps RAM at 16GB. That means you can either get a PC and live with Windows 10 or you can try installing Linux and hope it works. + +Alternately you could invest in some hardware that's been well tested and known to work with, if not every Linux distro, at least Ubuntu (and by extension, Mint and every other Ubuntu derivative). System 76 is perhaps the best known of these alternate, Linux-loving hardware vendors and for good reason -- they offer incredibly powerful Linux machines with more customization options than most manufacturers offer for any system, no matter what OS it ships with. + +System 76 has a decent range of laptops, from the small, lightweight, battery-sipping Lemur to some mid-range options with better performance to the top end beast-like Oryx Pro. + +After reviewing the svelte, but not necessarily top-end specced Dell XPS 13, I got curious about System 76's Oryx Pro. On paper it sounds like a desktop machine somehow packed into a laptop form factor. If money were not an object and you wanted the most of everything you could pack into an Oryx system you'd end up with a 6th Generation Intel i7-6820HK CPU, and GTX 1070 GPU, 64GB of RAM, a ridiculous 9TB worth of hard drive and either an 15.6 or 17.3 IPS. You'd end up with a desktop machine packed into a dark, brushed aluminum alloy shell that still manages to fit in your backpack. It would set you back almost $7000, but hey, with massive power comes a massive price tag. + +If you wanted a portable video editing workstation or a gaming machine you can take with you wherever you go you'd be hard pressed to find more impressive specs from any manufacturer, let alone one that ships with Linux-compatible hardware like System 76. + +When I mentioned to System 76 that I wanted to test the Oryx Pro and compare it to the Dell XPS as a "developer" laptop they were a little hesitant, pointing out that the two are really -- aside from both shipping with Ubuntu installed -- pretty much nothing alike. It wasn't until the Oryx Pro arrived though that I really understood just how different they are. + +## The Hardware + + +The Oryx Pro that System 76 sent for me to test was not the fully maxed out model, but it did have a GTX 1060 GPU, 32GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. It also had the 1080p matte IPS display. As configured it would set you back $1864. Even without the max hard drive space and nowhere near the max RAM the Oryx Pro was incredibly powerful, but that's not the first thing that jumps out at you when the Oryx Pro arrives. Once you get past the very clever, minimalist packaging the most striking thing about the Oryx Pro is holy crap this thing is massive. + +Like most computer users these days I've been programmed to think a laptop should be just slightly thicker than my phone, weigh about the same as my paper notebook and be no larger than an 8x11 sheet of paper. There is of course no reason to expect this beyond the fact that that's the expectation marketing campaigns have created. If you chuck those expectations out the window, you end up with, yes, a much larger laptop, but also a much more capable laptop. + +While the size of the Oryx Pro is shocking at first, especially when you pull out the Dell XPS 13 and put them next to each other, it's really not that big. Nor is it that heavy considering what you get. Weighing in at 5.5lbs for the 15.6" version, the Oryx Pro is heavy, but not back-breakingly so. It does do better in a backpack than a shoulder bag, but if that's the biggest compromise I have to make to get a portable video editing workstation, I'll take it. + +So yes, the System 76 folks were right, the Oryx Pro doesn't stack up all that well next to the Dell XPS 13 when it comes to size, weight and svelteness. If those are your criteria then the Dell XPS is what you want. If you want power though, the Oryx Pro blows the Dell out of the water, especially when you start looking at RAM capacity, which tops out at 16GB for the XPS 13. + +At just over an inch thick the Oryx Pro makes it clear that if you want to pack in some serious hardware you're going to have to forgo skinniness. This does, however, mean that the Oryx Pro has room for quite a few things becoming increasingly rare in laptops, like an ethernet port and an SD card slot. There's also 2 Mini DisplayPorts, an HDMI port, 2 USB 3.1 Type-C ports, 3 USB 3.0 Type-A ports and headphone and mic jacks. The GTX 1070 models also include a headphone amplifier. + +The Oryx Pro also includes a very nice keyboard, with some much thicker keys than you'll find on most laptops these days. It's no Model M , but it's about as close as I've seen a laptop get to the kind of old-school, clacky keyboards some of us still remember fondly -- minus the clacking part, which your fellow coffee shop denizens will appreciate. The keys have a nice springiness to them and the backlight supports multicolor back lighting. + +The Oryx Pro is not, despite its size and heft, ungainly. In fact its quite svelte and the brushed aluminum top gives it a nicely understated design. The bottom of the Oryx Pro is plastic, but the build quality of the laptop is good enough that I didn't notice much flex even lifting it one handed. Another bonus to having a slightly thicker body is that you can have real speakers that actually project sound out of the top rather than some muffled, tinny speakers stuck underneath. And the Oryx Pro's speakers are impressively good, they're even angled towards you and manage to deliver a surprising amount of bass for their size. + +While the Oryx itself is, if not the sleekest laptop out there, at least not quite like the bricks Lenovo used to churn out, there is one downright ungainly thing about the Oryx Pro -- the power brick. The power brick is ridiculously huge, about double the size of any power brick I've ever seen. It's also worth noting that it adds nearly 2lbs to the total weight of the Oryx Pro. And you're going to want that power brick with you if you plan to work for more than a couple hours because of course, with great power comes great power consumption. + +Exactly how much battery life you get out of the Oryx Pro will obviously vary according to what you're doing with it. I happened to have a video editing job that coincided with having the Oryx Pro so I loaded up both KDenlive and Lightworks and when crunching video, as you'd expect, battery life suffers. I still managed to get about 1.5 hours out of the battery, even running a video editor, though that dropped more when actually exporting the edit to the final MP4 file. + +The other things you may notice if you push the Oryx Pro at all is that it has a good old fashioned fan in it and it uses it. It's not particularly loud as fans go -- my EeePC's fan is far louder -- but it is noticeable. If you frequently work in very quite spaces, like a school library, you'll notice the fan, as will anyone working around you. + +I will admit upfront that I am not a gamer, but I did test Grand Theft Auto V and a couple other more graphics-intensive games and discovered just how impressive top end Nvidia hardware actually is. Suffice to say, if you're looking for a portable gaming machine, the Oryx Pro delivers. + +I gave the Nvidia card a workout editing 4K video as well and it was similarly impressive, especially with 32GB of RAM at its disposal. + +The graphics card in the Oryx Pro is powering a 1920×1080 matte, optionally IPS, display that has nice rich colors, renders pretty close to true black, and isn't so HiDPI that it has problems on Linux desktops. Did I mention it's matte? A good matte display, especially a good matte IPS display, is frankly the number one selling point of the Oryx Pro for me. I could comfortably stare at this screen all day with very little eye strain. + +That said, if I have a complaint about the Oryx Pro it's the lack of a 4K option. A screen this good at 1080p is just begging to be that much better in 4K. I am apparently not the only one to think that. Just before this review was finished System 76 let me know that a 4K screen option would soon be available. + +## Software + +The Oryx Pro ships with Ubuntu installed by default. There's an option when ordering to select the newest LTS Ubuntu release (16.04.1 as of this review) or to go ahead and go with the latest stable release (16.10 as of this review). The model I tested came with 16.04.1, but true to my ongoing experience with 16.04, I encountered a few bugs, all of which were fixed when I upgraded to 16.10. + +None of the bugs were show stoppers, though at least one, which caused Ubuntu's HUD interface and dock to get flickering lines though it after waking from sleep sometimes, is likely the result of the graphics card and Ubuntu 16.04's somewhat older kernel. Again, upgrading to 16.10 got rid of the problem and I strongly suggest opting for the latest stable release when ordering an Oryx Pro. + +Unlike the Dell XPS, which, with a higher pixel density display, has some problems running certain applications -- notably GIMP -- at such high DPI, every application I tested worked just fine on the Oryx Pro. + +If, like me, Ubuntu is not your favorite distro, fear not, chances are good that the Oryx Pro will run your favorite distro without a hitch. I tested a pre-release version of Fedora 25, Ubuntu MATE, Arch with Openbox and Debian Testing with GNOME all without encountering any hardware-related problems. Officially System 76 only supports Ubuntu, but unofficially I've found their support to be helpful no matter what distro you happen to be running. + +## User Experience + +The Oryx Pro is a pleasure to use, the keyboard is nice, and, as mentioned above, the matte screen is wonderful. Adding a USB mouse to the package gave me a portable system -- albeit a heavy one -- fully capable of editing video at the coffee shop. I did get some looks from the generally Mac-centric crowd when I pulled out such a massive -- next to a Mac laptop anyway -- machine, but it was the power brick that elicited a "woah" comment. + +I carried the Oryx Pro in a backpack of the old school variety when designers recognized that two straps distributes weight better than one and indeed, you'll want a backpack if you plan on toting this thing around. I would not call it heavy exactly, but suffice to say that if you carry it around all day you'll know it's there. + +There's another thing that sometimes comes up in reviews of System 76 machines, namely that the same machine can be had for less money from another manufacturer like Clevo. It's true that System 76 purchases parts from other manufacturers, but that's really a small part of what makes the Oryx Pro a pleasant Linux experience. If saving money is your top criteria you might indeed want to check out the Clevo version that specs out roughly the same on paper. However, that will not get you a machine with the firmware, drivers and hardware components that System 76 uses to build fully Ubuntu-compatible machines (and by extension Linux more generally). + +If you want hotkeys, touchpad, audio jacks, keyboard backlighting, suspend and all the other functions you take for granted to work out of the box with no fiddling on your part then you want to pay for the work System 76's engineers have put in. + +In the end all hardware is a compromise, the question is, which end of the spectrum do you want to compromise on? + +If what you value is portability and extended battery life, and you only need enough RAM to run a web browser (so, about 16GB), then the Oryx Pro might disappoint. At 7lbs (with power brick) the Oryx Pro is relatively large and heavy next to something like the Dell XPS 13, but you won't get 64GB of RAM in an XPS 13. You won't get up to 9TBs of data storage space in an XPS 13. + +The real question is then, do you need 64GB of RAM? Do you need all the power of the Oryx Pro? If you're serious about editing video, gaming, or are compiling software on a regular basis then you'll appreciate the additional RAM and power of the Oryx Pro. diff --git a/published/ubuntu1610.html b/published/ubuntu1610.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3e9275c --- /dev/null +++ b/published/ubuntu1610.html @@ -0,0 +1,52 @@ +<p>Canonical recently rolled out Ubuntu 16.10, a less experimental, but worthwhile, update to its flagship Unity-based desktop.</p> +<p>There's plenty in Ubuntu 16.10 that makes it worth the upgrade, though none of it is groundbreaking. Rather this release sees Canonical continuing to refine and bug-fix what at this point has become on the fastest, stablest, least-likely-to-completely-change-between-point-releases of the three major "modern" Linux desktops.</p> +<p>Still, while the Unity 7.5 desktop offers stability and speed today, it's not long for this world. Purportedly not long for this world anyway. Ubuntu 16.10 is the seventh release since the fabled Unity 8 and its accompanying Mir display server were announced. And there's still no Unity 8 and Mir.</p> +<p>In Canonical's defense, the competing display server project, Wayland, hasn't exactly taken the world by storm just yet. Wayland will likely <a href="https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-release-fedora-25-beta/">be the default for the Fedora Project's</a> next release, Fedora 25. The difference is that GNOME 3 isn't tied to Wayland and has been cranking out impressive releases for some time now while Unity 7.5 is feeling, well, a bit dated.</p> +<p>It's worth noting that Ubuntu 16.10 is the first official release of Ubuntu to ship with Unity 8 and Mir available. To try out a Unity 8 session, just click the Ubuntu symbol next to your username when you log in.</p> + +[image="ubuntu1610-Unity8.jpg" caption="Selecting the Unity 8 session from the login screen is easy, actually running it depends on your hardware. To preview Unity 8 running on an NVidia card, you can simulate the crash cycle by just closing your eyes. Now open them again and look at the login screen."] + +<p>Good luck getting Unity 8 to run though. Older hardware isn't up to the task and most new NVidia-based hardware won't work either. For this review I used both a Dell XPS and System 76 Oryx Pro and neither one of these very modern, well-specced pieces of hardware can successfully boot to Unity 8. Most disappointing, those accounts I've seen of people who can get Unity 8 running (like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3_QK3soYw8">this video</a>) show a streamlined Unity interface with... a new set of icons and some UI elements reminiscent of GNOME Shell. It's banal enough -- at least the skin deep look we can get right now -- to make you wonder what the fuss is about.</p> +<p>But of course the fuss is about "convergence". The fuss is about the purported future in which you plug your phone into a monitor and it turns into a full desktop computing experience. I've started to feel like Fox Mulder waiting for Unity 8. I want to believe. I really do, but I've started to think convergence is about as likely as the zombie apocalypse and that the truth, the reality we'll end up with, will be somewhere below Canonical's fantasies of do anything phones and flesh eating updates that install Windows instead of Linux.</p> +<p>Which is to say Unity 8 isn't here yet and you should probably stop holding your breath waiting for it arrive.</p> +<p>In the mean time Canonical is shipping a very nice desktop operating system that's fast, stable and has fixed most of the issues that plagued the last release, which was supposed to be the Long Term Support release. If it were me, I'd much rather support Ubuntu 16.10 for five years than 16.04, but of course most of what's great about 16.10 will be backported to 16.04 as well at some point. So if you were bitten by 16.04, but not bitten hard enough to want to get off the LTS bandwagon then sit tight, backports are on the way.</p> +<h2 id="kernel-4.8">Kernel 4.8</h2> +<p>The biggest and best news to arrive with 16.10 is probably the move to Linux kernel 4.8. While earlier this year I called kernel 4.6 one of the best to come along in years (paraphrasing Linux Torvalds), 4.8 is a significant upgrade for the additional hardware support. There are three notable developments in 4.8, improved Skylake support, better support for NVidia Pascal and support for the raspberry pi 3.</p> +<p>Skylake has been a very hit or miss series of chips in both Linux and Windows, though it seems particularly prone to problems in Linux. Kernel 4.8 fixes a Skylake power management bug that can crash your system and seems to generally be much more stable than earlier releases. I still occasionally experienced a bug with Chromium and YouTube both on Ubuntu and Arch running 4.8, but otherwise 4.8 has solved all the problems I've noticed on Skylake machines.</p> +<p>Nvidia Pascal cards get some love in this update as well. The new support applies to the open-source Nouveau driver, and it's far from complete, but it's a start. I'd still suggest sticking with Nvidia's proprietary drivers for now, but at least Nouveau support is in the works.</p> +<p>The Raspberry Pi 3 support is good news for anyone looking to get Ubuntu installed. Previously Linux kernels had to be patched to work with the Raspberry Pi 3, which in practical terms means you needed the Debian patched Raspbian, but now RP3 support native to the Linux kernel, any distro should run just fine, provided you turn off any graphics-intensive UI.</p> +<p>There are also a couple of more universal improvements to ACPI low power mode, which might squeeze a few more minutes out of your laptop battery, and some big improvements to USB camera and HDMI device capture, which will be welcome to those of you editing video in Linux.</p> +<h2 id="unity-7.5">Unity 7.5</h2> + +[image="ubuntu1610-desktop.jpg" caption="At first glance not much has changed in 16.10. The wallpaper is slightly differnt, but most of Ubuntu's changes this time around are under the hood."] + +<p>The most noticeable difference in 16.10's Unity desktop is the speed improvement. Unity is just plain fast. Applications launch quickly, windows minimize quickly, suspend resumes quickly, even boot time is minimal.</p> +<p>This release also sees some significant updates to the GNOME components and applications that Unity depends on, bringing most of the GNOME stack up to version 3.20 (a couple appear to be at GNOME 3.22, which is downright cutting edge by Ubuntu's backporting standards). Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the Nautilus file browser, which gains the new search filters, progress indicator and icon size control that GNOME users have enjoyed for some time now.</p> +<p>In Ubuntu the best of these new features is the greatly improved search features, which are not only much faster, but also allow you to chain filters together. Files, as Nautilus is known these days, also comes with a much more compact preferences dialog, which offers new settings for showing the permanent delete and create symbolic link buttons.</p> + +[image="ubuntu1610-files-search.jpg" caption="Searching for files using GNOME 3.20's new file search filtering tool."] + + +<p>Most of the rest of the standard GNOME-based Unity application stack has been updated to the latest version. LibreOffice has been updated to 5.2, Firefox is at 49. Another under the hood change that some users may be pleasantly surprised by: the move to GTK3 apps (when available). LibreOffice is one example of this and it looks much better than previous releases. On the other hand this could end up breaking some themes, so if you're very attached to some customized Unity theme I highly recommend testing it with 16.10 in a virtual machine before you commit to upgrading.</p> +<p>Speaking of virtual machines, Ubuntu 16.10 is noticeably faster in VMs than previous releases. This is primarily due to the new Unity Low Graphics Mode, which tones down the fade effects and transparency in favor of faster rendering times.</p> +<p>Unfortunately one place Unity seems to lag behind GNOME is detecting HiDPI screens. While 16.10 has excellent HiDPI support, it never detected my screens. I had to manually turn on scaling, which is a minor point to be sure, but a new user who doesn't know that they need to turn on dpi scaling might be quite lost, staring at tiny text on a 4k monitor. It's worth noting that Unity did successfully detect that my Virtualbox install was using a HiDPI screen (on the same hardware where, when installed to disk, it did not).</p> +<p>Also worth noting, systemd is now used for user sessions. Previous releases (and this one) used systemd for system sessions, but not user sessions. Upstart, Ubuntu's previous session manager, is still around for Unity and some indicators, but these too are in the process of being migrated to systemd. Soon it will be just systemd turtles all the way down.</p> +<p>While there hasn't been much done to the Ubuntu Software Center in this release, there are some better search tools available for the nascent Snap packages system. I still find the easiest way to find Snap packages is with the command line tool, e.g. "snap find appname", but a fair number of Snap packages do turn up in the Ubuntu Software Center. Despite the promise of Snap packages -- installing apps without worry about dependencies being probably the biggest win for end users -- developers do not appear to be rushing into Snaps. There's Snap versions of popular apps like LibreOffice and the graphics tool Krita, as well as other, smaller projects, but there are still plenty of issues with Snap apps and far too few Snaps to get too excited at this point.</p> + + +[image="ubuntu1610-software-app.jpg" caption="Search for Snap packages in the Software app kinda works, but you're better off using the command line tool 'snap search packag-name'."] + +<p>It may well be that app developers are waiting a bit to see which of the container-meets-package formats will end up rising to the top as it were. Ubuntu's Snaps are more or less the same (conceptually anyway) as <a href="http://flatpak.org/">Flatpak</a> packages, which grew out of a Red Hat led effort.</p> +<h2 id="stability-and-performance">Stability and Performance</h2> +<p>Despite feeling a bit faster, Ubuntu 16.10 was a bit more resource heavy than its LTS predecessor. I found that idle performance for 16.10 was nearly identical to 16.04, though 16.10 was using about 25 percent more RAM. There's better news when it comes to power use though. Using the powerstat application (developed by an Ubuntu engineer Colin King) with brightness at full, Wifi on and bluetooth off, I found 16.10 used roughly 10 percent less energy. At least some of that improvement may be due to the aforementioned kernel power management improvements though. In other words, once it's backported to 16.04 power consumption may be much closer, but in the mean time, 10 percent is a significant improvement.</p> +<p>One place I found Ubuntu 16.10 a giant leap ahead of 16.04 was stability and bugs. Generally this is the opposite of what I would expect, Ubuntu's October releases tend to more experimental, a place for developers to try reasonably stable new ideas that might still have a bug or two. Unfortunately I found 16.04 to be quite buggy -- which could have been related the Skylake issues upstream from Ubuntu itself -- as released, though things have settled down a bit now.</p> +<p>With 16.10 all my trackpad issues and X session crashes have vanished (save the aforementioned Chromium/YouTube bug). Once again the majority of the stability fixes will likely be backported to 16.04, but if any of these or other bugs have bitten you with 16.04 it might be worth making the leap to 16.10 to see if that improves your experience.</p> +<h2 id="flavors">Flavors</h2> +<p>Unity is the flagship Ubuntu release, but by no means the only way to enjoy Ubuntu. The list of improvements in 16.10 for Ubuntu's various flavors is beyond the scope of a short review like this, but there are two releases in particular that deserve mention. The first is not technically a flavor, but it's already the most used version of Ubuntu out there -- the server edition.</p> +<p>Ubuntu 16.10 includes the latest OpenStack release, dubbed Newton, as well as updated versions of OpenStack's various components. Again, this will also be available to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users as well, so there's no need to move your production server off the purportedly more stable LTS release just to get the latest version of OpenStack. You might want to give it some thought whether you want to upgrade at all give what a headache it can be. Even the Ubuntu release notes offer a warning that "upgrading an OpenStack deployment is a non-trivial process and care should be taken to plan and test upgrade procedures which will be specific to each OpenStack deployment". But really, the cloud makes everything so simple right?</p> +<p>All of Ubuntu's various flavors have updates for 16.10. Ubuntu GNOME has migrated some applications to GNOME 3.22, though the core system components like gnome-shell, gnome-control-center and nautilus are still at 3.20. Kubuntu 16.10 has a new version of Plasma 5 and updates for the stock KDE applications.</p> +<p>Ubuntu MATE has turned out another great update and is notable for being the first distro to ship MATE 1.16. The big news in MATE 1.16 is full GTK3+ support. The move to GTK3+ is a big one and smoothes out many of the graphical rough edges of past releases. The HiDPI support -- one of the big benefits of the move the GTK3+ -- is still a work in progress though. I was able to getting working pretty well in a virtual machine, but on the hardware site it didn't work. Developer Martin Wimpress <a href="https://ubuntu-mate.org/blog/ubuntu-mate-yakkety-final-release/#post-2949372581">says</a> that HiDPI support will be an area of focus for Ubuntu MATE 17.04. Still, even without full HiDPI support, Ubuntu MATE feels like what Ubuntu would have become if the Unity interface had never come along. In that sense it's nice to know that if you don't like Unity for some reason, you can still use Ubuntu just like you used to, they've just added the word MATE to the name.</p> +<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2> +<p>For all its improvements, Ubuntu 16.10 is not a huge update. It does have all the benefits of kernel 4.8, so if you had issues with 16.04 I would definitely suggest upgrading. However, most of the bug fixes and other speed and stability improvements will be backported to 16.04 as well, though you'll have to wait a bit longer.</p> +<p>If you want to experiment with Unity 8, then 16.10 is well worth the upgrade, just make sure you have a graphics card and drivers that Mir supports before you dive in. Also be forewarned that even if you get Unity 8 running, most applications won't install. It really is very much experimental still.</p> +<p>While it's been a welcome improvement over 16.04 for me (mostly due to hardware issues with 16.04), Ubuntu 16.10 still feels very much like Ubuntu is in a holding pattern, waiting for Unity 8 to mature, or at least become stable enough to use for more than a two minute screen capture video. While Ubuntu's planned future looks bright -- combining Snap packages, Mir and Unity 8 would make for an impressive system and if it can realize its vision of convergence, Canonical may really be on to something. Unfortunately that future feels no closer than it did this time last year.</p> diff --git a/published/ubuntu1610.txt b/published/ubuntu1610.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d6d1787 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/ubuntu1610.txt @@ -0,0 +1,75 @@ +Canonical recently rolled out Ubuntu 16.10, a less experimental, but worthwhile, update to its flagship Unity-based desktop. + +There's plenty in Ubuntu 16.10 that makes it worth the upgrade, though none of it is groundbreaking. Rather this release sees Canonical continuing to refine and bug-fix what at this point has become on the fastest, stablest, least-likely-to-completely-change-between-point-releases of the three major "modern" Linux desktops. + +Still, while the Unity 7.5 desktop offers stability and speed today, it's not long for this world. Purportedly not long for this world anyway. Ubuntu 16.10 is the seventh release since the fabled Unity 8 and its accompanying Mir display server were announced. And there's still no Unity 8 and Mir. + +In Canonical's defense, the competing display server project, Wayland, hasn't exactly taken the world by storm just yet. Wayland will likely [be the default for the Fedora Project's](https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-release-fedora-25-beta/) next release, Fedora 25. The difference is that GNOME 3 isn't tied to Wayland and has been cranking out impressive releases for some time now while Unity 7.5 is feeling, well, a bit dated. + +It's worth noting that Ubuntu 16.10 is the first official release of Ubuntu to ship with Unity 8 and Mir available. To try out a Unity 8 session, just click the Ubuntu symbol next to your username when you log in. + +Good luck getting Unity 8 to run though. Older hardware isn't up to the task and most new NVidia-based hardware won't work either. For this review I used both a Dell XPS and System 76 Oryx Pro and neither one of these very modern, well-specced pieces of hardware can successfully boot to Unity 8. Most disappointing, those accounts I've seen of people who can get Unity 8 running (like [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3_QK3soYw8)) show a streamlined Unity interface with... a new set of icons and some UI elements reminiscent of GNOME Shell. It's banal enough -- at least the skin deep look we can get right now -- to make you wonder what the fuss is about. + +But of course the fuss is about "convergence". The fuss is about the purported future in which you plug your phone into a monitor and it turns into a full desktop computing experience. I've started to feel like Fox Mulder waiting for Unity 8. I want to believe. I really do, but I've started to think convergence is about as likely as the zombie apocalypse and that the truth, the reality we'll end up with, will be somewhere below Canonical's fantasies of do anything phones and flesh eating updates that install Windows instead of Linux. + +Which is to say Unity 8 isn't here yet and you should probably stop holding your breath waiting for it arrive. + +In the mean time Canonical is shipping a very nice desktop operating system that's fast, stable and has fixed most of the issues that plagued the last release, which was supposed to be the Long Term Support release. If it were me, I'd much rather support Ubuntu 16.10 for five years than 16.04, but of course most of what's great about 16.10 will be backported to 16.04 as well at some point. So if you were bitten by 16.04, but not bitten hard enough to want to get off the LTS bandwagon then sit tight, backports are on the way. + +## Kernel 4.8 + +The biggest and best news to arrive with 16.10 is probably the move to Linux kernel 4.8. While earlier this year I called kernel 4.6 one of the best to come along in years (paraphrasing Linux Torvalds), 4.8 is a significant upgrade for the additional hardware support. There are three notable developments in 4.8, improved Skylake support, better support for NVidia Pascal and support for the raspberry pi 3. + +Skylake has been a very hit or miss series of chips in both Linux and Windows, though it seems particularly prone to problems in Linux. Kernel 4.8 fixes a Skylake power management bug that can crash your system and seems to generally be much more stable than earlier releases. I still occasionally experienced a bug with Chromium and YouTube both on Ubuntu and Arch running 4.8, but otherwise 4.8 has solved all the problems I've noticed on Skylake machines. + +Nvidia Pascal cards get some love in this update as well. The new support applies to the open-source Nouveau driver, and it's far from complete, but it's a start. I'd still suggest sticking with Nvidia's proprietary drivers for now, but at least Nouveau support is in the works. + +The Raspberry Pi 3 support is good news for anyone looking to get Ubuntu installed. Previously Linux kernels had to be patched to work with the Raspberry Pi 3, which in practical terms means you needed the Debian patched Raspbian, but now RP3 support native to the Linux kernel, any distro should run just fine, provided you turn off any graphics-intensive UI. + +There are also a couple of more universal improvements to ACPI low power mode, which might squeeze a few more minutes out of your laptop battery, and some big improvements to USB camera and HDMI device capture, which will be welcome to those of you editing video in Linux. + +## Unity 7.5 + +The most noticeable difference in 16.10's Unity desktop is the speed improvement. Unity is just plain fast. Applications launch quickly, windows minimize quickly, suspend resumes quickly, even boot time is minimal. + +This release also sees some significant updates to the GNOME components and applications that Unity depends on, bringing most of the GNOME stack up to version 3.20 (a couple appear to be at GNOME 3.22, which is downright cutting edge by Ubuntu's backporting standards). Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the Nautilus file browser, which gains the new search filters, progress indicator and icon size control that GNOME users have enjoyed for some time now. + +In Ubuntu the best of these new features is the greatly improved search features, which are not only much faster, but also allow you to chain filters together. Files, as Nautilus is known these days, also comes with a much more compact preferences dialog, which offers new settings for showing the permanent delete and create symbolic link buttons. + +Most of the rest of the standard GNOME-based Unity application stack has been updated to the latest version. LibreOffice has been updated to 5.2, Firefox is at 49. Another under the hood change that some users may be pleasantly surprised by: the move to GTK3 apps (when available). LibreOffice is one example of this and it looks much better than previous releases. On the other hand this could end up breaking some themes, so if you're very attached to some customized Unity theme I highly recommend testing it with 16.10 in a virtual machine before you commit to upgrading. + +Speaking of virtual machines, Ubuntu 16.10 is noticeably faster in VMs than previous releases. This is primarily due to the new Unity Low Graphics Mode, which tones down the fade effects and transparency in favor of faster rendering times. + +Unfortunately one place Unity seems to lag behind GNOME is detecting HiDPI screens. While 16.10 has excellent HiDPI support, it never detected my screens. I had to manually turn on scaling, which is a minor point to be sure, but a new user who doesn't know that they need to turn on dpi scaling might be quite lost, staring at tiny text on a 4k monitor. It's worth noting that Unity did successfully detect that my Virtualbox install was using a HiDPI screen (on the same hardware where, when installed to disk, it did not). + +Also worth noting, systemd is now used for user sessions. Previous releases (and this one) used systemd for system sessions, but not user sessions. Upstart, Ubuntu's previous session manager, is still around for Unity and some indicators, but these too are in the process of being migrated to systemd. Soon it will be just systemd turtles all the way down. + +While there hasn't been much done to the Ubuntu Software Center in this release, there are some better search tools available for the nascent Snap packages system. I still find the easiest way to find Snap packages is with the command line tool, e.g. "snap find appname", but a fair number of Snap packages do turn up in the Ubuntu Software Center. Despite the promise of Snap packages -- installing apps without worry about dependencies being probably the biggest win for end users -- developers do not appear to be rushing into Snaps. There's Snap versions of popular apps like LibreOffice and the graphics tool Krita, as well as other, smaller projects, but there are still plenty of issues with Snap apps and far too few Snaps to get too excited at this point. + +It may well be that app developers are waiting a bit to see which of the container-meets-package formats will end up rising to the top as it were. Ubuntu's Snaps are more or less the same (conceptually anyway) as [Flatpak](http://flatpak.org/) packages, which grew out of a Red Hat led effort. + +## Stability and Performance + +Despite feeling a bit faster, Ubuntu 16.10 was a bit more resource heavy than its LTS predecessor. I found that idle performance for 16.10 was nearly identical to 16.04, though 16.10 was using about 25 percent more RAM. There's better news when it comes to power use though. Using the powerstat application (developed by an Ubuntu engineer Colin King) with brightness at full, Wifi on and bluetooth off, I found 16.10 used roughly 10 percent less energy. At least some of that improvement may be due to the aforementioned kernel power management improvements though. In other words, once it's backported to 16.04 power consumption may be much closer, but in the mean time, 10 percent is a significant improvement. + +One place I found Ubuntu 16.10 a giant leap ahead of 16.04 was stability and bugs. Generally this is the opposite of what I would expect, Ubuntu's October releases tend to more experimental, a place for developers to try reasonably stable new ideas that might still have a bug or two. Unfortunately I found 16.04 to be quite buggy -- which could have been related the Skylake issues upstream from Ubuntu itself -- as released, though things have settled down a bit now. + +With 16.10 all my trackpad issues and X session crashes have vanished (save the aforementioned Chromium/YouTube bug). Once again the majority of the stability fixes will likely be backported to 16.04, but if any of these or other bugs have bitten you with 16.04 it might be worth making the leap to 16.10 to see if that improves your experience. + +## Flavors + +Unity is the flagship Ubuntu release, but by no means the only way to enjoy Ubuntu. The list of improvements in 16.10 for Ubuntu's various flavors is beyond the scope of a short review like this, but there are two releases in particular that deserve mention. The first is not technically a flavor, but it's already the most used version of Ubuntu out there -- the server edition. + +Ubuntu 16.10 includes the latest OpenStack release, dubbed Newton, as well as updated versions of OpenStack's various components. Again, this will also be available to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users as well, so there's no need to move your production server off the purportedly more stable LTS release just to get the latest version of OpenStack. You might want to give it some thought whether you want to upgrade at all give what a headache it can be. Even the Ubuntu release notes offer a warning that "upgrading an OpenStack deployment is a non-trivial process and care should be taken to plan and test upgrade procedures which will be specific to each OpenStack deployment". But really, the cloud makes everything so simple right? + +All of Ubuntu's various flavors have updates for 16.10. Ubuntu GNOME has migrated some applications to GNOME 3.22, though the core system components like gnome-shell, gnome-control-center and nautilus are still at 3.20. Kubuntu 16.10 has a new version of Plasma 5 and updates for the stock KDE applications. + +Ubuntu MATE has turned out another great update and is notable for being the first distro to ship MATE 1.16. The big news in MATE 1.16 is full GTK3+ support. If you've ever had problems getting MATE to look good on HiDPI screens, give Ubuntu MATE 16.10 a spin, it worked flawless out of the box for me. The move to GTK3+ is a big one and smoothes out many of the graphical rough edges of past releases. Ubuntu MATE feels like what Ubuntu would have become if the Unity interface had never come along. In that sense it's nice to know that if you don't like Unity for some reason, you can still use Ubuntu just like you used to, they've just added the word MATE to the name. + +## Conclusion + +For all its improvements, Ubuntu 16.10 is not a huge update. It does have all the benefits of kernel 4.8, so if you had issues with 16.04 I would definitely suggest upgrading. However, most of the bug fixes and other speed and stability improvements will be backported to 16.04 as well, though you'll have to wait a bit longer. + +If you want to experiment with Unity 8, then 16.10 is well worth the upgrade, just make sure you have a graphics card and drivers that Mir supports before you dive in. Also be forewarned that even if you get Unity 8 running, most applications won't install. It really is very much experimental still. + +While it's been a welcome improvement over 16.04 for me (mostly due to hardware issues with 16.04), Ubuntu 16.10 still feels very much like Ubuntu is in a holding pattern, waiting for Unity 8 to mature, or at least become stable enough to use for more than a two minute screen capture video. While Ubuntu's planned future looks bright -- combining Snap packages, Mir and Unity 8 would make for an impressive system and if it can realize its vision of convergence, Canonical may really be on to something. Unfortunately that future feels no closer than it did this time last year. |