From 5e0e431e35ad867da0c79b7db5e7a3486d764670 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: luxagraf Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2017 08:49:20 -0800 Subject: archived published articles --- dell7520.txt | 86 ----------------------------------- dell7520review.html | 45 ------------------- galaga-pro-review.txt | 68 ---------------------------- galago-pro-review.html | 43 ++++++++++++++++++ published/dell7520.txt | 86 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ published/dell7520review.html | 45 +++++++++++++++++++ published/galago-pro-review.txt | 84 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ published/ubuntu1704review.html | 58 ++++++++++++++++++++++++ published/ubuntu1704review.txt | 99 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ubuntu1704review.html | 58 ------------------------ ubuntu1704review.txt | 99 ----------------------------------------- 11 files changed, 415 insertions(+), 356 deletions(-) delete mode 100644 dell7520.txt delete mode 100644 dell7520review.html delete mode 100644 galaga-pro-review.txt create mode 100644 galago-pro-review.html create mode 100644 published/dell7520.txt create mode 100644 published/dell7520review.html create mode 100644 published/galago-pro-review.txt create mode 100644 published/ubuntu1704review.html create mode 100644 published/ubuntu1704review.txt delete mode 100644 ubuntu1704review.html delete mode 100644 ubuntu1704review.txt diff --git a/dell7520.txt b/dell7520.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 55d1a18..0000000 --- a/dell7520.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,86 +0,0 @@ -Dell's Project Sputnik, which is the company's effort to produce "developer" suited laptops with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed, recently expanded its offerings with quite a few revamped laptops in the company's Precision line. - -Project Sputnik has done an admirable job of bringing a "just works" Linux experience to Dell Ultrabooks like the XPS 13 Developer Edition, which I've tested three times now. While the XPS 13 is a great machine that I would not hesitate to recommend for most Linux users, it does have its shortcomings. The biggest problem in my view has long been the limited amount of RAM -- the XPS 13 tops out at 16GB. While that's enough for most users, there are those -- software developers compiling large projects, video editors, even photographers -- who would benefit from more RAM. - -Normally in the Dell line to get more RAM you'd pick up a one of the various Precision laptops, which lack the svelteness of the XPS series, but can pack in more RAM and larger hard drives. Unfortunately the availability of the Ubuntu-based Precision machines has been somewhat spotty in the past. With this latest refresh though that's no longer the case, you can get [Ubuntu-based Precision laptops in a variety of configurations from the Dell site](http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop?c=us&l=en&s=biz). - -Dell isn't the only manufacturer producing great Linux machines. And in fact the [Oryx Pro](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/system76-oryx-pro-review-linux-in-a-laptop-has-never-been-better/) from System 76 is another great machine, and my previous recommendation for anyone who needed more RAM and didn't mind the additional size and weight. - -Naturally Linux will probably work just fine on plenty of hardware not specifically tailored to running Linux, but if you want a "just works" experience I'd suggest staying away from bleeding edge hardware, which sometimes lacks drivers (or stick with a bleeding edge distro like Arch). That's where efforts like Dell's Project Sputnik come in handy, the hardware is already vetted, the drivers pre-installed and configured for a great out of the box experience. - -And now, with the revamped Sputnik lineup you can get your just works Linux rig and all the power and RAM of a bigger laptop in the form of the Dell Precision 7520. - -## Hardware - -The machine Dell sent me for testing was a Dell 7520 Developer Edition with an Intel Xeon E3-1505M v6 (Quad Core Xeon 3.00GHz, 4.00GHz Turbo, 8MB 45W, w/Intel HD Graphics 630), 32 GB RAM, 512 GB of SSD space, an NVIDIA Quadro M2200 w/4GB GDDR5 graphics card, and a brilliant 15.6" UHD IGZO (3840x2160) LED-backlit non-touch screen. - -The Xeon is the top of the line chip for Precision 7520s, though you can get a Radeon Pro graphics card, up to 64GB of memory, and up to 3TB of hard drive space. The model I tested maxed out the SSD (512GB), but you can ditch the SSD in favor of a 1TB 7200rpm spinning drive and add a second spinning drive up to 2TB in size. Other customization options include a different finger print reader, and an option to have a PCIe drive as the second drive. - -The 7520 boasts a full size keyboard complete with number pad, though the arrow keys, page up/down, and home/end keys are all half size keys, which some may find annoying. There's also "nub" cursor controller in the middle of the keyboard, which would be great were it not so stiff. The really brilliant piece of engineering in the keyboard though is the mouse buttons -- separate left, middle and right -- just below the space bar, which makes it possible to, for example, right click with your thumb without ever taking your fingers off the home row or otherwise interrupting your typing. - -I like this bit so much I've had some trouble going back to my Lenovo, I still routinely tap my right thumb just below the space bar only to find there's nothing there. That said, I can see where some people might not like this feature since, especially at first, there's a tendency to accidentally hit the mouse buttons when you meant to hit the space bar. In my case it only took about half a hour of typing for that to go away, but it might be worth heading to a brick and mortar store to try out the keyboard before you rush off to order one. - -The keys themselves are your basic chiclet-style keys, though as is the case with other Dell laptops I've tested, they manage to have a rather solid, satisfying feeling with a good bit of give to them. If, like me, you tend to pound on your keys like you're still using a Model M, Dell offers one of the better keyboard experiences in a laptop today. - -The trackpad is less remarkable, though it's plenty responsive and smooth enough with separate buttons just below it. With Ubuntu's stock trackpad drivers you can configure the trackpad to respond to taps if you don't like the separate buttons, but there is no Apple-style push anywhere on the trackpad to left-click. - -For ports the Precision 7520 offers 4 USB 3.0 ports with PowerShare, three on the left side, one on the right. Also on the left is a Thunderbolt 3 type C port, HDMI, and Mini display port connector. On the right, along with the three USB ports, there's a memory card reader, headphone jack and security lock. The back of the Precision 7520 sports a RJ45 port and the power adapter port. There's also a fingerprint reader and an optional smart card slot. - -The case of the Precision 7520 is a somewhat soft dark finish. It looks nice, but it does show fingerprints quite a bit. The body is built around a very sturdy metal chassis that doesn't flex much, even when you carry it open with one hand, which you shouldn't do because this thing is pretty heavy. It's not off the charts but at around six and half pounds (exact weight varies according to customizations) it's definitely a two hander, at least when it's open. It's worth noting though that the hinge is quite smooth and opening it up with one hand isn't difficult. - -The Precision 7520 is just under 15in wide, 10.38 inches deep and a little over an inch thick, tapering from the back to front. In other words it's neither a massive beast, nor the most svelte thing on the market. Personally, the extra bulk is nothing compared to the power gained by having the bulk. - -The Xeon processor in the machine I tested handled everything I ever threw at it without breaking a sweat. I was able to edit through, color, and render a backlog of video editing that I had been dreading trying to do on my i5 8GB Lenovo (yes I'm one of those weirdos that edits video using FOSS software on Linux). - -What would have been hours of rendering time on the Lenovo took, by comparison, hardly any time at all on the Dell. I crunched through several hours worth of footage, compiled and rendered out my edits and the Dell hardly even spun up its fans. A note on those fans though: they didn't run very often in normal use, but when I pushed it they did kick in and they're not the quietest things around. They did, however, do an excellent job of keeping things cool even when I was rendering video while sitting in the afternoon sun while camping in Louisiana swamps in June. I should note here that while the model I tested had 32GB of RAM, you can, for a price, push that up to 64GB of RAM. - -The last hardware bit of note is the screen, which offers 3840x2160 pixel resolution in a 15.6 inch package. The screen itself looks amazing and I found the color rendering to be excellent, especially with regard to nice, deep blacks. Unfortunately some Linux apps -- GIMP I'm looking at you -- have really poor HiDPI support. The HiDPI support is getting better, certainly Unity itself is almost flawless, as is GNOME, which I also tested, more on that in a minute, but there are enough apps that have tiny, illegible UIs on a HiDPI screen that it's worth double checking to make sure all your favorites work before you spend the money on the high end screen. The Precision 7520 can also be configured to use 1920x1080 IPS screen for those that don't want to mess with the HiDPI version. - -## Software - -As with the rest of Dell's Sputnik offerings the Precision 7520 Developer Edition ships with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. That'll be the base of Dell's machines for the next few years at a minimum despite the fact that, in the midst of my testing, Ubuntu announced it would no longer develop the Unity interface that has been its default desktop since 2010. More on the demise of Unity in a minute, but for now it's worth pointing out that the combination of screen size and hardware specs of the Precision 7520 make for the best Unity machine I've ever used, period. - -Ironically, just when I was thinking, hey, Unity isn't so bad on a nice big screen with plenty of RAM to spare, Canonical announced it was stopping the development of Unity and would adopt a mostly stock GNOME interface for future releases. - -Since Dell ships with LTS releases, the earliest you'll likely see GNOME on a Dell machine is 18.04, which will arrive in April 2018 and, given adoption time in the past, won't likely ship with Dell hardware until 2019. That might be slightly disappointing to those who want bleeding edge software, but it's the main reason Dell machines don't have hardware issues. It takes time to test and fix bugs. - -Of course there's nothing stopping you from updating your system yourself, or installing any other distro you might like. I stuck with Ubuntu on this machine though in the past I have run Fedora, Arch and Mint on Dell machines without encountering any problems (quite a few Fedora developers seem to use XPS 13s so fixes for Dell specific issues seem to get pushed out very quickly in Fedora). This time around I wanted to spend some time with Ubuntu GNOME on high end hardware, since that will, like it or not, be the future of the Ubuntu Desktop. - -That's not to say that Unity is abandonware. It will live on in the Universe repos for anyone who'd like to continue using it and it's certainly alive and well in Dell machines. If you're fond of the Unity interface there's no need to panic just yet, you'll be able to continue using it for quite a while. There have already been stirrings of a community around it that would like to continue development. Even if there are just a couple of people fixing bugs and keeping the lights on you should be able to get a good five more years out of it (Canonical is committed to maintaining for the five year release cycle of 16.04, which lasts until April of 2021). - -Jared Domínguez, Software Principal Engineer at Dell, says "Dell has been working with Canonical on Unity transition plans." For those buying a 7520 (or other Dell with Ubuntu install) Dominquez says, "we understand the need to keep a consistent experience, especially considering the large corporate Ubuntu desktop deployments that depend on Dell". He goes on to add that, once GNOME starts shipping by default on Ubuntu, "I personally anticipate that everyone will benefit from the combined GNOME effort of Canonical and Red Hat on Ubuntu and RHEL, both of which we ship." - -I went ahead and tested Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 quite extensively and didn't run into any problems at all, hardware or otherwise. In fact the near stock GNOME that ships with Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 looks really nice on the HiDPI screen. There's even some nice tools starting to emerge that add some of the best features of Unity to GNOME. For example, [this GNOME extension](https://github.com/ElectricPrism/gnome-hud-menu) takes the idea of Unity's HUD menu (a search interface for application menu items) and uses the very fast dmenu to get the same functionality in GNOME. As an added bonus, dmenu is even faster and more responsive than Unity's HUD, albeit not quite as pretty to look at. I should also note that it doesn't work with Firefox or Chromium. - -There are also quite a few GNOME themes out there, which, in conjunction with GNOME Shell extensions, can do an admirable job of impersonating the Unity desktop in both function and form. It's worth noting too that Ubuntu hasn't formally released a GNOME version just yet, it may well ship with some customizations to make the transition from Unity to GNOME a little easier on users. - -Whether you opt to stick with Ubuntu 16.04 as it ships with the Precision 7520, upgrade to 17.04. switch to Ubuntu GNOME, or use an entirely different distro, you're unlikely to encounter any issues with the hardware. That's part of what you're paying for when you get the Precision 7520 and yes, there are some cheaper options out there, but few, if any, will work as flawlessly as the Dell. - -Perhaps the best comparison machine to the Precision 7520 is System76's Oryx Pro, which I reviewed last year. The Oryx Pro has since been updated and you can configure it to more or less match the Dell Precision 7520. The Dell has the Oryx Pro beat on size and weight, though not by much. On the other hand the Oryx Pro can (for an additional price) pack in up to 6TB of drive space. Both are great machines, which is better suited to you is really something too personal to generalize into a recommendation. Based on my experience you won't be disappointed by either. - -## Overall Impressions - -I enjoyed my time with the Dell Precision 7520 and would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone that needs the power. That said, if your primary use case is browsing the web, chat/Skype, light photo editing, etc, then this thing is way overkill. If you don't need the power it's hard to justify the additional size and weight over the XPS developer edition line. On the other hand, if the XPS machines have always left you feeling underpowered, the Precision 7520 is for you. - -And now it's time for my biggest gripe with this machine: The battery life sucks. As Confucious once said, with great power comes crappy battery life. That's certainly the case with the 7520, which manages to eke out about fours hours doing light duty web browsing and the like, but quickly drops off to less than two if you start pushing it. - -Given the size and weight, along with the battery life, suffice to say that the happiest Dell Precision 7520 user will be the one that primarily has it sitting on a desk at home or work and only occasionally ventures out to tax the battery. The more you leave this on the desk -- chained to a couple 4K displays via Dell's Thunderbolt docking station would be nice -- the more your back will thank you anyway. - - - -The Good - - Trouble-free Linux on good hardware - Excellent screen with great resolution - Plenty of RAM to handle whatever you throw at it - Price is competitive for the hardware you get - -The Bad - - Screen resolution of HiDPI models can cause problems with some apps - It's not the lightest thing around - Charger is also quite large - -The Ugly - - It's not Dell's fault, but if you stick with Ubuntu, eventually you're going to wake up one day to GNOME rather than Unity. diff --git a/dell7520review.html b/dell7520review.html deleted file mode 100644 index 3efd7ba..0000000 --- a/dell7520review.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,45 +0,0 @@ -

Dell's Project Sputnik, which is the company's effort to produce "developer" suited laptops with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed, recently expanded its offerings with quite a few revamped laptops in the company's Precision line.

-

Project Sputnik has done an admirable job of bringing a "just works" Linux experience to Dell Ultrabooks like the XPS 13 Developer Edition, which I've tested three times now. While the XPS 13 is a great machine that I would not hesitate to recommend for most Linux users, it does have its shortcomings. The biggest problem in my view has long been the limited amount of RAM -- the XPS 13 tops out at 16GB. While that's enough for most users, there are those -- software developers compiling large projects, video editors, even photographers -- who would benefit from more RAM.

-

Normally in the Dell line to get more RAM you'd pick up a one of the various Precision laptops, which lack the svelteness of the XPS series, but can pack in more RAM and larger hard drives. Unfortunately the availability of the Ubuntu-based Precision machines has been somewhat spotty in the past. With this latest refresh though that's no longer the case, you can get Ubuntu-based Precision laptops in a variety of configurations from the Dell site.

-

Dell isn't the only manufacturer producing great Linux machines. And in fact the Oryx Pro from System 76 is another great machine, and my previous recommendation for anyone who needed more RAM and didn't mind the additional size and weight.

-

Naturally Linux will probably work just fine on plenty of hardware not specifically tailored to running Linux, but if you want a "just works" experience I'd suggest staying away from bleeding edge hardware, which sometimes lacks drivers (or stick with a bleeding edge distro like Arch). That's where efforts like Dell's Project Sputnik come in handy, the hardware is already vetted, the drivers pre-installed and configured for a great out of the box experience.

-

And now, with the revamped Sputnik lineup you can get your just works Linux rig and all the power and RAM of a bigger laptop in the form of the Dell Precision 7520.

-

Hardware

-

The machine Dell sent me for testing was a Dell 7520 Developer Edition with an Intel Xeon E3-1505M v6 (Quad Core Xeon 3.00GHz, 4.00GHz Turbo, 8MB 45W, w/Intel HD Graphics 630), 32 GB RAM, 512 GB of SSD space, an NVIDIA Quadro M2200 w/4GB GDDR5 graphics card, and a brilliant 15.6" UHD IGZO (3840x2160) LED-backlit non-touch screen.

-

The Xeon is the top of the line chip for Precision 7520s, though you can get a Radeon Pro graphics card, up to 64GB of memory, and up to 3TB of hard drive space. The model I tested maxed out the SSD (512GB), but you can ditch the SSD in favor of a 1TB 7200rpm spinning drive and add a second spinning drive up to 2TB in size. Other customization options include a different finger print reader, and an option to have a PCIe drive as the second drive.

-

The 7520 boasts a full size keyboard complete with number pad, though the arrow keys, page up/down, and home/end keys are all half size keys, which some may find annoying. There's also "nub" cursor controller in the middle of the keyboard, which would be great were it not so stiff. The really brilliant piece of engineering in the keyboard though is the mouse buttons -- separate left, middle and right -- just below the space bar, which makes it possible to, for example, right click with your thumb without ever taking your fingers off the home row or otherwise interrupting your typing.

-

I like this bit so much I've had some trouble going back to my Lenovo, I still routinely tap my right thumb just below the space bar only to find there's nothing there. That said, I can see where some people might not like this feature since, especially at first, there's a tendency to accidentally hit the mouse buttons when you meant to hit the space bar. In my case it only took about half a hour of typing for that to go away, but it might be worth heading to a brick and mortar store to try out the keyboard before you rush off to order one.

-

The keys themselves are your basic chiclet-style keys, though as is the case with other Dell laptops I've tested, they manage to have a rather solid, satisfying feeling with a good bit of give to them. If, like me, you tend to pound on your keys like you're still using a Model M, Dell offers one of the better keyboard experiences in a laptop today.

-

The trackpad is less remarkable, though it's plenty responsive and smooth enough with separate buttons just below it. With Ubuntu's stock trackpad drivers you can configure the trackpad to respond to taps if you don't like the separate buttons, but there is no Apple-style push anywhere on the trackpad to left-click.

-

For ports the Precision 7520 offers 4 USB 3.0 ports with PowerShare, three on the left side, one on the right. Also on the left is a Thunderbolt 3 type C port, HDMI, and Mini display port connector. On the right, along with the three USB ports, there's a memory card reader, headphone jack and security lock. The back of the Precision 7520 sports a RJ45 port and the power adapter port. There's also a fingerprint reader and an optional smart card slot.

-

The case of the Precision 7520 is a somewhat soft dark finish. It looks nice, but it does show fingerprints quite a bit. The body is built around a very sturdy metal chassis that doesn't flex much, even when you carry it open with one hand, which you shouldn't do because this thing is pretty heavy. It's not off the charts but at around six and half pounds (exact weight varies according to customizations) it's definitely a two hander, at least when it's open. It's worth noting though that the hinge is quite smooth and opening it up with one hand isn't difficult.

-

The Precision 7520 is just under 15in wide, 10.38 inches deep and a little over an inch thick, tapering from the back to front. In other words it's neither a massive beast, nor the most svelte thing on the market. Personally, the extra bulk is nothing compared to the power gained by having the bulk.

-

The Xeon processor in the machine I tested handled everything I ever threw at it without breaking a sweat. I was able to edit through, color, and render a backlog of video editing that I had been dreading trying to do on my i5 8GB Lenovo (yes I'm one of those weirdos that edits video using FOSS software on Linux).

-

What would have been hours of rendering time on the Lenovo took, by comparison, hardly any time at all on the Dell. I crunched through several hours worth of footage, compiled and rendered out my edits and the Dell hardly even spun up its fans. A note on those fans though: they didn't run very often in normal use, but when I pushed it they did kick in and they're not the quietest things around. They did, however, do an excellent job of keeping things cool even when I was rendering video while sitting in the afternoon sun while camping in Louisiana swamps in June. I should note here that while the model I tested had 32GB of RAM, you can, for a price, push that up to 64GB of RAM.

-

The last hardware bit of note is the screen, which offers 3840x2160 pixel resolution in a 15.6 inch package. The screen itself looks amazing and I found the color rendering to be excellent, especially with regard to nice, deep blacks. Unfortunately some Linux apps -- GIMP I'm looking at you -- have really poor HiDPI support. The HiDPI support is getting better, certainly Unity itself is almost flawless, as is GNOME, which I also tested, more on that in a minute, but there are enough apps that have tiny, illegible UIs on a HiDPI screen that it's worth double checking to make sure all your favorites work before you spend the money on the high end screen. The Precision 7520 can also be configured to use 1920x1080 IPS screen for those that don't want to mess with the HiDPI version.

-

Software

-

As with the rest of Dell's Sputnik offerings the Precision 7520 Developer Edition ships with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. That'll be the base of Dell's machines for the next few years at a minimum despite the fact that, in the midst of my testing, Ubuntu announced it would no longer develop the Unity interface that has been its default desktop since 2010. More on the demise of Unity in a minute, but for now it's worth pointing out that the combination of screen size and hardware specs of the Precision 7520 make for the best Unity machine I've ever used, period.

-

Ironically, just when I was thinking, hey, Unity isn't so bad on a nice big screen with plenty of RAM to spare, Canonical announced it was stopping the development of Unity and would adopt a mostly stock GNOME interface for future releases.

-

Since Dell ships with LTS releases, the earliest you'll likely see GNOME on a Dell machine is 18.04, which will arrive in April 2018 and, given adoption time in the past, won't likely ship with Dell hardware until 2019. That might be slightly disappointing to those who want bleeding edge software, but it's the main reason Dell machines don't have hardware issues. It takes time to test and fix bugs.

-

Of course there's nothing stopping you from updating your system yourself, or installing any other distro you might like. I stuck with Ubuntu on this machine though in the past I have run Fedora, Arch and Mint on Dell machines without encountering any problems (quite a few Fedora developers seem to use XPS 13s so fixes for Dell specific issues seem to get pushed out very quickly in Fedora). This time around I wanted to spend some time with Ubuntu GNOME on high end hardware, since that will, like it or not, be the future of the Ubuntu Desktop.

-

That's not to say that Unity is abandonware. It will live on in the Universe repos for anyone who'd like to continue using it and it's certainly alive and well in Dell machines. If you're fond of the Unity interface there's no need to panic just yet, you'll be able to continue using it for quite a while. There have already been stirrings of a community around it that would like to continue development. Even if there are just a couple of people fixing bugs and keeping the lights on you should be able to get a good five more years out of it (Canonical is committed to maintaining for the five year release cycle of 16.04, which lasts until April of 2021).

-

Jared Domínguez, Software Principal Engineer at Dell, says "Dell has been working with Canonical on Unity transition plans." For those buying a 7520 (or other Dell with Ubuntu install) Dominquez says, "we understand the need to keep a consistent experience, especially considering the large corporate Ubuntu desktop deployments that depend on Dell". He goes on to add that, once GNOME starts shipping by default on Ubuntu, "I personally anticipate that everyone will benefit from the combined GNOME effort of Canonical and Red Hat on Ubuntu and RHEL, both of which we ship."

-

I went ahead and tested Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 quite extensively and didn't run into any problems at all, hardware or otherwise. In fact the near stock GNOME that ships with Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 looks really nice on the HiDPI screen. There's even some nice tools starting to emerge that add some of the best features of Unity to GNOME. For example, this GNOME extension takes the idea of Unity's HUD menu (a search interface for application menu items) and uses the very fast dmenu to get the same functionality in GNOME. As an added bonus, dmenu is even faster and more responsive than Unity's HUD, albeit not quite as pretty to look at. I should also note that it doesn't work with Firefox or Chromium.

-

There are also quite a few GNOME themes out there, which, in conjunction with GNOME Shell extensions, can do an admirable job of impersonating the Unity desktop in both function and form. It's worth noting too that Ubuntu hasn't formally released a GNOME version just yet, it may well ship with some customizations to make the transition from Unity to GNOME a little easier on users.

-

Whether you opt to stick with Ubuntu 16.04 as it ships with the Precision 7520, upgrade to 17.04. switch to Ubuntu GNOME, or use an entirely different distro, you're unlikely to encounter any issues with the hardware. That's part of what you're paying for when you get the Precision 7520 and yes, there are some cheaper options out there, but few, if any, will work as flawlessly as the Dell.

-

Perhaps the best comparison machine to the Precision 7520 is System76's Oryx Pro, which I reviewed last year. The Oryx Pro has since been updated and you can configure it to more or less match the Dell Precision 7520. The Dell has the Oryx Pro beat on size and weight, though not by much. On the other hand the Oryx Pro can (for an additional price) pack in up to 6TB of drive space. Both are great machines, which is better suited to you is really something too personal to generalize into a recommendation. Based on my experience you won't be disappointed by either.

-

Overall Impressions

-

I enjoyed my time with the Dell Precision 7520 and would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone that needs the power. That said, if your primary use case is browsing the web, chat/Skype, light photo editing, etc, then this thing is way overkill. If you don't need the power it's hard to justify the additional size and weight over the XPS developer edition line. On the other hand, if the XPS machines have always left you feeling underpowered, the Precision 7520 is for you.

-

And now it's time for my biggest gripe with this machine: The battery life sucks. As Confucious once said, with great power comes crappy battery life. That's certainly the case with the 7520, which manages to eke out about fours hours doing light duty web browsing and the like, but quickly drops off to less than two if you start pushing it.

-

Given the size and weight, along with the battery life, suffice to say that the happiest Dell Precision 7520 user will be the one that primarily has it sitting on a desk at home or work and only occasionally ventures out to tax the battery. The more you leave this on the desk -- chained to a couple 4K displays via Dell's Thunderbolt docking station would be nice -- the more your back will thank you anyway.

-

The Good

-
Trouble-free Linux on good hardware
-Excellent screen with great resolution
-Plenty of RAM to handle whatever you throw at it
-Price is competitive for the hardware you get
-

The Bad

-
Screen resolution of HiDPI models can cause problems with some apps
-It's not the lightest thing around
-Charger is also quite large
-

The Ugly

-
It's not Dell's fault, but if you stick with Ubuntu, eventually you're going to wake up one day to GNOME rather than Unity.
diff --git a/galaga-pro-review.txt b/galaga-pro-review.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 235bd7e..0000000 --- a/galaga-pro-review.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,68 +0,0 @@ -Wiping the default operating system from your laptop and plugging in a USB stick with your favorite distro's live CD has long been one of the great rites of passage of the Linux world. Some of us get a little, dare I say giddy, every time we wipe that other OS away and see that first flash of GRUB. Of course rites of passage are supposed to be one time events. Once you've wiped Windows or OS X a time or two most of no longer have that giddiness -- it becomes one more annoyance, a kind of tax on Linux users. - -In recent years the PC industry has finally spawned a few manufacturers offering up machines with Linux pre-installed and at this point I have tested most of them. Dell's XPS and Precision lines both have Linux-friendly offerings and dedicated Linux manufacturers like System76 have long offered decent hardware with Linux pre-installed. In all my testing of various models from four different manufacturers I've yet to encounter a driver problem, which is the real benefit of a machine with Linux pre-installed. To be fair, I could say the same for the Lenovo x240 that serves as my daily driver. - -Still, finding the perfect Linux laptop has always been something of a Goldilocks problem -- this one is too big, this one is too underpowered, this one has too little RAM, this one lacks a big SSD and so on. Generally speaking if you want power and storage you're going to end up with something too big to comfortable throw in a bag and carry all day -- the Dell Precision 7520 and the System76 Oryx Pro are good examples of this. - -Alternately you could go for the more portable Dell XPS 13 or System76 Lemur, which both offer a more svelte, lightweight machine that's easier on your shoulders, but is generally lacking in RAM and drive space. - -What Linux users like myself have long wanted is a laptop with roughly the form factor and weight of a Macbook pro, but with the option to get 32GB of RAM or three TB of storage. A laptop that is both reasonably lightweight and powerful. - -And that my fellow Linux users, is exactly what System76 has managed to deliver with its new Galago Pro laptop. - -It's not perfect, but this is a very clever, very well designed piece of hardware with some very impressive specs. - -The model I tested featured the faster 7th Gen Intel i7-7500U (also avaolable with an i5 for slightly less), 250 GB Samsung 960 EVO NVMe, 8GB RAM (Dual Channel DDR4 at 2133MHz), a 250GB Samsung 960 EVO NVMe SSD and a 13.3″ 3K HiDPI screen with an Intel HD Graphics 620 card. As spec'ed the Galago Pro I tested would set you back $1,328. - -# Hardware and Design. - -The Galago Pro features an all-aluminium body that looks and feels a bit like a Macbook Pro, but without the wrist-cutting sharp edges of the Macbook Pro. It's a slick piece of hardware and it's light, weighing in at a mere 2.87lbs. In fact it's difficult to convey just how maazingly light this thing is. My Lenovo x240 isn't exactly a beast, but after carting around the Galago Pro for a few weeks the Lenovo started to seem a bit more brick-like. - -Around the outside of the Galago Pro you'll find the usual array of ports, including one USB-C with Thunderbolt, two USB 3.1 ports, an SD Card Reader, and, for additional displays there's an HDMI as well as MiniDP/USB-C. System76 also bucks a current trend by including an actual Ethernet port, which also features a little door that holds the cable in place. If you're a regular user of hotel wifi you know how valuable an Ethernet jack can be. There's also a slot for a SIM card. - -The keyboard is reminecent of the Dell XPS 13 -- black Chiclet keys surrounded by smooth a aluminum frame. The travel is okay, on par with the rest of the laptops out there that sport similar keyboards (like the Macbook Pro). I happen to prefer the spongier, closer-to-clakkity keyboards Lenovo uses, but judging by the market I am not in the majority there. - -Once place the Galago Pro differs significantly from both the XPS 13 line and MAcbook Pros is the bezel that surrounds the Galago Pro's screen -- it's big. The display itself is more or less the same though, the 13.3-inch screen packs in 3200x1800 pixels. As with the Dell there are some Linux apps where the HiDPI screen is more of a hindrance than a help (I'm looking at you GiMP). Color wise the screen is quite nice and renders true blacks pretty well. It's also nicely backlit and it works out of the box in Ubuntu - -The i7 That ships with the Galago Pro is the latest of the Kaby Lake versions and for that reason I strongly recommend ordering your Galago Pro with Ubuntu 17.04, which features a newer Linux kernel with much better ssupport for Kaby Lake. - -Another point that sometimes gets glossed over in reviews is that the Galago Pro is very user servicable. I couldn't find any disassembly guides on System76's website, but a quick YouTube search will get you a couple videos. It's pretty simple, just lift up the keyboard, detach the cable, unscrew three screws and then flip it over and unscrew everything from the bottom and you'll have access to the insides. You can swap out both drives and the RAM if you decided to upgrade down the road. - -So far so good, but like I said the Galago Pro is not perfect and it's biggest failing is battery life. In normal use (wifi and bluetooth on, screen at 80 percent brightness and using Vim for writing, Firefox for browsing the web and mpd for music I only got about 3.5 hours out of the battery. That was using the stock Ubuntu as shipped. When I wiped that, installed Arch Linux, just used Openbox with tint2 and installed TLP I managed to get one more hour out if it. Still not great, but better. Suffice to say that this is not an all day without a cord sort of laptop. On the plus side the charger and cord are quite small and light. - -Another thing I disliked about the Galago Pro was the trackpad. It wasn't the worst I've ever used (pick any Chromebook to experience the worst trackpad ever), but I was plagued by jittery cursor movements and occasional moments where it would be totally unresponsive. Another downside -- the fan is pretty loud and it will kick in pretty much any time you spike the CPU to 100 percent. - -None of the issues I experienced are what I would call deal breakers, except perhaps the battery, I really wish the battery life was closer to the Dell XPS 13, which pretty consistently lasted seven or eight hours in all my informal tests. - -# Software - -As it has for some time, System76 is currently shipping the Galago Pro with either Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or the more recent 17.04. As mentioned above, I would strongly suggest you go with the latter as the updated kernel has better support for the hardware in the Galago Pro, though System76 includes its own repositories with additional software designed to make everything work smoothly. - -Of course, as I noted when I reviewed Ubuntu 17.04, the Unity desktop that System76 is currently shipping is essentially abandonware. - -Earlier this year, much to the surprise of the Linux community, Ubuntu abruptly announced it would no longer be working on Unity and would instead adopt the GNOME desktop going forward. That was the status of Ubuntu when I received the Galago Pro. Not long after however System76 announced their own Linux distro, dubbed Pop!_ OS, hereafter just Pop OS._ - -But one thing, don't call it a distro. System76 would like you to call it an operating system. I'm not being entirely sarcastic here either, System76 has a good reason not to call it a distro -- trademark issues. And I don't think calling it an OS or distro is going to matter. The fact is Pop OS contains quite a bit of Ubuntu branding within it, something that may end up raising the hackles of Ubuntu's lawyers. Maybe the Linux Mint devs can give System76 some advice on getting the Ubuntu branding out. Or perhaps, as Chris Fisher of Linux Action News fame suggests, Pop OS can become an official Ubuntu flavor. - -Whatever it's future, Pop OS right now is still in the alpha stage. I went ahead and grabbed a copy and installed it on the Galago Pro to see what it was like though. At the moment Pop OS is more or less a custom GNOME theme, with some extentions that make GNOME quite a bit more user-friendly, but not a lot beyond that. Because it's more or less just a GNOME theme with some extensions pre-installed it's perfectly stable. It's Ubuntu with some some different paint. And it's nice enough paint, but not something most System76 customers would probably have any trouble doing on their own. - -When I first heard about Pop OS I thought the move made sense. System76 has always tied its brand very closely to Ubuntu and with the future of Ubuntu suddenly looking a bit uncertain it makes sense that System76 would want more control over their future. As it stands the shipping version of Unity that System76 will sell until Pop becomes the default will be "upgraded" to GNOME should users opt to upgrade to 17.10 when it comes out later this year. That's going to be a very confusing upgrade for anyone not expecting it. - -Having now played with Pop a bit I'm less sure it's the right move. Developing and maintaining a distro is no small undertaking and in it's current state there just isn't enough to differentiate it from Ubuntu or, for that matter, any other distro with a custom GNOME theme. Beyond that lies the real question -- who is System76's intended audience for Pop OS and what do they want in their desktop? - -System76's marketing materials says that they're "focused on the professionals and makers that use their computers to create", which is alarmingly vague since probably the number one issue that plagues distros is a lack of focus. Perhaps I'm being too hard on an alpha release software. And don't get me wrong, I'm not rooting against Pop OS. I hope that System76 is able to put something together that entices more people to try a Linux machine, but right now? Right now let's just say it's an alpha release. - -The good news for anyone who wants to run the distro of their choice on System76 hardware is that while there's no official support, you're pretty unlikely to need it. I didn't do a lot of distro testing with the Galago Pro, but I did install Arch so I could get some work done and had no problems with anything but the keyboard backlight, which to me is an unnecessary bit of battery drain anyway (which is to say I didn't even try to get it working, though I believe there is something in AUR that mirrors the PPA System76 uses for its stock Ubuntu). - -Beyond this machine though I have run Fedora, Mint, Xubuntu, OpenSUSE and Arch on three different System76 machines at this point and I have never once encountered a hardware problem, aside from the lack of HiDPI support in some desktops, which is hardly System76's fault (the company has even contributed considerable work back upstream to make HiDPI support better in Unity, an effort that now, alas, looks like wasted time). Suffice to say that if you want to run the distro of your choice you'll probably be fine. - -## The Galago Pro in the Real World - -The Galago Pro was my daily machine for about a month, in that time, while I had some issues as noted above (I don't like the trackpad or the keyboard) by and large it's the best stock Linux machine. The only place that the Dell XPS 13 blows it out of the water is in battery life. As someone who lives full time in an RV and relies on a very limited amount of solar power (300w) for all my energy needs that battery life is a deal breaker. That said, in nearly every other regard this is by far my favorite laptop and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it. - -There's something that comes up in the comments of nearly every review of System76 hardware, the fact that the company doesn't build it's own hardware, it orders everything from upstream hardware vendors, in the case of the Galago Pro that would be the Clevo N130BU (or N131BU). I've never quite understood what the issue is, but it certainly seems to rub some people the wrong way. Could you save a couple bucks by ordering the Clevo directly? Sure, but you'd have no support, no custom PPA to fix hardware issues and no community to get involved in. If you just want a dirt cheap Linux rig, try eBay. - -What System76 offers is great experience with a piece of hardware, maybe not the absolute cheapest hardware. - -However, that is going to change. - diff --git a/galago-pro-review.html b/galago-pro-review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..224194f --- /dev/null +++ b/galago-pro-review.html @@ -0,0 +1,43 @@ +

Wiping the default operating system from your laptop and plugging in a USB stick with your favorite distro's live CD has long been one of the great rites of passage of the Linux world. Some of us get a little, dare I say giddy, every time we wipe that other OS away and see that first flash of GRUB. Of course rites of passage are supposed to be one time events. Once you've wiped Windows or OS X a time or two most of no longer have that giddiness -- it becomes one more annoyance, a kind of tax on Linux users.

+

In recent years the PC industry has finally spawned a few manufacturers offering up machines with Linux pre-installed and at this point I have tested most of them. Dell's XPS and Precision lines both have Linux-friendly offerings and dedicated Linux manufacturers like System76 have long offered decent hardware with Linux pre-installed. In all my testing of various models from four different manufacturers I've yet to encounter a driver problem, which is the real benefit of a machine with Linux pre-installed. To be fair, I could say the same for the Lenovo x240 that serves as my daily driver.

+

Still, finding the perfect Linux laptop has always been something of a Goldilocks problem -- this one is too big, this one is too underpowered, this one has too little RAM, this one lacks a big SSD and so on. Generally speaking if you want power and storage you're going to end up with something too big to comfortable throw in a bag and carry all day -- the Dell Precision 7520 and the System76 Oryx Pro are good examples of this.

+

Alternately you could go for the more portable Dell XPS 13 or System76 Lemur, which both offer a more svelte, lightweight machine that's easier on your shoulders, but is generally lacking in RAM and drive space.

+

What Linux users like myself have long wanted is a laptop with roughly the form factor and weight of a Macbook pro, but with the option to get 32GB of RAM or three TB of storage. A laptop that is both reasonably lightweight and powerful.

+

And that my fellow Linux users, is exactly what System76 has managed to deliver with its new Galago Pro laptop.

+

It's not perfect, but this is a very clever, very well designed piece of hardware with some very impressive specs.

+

The model I tested featured the faster 7th Gen Intel i7-7500U (also available with an i5 for slightly less), 250 GB Samsung 960 EVO NVMe, 8GB RAM (Dual Channel DDR4 at 2133MHz), a 250GB Samsung 960 EVO NVMe SSD and a 13.3″ 3K HiDPI screen with an Intel HD Graphics 620 card. As tested the Galago Pro would set you back $1,328.

+

Hardware and Design.

+

The Galago Pro features an all-aluminium body that looks and feels a bit like a Macbook Pro, but without the wrist-cutting sharp edges of the Macbook Pro. It's a slick piece of hardware and it's light, weighing in at a mere 2.87lbs. In fact it's difficult to convey just how amazingly light this thing is. Technically it's heavier than the XPS 13 actually, but it's also considerably larger which makes it seem lighter. My Lenovo x240 isn't exactly a beast, but after carting around the Galago Pro for a few weeks the Lenovo started to seem a bit more brick-like.

+

Around the outside of the Galago Pro you'll find the usual array of ports, including one USB-C with Thunderbolt, two USB 3.1 ports, an SD Card Reader, and, for additional displays there's an HDMI as well as MiniDP/USB-C. System76 also bucks a current trend by including an actual Ethernet port, which also features a little door that holds the cable in place. If you're a regular user of hotel wifi you know how valuable an Ethernet jack can be. There's also a slot for a SIM card.

+

The keyboard is reminiscent of the Dell XPS 13 -- black chiclet keys surrounded by smooth a aluminum frame. The travel is okay, on par with the rest of the laptops out there that sport similar keyboards (like the Macbook Pro). I happen to prefer the spongier, closer-to-clakkity keyboards Lenovo uses, but judging by the market I am not in the majority there.

+

One place the Galago Pro differs significantly from both the XPS 13 line and Macbook Pros is the bezel that surrounds the Galago Pro's screen -- it's big. The display itself is more or less the same though, the 13.3-inch screen packs in 3200x1800 pixels. As with the Dell there are some Linux apps where the HiDPI screen is more of a hindrance than a help (I'm looking at you GiMP). Color wise the screen is quite nice and renders true blacks pretty well. It's also nicely backlit and it works out of the box in Ubuntu

+

The i7 That ships with the Galago Pro is the latest of the Kaby Lake versions and for that reason I strongly recommend ordering your Galago Pro with Ubuntu 17.04, which features a newer Linux kernel with much better support for Kaby Lake.

+

Another point that sometimes gets glossed over in reviews is that the Galago Pro is very user serviceable. I couldn't find any disassembly guides on System76's website, but a quick YouTube search will get you a couple videos. It's pretty simple, just lift up the keyboard, detach the cable, unscrew three screws and then flip it over and unscrew everything from the bottom and you'll have access to the insides. You can swap out both drives and the RAM if you decided to upgrade down the road.

+

So far so good, but like I said the Galago Pro is not perfect and its biggest failing is battery life. In normal use (wifi and Bluetooth on, screen at 80 percent brightness and using Vim for writing, Firefox for browsing the web and mpd for music I only got about 3.5 hours out of the battery. That was using the stock Ubuntu as shipped. When I wiped that, installed Arch Linux, just used Openbox with tint2 and installed TLP I managed to get one more hour out if it. Still not great, but better. Suffice to say that this is not an all day without a cord sort of laptop. On the plus side the charger and cord are quite small and light.

+

Another thing I disliked about the Galago Pro was the trackpad. It wasn't the worst I've ever used (pick any Chromebook to experience the worst trackpad ever), but I was plagued by jittery cursor movements and occasional moments where it would be totally unresponsive. Another downside -- the fan is pretty loud and it will kick in pretty much any time you spike the CPU to 100 percent.

+

None of the issues I experienced are what I would call deal breakers, except perhaps the battery, I really wish the battery life was closer to the Dell XPS 13, which pretty consistently lasted seven or eight hours in all my informal tests.

+

Software

+

As it has for some time, System76 is currently shipping the Galago Pro with either Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or the more recent 17.04. As mentioned above, I would strongly suggest you go with the latter as the updated kernel has better support for the hardware in the Galago Pro, though System76 includes its own repositories with additional software designed to make everything work smoothly.

+

Of course, as I noted when I reviewed Ubuntu 17.04, the Unity desktop that System76 is currently shipping is essentially abandonware.

+

Earlier this year, much to the surprise of the Linux community, Ubuntu abruptly announced it would no longer be working on Unity and would instead adopt the GNOME desktop going forward. That was the status of Ubuntu when I received the Galago Pro. Not long after however System76 announced their own Linux distro, dubbed Pop!_ OS, hereafter just Pop OS._

+

But one thing, don't call it a distro. System76 would like you to call it an operating system. I'm not being entirely sarcastic here either, System76 has a good reason not to call it a distro -- trademark issues. And I don't think calling it an OS or distro is going to matter. The fact is Pop OS contains quite a bit of Ubuntu branding within it, something that may end up raising the hackles of Ubuntu's lawyers. Maybe the Linux Mint devs can give System76 some advice on getting the Ubuntu branding out. Or perhaps, as Chris Fisher of Linux Action News fame suggests, Pop OS can become an official Ubuntu flavor.

+

Whatever its future, Pop OS right now is still in the alpha stage. I went ahead and grabbed a copy and installed it on the Galago Pro to see what it was like though. At the moment Pop OS is more or less a custom GNOME theme, with some extensions that make GNOME quite a bit more user-friendly, but not a lot beyond that. Because it's more or less just a GNOME theme with some extensions pre-installed it's perfectly stable. It's Ubuntu with some some different paint. And it's nice enough paint, but not something most System76 customers would probably have any trouble doing on their own.

+

When I first heard about Pop OS I thought the move made sense. System76 has always tied its brand very closely to Ubuntu and with the future of Ubuntu suddenly looking a bit uncertain it makes sense that System76 would want more control over their future. As it stands the shipping version of Unity that System76 will sell until Pop becomes the default will be "upgraded" to GNOME should users opt to upgrade to 17.10 when it comes out later this year. That's going to be a very confusing upgrade for anyone not expecting it.

+

Having now played with Pop a bit I'm less sure it's the right move. Developing and maintaining a distro is no small undertaking and in its current state there just isn't enough to differentiate it from Ubuntu or, for that matter, any other distro with a custom GNOME theme. Beyond that lies the real question -- who is System76's intended audience for Pop OS and what do they want in their desktop?

+

System76's marketing materials says that they're "focused on the professionals and makers that use their computers to create", which is alarmingly vague since probably the number one issue that plagues distros is a lack of focus. Perhaps I'm being too hard on an alpha release software. And don't get me wrong, I'm not rooting against Pop OS. I hope that System76 is able to put something together that entices more people to try a Linux machine, but right now? Right now let's just say it's an alpha release.

+

The good news for anyone who wants to run the distro of their choice on System76 hardware is that while there's no official support, you're pretty unlikely to need it. I didn't do a lot of distro testing with the Galago Pro, but I did install Arch so I could get some work done and had no problems with anything but the keyboard backlight, which to me is an unnecessary bit of battery drain anyway (which is to say I didn't even try to get it working, though I believe there is something in the AUR that mirrors the PPA System76 uses for its stock Ubuntu).

+

Beyond this machine though I have run Fedora, Mint, Xubuntu, OpenSUSE and Arch on three different System76 machines at this point and I have never once encountered a hardware problem, aside from the lack of HiDPI support in some desktops, which is hardly System76's fault (the company has even contributed considerable work back upstream to make HiDPI support better in Unity, an effort that now, alas, looks like wasted time). Suffice to say that if you want to run the distro of your choice you'll probably be fine.

+

The Future of System76 and the Galago Pro

+

The Galago Pro was my daily machine for about a month, in that time, while I had some issues as noted above (I don't like the trackpad or the keyboard) by and large it's the best stock Linux machine. The only place that the Dell XPS 13 blows it out of the water is in battery life. As someone who lives full time in an RV and relies on a very limited amount of solar power (300w) for all my energy needs that battery life is a deal breaker. That said, in nearly every other regard this is by far my favorite laptop and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.

+

There's something that comes up in the comments of nearly every review of System76 hardware, the fact that the company doesn't build its own hardware, it orders everything from upstream hardware vendors, in the case of the Galago Pro that would be the Clevo N130BU (or N131BU). I've never quite understood what the issue is, but it certainly seems to rub some people the wrong way. Could you save a couple bucks by ordering the Clevo directly? Sure, but you'd have no support, no custom PPA to fix hardware issues and no community to get involved in. If you just want a dirt cheap Linux rig, try eBay.

+

What System76 offers is great Linux experience with a piece of hardware, maybe not the absolute cheapest hardware.

+

However, that is going to change. In addition to launching its own don't-call-it-a-distro OS, the company has announced that will soon begin what it calls "phase three" -- moving its product design and manufacturing in-house where it hopes to "build the Model S of computers". It's a bold move, starting up hardware manufacturing and an operating system at the same time, one that might well lead to over extending itself, after all, even Canonical has backed away from making its own desktop OS.

+

It's a massive dual undertaking that may well leave System76 looking fondly back at its self proclaimed "phase one", which has as its first line item the considerably less stressful: "drink beer and talk about open source." Still, if System76 manages to pull off building its own hardware line the Linux world stands to reap some potentially awesome benefits. In the mean time if you're looking for a lean, mean, if not all-day machine, the Galago Pro makes an excellent choice.

+

The Good

+
Trouble-free Linux on good, lightweight hardware
+Excellent screen with great resolution
+Plenty of RAM to handle whatever you throw at it
+

The Bad

+
Screen resolution is sometimes a problem with certain applications
+

The Ugly

+
battery life could be better, much better.
diff --git a/published/dell7520.txt b/published/dell7520.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..55d1a18 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/dell7520.txt @@ -0,0 +1,86 @@ +Dell's Project Sputnik, which is the company's effort to produce "developer" suited laptops with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed, recently expanded its offerings with quite a few revamped laptops in the company's Precision line. + +Project Sputnik has done an admirable job of bringing a "just works" Linux experience to Dell Ultrabooks like the XPS 13 Developer Edition, which I've tested three times now. While the XPS 13 is a great machine that I would not hesitate to recommend for most Linux users, it does have its shortcomings. The biggest problem in my view has long been the limited amount of RAM -- the XPS 13 tops out at 16GB. While that's enough for most users, there are those -- software developers compiling large projects, video editors, even photographers -- who would benefit from more RAM. + +Normally in the Dell line to get more RAM you'd pick up a one of the various Precision laptops, which lack the svelteness of the XPS series, but can pack in more RAM and larger hard drives. Unfortunately the availability of the Ubuntu-based Precision machines has been somewhat spotty in the past. With this latest refresh though that's no longer the case, you can get [Ubuntu-based Precision laptops in a variety of configurations from the Dell site](http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop?c=us&l=en&s=biz). + +Dell isn't the only manufacturer producing great Linux machines. And in fact the [Oryx Pro](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/system76-oryx-pro-review-linux-in-a-laptop-has-never-been-better/) from System 76 is another great machine, and my previous recommendation for anyone who needed more RAM and didn't mind the additional size and weight. + +Naturally Linux will probably work just fine on plenty of hardware not specifically tailored to running Linux, but if you want a "just works" experience I'd suggest staying away from bleeding edge hardware, which sometimes lacks drivers (or stick with a bleeding edge distro like Arch). That's where efforts like Dell's Project Sputnik come in handy, the hardware is already vetted, the drivers pre-installed and configured for a great out of the box experience. + +And now, with the revamped Sputnik lineup you can get your just works Linux rig and all the power and RAM of a bigger laptop in the form of the Dell Precision 7520. + +## Hardware + +The machine Dell sent me for testing was a Dell 7520 Developer Edition with an Intel Xeon E3-1505M v6 (Quad Core Xeon 3.00GHz, 4.00GHz Turbo, 8MB 45W, w/Intel HD Graphics 630), 32 GB RAM, 512 GB of SSD space, an NVIDIA Quadro M2200 w/4GB GDDR5 graphics card, and a brilliant 15.6" UHD IGZO (3840x2160) LED-backlit non-touch screen. + +The Xeon is the top of the line chip for Precision 7520s, though you can get a Radeon Pro graphics card, up to 64GB of memory, and up to 3TB of hard drive space. The model I tested maxed out the SSD (512GB), but you can ditch the SSD in favor of a 1TB 7200rpm spinning drive and add a second spinning drive up to 2TB in size. Other customization options include a different finger print reader, and an option to have a PCIe drive as the second drive. + +The 7520 boasts a full size keyboard complete with number pad, though the arrow keys, page up/down, and home/end keys are all half size keys, which some may find annoying. There's also "nub" cursor controller in the middle of the keyboard, which would be great were it not so stiff. The really brilliant piece of engineering in the keyboard though is the mouse buttons -- separate left, middle and right -- just below the space bar, which makes it possible to, for example, right click with your thumb without ever taking your fingers off the home row or otherwise interrupting your typing. + +I like this bit so much I've had some trouble going back to my Lenovo, I still routinely tap my right thumb just below the space bar only to find there's nothing there. That said, I can see where some people might not like this feature since, especially at first, there's a tendency to accidentally hit the mouse buttons when you meant to hit the space bar. In my case it only took about half a hour of typing for that to go away, but it might be worth heading to a brick and mortar store to try out the keyboard before you rush off to order one. + +The keys themselves are your basic chiclet-style keys, though as is the case with other Dell laptops I've tested, they manage to have a rather solid, satisfying feeling with a good bit of give to them. If, like me, you tend to pound on your keys like you're still using a Model M, Dell offers one of the better keyboard experiences in a laptop today. + +The trackpad is less remarkable, though it's plenty responsive and smooth enough with separate buttons just below it. With Ubuntu's stock trackpad drivers you can configure the trackpad to respond to taps if you don't like the separate buttons, but there is no Apple-style push anywhere on the trackpad to left-click. + +For ports the Precision 7520 offers 4 USB 3.0 ports with PowerShare, three on the left side, one on the right. Also on the left is a Thunderbolt 3 type C port, HDMI, and Mini display port connector. On the right, along with the three USB ports, there's a memory card reader, headphone jack and security lock. The back of the Precision 7520 sports a RJ45 port and the power adapter port. There's also a fingerprint reader and an optional smart card slot. + +The case of the Precision 7520 is a somewhat soft dark finish. It looks nice, but it does show fingerprints quite a bit. The body is built around a very sturdy metal chassis that doesn't flex much, even when you carry it open with one hand, which you shouldn't do because this thing is pretty heavy. It's not off the charts but at around six and half pounds (exact weight varies according to customizations) it's definitely a two hander, at least when it's open. It's worth noting though that the hinge is quite smooth and opening it up with one hand isn't difficult. + +The Precision 7520 is just under 15in wide, 10.38 inches deep and a little over an inch thick, tapering from the back to front. In other words it's neither a massive beast, nor the most svelte thing on the market. Personally, the extra bulk is nothing compared to the power gained by having the bulk. + +The Xeon processor in the machine I tested handled everything I ever threw at it without breaking a sweat. I was able to edit through, color, and render a backlog of video editing that I had been dreading trying to do on my i5 8GB Lenovo (yes I'm one of those weirdos that edits video using FOSS software on Linux). + +What would have been hours of rendering time on the Lenovo took, by comparison, hardly any time at all on the Dell. I crunched through several hours worth of footage, compiled and rendered out my edits and the Dell hardly even spun up its fans. A note on those fans though: they didn't run very often in normal use, but when I pushed it they did kick in and they're not the quietest things around. They did, however, do an excellent job of keeping things cool even when I was rendering video while sitting in the afternoon sun while camping in Louisiana swamps in June. I should note here that while the model I tested had 32GB of RAM, you can, for a price, push that up to 64GB of RAM. + +The last hardware bit of note is the screen, which offers 3840x2160 pixel resolution in a 15.6 inch package. The screen itself looks amazing and I found the color rendering to be excellent, especially with regard to nice, deep blacks. Unfortunately some Linux apps -- GIMP I'm looking at you -- have really poor HiDPI support. The HiDPI support is getting better, certainly Unity itself is almost flawless, as is GNOME, which I also tested, more on that in a minute, but there are enough apps that have tiny, illegible UIs on a HiDPI screen that it's worth double checking to make sure all your favorites work before you spend the money on the high end screen. The Precision 7520 can also be configured to use 1920x1080 IPS screen for those that don't want to mess with the HiDPI version. + +## Software + +As with the rest of Dell's Sputnik offerings the Precision 7520 Developer Edition ships with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. That'll be the base of Dell's machines for the next few years at a minimum despite the fact that, in the midst of my testing, Ubuntu announced it would no longer develop the Unity interface that has been its default desktop since 2010. More on the demise of Unity in a minute, but for now it's worth pointing out that the combination of screen size and hardware specs of the Precision 7520 make for the best Unity machine I've ever used, period. + +Ironically, just when I was thinking, hey, Unity isn't so bad on a nice big screen with plenty of RAM to spare, Canonical announced it was stopping the development of Unity and would adopt a mostly stock GNOME interface for future releases. + +Since Dell ships with LTS releases, the earliest you'll likely see GNOME on a Dell machine is 18.04, which will arrive in April 2018 and, given adoption time in the past, won't likely ship with Dell hardware until 2019. That might be slightly disappointing to those who want bleeding edge software, but it's the main reason Dell machines don't have hardware issues. It takes time to test and fix bugs. + +Of course there's nothing stopping you from updating your system yourself, or installing any other distro you might like. I stuck with Ubuntu on this machine though in the past I have run Fedora, Arch and Mint on Dell machines without encountering any problems (quite a few Fedora developers seem to use XPS 13s so fixes for Dell specific issues seem to get pushed out very quickly in Fedora). This time around I wanted to spend some time with Ubuntu GNOME on high end hardware, since that will, like it or not, be the future of the Ubuntu Desktop. + +That's not to say that Unity is abandonware. It will live on in the Universe repos for anyone who'd like to continue using it and it's certainly alive and well in Dell machines. If you're fond of the Unity interface there's no need to panic just yet, you'll be able to continue using it for quite a while. There have already been stirrings of a community around it that would like to continue development. Even if there are just a couple of people fixing bugs and keeping the lights on you should be able to get a good five more years out of it (Canonical is committed to maintaining for the five year release cycle of 16.04, which lasts until April of 2021). + +Jared Domínguez, Software Principal Engineer at Dell, says "Dell has been working with Canonical on Unity transition plans." For those buying a 7520 (or other Dell with Ubuntu install) Dominquez says, "we understand the need to keep a consistent experience, especially considering the large corporate Ubuntu desktop deployments that depend on Dell". He goes on to add that, once GNOME starts shipping by default on Ubuntu, "I personally anticipate that everyone will benefit from the combined GNOME effort of Canonical and Red Hat on Ubuntu and RHEL, both of which we ship." + +I went ahead and tested Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 quite extensively and didn't run into any problems at all, hardware or otherwise. In fact the near stock GNOME that ships with Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 looks really nice on the HiDPI screen. There's even some nice tools starting to emerge that add some of the best features of Unity to GNOME. For example, [this GNOME extension](https://github.com/ElectricPrism/gnome-hud-menu) takes the idea of Unity's HUD menu (a search interface for application menu items) and uses the very fast dmenu to get the same functionality in GNOME. As an added bonus, dmenu is even faster and more responsive than Unity's HUD, albeit not quite as pretty to look at. I should also note that it doesn't work with Firefox or Chromium. + +There are also quite a few GNOME themes out there, which, in conjunction with GNOME Shell extensions, can do an admirable job of impersonating the Unity desktop in both function and form. It's worth noting too that Ubuntu hasn't formally released a GNOME version just yet, it may well ship with some customizations to make the transition from Unity to GNOME a little easier on users. + +Whether you opt to stick with Ubuntu 16.04 as it ships with the Precision 7520, upgrade to 17.04. switch to Ubuntu GNOME, or use an entirely different distro, you're unlikely to encounter any issues with the hardware. That's part of what you're paying for when you get the Precision 7520 and yes, there are some cheaper options out there, but few, if any, will work as flawlessly as the Dell. + +Perhaps the best comparison machine to the Precision 7520 is System76's Oryx Pro, which I reviewed last year. The Oryx Pro has since been updated and you can configure it to more or less match the Dell Precision 7520. The Dell has the Oryx Pro beat on size and weight, though not by much. On the other hand the Oryx Pro can (for an additional price) pack in up to 6TB of drive space. Both are great machines, which is better suited to you is really something too personal to generalize into a recommendation. Based on my experience you won't be disappointed by either. + +## Overall Impressions + +I enjoyed my time with the Dell Precision 7520 and would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone that needs the power. That said, if your primary use case is browsing the web, chat/Skype, light photo editing, etc, then this thing is way overkill. If you don't need the power it's hard to justify the additional size and weight over the XPS developer edition line. On the other hand, if the XPS machines have always left you feeling underpowered, the Precision 7520 is for you. + +And now it's time for my biggest gripe with this machine: The battery life sucks. As Confucious once said, with great power comes crappy battery life. That's certainly the case with the 7520, which manages to eke out about fours hours doing light duty web browsing and the like, but quickly drops off to less than two if you start pushing it. + +Given the size and weight, along with the battery life, suffice to say that the happiest Dell Precision 7520 user will be the one that primarily has it sitting on a desk at home or work and only occasionally ventures out to tax the battery. The more you leave this on the desk -- chained to a couple 4K displays via Dell's Thunderbolt docking station would be nice -- the more your back will thank you anyway. + + + +The Good + + Trouble-free Linux on good hardware + Excellent screen with great resolution + Plenty of RAM to handle whatever you throw at it + Price is competitive for the hardware you get + +The Bad + + Screen resolution of HiDPI models can cause problems with some apps + It's not the lightest thing around + Charger is also quite large + +The Ugly + + It's not Dell's fault, but if you stick with Ubuntu, eventually you're going to wake up one day to GNOME rather than Unity. diff --git a/published/dell7520review.html b/published/dell7520review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3efd7ba --- /dev/null +++ b/published/dell7520review.html @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +

Dell's Project Sputnik, which is the company's effort to produce "developer" suited laptops with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed, recently expanded its offerings with quite a few revamped laptops in the company's Precision line.

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Project Sputnik has done an admirable job of bringing a "just works" Linux experience to Dell Ultrabooks like the XPS 13 Developer Edition, which I've tested three times now. While the XPS 13 is a great machine that I would not hesitate to recommend for most Linux users, it does have its shortcomings. The biggest problem in my view has long been the limited amount of RAM -- the XPS 13 tops out at 16GB. While that's enough for most users, there are those -- software developers compiling large projects, video editors, even photographers -- who would benefit from more RAM.

+

Normally in the Dell line to get more RAM you'd pick up a one of the various Precision laptops, which lack the svelteness of the XPS series, but can pack in more RAM and larger hard drives. Unfortunately the availability of the Ubuntu-based Precision machines has been somewhat spotty in the past. With this latest refresh though that's no longer the case, you can get Ubuntu-based Precision laptops in a variety of configurations from the Dell site.

+

Dell isn't the only manufacturer producing great Linux machines. And in fact the Oryx Pro from System 76 is another great machine, and my previous recommendation for anyone who needed more RAM and didn't mind the additional size and weight.

+

Naturally Linux will probably work just fine on plenty of hardware not specifically tailored to running Linux, but if you want a "just works" experience I'd suggest staying away from bleeding edge hardware, which sometimes lacks drivers (or stick with a bleeding edge distro like Arch). That's where efforts like Dell's Project Sputnik come in handy, the hardware is already vetted, the drivers pre-installed and configured for a great out of the box experience.

+

And now, with the revamped Sputnik lineup you can get your just works Linux rig and all the power and RAM of a bigger laptop in the form of the Dell Precision 7520.

+

Hardware

+

The machine Dell sent me for testing was a Dell 7520 Developer Edition with an Intel Xeon E3-1505M v6 (Quad Core Xeon 3.00GHz, 4.00GHz Turbo, 8MB 45W, w/Intel HD Graphics 630), 32 GB RAM, 512 GB of SSD space, an NVIDIA Quadro M2200 w/4GB GDDR5 graphics card, and a brilliant 15.6" UHD IGZO (3840x2160) LED-backlit non-touch screen.

+

The Xeon is the top of the line chip for Precision 7520s, though you can get a Radeon Pro graphics card, up to 64GB of memory, and up to 3TB of hard drive space. The model I tested maxed out the SSD (512GB), but you can ditch the SSD in favor of a 1TB 7200rpm spinning drive and add a second spinning drive up to 2TB in size. Other customization options include a different finger print reader, and an option to have a PCIe drive as the second drive.

+

The 7520 boasts a full size keyboard complete with number pad, though the arrow keys, page up/down, and home/end keys are all half size keys, which some may find annoying. There's also "nub" cursor controller in the middle of the keyboard, which would be great were it not so stiff. The really brilliant piece of engineering in the keyboard though is the mouse buttons -- separate left, middle and right -- just below the space bar, which makes it possible to, for example, right click with your thumb without ever taking your fingers off the home row or otherwise interrupting your typing.

+

I like this bit so much I've had some trouble going back to my Lenovo, I still routinely tap my right thumb just below the space bar only to find there's nothing there. That said, I can see where some people might not like this feature since, especially at first, there's a tendency to accidentally hit the mouse buttons when you meant to hit the space bar. In my case it only took about half a hour of typing for that to go away, but it might be worth heading to a brick and mortar store to try out the keyboard before you rush off to order one.

+

The keys themselves are your basic chiclet-style keys, though as is the case with other Dell laptops I've tested, they manage to have a rather solid, satisfying feeling with a good bit of give to them. If, like me, you tend to pound on your keys like you're still using a Model M, Dell offers one of the better keyboard experiences in a laptop today.

+

The trackpad is less remarkable, though it's plenty responsive and smooth enough with separate buttons just below it. With Ubuntu's stock trackpad drivers you can configure the trackpad to respond to taps if you don't like the separate buttons, but there is no Apple-style push anywhere on the trackpad to left-click.

+

For ports the Precision 7520 offers 4 USB 3.0 ports with PowerShare, three on the left side, one on the right. Also on the left is a Thunderbolt 3 type C port, HDMI, and Mini display port connector. On the right, along with the three USB ports, there's a memory card reader, headphone jack and security lock. The back of the Precision 7520 sports a RJ45 port and the power adapter port. There's also a fingerprint reader and an optional smart card slot.

+

The case of the Precision 7520 is a somewhat soft dark finish. It looks nice, but it does show fingerprints quite a bit. The body is built around a very sturdy metal chassis that doesn't flex much, even when you carry it open with one hand, which you shouldn't do because this thing is pretty heavy. It's not off the charts but at around six and half pounds (exact weight varies according to customizations) it's definitely a two hander, at least when it's open. It's worth noting though that the hinge is quite smooth and opening it up with one hand isn't difficult.

+

The Precision 7520 is just under 15in wide, 10.38 inches deep and a little over an inch thick, tapering from the back to front. In other words it's neither a massive beast, nor the most svelte thing on the market. Personally, the extra bulk is nothing compared to the power gained by having the bulk.

+

The Xeon processor in the machine I tested handled everything I ever threw at it without breaking a sweat. I was able to edit through, color, and render a backlog of video editing that I had been dreading trying to do on my i5 8GB Lenovo (yes I'm one of those weirdos that edits video using FOSS software on Linux).

+

What would have been hours of rendering time on the Lenovo took, by comparison, hardly any time at all on the Dell. I crunched through several hours worth of footage, compiled and rendered out my edits and the Dell hardly even spun up its fans. A note on those fans though: they didn't run very often in normal use, but when I pushed it they did kick in and they're not the quietest things around. They did, however, do an excellent job of keeping things cool even when I was rendering video while sitting in the afternoon sun while camping in Louisiana swamps in June. I should note here that while the model I tested had 32GB of RAM, you can, for a price, push that up to 64GB of RAM.

+

The last hardware bit of note is the screen, which offers 3840x2160 pixel resolution in a 15.6 inch package. The screen itself looks amazing and I found the color rendering to be excellent, especially with regard to nice, deep blacks. Unfortunately some Linux apps -- GIMP I'm looking at you -- have really poor HiDPI support. The HiDPI support is getting better, certainly Unity itself is almost flawless, as is GNOME, which I also tested, more on that in a minute, but there are enough apps that have tiny, illegible UIs on a HiDPI screen that it's worth double checking to make sure all your favorites work before you spend the money on the high end screen. The Precision 7520 can also be configured to use 1920x1080 IPS screen for those that don't want to mess with the HiDPI version.

+

Software

+

As with the rest of Dell's Sputnik offerings the Precision 7520 Developer Edition ships with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. That'll be the base of Dell's machines for the next few years at a minimum despite the fact that, in the midst of my testing, Ubuntu announced it would no longer develop the Unity interface that has been its default desktop since 2010. More on the demise of Unity in a minute, but for now it's worth pointing out that the combination of screen size and hardware specs of the Precision 7520 make for the best Unity machine I've ever used, period.

+

Ironically, just when I was thinking, hey, Unity isn't so bad on a nice big screen with plenty of RAM to spare, Canonical announced it was stopping the development of Unity and would adopt a mostly stock GNOME interface for future releases.

+

Since Dell ships with LTS releases, the earliest you'll likely see GNOME on a Dell machine is 18.04, which will arrive in April 2018 and, given adoption time in the past, won't likely ship with Dell hardware until 2019. That might be slightly disappointing to those who want bleeding edge software, but it's the main reason Dell machines don't have hardware issues. It takes time to test and fix bugs.

+

Of course there's nothing stopping you from updating your system yourself, or installing any other distro you might like. I stuck with Ubuntu on this machine though in the past I have run Fedora, Arch and Mint on Dell machines without encountering any problems (quite a few Fedora developers seem to use XPS 13s so fixes for Dell specific issues seem to get pushed out very quickly in Fedora). This time around I wanted to spend some time with Ubuntu GNOME on high end hardware, since that will, like it or not, be the future of the Ubuntu Desktop.

+

That's not to say that Unity is abandonware. It will live on in the Universe repos for anyone who'd like to continue using it and it's certainly alive and well in Dell machines. If you're fond of the Unity interface there's no need to panic just yet, you'll be able to continue using it for quite a while. There have already been stirrings of a community around it that would like to continue development. Even if there are just a couple of people fixing bugs and keeping the lights on you should be able to get a good five more years out of it (Canonical is committed to maintaining for the five year release cycle of 16.04, which lasts until April of 2021).

+

Jared Domínguez, Software Principal Engineer at Dell, says "Dell has been working with Canonical on Unity transition plans." For those buying a 7520 (or other Dell with Ubuntu install) Dominquez says, "we understand the need to keep a consistent experience, especially considering the large corporate Ubuntu desktop deployments that depend on Dell". He goes on to add that, once GNOME starts shipping by default on Ubuntu, "I personally anticipate that everyone will benefit from the combined GNOME effort of Canonical and Red Hat on Ubuntu and RHEL, both of which we ship."

+

I went ahead and tested Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 quite extensively and didn't run into any problems at all, hardware or otherwise. In fact the near stock GNOME that ships with Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 looks really nice on the HiDPI screen. There's even some nice tools starting to emerge that add some of the best features of Unity to GNOME. For example, this GNOME extension takes the idea of Unity's HUD menu (a search interface for application menu items) and uses the very fast dmenu to get the same functionality in GNOME. As an added bonus, dmenu is even faster and more responsive than Unity's HUD, albeit not quite as pretty to look at. I should also note that it doesn't work with Firefox or Chromium.

+

There are also quite a few GNOME themes out there, which, in conjunction with GNOME Shell extensions, can do an admirable job of impersonating the Unity desktop in both function and form. It's worth noting too that Ubuntu hasn't formally released a GNOME version just yet, it may well ship with some customizations to make the transition from Unity to GNOME a little easier on users.

+

Whether you opt to stick with Ubuntu 16.04 as it ships with the Precision 7520, upgrade to 17.04. switch to Ubuntu GNOME, or use an entirely different distro, you're unlikely to encounter any issues with the hardware. That's part of what you're paying for when you get the Precision 7520 and yes, there are some cheaper options out there, but few, if any, will work as flawlessly as the Dell.

+

Perhaps the best comparison machine to the Precision 7520 is System76's Oryx Pro, which I reviewed last year. The Oryx Pro has since been updated and you can configure it to more or less match the Dell Precision 7520. The Dell has the Oryx Pro beat on size and weight, though not by much. On the other hand the Oryx Pro can (for an additional price) pack in up to 6TB of drive space. Both are great machines, which is better suited to you is really something too personal to generalize into a recommendation. Based on my experience you won't be disappointed by either.

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Overall Impressions

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I enjoyed my time with the Dell Precision 7520 and would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone that needs the power. That said, if your primary use case is browsing the web, chat/Skype, light photo editing, etc, then this thing is way overkill. If you don't need the power it's hard to justify the additional size and weight over the XPS developer edition line. On the other hand, if the XPS machines have always left you feeling underpowered, the Precision 7520 is for you.

+

And now it's time for my biggest gripe with this machine: The battery life sucks. As Confucious once said, with great power comes crappy battery life. That's certainly the case with the 7520, which manages to eke out about fours hours doing light duty web browsing and the like, but quickly drops off to less than two if you start pushing it.

+

Given the size and weight, along with the battery life, suffice to say that the happiest Dell Precision 7520 user will be the one that primarily has it sitting on a desk at home or work and only occasionally ventures out to tax the battery. The more you leave this on the desk -- chained to a couple 4K displays via Dell's Thunderbolt docking station would be nice -- the more your back will thank you anyway.

+

The Good

+
Trouble-free Linux on good hardware
+Excellent screen with great resolution
+Plenty of RAM to handle whatever you throw at it
+Price is competitive for the hardware you get
+

The Bad

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Screen resolution of HiDPI models can cause problems with some apps
+It's not the lightest thing around
+Charger is also quite large
+

The Ugly

+
It's not Dell's fault, but if you stick with Ubuntu, eventually you're going to wake up one day to GNOME rather than Unity.
diff --git a/published/galago-pro-review.txt b/published/galago-pro-review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0d8bc6f --- /dev/null +++ b/published/galago-pro-review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,84 @@ +Wiping the default operating system from your laptop and plugging in a USB stick with your favorite distro's live CD has long been one of the great rites of passage of the Linux world. Some of us get a little, dare I say giddy, every time we wipe that other OS away and see that first flash of GRUB. Of course rites of passage are supposed to be one time events. Once you've wiped Windows or OS X a time or two most of no longer have that giddiness -- it becomes one more annoyance, a kind of tax on Linux users. + +In recent years the PC industry has finally spawned a few manufacturers offering up machines with Linux pre-installed and at this point I have tested most of them. Dell's XPS and Precision lines both have Linux-friendly offerings and dedicated Linux manufacturers like System76 have long offered decent hardware with Linux pre-installed. In all my testing of various models from four different manufacturers I've yet to encounter a driver problem, which is the real benefit of a machine with Linux pre-installed. To be fair, I could say the same for the Lenovo x240 that serves as my daily driver. + +Still, finding the perfect Linux laptop has always been something of a Goldilocks problem -- this one is too big, this one is too underpowered, this one has too little RAM, this one lacks a big SSD and so on. Generally speaking if you want power and storage you're going to end up with something too big to comfortable throw in a bag and carry all day -- the Dell Precision 7520 and the System76 Oryx Pro are good examples of this. + +Alternately you could go for the more portable Dell XPS 13 or System76 Lemur, which both offer a more svelte, lightweight machine that's easier on your shoulders, but is generally lacking in RAM and drive space. + +What Linux users like myself have long wanted is a laptop with roughly the form factor and weight of a Macbook pro, but with the option to get 32GB of RAM or three TB of storage. A laptop that is both reasonably lightweight and powerful. + +And that my fellow Linux users, is exactly what System76 has managed to deliver with its new Galago Pro laptop. + +It's not perfect, but this is a very clever, very well designed piece of hardware with some very impressive specs. + +The model I tested featured the faster 7th Gen Intel i7-7500U (also available with an i5 for slightly less), 250 GB Samsung 960 EVO NVMe, 8GB RAM (Dual Channel DDR4 at 2133MHz), a 250GB Samsung 960 EVO NVMe SSD and a 13.3″ 3K HiDPI screen with an Intel HD Graphics 620 card. As tested the Galago Pro would set you back $1,328. + +## Hardware and Design. + +The Galago Pro features an all-aluminium body that looks and feels a bit like a Macbook Pro, but without the wrist-cutting sharp edges of the Macbook Pro. It's a slick piece of hardware and it's light, weighing in at a mere 2.87lbs. In fact it's difficult to convey just how amazingly light this thing is. Technically it's heavier than the XPS 13 actually, but it's also considerably larger which makes it seem lighter. My Lenovo x240 isn't exactly a beast, but after carting around the Galago Pro for a few weeks the Lenovo started to seem a bit more brick-like. + +Around the outside of the Galago Pro you'll find the usual array of ports, including one USB-C with Thunderbolt, two USB 3.1 ports, an SD Card Reader, and, for additional displays there's an HDMI as well as MiniDP/USB-C. System76 also bucks a current trend by including an actual Ethernet port, which also features a little door that holds the cable in place. If you're a regular user of hotel wifi you know how valuable an Ethernet jack can be. There's also a slot for a SIM card. + +The keyboard is reminiscent of the Dell XPS 13 -- black chiclet keys surrounded by smooth a aluminum frame. The travel is okay, on par with the rest of the laptops out there that sport similar keyboards (like the Macbook Pro). I happen to prefer the spongier, closer-to-clakkity keyboards Lenovo uses, but judging by the market I am not in the majority there. + +One place the Galago Pro differs significantly from both the XPS 13 line and Macbook Pros is the bezel that surrounds the Galago Pro's screen -- it's big. The display itself is more or less the same though, the 13.3-inch screen packs in 3200x1800 pixels. As with the Dell there are some Linux apps where the HiDPI screen is more of a hindrance than a help (I'm looking at you GiMP). Color wise the screen is quite nice and renders true blacks pretty well. It's also nicely backlit and it works out of the box in Ubuntu + +The i7 That ships with the Galago Pro is the latest of the Kaby Lake versions and for that reason I strongly recommend ordering your Galago Pro with Ubuntu 17.04, which features a newer Linux kernel with much better support for Kaby Lake. + +Another point that sometimes gets glossed over in reviews is that the Galago Pro is very user serviceable. I couldn't find any disassembly guides on System76's website, but a quick YouTube search will get you a couple videos. It's pretty simple, just lift up the keyboard, detach the cable, unscrew three screws and then flip it over and unscrew everything from the bottom and you'll have access to the insides. You can swap out both drives and the RAM if you decided to upgrade down the road. + +So far so good, but like I said the Galago Pro is not perfect and its biggest failing is battery life. In normal use (wifi and Bluetooth on, screen at 80 percent brightness and using Vim for writing, Firefox for browsing the web and mpd for music I only got about 3.5 hours out of the battery. That was using the stock Ubuntu as shipped. When I wiped that, installed Arch Linux, just used Openbox with tint2 and installed TLP I managed to get one more hour out if it. Still not great, but better. Suffice to say that this is not an all day without a cord sort of laptop. On the plus side the charger and cord are quite small and light. + +Another thing I disliked about the Galago Pro was the trackpad. It wasn't the worst I've ever used (pick any Chromebook to experience the worst trackpad ever), but I was plagued by jittery cursor movements and occasional moments where it would be totally unresponsive. Another downside -- the fan is pretty loud and it will kick in pretty much any time you spike the CPU to 100 percent. + +None of the issues I experienced are what I would call deal breakers, except perhaps the battery, I really wish the battery life was closer to the Dell XPS 13, which pretty consistently lasted seven or eight hours in all my informal tests. + +## Software + +As it has for some time, System76 is currently shipping the Galago Pro with either Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or the more recent 17.04. As mentioned above, I would strongly suggest you go with the latter as the updated kernel has better support for the hardware in the Galago Pro, though System76 includes its own repositories with additional software designed to make everything work smoothly. + +Of course, as I noted when I reviewed Ubuntu 17.04, the Unity desktop that System76 is currently shipping is essentially abandonware. + +Earlier this year, much to the surprise of the Linux community, Ubuntu abruptly announced it would no longer be working on Unity and would instead adopt the GNOME desktop going forward. That was the status of Ubuntu when I received the Galago Pro. Not long after however System76 announced their own Linux distro, dubbed Pop!_ OS, hereafter just Pop OS._ + +But one thing, don't call it a distro. System76 would like you to call it an operating system. I'm not being entirely sarcastic here either, System76 has a good reason not to call it a distro -- trademark issues. And I don't think calling it an OS or distro is going to matter. The fact is Pop OS contains quite a bit of Ubuntu branding within it, something that may end up raising the hackles of Ubuntu's lawyers. Maybe the Linux Mint devs can give System76 some advice on getting the Ubuntu branding out. Or perhaps, as Chris Fisher of Linux Action News fame suggests, Pop OS can become an official Ubuntu flavor. + +Whatever its future, Pop OS right now is still in the alpha stage. I went ahead and grabbed a copy and installed it on the Galago Pro to see what it was like though. At the moment Pop OS is more or less a custom GNOME theme, with some extensions that make GNOME quite a bit more user-friendly, but not a lot beyond that. Because it's more or less just a GNOME theme with some extensions pre-installed it's perfectly stable. It's Ubuntu with some some different paint. And it's nice enough paint, but not something most System76 customers would probably have any trouble doing on their own. + +When I first heard about Pop OS I thought the move made sense. System76 has always tied its brand very closely to Ubuntu and with the future of Ubuntu suddenly looking a bit uncertain it makes sense that System76 would want more control over their future. As it stands the shipping version of Unity that System76 will sell until Pop becomes the default will be "upgraded" to GNOME should users opt to upgrade to 17.10 when it comes out later this year. That's going to be a very confusing upgrade for anyone not expecting it. + +Having now played with Pop a bit I'm less sure it's the right move. Developing and maintaining a distro is no small undertaking and in its current state there just isn't enough to differentiate it from Ubuntu or, for that matter, any other distro with a custom GNOME theme. Beyond that lies the real question -- who is System76's intended audience for Pop OS and what do they want in their desktop? + +System76's marketing materials says that they're "focused on the professionals and makers that use their computers to create", which is alarmingly vague since probably the number one issue that plagues distros is a lack of focus. Perhaps I'm being too hard on an alpha release software. And don't get me wrong, I'm not rooting against Pop OS. I hope that System76 is able to put something together that entices more people to try a Linux machine, but right now? Right now let's just say it's an alpha release. + +The good news for anyone who wants to run the distro of their choice on System76 hardware is that while there's no official support, you're pretty unlikely to need it. I didn't do a lot of distro testing with the Galago Pro, but I did install Arch so I could get some work done and had no problems with anything but the keyboard backlight, which to me is an unnecessary bit of battery drain anyway (which is to say I didn't even try to get it working, though I believe there is something in the AUR that mirrors the PPA System76 uses for its stock Ubuntu). + +Beyond this machine though I have run Fedora, Mint, Xubuntu, OpenSUSE and Arch on three different System76 machines at this point and I have never once encountered a hardware problem, aside from the lack of HiDPI support in some desktops, which is hardly System76's fault (the company has even contributed considerable work back upstream to make HiDPI support better in Unity, an effort that now, alas, looks like wasted time). Suffice to say that if you want to run the distro of your choice you'll probably be fine. + +## The Future of System76 and the Galago Pro + +The Galago Pro was my daily machine for about a month, in that time, while I had some issues as noted above (I don't like the trackpad or the keyboard) by and large it's the best stock Linux machine. The only place that the Dell XPS 13 blows it out of the water is in battery life. As someone who lives full time in an RV and relies on a very limited amount of solar power (300w) for all my energy needs that battery life is a deal breaker. That said, in nearly every other regard this is by far my favorite laptop and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it. + +There's something that comes up in the comments of nearly every review of System76 hardware, the fact that the company doesn't build its own hardware, it orders everything from upstream hardware vendors, in the case of the Galago Pro that would be the Clevo N130BU (or N131BU). I've never quite understood what the issue is, but it certainly seems to rub some people the wrong way. Could you save a couple bucks by ordering the Clevo directly? Sure, but you'd have no support, no custom PPA to fix hardware issues and no community to get involved in. If you just want a dirt cheap Linux rig, try eBay. + +What System76 offers is great Linux experience with a piece of hardware, maybe not the absolute cheapest hardware. + +However, that is going to change. In addition to launching its own don't-call-it-a-distro OS, the company has announced that will soon begin what it calls "phase three" -- moving its product design and manufacturing in-house where it hopes to "build the Model S of computers". It's a bold move, starting up hardware manufacturing and an operating system at the same time, one that might well lead to over extending itself, after all, even Canonical has backed away from making its own desktop OS. + +It's a massive dual undertaking that may well leave System76 looking fondly back at its self proclaimed "phase one", which has as its first line item the considerably less stressful: "drink beer and talk about open source." Still, if System76 manages to pull off building its own hardware line the Linux world stands to reap some potentially awesome benefits. In the mean time if you're looking for a lean, mean, if not all-day machine, the Galago Pro makes an excellent choice. + + +The Good + + Trouble-free Linux on good, lightweight hardware + Excellent screen with great resolution + Plenty of RAM to handle whatever you throw at it + +The Bad + + Screen resolution is sometimes a problem with certain applications + +The Ugly + + battery life could be better, much better. diff --git a/published/ubuntu1704review.html b/published/ubuntu1704review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b1411ab --- /dev/null +++ b/published/ubuntu1704review.html @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +

Canonical recently released Ubuntu 17.04, an update to its flagship Unity-based Linux desktop.

+

Ubuntu 17.04 offers a few new features, bug fixes and improvements over its predecessor, but it's also a significant release because it will likely be the last version of Unity that Canonical ships. Technically there is Ubuntu 17.10 coming later this year, but it seems unlikely the company is going to put much effort into developing a desktop it is abandoning.

+

Six years after its tumultuous switch from GNOME 2 to its homegrown Unity desktop, Canonical recently announced it was abandoning work on Unity and will switch the default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME with next year's 18.04 LTS release. The company is also abandoning the development of the Mir display server and its unified interface of Ubuntu for phones and tablets. The company's vision of "convergence", as Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth termed it, is dead.

+

Shuttleworth posted that news just a few days before Ubuntu 17.04 arrived, which took a considerable amount of wind out of Ubuntu 17.04's sails, though, to be fair, the last few Ubuntu desktop releases have not had much wind in their sails to start with. There have been a few feature updates, some work on bringing in more up-to-date GNOME and GTK elements, but by and large they've been maintenance releases.

+

In fact Ubuntu's twice yearly update schedule has lately felt more like a burden the company has to deal with while the real work of building Unity 8 happened in between. And Unity 8 did indeed look promising, unfortunately it's not something that mobile carriers and phone makers seemed to want. As Shuttleworth writes in his announcement, "what the Unity 8 team has delivered so far is beautiful, usable and solid, but I respect that markets, and community, ultimately decide which products grow and which disappear."

+

So Unity 8 is going the way of the Dodo which leaves the Unity-based default version of Ubuntu 17.04 as a kind of living fossil. The Ubuntu GNOME project will be the default release of Ubuntu this time next year.

+

That's not to say that 17.04 is abandonware. In fact there are improvements, even a couple new features. And it will live on in the Universe repos for anyone who'd like to continue using it. If you're fond of the Unity interface there's no need to panic just yet, you'll be able to continue using it for quite a while. There have already been stirrings of a community around it that would like to continue development. Even if there are just a couple of people fixing bugs and keeping the lights on you should be able to get a good five more years out of it (Canonical is committed to maintaining for the five year release cycle of 16.04, which lasts until April of 2021).

+

What makes Shuttleworth's announcement a little odd is that Unity 7 is a very mature and stable desktop. Why not stick with Unity 7? Why move to GNOME? The answer seems to lie in how Canonical is allocating resources. Canonical doesn't want to employ an army of programmers to keep Unity 7 secure and improving when the GNOME project is available for free with an army of programmers not paid by Canonical maintaining and improving it.

+

That means the future of Ubuntu then looks a lot like the future of, well, any other distro that uses GNOME by default. That's a little disappointing, especially if you, like me, happened to really want an Ubuntu phone. On the other hand I have fond memories of pre-Unity Ubuntu which of course also used a more or less stock version of GNOME.

+

It's also worth noting that there are several other 'buntu flavors out there for anyone who doesn't want to use GNOME. I'll take a look at two of them -- Ubuntu MATE and Xubuntu -- below, along with the future of Ubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, but first here's what's new in Ubuntu 17.04.

+

Ubuntu 17.04

+

There's more to a distro than its default desktop and Ubuntu 17.04 is no exception. There's quite a bit of new stuff in this release, but possibly the best news is that Ubuntu is now using Linux kernel 4.10. That means your Kaby Lake processors are fully supported (as are AMD Ryzen chips for those that love rooting for the underdog). There's also some support for NVIDIA's Tegra P1 and some improvements to the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) drivers.

+

Another big change that most people will never even notice is that Ubuntu 17.04 switched from a swap partition to a swap file. You could see some speed improvements from that in some situations -- and it makes your swap partition unnecessary, which saves a step in the installation process. The exception here is Btrfs, which does not support swap files. If you're using Btrfs you'll need to opt for manual partitioning and create a swap partition yourself.

+

Also worth mentioning is Ubuntu 17.04's support for the new "driverless" printers. These printers use the IPP Everywhere and Apple AirPrint protocols and connecting them to your Ubuntu desktop should be, in Canonical's words "as easy as connecting a USB stick" (I don't have a printer to test with).

+

This release also sees the usual slew of application updates for Ubuntu's stock apps. GNOME-based apps have mostly been updated to GNOME 3.24, though there are a few that linger at older versions (Terminal and Nautilus for example).

+

Updates to Unity 7 include... well, nothing really. Unity is dead, long live GNOME.

+ +[image="ubuntu1704-unity7.jpg" caption="The good old Unity desktop is no more."] + +

Ubuntu GNOME 17.04

+

Shortly after Shuttleworth announced Unity 8 and accompaniments were dead and Ubuntu was returning to a stock GNOME desktop, the Ubuntu GNOME team posted a note saying "that there will no longer be a separate GNOME flavor of Ubuntu". Instead the development teams from both Ubuntu GNOME and Ubuntu Desktop will be merging. The "flavor" itself will be merged into mainline Ubuntu and, starting with 17.10, if you update Ubuntu GNOME you'll actually be sideways updating to just Ubuntu.

+

Shuttleworth's announcement says that Ubuntu will be making minimal customizations to the GNOME interface and since the Ubuntu GNOME project currently makes very few customizations it seems reasonable to assume that today's Ubuntu GNOME is not too far off tomorrow's Ubuntu.

+ +[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-base.jpg" caption="The basic GNOME shell look in Ubuntu GNOME 17.04."] + +

Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 uses GNOME 3.24, having leapfrogged over 3.22 from 3.20. There's quite a bit of new stuff in this release, including a built-in new feature called Night Light which automatically changes your monitor color to reduce the blue light emitted by your screen at night. Night Light is GNOME's version of RedShift or f.lux, but, because it was developed by GNOME it actually works with Wayland, whereas the others do not. As someone who spends most of their time in front a screen at night this is reason enough alone for me to switch to GNOME. And I'm happy to report that it just works.

+

GNOME's Calendar app gets a much-requested Week view with this release, though it still lacks support for a broader range of calendars (if you use Google Calendar it works fine, everything else has caused me problems).

+

Like the Unity desktop the Ubuntu GNOME devs has stuck with older versions of some apps, including Terminal, Nautilus (both at GNOME 3.20 versions) and Evolution, which remains (for stability, say the release notes) at the GNOME 3.22 version.

+

One thing that's not going away with Unity 8 is Snap packages. A "snap" package is designed to work across distros and is already widely support (Canonical says 10 distros support Snaps as of this writing). Snaps offer sandboxing for improved security and quicker updates (since they come direct from the developer, rather than via the package manager). Because there can never be just one version of something in the Linux world there are also Flatpaks. Roughly the same as Snaps, though they differ considerably in implementation) Flatpaks are also cross distro and support for them in GNOME Software has improved quite a bit in this release and support is installed by default. So with Ubuntu GNOME you can easily install both Snaps and Flatpaks.

+ +[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-software.jpg" caption="The GNOME Software app should be reasonably familiar for Unity users."] + +

The Software app (still at GNOME 3.22) also now supports installing GNOME Shell extensions, which, if you're hoping to replicate the experience of Unity 7 in GNOME, you're going to need to learn to love.

+

Ubuntu GNOME does not ship with the full compliment of GNOME apps and I would expect Ubuntu to follow this since apps like Brasero, Evolution and Seahorse are of limited audience at this point. The only possible exception is Evolution since Thunderbird comes up short in some scenarios. All three apps are of course available for install via the Software app. Likewise there are a couple of new GNOME apps that aren't installed by default -- like the brand new GNOME Recipes app and GNOME Games -- but they are in the repos if you'd like to try them out (Recipes is still very rough around the edges).

+

GNOME for Unity Refugees

+

So you like Unity but you want to stick with what Canonical uses by default. That means you'll be switching to GNOME 3. Unity was based on and uses quite a few components straight out of GNOME so it's not like you're diving into a whole new world, but, that said, there are things you will miss, things you'll need to work around and several things you might like better.

+ +[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-unity.jpg" caption="GNOME shell looking a bit like Unity (achieved via this script on GitHub"] + +

Let's start with the last part. In my experience, on my testing hardware, which consists of a Lenovo x240 and a Dell Precision 7520, GNOME Shell is faster than Unity. Particularly for common tasks like calling up the search interface, but also in other areas like launching apps and dragging windows. Neither is what I would call slow, but with Unity I sometimes notice a half-second hesitation before and animation starts, which I never notice with GNOME.

+

This is highly subjective of course but I like GNOME's search interface and sidebar components better because they get out of the way and then come up when I want them. You can set the Unity sidebar to hide and show only when you want it, but it's still not as smooth as what GNOME offers. Again though, this is largely a matter of taste.

+

While speed may be the single most important element of a UI, there is plenty about GNOME that is going to disappoint Unity users. The biggest ripe I have is keyboard shortcuts. Unity had them in spades. For as graphical as Unity is/was, it was also very easy to drive without taking your hands off the keyboard. GNOME lacks that level of shortcuts. There may be some way of setting custom keyboard shortcuts in GNOME, but if I have to customize every keyboard shortcut then I might as well go with something far lighter weight and truly customizable like Openbox. What I liked about Unity wasn't even the shortcuts necessarily but the HUD that would find commands within menus simply by searching a few letters.

+

Fortunately for Unity refugees there's Plotinus, which more or less replicates the Unity HUD UI in GNOME. The problem is it's not simple to install and it's low level enough that there may be some serious potential problems and conflicts (to be fair, there have not been any so far in my testing). Once you get it installed though it's a great extension and useful enough that System76 plans to roll it into future builds of Ubuntu that ship with System76 machines. That solves one potential pain point for switching, but the other is more difficult -- Unity Scopes.

+

Unity Scopes were like little search engines for the Dash search feature. They got a lot of bad press, some of it from me, for including an Amazon search scope with affiliate links, but in spite of that gaff they were a fantastically useful feature. I have yet to find the equivalent for GNOME. GNOME ostensibly has the same feature, though in GNOME they're called Search Providers, the problem is that the UI is nowhere near as useful as Unity's UI. Unity allowed you to interact with items in Scopes without opening any apps (how much varied by Scope), in GNOME you generally just use them to find things and launch apps.

+

Those are probably the two things you'll miss the most moving from Unity to GNOME. And with a little bit of effort installing Plotinus and tracking down some GNOME Search Providers you can get about 90 percent of what you had in Unity back.

+

As for the things that kind of suck about GNOME that you might want to work around, my top pick would be the huge toolbars at the top of every window. I'm convinced that no GNOME dev has ever used GNOME on anything smaller than a 24in monitor (I'm also pretty sure they all look and talk just like Seinfeld's soup Nazi, no minimize for you!). If they had they'd realize what a space wasting horror GNOME toolbars are. But then I generally configure Openbox to have no toolbars and move windows with keyboard shortcuts so perhaps I'm just weird. Whatever the case, if you use a laptop with limited vertical space it's possible GNOME's toolbars will drive you crazy too.

+

[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-toolbar.jpg" caption="Of course what I want when I'm in "full screen" mode is a giant useless menu bar. There is an extension that will get rid of it in full screen mode, but this is the default."]

+

Then there's GNOME Files. There's a reason Ubuntu uses older, heavily patched versions of Files and I believe it's because Ubuntu wanted to ship a file browser that was actually useful. Currently Ubuntu GNOME also uses this patched version of Files so I'm hopeful that will continue going forward. Otherwise you might try Nemo or Thunar or some other file browser.

+

Oh and like every computer user on earth save those using stock GNOME you might like minimize and maximize buttons, Ubuntu GNOME (and one hope, Ubuntu 18.04) ships with GNOME tweak tool installed. Open it up, select the Window menu item and turn on min and max buttons. Ah, so much better.

+

Here's the bottom line Unity refugees: The transition to GNOME will have some bumps, you'll probably spend some quality to with Google and the Ask Ubuntu site, but in the end you'll probably be able to get GNOME to work in a way that doesn't drive you crazy. Heck, there are even GNOME themes that pretty closely match the Unity 7 interface. On the outside chance that you just don't mesh with GNOME though, there are alternatives in the Ubuntu stable that are worth a look.

+

Other 'buntus

+

There are quite a few "flavors" of Ubuntu, basically one for every common desktop out there. The two I've used the most are Xubuntu and Ubuntu MATE, which use the Xfce and MATE desktops respectively. They're both well worth a look, especially Ubuntu MATE, which for my money does MATE even better than Linux Mint.

+

Xubuntu offers one of the best looking default Xfce desktops around and if you want to go back to more traditional, task bar-based workflow it, along with MATE, are your best bets. One thing to note, while Xfce is a bit lighter than say GNOME, the Xubuntu implementation is not the lightest version around. It comes with a lot of bells and whistles, but at the cost of significantly more RAM use than a more minimalist version of Xfce like you'd get, for example, with Debian.

+

There's also a relative newcomer, Ubuntu Budgie, which is based on the Budgie desktop, the default desktop of the relatively new Solus distro. I haven't tested Ubuntu Budgie in anything other than a virtual machine, but it did just fine in Virutalbox and might be worth a look if you want something totally different.

+

My favorite 'buntu is actually not even an official "flavor", I prefer the minimal Ubuntu iso, which functions just like the Debian minimal CD (and is probably built from it). It's a bare system without even Xorg. From there I can install just what I need and nothing else. For me that means Openbox, dmenu and tint2 along with Xorg and my applications. If you want to go minimal it's worth experimenting with.

+

Conclusion

+

While it's a shame that Shuttleworth's vision of convergence, with a single device that behaves like a phone in your hand and desktop when hooked up to a monitor, is not going to see the light. I think it would have been fantastic, but it's not going to happen. Unity 8 is never going to happen. Mir is never going to happen. Ubuntu will likely be just fine even without a solid desktop of its own.

+

It's certainly possible that Ubuntu is going to go the way of Red Hat, catering to the needs of its large corporate customers rather than those of us who use the desktop, but so far I don't see evidence to support that prediction. Ubuntu has used stock GNOME in the past and will do so again in the future, beyond that it doesn't sound like a lot is going to change and that's good thing.

diff --git a/published/ubuntu1704review.txt b/published/ubuntu1704review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dcaf45e --- /dev/null +++ b/published/ubuntu1704review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,99 @@ +Canonical recently released Ubuntu 17.04, an update to its flagship Unity-based Linux desktop. + +Ubuntu 17.04 offers a few new features, bug fixes and improvements over its predecessor, but it's also a significant release because it will likely be the last version of Unity that Canonical ships. Technically there is Ubuntu 17.10 coming later this year, but it seems unlikely the company is going to put much effort into developing a desktop it is abandoning. + +Six years after its tumultuous switch from GNOME 2 to its homegrown Unity desktop, Canonical recently announced it was abandoning work on Unity and will switch the default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME with next year's 18.04 LTS release. The company is also abandoning the development of the Mir display server and its unified interface of Ubuntu for phones and tablets. The company's vision of "convergence", as Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth termed it, is dead. + +Shuttleworth posted that news just a few days before Ubuntu 17.04 arrived, which took a considerable amount of wind out of Ubuntu 17.04's sails, though, to be fair, the last few Ubuntu desktop releases have not had much wind in their sails to start with. There have been a few feature updates, some work on bringing in more up-to-date GNOME and GTK elements, but by and large they've been maintenance releases. + +In fact Ubuntu's twice yearly update schedule has lately felt more like a burden the company has to deal with while the real work of building Unity 8 happened in between. And Unity 8 did indeed look promising, unfortunately it's not something that mobile carriers and phone makers seemed to want. As Shuttleworth writes in his announcement, "what the Unity 8 team has delivered so far is beautiful, usable and solid, but I respect that markets, and community, ultimately decide which products grow and which disappear." + +So Unity 8 is going the way of the Dodo which leaves the Unity-based default version of Ubuntu 17.04 as a kind of living fossil. The Ubuntu GNOME project will be the default release of Ubuntu this time next year. + +That's not to say that 17.04 is abandonware. In fact there are improvements, even a couple new features. And it will live on in the Universe repos for anyone who'd like to continue using it. If you're fond of the Unity interface there's no need to panic just yet, you'll be able to continue using it for quite a while. There have already been stirrings of a community around it that would like to continue development. Even if there are just a couple of people fixing bugs and keeping the lights on you should be able to get a good five more years out of it (Canonical is committed to maintaining for the five year release cycle of 16.04, which lasts until April of 2021). + +What makes Shuttleworth's announcement a little odd is that Unity 7 is a very mature and stable desktop. Why not stick with Unity 7? Why move to GNOME? The answer seems to lie in how Canonical is allocating resources. Canonical doesn't want to employ an army of programmers to keep Unity 7 secure and improving when the GNOME project is available for free with an army of programmers not paid by Canonical maintaining and improving it. + +That means the future of Ubuntu then looks a lot like the future of, well, any other distro that uses GNOME by default. That's a little disappointing, especially if you, like me, happened to really want an Ubuntu phone. On the other hand I have fond memories of pre-Unity Ubuntu which of course also used a more or less stock version of GNOME. + +It's also worth noting that there are several other 'buntu flavors out there for anyone who doesn't want to use GNOME. I'll take a look at two of them -- Ubuntu MATE and Xubuntu -- below, along with the future of Ubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, but first here's what's new in Ubuntu 17.04. + +## Ubuntu 17.04 + +There's more to a distro than its default desktop and Ubuntu 17.04 is no exception. There's quite a bit of new stuff in this release, but possibly the best news is that Ubuntu is now using Linux kernel 4.10. That means your Kaby Lake processors are fully supported (as are AMD Ryzen chips for those that love rooting for the underdog). There's also some support for NVIDIA's Tegra P1 and some improvements to the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) drivers. + +Another big change that most people will never even notice is that Ubuntu 17.04 switched from a swap partition to a swap file. You could see some speed improvements from that in some situations -- and it makes your swap partition unnecessary, which saves a step in the installation process. The exception here is Btrfs, which does not support swap files. If you're using Btrfs you'll need to opt for manual partitioning and create a swap partition yourself. + +Also worth mentioning is Ubuntu 17.04's support for the new "driverless" printers. These printers use the [IPP Everywhere](http://www.pwg.org/dynamo/eveprinters.php) and Apple [AirPrint](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201311) protocols and connecting them to your Ubuntu desktop should be, in Canonical's words "as easy as connecting a USB stick" (I don't have a printer to test with). + +This release also sees the usual slew of application updates for Ubuntu's stock apps. GNOME-based apps have mostly been updated to GNOME 3.24, though there are a few that linger at older versions (Terminal and Nautilus for example). + +Updates to Unity 7 include... well, nothing really. Unity is dead, long live GNOME. + +[image="ubuntu1704-unity7.jpg" caption="The good old Unity desktop is no more."] + +## Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 + +Shortly after Shuttleworth announced Unity 8 and accompaniments were dead and Ubuntu was returning to a stock GNOME desktop, the Ubuntu GNOME team posted a note saying "that there will no longer be a separate GNOME flavor of Ubuntu". Instead the development teams from both Ubuntu GNOME and Ubuntu Desktop will be merging. The "flavor" itself will be merged into mainline Ubuntu and, starting with 17.10, if you update Ubuntu GNOME you'll actually be sideways updating to just Ubuntu. + +Shuttleworth's announcement says that Ubuntu will be making minimal customizations to the GNOME interface and since the Ubuntu GNOME project currently makes very few customizations it seems reasonable to assume that today's Ubuntu GNOME is not too far off tomorrow's Ubuntu. + +[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-base.jpg" caption="The basic GNOME shell look in Ubuntu GNOME 17.04."] + +Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 uses GNOME 3.24, having leapfrogged over 3.22 from 3.20. There's quite a bit of new stuff in this release, including a built-in new feature called Night Light which automatically changes your monitor color to reduce the blue light emitted by your screen at night. Night Light is GNOME's version of RedShift or f.lux, but, because it was developed by GNOME it actually works with Wayland, whereas the others do not. As someone who spends most of their time in front a screen at night this is reason enough alone for me to switch to GNOME. And I'm happy to report that it just works. + +GNOME's Calendar app gets a much-requested Week view with this release, though it still lacks support for a broader range of calendars (if you use Google Calendar it works fine, everything else has caused me problems). + +Like the Unity desktop the Ubuntu GNOME devs has stuck with older versions of some apps, including Terminal, Nautilus (both at GNOME 3.20 versions) and Evolution, which remains (for stability, say the release notes) at the GNOME 3.22 version. + +One thing that's not going away with Unity 8 is Snap packages. A "snap" package is designed to work across distros and is already widely support (Canonical says 10 distros support Snaps as of this writing). Snaps offer sandboxing for improved security and quicker updates (since they come direct from the developer, rather than via the package manager). Because there can never be just one version of something in the Linux world there are also Flatpaks. Roughly the same as Snaps, though they differ considerably in implementation) Flatpaks are also cross distro and support for them in GNOME Software has improved quite a bit in this release and support is installed by default. So with Ubuntu GNOME you can easily install both Snaps and Flatpaks. + +[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-software.jpg" caption="The GNOME Software app should be reasonably familiar for Unity users."] + +The Software app (still at GNOME 3.22) also now supports installing GNOME Shell extensions, which, if you're hoping to replicate the experience of Unity 7 in GNOME, you're going to need to learn to love. + +Ubuntu GNOME does not ship with the full compliment of GNOME apps and I would expect Ubuntu to follow this since apps like Brasero, Evolution and Seahorse are of limited audience at this point. The only possible exception is Evolution since Thunderbird comes up short in some scenarios. All three apps are of course available for install via the Software app. Likewise there are a couple of new GNOME apps that aren't installed by default -- like the brand new GNOME Recipes app and GNOME Games -- but they are in the repos if you'd like to try them out (Recipes is still very rough around the edges). + +## GNOME for Unity Refugees + +So you like Unity but you want to stick with what Canonical uses by default. That means you'll be switching to GNOME 3. Unity was based on and uses quite a few components straight out of GNOME so it's not like you're diving into a whole new world, but, that said, there are things you will miss, things you'll need to work around and several things you might like better. + +[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-unity.jpg" caption="GNOME shell looking a bit like Unity (achieved via this script on GitHub"] + +Let's start with the last part. In my experience, on my testing hardware, which consists of a Lenovo x240 and a Dell Precision 7520, GNOME Shell is faster than Unity. Particularly for common tasks like calling up the search interface, but also in other areas like launching apps and dragging windows. Neither is what I would call slow, but with Unity I sometimes notice a half-second hesitation before and animation starts, which I never notice with GNOME. + +This is highly subjective of course but I like GNOME's search interface and sidebar components better because they get out of the way and then come up when I want them. You can set the Unity sidebar to hide and show only when you want it, but it's still not as smooth as what GNOME offers. Again though, this is largely a matter of taste. + +While speed may be the single most important element of a UI, there is plenty about GNOME that is going to disappoint Unity users. The biggest ripe I have is keyboard shortcuts. Unity had them in spades. For as graphical as Unity is/was, it was also very easy to drive without taking your hands off the keyboard. GNOME lacks that level of shortcuts. There may be some way of setting custom keyboard shortcuts in GNOME, but if I have to customize every keyboard shortcut then I might as well go with something far lighter weight and truly customizable like Openbox. What I liked about Unity wasn't even the shortcuts necessarily but the HUD that would find commands within menus simply by searching a few letters. + +Fortunately for Unity refugees there's [Plotinus](https://github.com/p-e-w/plotinus), which more or less replicates the Unity HUD UI in GNOME. The problem is it's not simple to install and it's low level enough that there may be some serious potential problems and conflicts (to be fair, there have not been any so far in my testing). Once you get it installed though it's a great extension and useful enough that System76 plans to roll it into future builds of Ubuntu that ship with System76 machines. That solves one potential pain point for switching, but the other is more difficult -- Unity Scopes. + +Unity Scopes were like little search engines for the Dash search feature. They got a lot of bad press, some of it from me, for including an Amazon search scope with affiliate links, but in spite of that gaff they were a fantastically useful feature. I have yet to find the equivalent for GNOME. GNOME ostensibly has the same feature, though in GNOME they're called Search Providers, the problem is that the UI is nowhere near as useful as Unity's UI. Unity allowed you to interact with items in Scopes without opening any apps (how much varied by Scope), in GNOME you generally just use them to find things and launch apps. + +Those are probably the two things you'll miss the most moving from Unity to GNOME. And with a little bit of effort installing Plotinus and tracking down some GNOME Search Providers you can get about 90 percent of what you had in Unity back. + +As for the things that kind of suck about GNOME that you might want to work around, my top pick would be the huge toolbars at the top of every window. I'm convinced that no GNOME dev has ever used GNOME on anything smaller than a 24in monitor (I'm also pretty sure they all look and talk just like Seinfeld's soup Nazi, *no minimize for you!*). If they had they'd realize what a space wasting horror GNOME toolbars are. But then I generally configure Openbox to have no toolbars and move windows with keyboard shortcuts so perhaps I'm just weird. Whatever the case, if you use a laptop with limited vertical space it's possible GNOME's toolbars will drive you crazy too. + +[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-toolbar.jpg" caption="Of course what I want when I'm in "full screen" mode is a giant useless menu bar. There is an extension that will get rid of it in full screen mode, but this is the default."] + +Then there's GNOME Files. There's a reason Ubuntu uses older, heavily patched versions of Files and I believe it's because Ubuntu wanted to ship a file browser that was actually useful. Currently Ubuntu GNOME also uses this patched version of Files so I'm hopeful that will continue going forward. Otherwise you might try Nemo or Thunar or some other file browser. + +Oh and like every computer user on earth save those using stock GNOME you might like minimize and maximize buttons, Ubuntu GNOME (and one hope, Ubuntu 18.04) ships with GNOME tweak tool installed. Open it up, select the Window menu item and turn on min and max buttons. Ah, so much better. + +Here's the bottom line Unity refugees: The transition to GNOME will have some bumps, you'll probably spend some quality to with Google and the Ask Ubuntu site, but in the end you'll probably be able to get GNOME to work in a way that doesn't drive you crazy. Heck, there are even GNOME themes that [pretty closely match the Unity 7 interface](https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1174889). On the outside chance that you just don't mesh with GNOME though, there are alternatives in the Ubuntu stable that are worth a look. + +## Other 'buntus + +There are quite a few "flavors" of Ubuntu, basically one for every common desktop out there. The two I've used the most are Xubuntu and Ubuntu MATE, which use the Xfce and MATE desktops respectively. They're both well worth a look, especially Ubuntu MATE, which for my money does MATE even better than Linux Mint. + +Xubuntu offers one of the best looking default Xfce desktops around and if you want to go back to more traditional, task bar-based workflow it, along with MATE, are your best bets. One thing to note, while Xfce is a bit lighter than say GNOME, the Xubuntu implementation is not the lightest version around. It comes with a lot of bells and whistles, but at the cost of significantly more RAM use than a more minimalist version of Xfce like you'd get, for example, with Debian. + +There's also a relative newcomer, Ubuntu Budgie, which is based on the Budgie desktop, the default desktop of the relatively new Solus distro. I haven't tested Ubuntu Budgie in anything other than a virtual machine, but it did just fine in Virutalbox and might be worth a look if you want something totally different. + +My favorite 'buntu is actually not even an official "flavor", I prefer the minimal Ubuntu iso, which functions just like the Debian minimal CD (and is probably built from it). It's a bare system without even Xorg. From there I can install just what I need and nothing else. For me that means Openbox, dmenu and tint2 along with Xorg and my applications. If you want to go minimal it's worth experimenting with. + +## Conclusion + +While it's a shame that Shuttleworth's vision of convergence, with a single device that behaves like a phone in your hand and desktop when hooked up to a monitor, is not going to see the light. I think it would have been fantastic, but it's not going to happen. Unity 8 is never going to happen. Mir is never going to happen. Ubuntu will likely be just fine even without a solid desktop of its own. + +It's certainly possible that Ubuntu is going to go the way of Red Hat, catering to the needs of its large corporate customers rather than those of us who use the desktop, but so far I don't see evidence to support that prediction. Ubuntu has used stock GNOME in the past and will do so again in the future, beyond that it doesn't sound like a lot is going to change and that's good thing. diff --git a/ubuntu1704review.html b/ubuntu1704review.html deleted file mode 100644 index b1411ab..0000000 --- a/ubuntu1704review.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,58 +0,0 @@ -

Canonical recently released Ubuntu 17.04, an update to its flagship Unity-based Linux desktop.

-

Ubuntu 17.04 offers a few new features, bug fixes and improvements over its predecessor, but it's also a significant release because it will likely be the last version of Unity that Canonical ships. Technically there is Ubuntu 17.10 coming later this year, but it seems unlikely the company is going to put much effort into developing a desktop it is abandoning.

-

Six years after its tumultuous switch from GNOME 2 to its homegrown Unity desktop, Canonical recently announced it was abandoning work on Unity and will switch the default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME with next year's 18.04 LTS release. The company is also abandoning the development of the Mir display server and its unified interface of Ubuntu for phones and tablets. The company's vision of "convergence", as Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth termed it, is dead.

-

Shuttleworth posted that news just a few days before Ubuntu 17.04 arrived, which took a considerable amount of wind out of Ubuntu 17.04's sails, though, to be fair, the last few Ubuntu desktop releases have not had much wind in their sails to start with. There have been a few feature updates, some work on bringing in more up-to-date GNOME and GTK elements, but by and large they've been maintenance releases.

-

In fact Ubuntu's twice yearly update schedule has lately felt more like a burden the company has to deal with while the real work of building Unity 8 happened in between. And Unity 8 did indeed look promising, unfortunately it's not something that mobile carriers and phone makers seemed to want. As Shuttleworth writes in his announcement, "what the Unity 8 team has delivered so far is beautiful, usable and solid, but I respect that markets, and community, ultimately decide which products grow and which disappear."

-

So Unity 8 is going the way of the Dodo which leaves the Unity-based default version of Ubuntu 17.04 as a kind of living fossil. The Ubuntu GNOME project will be the default release of Ubuntu this time next year.

-

That's not to say that 17.04 is abandonware. In fact there are improvements, even a couple new features. And it will live on in the Universe repos for anyone who'd like to continue using it. If you're fond of the Unity interface there's no need to panic just yet, you'll be able to continue using it for quite a while. There have already been stirrings of a community around it that would like to continue development. Even if there are just a couple of people fixing bugs and keeping the lights on you should be able to get a good five more years out of it (Canonical is committed to maintaining for the five year release cycle of 16.04, which lasts until April of 2021).

-

What makes Shuttleworth's announcement a little odd is that Unity 7 is a very mature and stable desktop. Why not stick with Unity 7? Why move to GNOME? The answer seems to lie in how Canonical is allocating resources. Canonical doesn't want to employ an army of programmers to keep Unity 7 secure and improving when the GNOME project is available for free with an army of programmers not paid by Canonical maintaining and improving it.

-

That means the future of Ubuntu then looks a lot like the future of, well, any other distro that uses GNOME by default. That's a little disappointing, especially if you, like me, happened to really want an Ubuntu phone. On the other hand I have fond memories of pre-Unity Ubuntu which of course also used a more or less stock version of GNOME.

-

It's also worth noting that there are several other 'buntu flavors out there for anyone who doesn't want to use GNOME. I'll take a look at two of them -- Ubuntu MATE and Xubuntu -- below, along with the future of Ubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, but first here's what's new in Ubuntu 17.04.

-

Ubuntu 17.04

-

There's more to a distro than its default desktop and Ubuntu 17.04 is no exception. There's quite a bit of new stuff in this release, but possibly the best news is that Ubuntu is now using Linux kernel 4.10. That means your Kaby Lake processors are fully supported (as are AMD Ryzen chips for those that love rooting for the underdog). There's also some support for NVIDIA's Tegra P1 and some improvements to the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) drivers.

-

Another big change that most people will never even notice is that Ubuntu 17.04 switched from a swap partition to a swap file. You could see some speed improvements from that in some situations -- and it makes your swap partition unnecessary, which saves a step in the installation process. The exception here is Btrfs, which does not support swap files. If you're using Btrfs you'll need to opt for manual partitioning and create a swap partition yourself.

-

Also worth mentioning is Ubuntu 17.04's support for the new "driverless" printers. These printers use the IPP Everywhere and Apple AirPrint protocols and connecting them to your Ubuntu desktop should be, in Canonical's words "as easy as connecting a USB stick" (I don't have a printer to test with).

-

This release also sees the usual slew of application updates for Ubuntu's stock apps. GNOME-based apps have mostly been updated to GNOME 3.24, though there are a few that linger at older versions (Terminal and Nautilus for example).

-

Updates to Unity 7 include... well, nothing really. Unity is dead, long live GNOME.

- -[image="ubuntu1704-unity7.jpg" caption="The good old Unity desktop is no more."] - -

Ubuntu GNOME 17.04

-

Shortly after Shuttleworth announced Unity 8 and accompaniments were dead and Ubuntu was returning to a stock GNOME desktop, the Ubuntu GNOME team posted a note saying "that there will no longer be a separate GNOME flavor of Ubuntu". Instead the development teams from both Ubuntu GNOME and Ubuntu Desktop will be merging. The "flavor" itself will be merged into mainline Ubuntu and, starting with 17.10, if you update Ubuntu GNOME you'll actually be sideways updating to just Ubuntu.

-

Shuttleworth's announcement says that Ubuntu will be making minimal customizations to the GNOME interface and since the Ubuntu GNOME project currently makes very few customizations it seems reasonable to assume that today's Ubuntu GNOME is not too far off tomorrow's Ubuntu.

- -[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-base.jpg" caption="The basic GNOME shell look in Ubuntu GNOME 17.04."] - -

Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 uses GNOME 3.24, having leapfrogged over 3.22 from 3.20. There's quite a bit of new stuff in this release, including a built-in new feature called Night Light which automatically changes your monitor color to reduce the blue light emitted by your screen at night. Night Light is GNOME's version of RedShift or f.lux, but, because it was developed by GNOME it actually works with Wayland, whereas the others do not. As someone who spends most of their time in front a screen at night this is reason enough alone for me to switch to GNOME. And I'm happy to report that it just works.

-

GNOME's Calendar app gets a much-requested Week view with this release, though it still lacks support for a broader range of calendars (if you use Google Calendar it works fine, everything else has caused me problems).

-

Like the Unity desktop the Ubuntu GNOME devs has stuck with older versions of some apps, including Terminal, Nautilus (both at GNOME 3.20 versions) and Evolution, which remains (for stability, say the release notes) at the GNOME 3.22 version.

-

One thing that's not going away with Unity 8 is Snap packages. A "snap" package is designed to work across distros and is already widely support (Canonical says 10 distros support Snaps as of this writing). Snaps offer sandboxing for improved security and quicker updates (since they come direct from the developer, rather than via the package manager). Because there can never be just one version of something in the Linux world there are also Flatpaks. Roughly the same as Snaps, though they differ considerably in implementation) Flatpaks are also cross distro and support for them in GNOME Software has improved quite a bit in this release and support is installed by default. So with Ubuntu GNOME you can easily install both Snaps and Flatpaks.

- -[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-software.jpg" caption="The GNOME Software app should be reasonably familiar for Unity users."] - -

The Software app (still at GNOME 3.22) also now supports installing GNOME Shell extensions, which, if you're hoping to replicate the experience of Unity 7 in GNOME, you're going to need to learn to love.

-

Ubuntu GNOME does not ship with the full compliment of GNOME apps and I would expect Ubuntu to follow this since apps like Brasero, Evolution and Seahorse are of limited audience at this point. The only possible exception is Evolution since Thunderbird comes up short in some scenarios. All three apps are of course available for install via the Software app. Likewise there are a couple of new GNOME apps that aren't installed by default -- like the brand new GNOME Recipes app and GNOME Games -- but they are in the repos if you'd like to try them out (Recipes is still very rough around the edges).

-

GNOME for Unity Refugees

-

So you like Unity but you want to stick with what Canonical uses by default. That means you'll be switching to GNOME 3. Unity was based on and uses quite a few components straight out of GNOME so it's not like you're diving into a whole new world, but, that said, there are things you will miss, things you'll need to work around and several things you might like better.

- -[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-unity.jpg" caption="GNOME shell looking a bit like Unity (achieved via this script on GitHub"] - -

Let's start with the last part. In my experience, on my testing hardware, which consists of a Lenovo x240 and a Dell Precision 7520, GNOME Shell is faster than Unity. Particularly for common tasks like calling up the search interface, but also in other areas like launching apps and dragging windows. Neither is what I would call slow, but with Unity I sometimes notice a half-second hesitation before and animation starts, which I never notice with GNOME.

-

This is highly subjective of course but I like GNOME's search interface and sidebar components better because they get out of the way and then come up when I want them. You can set the Unity sidebar to hide and show only when you want it, but it's still not as smooth as what GNOME offers. Again though, this is largely a matter of taste.

-

While speed may be the single most important element of a UI, there is plenty about GNOME that is going to disappoint Unity users. The biggest ripe I have is keyboard shortcuts. Unity had them in spades. For as graphical as Unity is/was, it was also very easy to drive without taking your hands off the keyboard. GNOME lacks that level of shortcuts. There may be some way of setting custom keyboard shortcuts in GNOME, but if I have to customize every keyboard shortcut then I might as well go with something far lighter weight and truly customizable like Openbox. What I liked about Unity wasn't even the shortcuts necessarily but the HUD that would find commands within menus simply by searching a few letters.

-

Fortunately for Unity refugees there's Plotinus, which more or less replicates the Unity HUD UI in GNOME. The problem is it's not simple to install and it's low level enough that there may be some serious potential problems and conflicts (to be fair, there have not been any so far in my testing). Once you get it installed though it's a great extension and useful enough that System76 plans to roll it into future builds of Ubuntu that ship with System76 machines. That solves one potential pain point for switching, but the other is more difficult -- Unity Scopes.

-

Unity Scopes were like little search engines for the Dash search feature. They got a lot of bad press, some of it from me, for including an Amazon search scope with affiliate links, but in spite of that gaff they were a fantastically useful feature. I have yet to find the equivalent for GNOME. GNOME ostensibly has the same feature, though in GNOME they're called Search Providers, the problem is that the UI is nowhere near as useful as Unity's UI. Unity allowed you to interact with items in Scopes without opening any apps (how much varied by Scope), in GNOME you generally just use them to find things and launch apps.

-

Those are probably the two things you'll miss the most moving from Unity to GNOME. And with a little bit of effort installing Plotinus and tracking down some GNOME Search Providers you can get about 90 percent of what you had in Unity back.

-

As for the things that kind of suck about GNOME that you might want to work around, my top pick would be the huge toolbars at the top of every window. I'm convinced that no GNOME dev has ever used GNOME on anything smaller than a 24in monitor (I'm also pretty sure they all look and talk just like Seinfeld's soup Nazi, no minimize for you!). If they had they'd realize what a space wasting horror GNOME toolbars are. But then I generally configure Openbox to have no toolbars and move windows with keyboard shortcuts so perhaps I'm just weird. Whatever the case, if you use a laptop with limited vertical space it's possible GNOME's toolbars will drive you crazy too.

-

[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-toolbar.jpg" caption="Of course what I want when I'm in "full screen" mode is a giant useless menu bar. There is an extension that will get rid of it in full screen mode, but this is the default."]

-

Then there's GNOME Files. There's a reason Ubuntu uses older, heavily patched versions of Files and I believe it's because Ubuntu wanted to ship a file browser that was actually useful. Currently Ubuntu GNOME also uses this patched version of Files so I'm hopeful that will continue going forward. Otherwise you might try Nemo or Thunar or some other file browser.

-

Oh and like every computer user on earth save those using stock GNOME you might like minimize and maximize buttons, Ubuntu GNOME (and one hope, Ubuntu 18.04) ships with GNOME tweak tool installed. Open it up, select the Window menu item and turn on min and max buttons. Ah, so much better.

-

Here's the bottom line Unity refugees: The transition to GNOME will have some bumps, you'll probably spend some quality to with Google and the Ask Ubuntu site, but in the end you'll probably be able to get GNOME to work in a way that doesn't drive you crazy. Heck, there are even GNOME themes that pretty closely match the Unity 7 interface. On the outside chance that you just don't mesh with GNOME though, there are alternatives in the Ubuntu stable that are worth a look.

-

Other 'buntus

-

There are quite a few "flavors" of Ubuntu, basically one for every common desktop out there. The two I've used the most are Xubuntu and Ubuntu MATE, which use the Xfce and MATE desktops respectively. They're both well worth a look, especially Ubuntu MATE, which for my money does MATE even better than Linux Mint.

-

Xubuntu offers one of the best looking default Xfce desktops around and if you want to go back to more traditional, task bar-based workflow it, along with MATE, are your best bets. One thing to note, while Xfce is a bit lighter than say GNOME, the Xubuntu implementation is not the lightest version around. It comes with a lot of bells and whistles, but at the cost of significantly more RAM use than a more minimalist version of Xfce like you'd get, for example, with Debian.

-

There's also a relative newcomer, Ubuntu Budgie, which is based on the Budgie desktop, the default desktop of the relatively new Solus distro. I haven't tested Ubuntu Budgie in anything other than a virtual machine, but it did just fine in Virutalbox and might be worth a look if you want something totally different.

-

My favorite 'buntu is actually not even an official "flavor", I prefer the minimal Ubuntu iso, which functions just like the Debian minimal CD (and is probably built from it). It's a bare system without even Xorg. From there I can install just what I need and nothing else. For me that means Openbox, dmenu and tint2 along with Xorg and my applications. If you want to go minimal it's worth experimenting with.

-

Conclusion

-

While it's a shame that Shuttleworth's vision of convergence, with a single device that behaves like a phone in your hand and desktop when hooked up to a monitor, is not going to see the light. I think it would have been fantastic, but it's not going to happen. Unity 8 is never going to happen. Mir is never going to happen. Ubuntu will likely be just fine even without a solid desktop of its own.

-

It's certainly possible that Ubuntu is going to go the way of Red Hat, catering to the needs of its large corporate customers rather than those of us who use the desktop, but so far I don't see evidence to support that prediction. Ubuntu has used stock GNOME in the past and will do so again in the future, beyond that it doesn't sound like a lot is going to change and that's good thing.

diff --git a/ubuntu1704review.txt b/ubuntu1704review.txt deleted file mode 100644 index dcaf45e..0000000 --- a/ubuntu1704review.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,99 +0,0 @@ -Canonical recently released Ubuntu 17.04, an update to its flagship Unity-based Linux desktop. - -Ubuntu 17.04 offers a few new features, bug fixes and improvements over its predecessor, but it's also a significant release because it will likely be the last version of Unity that Canonical ships. Technically there is Ubuntu 17.10 coming later this year, but it seems unlikely the company is going to put much effort into developing a desktop it is abandoning. - -Six years after its tumultuous switch from GNOME 2 to its homegrown Unity desktop, Canonical recently announced it was abandoning work on Unity and will switch the default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME with next year's 18.04 LTS release. The company is also abandoning the development of the Mir display server and its unified interface of Ubuntu for phones and tablets. The company's vision of "convergence", as Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth termed it, is dead. - -Shuttleworth posted that news just a few days before Ubuntu 17.04 arrived, which took a considerable amount of wind out of Ubuntu 17.04's sails, though, to be fair, the last few Ubuntu desktop releases have not had much wind in their sails to start with. There have been a few feature updates, some work on bringing in more up-to-date GNOME and GTK elements, but by and large they've been maintenance releases. - -In fact Ubuntu's twice yearly update schedule has lately felt more like a burden the company has to deal with while the real work of building Unity 8 happened in between. And Unity 8 did indeed look promising, unfortunately it's not something that mobile carriers and phone makers seemed to want. As Shuttleworth writes in his announcement, "what the Unity 8 team has delivered so far is beautiful, usable and solid, but I respect that markets, and community, ultimately decide which products grow and which disappear." - -So Unity 8 is going the way of the Dodo which leaves the Unity-based default version of Ubuntu 17.04 as a kind of living fossil. The Ubuntu GNOME project will be the default release of Ubuntu this time next year. - -That's not to say that 17.04 is abandonware. In fact there are improvements, even a couple new features. And it will live on in the Universe repos for anyone who'd like to continue using it. If you're fond of the Unity interface there's no need to panic just yet, you'll be able to continue using it for quite a while. There have already been stirrings of a community around it that would like to continue development. Even if there are just a couple of people fixing bugs and keeping the lights on you should be able to get a good five more years out of it (Canonical is committed to maintaining for the five year release cycle of 16.04, which lasts until April of 2021). - -What makes Shuttleworth's announcement a little odd is that Unity 7 is a very mature and stable desktop. Why not stick with Unity 7? Why move to GNOME? The answer seems to lie in how Canonical is allocating resources. Canonical doesn't want to employ an army of programmers to keep Unity 7 secure and improving when the GNOME project is available for free with an army of programmers not paid by Canonical maintaining and improving it. - -That means the future of Ubuntu then looks a lot like the future of, well, any other distro that uses GNOME by default. That's a little disappointing, especially if you, like me, happened to really want an Ubuntu phone. On the other hand I have fond memories of pre-Unity Ubuntu which of course also used a more or less stock version of GNOME. - -It's also worth noting that there are several other 'buntu flavors out there for anyone who doesn't want to use GNOME. I'll take a look at two of them -- Ubuntu MATE and Xubuntu -- below, along with the future of Ubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, but first here's what's new in Ubuntu 17.04. - -## Ubuntu 17.04 - -There's more to a distro than its default desktop and Ubuntu 17.04 is no exception. There's quite a bit of new stuff in this release, but possibly the best news is that Ubuntu is now using Linux kernel 4.10. That means your Kaby Lake processors are fully supported (as are AMD Ryzen chips for those that love rooting for the underdog). There's also some support for NVIDIA's Tegra P1 and some improvements to the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) drivers. - -Another big change that most people will never even notice is that Ubuntu 17.04 switched from a swap partition to a swap file. You could see some speed improvements from that in some situations -- and it makes your swap partition unnecessary, which saves a step in the installation process. The exception here is Btrfs, which does not support swap files. If you're using Btrfs you'll need to opt for manual partitioning and create a swap partition yourself. - -Also worth mentioning is Ubuntu 17.04's support for the new "driverless" printers. These printers use the [IPP Everywhere](http://www.pwg.org/dynamo/eveprinters.php) and Apple [AirPrint](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201311) protocols and connecting them to your Ubuntu desktop should be, in Canonical's words "as easy as connecting a USB stick" (I don't have a printer to test with). - -This release also sees the usual slew of application updates for Ubuntu's stock apps. GNOME-based apps have mostly been updated to GNOME 3.24, though there are a few that linger at older versions (Terminal and Nautilus for example). - -Updates to Unity 7 include... well, nothing really. Unity is dead, long live GNOME. - -[image="ubuntu1704-unity7.jpg" caption="The good old Unity desktop is no more."] - -## Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 - -Shortly after Shuttleworth announced Unity 8 and accompaniments were dead and Ubuntu was returning to a stock GNOME desktop, the Ubuntu GNOME team posted a note saying "that there will no longer be a separate GNOME flavor of Ubuntu". Instead the development teams from both Ubuntu GNOME and Ubuntu Desktop will be merging. The "flavor" itself will be merged into mainline Ubuntu and, starting with 17.10, if you update Ubuntu GNOME you'll actually be sideways updating to just Ubuntu. - -Shuttleworth's announcement says that Ubuntu will be making minimal customizations to the GNOME interface and since the Ubuntu GNOME project currently makes very few customizations it seems reasonable to assume that today's Ubuntu GNOME is not too far off tomorrow's Ubuntu. - -[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-base.jpg" caption="The basic GNOME shell look in Ubuntu GNOME 17.04."] - -Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 uses GNOME 3.24, having leapfrogged over 3.22 from 3.20. There's quite a bit of new stuff in this release, including a built-in new feature called Night Light which automatically changes your monitor color to reduce the blue light emitted by your screen at night. Night Light is GNOME's version of RedShift or f.lux, but, because it was developed by GNOME it actually works with Wayland, whereas the others do not. As someone who spends most of their time in front a screen at night this is reason enough alone for me to switch to GNOME. And I'm happy to report that it just works. - -GNOME's Calendar app gets a much-requested Week view with this release, though it still lacks support for a broader range of calendars (if you use Google Calendar it works fine, everything else has caused me problems). - -Like the Unity desktop the Ubuntu GNOME devs has stuck with older versions of some apps, including Terminal, Nautilus (both at GNOME 3.20 versions) and Evolution, which remains (for stability, say the release notes) at the GNOME 3.22 version. - -One thing that's not going away with Unity 8 is Snap packages. A "snap" package is designed to work across distros and is already widely support (Canonical says 10 distros support Snaps as of this writing). Snaps offer sandboxing for improved security and quicker updates (since they come direct from the developer, rather than via the package manager). Because there can never be just one version of something in the Linux world there are also Flatpaks. Roughly the same as Snaps, though they differ considerably in implementation) Flatpaks are also cross distro and support for them in GNOME Software has improved quite a bit in this release and support is installed by default. So with Ubuntu GNOME you can easily install both Snaps and Flatpaks. - -[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-software.jpg" caption="The GNOME Software app should be reasonably familiar for Unity users."] - -The Software app (still at GNOME 3.22) also now supports installing GNOME Shell extensions, which, if you're hoping to replicate the experience of Unity 7 in GNOME, you're going to need to learn to love. - -Ubuntu GNOME does not ship with the full compliment of GNOME apps and I would expect Ubuntu to follow this since apps like Brasero, Evolution and Seahorse are of limited audience at this point. The only possible exception is Evolution since Thunderbird comes up short in some scenarios. All three apps are of course available for install via the Software app. Likewise there are a couple of new GNOME apps that aren't installed by default -- like the brand new GNOME Recipes app and GNOME Games -- but they are in the repos if you'd like to try them out (Recipes is still very rough around the edges). - -## GNOME for Unity Refugees - -So you like Unity but you want to stick with what Canonical uses by default. That means you'll be switching to GNOME 3. Unity was based on and uses quite a few components straight out of GNOME so it's not like you're diving into a whole new world, but, that said, there are things you will miss, things you'll need to work around and several things you might like better. - -[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-unity.jpg" caption="GNOME shell looking a bit like Unity (achieved via this script on GitHub"] - -Let's start with the last part. In my experience, on my testing hardware, which consists of a Lenovo x240 and a Dell Precision 7520, GNOME Shell is faster than Unity. Particularly for common tasks like calling up the search interface, but also in other areas like launching apps and dragging windows. Neither is what I would call slow, but with Unity I sometimes notice a half-second hesitation before and animation starts, which I never notice with GNOME. - -This is highly subjective of course but I like GNOME's search interface and sidebar components better because they get out of the way and then come up when I want them. You can set the Unity sidebar to hide and show only when you want it, but it's still not as smooth as what GNOME offers. Again though, this is largely a matter of taste. - -While speed may be the single most important element of a UI, there is plenty about GNOME that is going to disappoint Unity users. The biggest ripe I have is keyboard shortcuts. Unity had them in spades. For as graphical as Unity is/was, it was also very easy to drive without taking your hands off the keyboard. GNOME lacks that level of shortcuts. There may be some way of setting custom keyboard shortcuts in GNOME, but if I have to customize every keyboard shortcut then I might as well go with something far lighter weight and truly customizable like Openbox. What I liked about Unity wasn't even the shortcuts necessarily but the HUD that would find commands within menus simply by searching a few letters. - -Fortunately for Unity refugees there's [Plotinus](https://github.com/p-e-w/plotinus), which more or less replicates the Unity HUD UI in GNOME. The problem is it's not simple to install and it's low level enough that there may be some serious potential problems and conflicts (to be fair, there have not been any so far in my testing). Once you get it installed though it's a great extension and useful enough that System76 plans to roll it into future builds of Ubuntu that ship with System76 machines. That solves one potential pain point for switching, but the other is more difficult -- Unity Scopes. - -Unity Scopes were like little search engines for the Dash search feature. They got a lot of bad press, some of it from me, for including an Amazon search scope with affiliate links, but in spite of that gaff they were a fantastically useful feature. I have yet to find the equivalent for GNOME. GNOME ostensibly has the same feature, though in GNOME they're called Search Providers, the problem is that the UI is nowhere near as useful as Unity's UI. Unity allowed you to interact with items in Scopes without opening any apps (how much varied by Scope), in GNOME you generally just use them to find things and launch apps. - -Those are probably the two things you'll miss the most moving from Unity to GNOME. And with a little bit of effort installing Plotinus and tracking down some GNOME Search Providers you can get about 90 percent of what you had in Unity back. - -As for the things that kind of suck about GNOME that you might want to work around, my top pick would be the huge toolbars at the top of every window. I'm convinced that no GNOME dev has ever used GNOME on anything smaller than a 24in monitor (I'm also pretty sure they all look and talk just like Seinfeld's soup Nazi, *no minimize for you!*). If they had they'd realize what a space wasting horror GNOME toolbars are. But then I generally configure Openbox to have no toolbars and move windows with keyboard shortcuts so perhaps I'm just weird. Whatever the case, if you use a laptop with limited vertical space it's possible GNOME's toolbars will drive you crazy too. - -[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-toolbar.jpg" caption="Of course what I want when I'm in "full screen" mode is a giant useless menu bar. There is an extension that will get rid of it in full screen mode, but this is the default."] - -Then there's GNOME Files. There's a reason Ubuntu uses older, heavily patched versions of Files and I believe it's because Ubuntu wanted to ship a file browser that was actually useful. Currently Ubuntu GNOME also uses this patched version of Files so I'm hopeful that will continue going forward. Otherwise you might try Nemo or Thunar or some other file browser. - -Oh and like every computer user on earth save those using stock GNOME you might like minimize and maximize buttons, Ubuntu GNOME (and one hope, Ubuntu 18.04) ships with GNOME tweak tool installed. Open it up, select the Window menu item and turn on min and max buttons. Ah, so much better. - -Here's the bottom line Unity refugees: The transition to GNOME will have some bumps, you'll probably spend some quality to with Google and the Ask Ubuntu site, but in the end you'll probably be able to get GNOME to work in a way that doesn't drive you crazy. Heck, there are even GNOME themes that [pretty closely match the Unity 7 interface](https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1174889). On the outside chance that you just don't mesh with GNOME though, there are alternatives in the Ubuntu stable that are worth a look. - -## Other 'buntus - -There are quite a few "flavors" of Ubuntu, basically one for every common desktop out there. The two I've used the most are Xubuntu and Ubuntu MATE, which use the Xfce and MATE desktops respectively. They're both well worth a look, especially Ubuntu MATE, which for my money does MATE even better than Linux Mint. - -Xubuntu offers one of the best looking default Xfce desktops around and if you want to go back to more traditional, task bar-based workflow it, along with MATE, are your best bets. One thing to note, while Xfce is a bit lighter than say GNOME, the Xubuntu implementation is not the lightest version around. It comes with a lot of bells and whistles, but at the cost of significantly more RAM use than a more minimalist version of Xfce like you'd get, for example, with Debian. - -There's also a relative newcomer, Ubuntu Budgie, which is based on the Budgie desktop, the default desktop of the relatively new Solus distro. I haven't tested Ubuntu Budgie in anything other than a virtual machine, but it did just fine in Virutalbox and might be worth a look if you want something totally different. - -My favorite 'buntu is actually not even an official "flavor", I prefer the minimal Ubuntu iso, which functions just like the Debian minimal CD (and is probably built from it). It's a bare system without even Xorg. From there I can install just what I need and nothing else. For me that means Openbox, dmenu and tint2 along with Xorg and my applications. If you want to go minimal it's worth experimenting with. - -## Conclusion - -While it's a shame that Shuttleworth's vision of convergence, with a single device that behaves like a phone in your hand and desktop when hooked up to a monitor, is not going to see the light. I think it would have been fantastic, but it's not going to happen. Unity 8 is never going to happen. Mir is never going to happen. Ubuntu will likely be just fine even without a solid desktop of its own. - -It's certainly possible that Ubuntu is going to go the way of Red Hat, catering to the needs of its large corporate customers rather than those of us who use the desktop, but so far I don't see evidence to support that prediction. Ubuntu has used stock GNOME in the past and will do so again in the future, beyond that it doesn't sound like a lot is going to change and that's good thing. -- cgit v1.2.3-70-g09d2