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The Debian project, upstream mother of countless Linux distributions, has released Debian 10, also known as “Buster”. And yes, that’s a reference to the character from Toy Story. All Debian releases are named after Toy Story characters.

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Debian has a well-deserved reputation as a rock solid distro for those who don’t want the latest and greatest, preferring instead the stability that comes from sticking with what works. Naturally Debian gets security updates, bug fixes and maintenance releases like any distro, but don’t expect major updates to applications or desktop environments.

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Right now, as with every release, Debian is pretty close to up-to-date with what the rest of the Linux world is doing. But Buster will be supported for five years and Debian 11 won’t arrive for at least two years (Buster comes 26 months after Debian 9). As time goes on, Buster will look increasingly outdated.

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But wait, isn’t Ubuntu based on Debian and it’s not out of date? Ubuntu pulls its Debian base from what Debian calls the Testing Channel. Debian Linux consists of three major development branches: Stable, Testing and Unstable. Work on new versions progresses through each, starting life in Unstable and eventually ending up in Stable. Ubuntu plucks its base from Testing, which, from Debian’s point of view is only about half-baked. Like I said, Debian is conservative.

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At the same time, in decades of using it, I have never had Debian break on me. I am still running several Debian 8 servers and they continue to chug along with very little input from me. They’re set to automatically update to pull in security and bug fixes and they just work.

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In a desktop though, that kind of stability can be a mixed bag. Sure, your system is unlikely to break, but you’re also unlikely to get the latest version of applications, which means you may find yourself waiting on new features in GIMP or Darktable long after every other distro has rolled them out.

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I used to hope that Flatpaks – an application packaging method that separates app from underlying system – would mitigate this somewhat, allowing Debian fans to run stable systems but still get the latest versions of key applications. In practice I have not been able to make this work for me, though I may give it another try now that Debian 10 is here.

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What’s New

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Debian is always a tough distro to get excited about because, while there’s a ton of new things in this release, most of them long ago arrived in nearly every other distro. Debian releases look like the distro is playing catch-up with the rest of the Linux world and in some ways that’s exactly what’s happening.

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This time around though it feels like there’s more to it than that. Most of the major updates in this release involve security in one way or another, making Buster feel a bit like Debian hardened.

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A good example of this is one of the headlining features of Debian 10, support for Secure Boot. Debian 10 can now, in most cases, install without a hitch on UEFI-enabled laptops. Lack of Secure Boot support has long been a stumbling block for anyone wanting to use Debian with all the features of modern machines and now that that’s out the way, Debian feels like a much more viable choice for larger institutions with existing security policies.

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That’s also true of the move to enabled AppArmor by default. AppArmor is a framework for managing application access. You create policies that restrict which apps can access which documents. It’s particularly useful on servers where it can be used, for example, to make sure that a flaw in a PHP file can’t be used to access anything outside of a web root. While Debian has long supported AppArmor and offered it in the repos, Buster is the first release to ship with it enabled by default.

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The third security-related update in this release is the ability to sandbox the Apt package manager. This one is a bit complicated and not enabled by default. Instructions to enable it can be found in the Debian release documents. Once you turn it on, you can restrict the list of allowed system calls, and send anything not allowed to SIGSYS.

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Those three updates alone make Debian 10 worth the update, especially on a server where frequent attacks make something like AppArmor a must-have.

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There are some other changes that will affect server users though, and not necessarily in a good way, especially the move from iptables to to nftables for managing your firewall. While nftables is in many respects better than iptables – the syntax for creating rules is simpler, it’s faster, and it offers live tracing – it is still different, and will require sysadmins to adjust their workflow and possibly re-write any scripts they have.

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The other change that strikes me as potentially problematic for some is the move to automatic upgrades to point releases when you enable Debian’s unattended-upgrades package. In the past unattended-upgrades defaulted to installing only upgrades that came from the security suite. With Buster that’s expanded to include upgrading to the latest stable point release.

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Now part of the stability of Debian comes from infrequent changes, but the other part of its stability comes from its very extensive testing process. Debian releases sometimes spend longer in a frozen state, just testing package updates, than Ubuntu spends on an entire release. That means stable point releases are unlikely to produce problems. Still, if you used unattended-upgrades to keep your systems up-to-date with security fixes in the past be aware that you’ll need to tweak your configuration if you want the same behavior going forward. See the file NEWS.Debian in unattended-upgrades for more details.

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Also notable in this release is support for driverless printing via any AirPrint-enabled printer (most printers made within the last few years are AirPrint ready). This feature comes courtesy of the upgrade to CUPS 2.2.10.

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One final note, Buster has finally accomplished the merging of /usr which Debian has been working on for a long time. That means that on a fresh install of Buster the directories /bin, /sbin, and /lib are now aliased to /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, and /usr/lib respectively.

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What you get in Debian 10

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Aside from the project-level changes, Debian 10’s release notes are relatively prosaic, as you would expect. Debian’s goal of stability and the ability to work just about anywhere – Debian supports more chip architectures than most people have probably heard of – do not lend themselves to bleeding edge kernels or the latest and greatest graphics driver updates.

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Debian 10 ships with Linux Kernel 4.19.0-4, which is the latest LTS kernel release. It arrived back in 2018 and will be supported through 2020 (Debian 10 itself will be supported through 2024). The 4.19 series kernel brings a number of new things to Debian, notably initial support for Intel Icelake graphics, much improved power management, better support for Intel’s Low Power Subsystem, better touch screen support, and quite a bit more. You can see everything that’s new over at the linux kernel mailing list announcement.

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I’ve noticed running Debian 10 in my laptop that battery life is at least an hour better than Debian 9 on the same machine. Whether is due to kernel level improvements, or other improvements in the stack is difficult to say for sure, but either way, I highly recommend upgrading if you’re running Debian 9 on a laptop.

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Part of Debian’s original appeal was its comprehesive package availability. If it wasn’t in the Debian repos, it probably wasn’t a Linux app. In today’s world that’s less true, but Debian still offers some of the largest repos around with a grand total to 57,703 packages. Of that number 13,370 are new packages added for this release. As part of Buster’s release some 35,532 packages were upgraded.

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Among the major upgrades are all the desktop environments (more on those below). Debian 10 ships with GNOME 3.30, KDE Plasma 5.14, Cinnamon 3.8, LXDE 0.99.2, LXQt 0.14, MATE 1.20, and Xfce 4.12. Yes, you read that right, the just-barely-ready-for-prime-time LXQt has an official ISO for Debian 10.

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Software you use to get work done has also been updated to the latest available releases like LibreOffice 6.1, Firefox, GIMP 2.10.8 and more. Programmers and developers will be happy to know that Debian 10, while not completely Python 2-free, is moving in that direction and has very good support for Python 3, offering Python 3.7.2 out of the box. Python 2 support will end in 2020 and like many other distros Debian is encouraging developers to migrate their applications head of Python 2’s end-of-life date.

+ + +[image="debian10-firefox.jpg" caption='Debian 10 ships with Firefox 60.'] + +

Another under-the-hood change in this release is the use of the Calameres installer for Debian-Live images. If you install Debian from the Live CD, you’ll see the distro-agnostic Calameres installer instead of the good old Debian nstaller. The Debian installer has quite a few more features, and it’s still what you’ll get if you use a net install or DVD installer, but the Calameres installer is unquestionably more newbie-friendly. It’s also refreshing to see a distro that doesn’t feel the need to roll its own installer, instead using an existing, relatively mature open source application.

+ + +[image="debian10-installer.jpg" caption='Installing Debian 10 with the Calameres installer.'] + +

Desktops

+ +[image="debian10-gnome.jpg" caption='The default GNOME desktop on Debian 10'] + +

If you needed proof that Wayland has really arrived, Debian 10 is here to provide it. The GNOME desktop in Debian to uses Wayland by default. When a distro as slow to adopt new technology as Debian makes something the default, it’s a safe bet that whatever it is, it’s ready for prime time. Stick a fork in X.org, because as far as GNOME is concerned it’s dead. That said, the X.org display server is also still installed by default and available for those who’d like to use it.

+

I have had no issues running GNOME under Wayland on Debian 10. This release brings GNOME 3.30, which is most notable for its speed boost. Developers from both Red Hat and Canonical put some time into fixing memory leaks and trying to make GNOME Shell faster and less resource hungry. The result is indeed a slightly speedier GNOME, though it is still not a fast or lightweight desktop by any stretch of the imagination.

+

GNOME is also not what you want if you’re a Debian user. It is the default desktop, as it has been for most of Debian’s history, insofar as there is a default in Debian’s sprawling array of installation methods, but these days it’s not the best choice.

+

GNOME Shell updates frequently, making major changes with nearly every release. And those releases arrive pretty regularly, nearly every six months. In the time since Debian 10 froze around GNOME 3.30 earlier this year, there’s already been one new GNOME release and another will arrive in September. Will they eventually make their way into Buster’s repositories? Maybe. Probably even, but it’ll be a while. In my experience, GNOME highlights one of the drawback of Debian stable, it’s, well, too stable.

+

In many respects this is my favorite part of Debian. It doesn’t change. It updates what needs to be updated and everything else can wait.

+

If you’d like to tap that stability though, and set up a system that you don’t have to think about at all for the next five years if you don’t want to, I would suggest that the ideal desktop would mirror the distro’s own conservative approach the development. Look for something with infrequent updates and when those updates come, nothing much ought to change. Bugs should be fixed, minor updates pushed out, but for the most part your system should be the same after your update as it was before.

+

There are several desktops that fit this description to varying degrees, but my favorite desktop of Debian is Xfce.

+ +[image="debian10-xfce.jpg" caption='The Xfce desktop is better suited to Debian's update cycle'] + +

Like Debian, Xfce usually goes more than a year without a major update, often two years. When updates do arrive they’re the kind you want, tons of bug fixes, speed improvements, and little tweaks rather than huge interface overhauls. Ironically, that may not be true this round, as Xfce 4.14 just arrived and makes a fairly major update to GTK 3 components. Still, while you might have to wait a little while for 4.14 to get to Debian 10, rest assured that there won’t be nearly as many Xfce updates coming as what you’ll get from GNOME or even KDE.

+

I installed Debian using the net installer, which has a nice graphical installer, though I still opt for the text-based installer. Old habits die hard and something about the text-based installer just feels more Debian to me. Once the base system was running I added Xfce, which is currently at version 4.12.

+

Debian’s Xfce is rather plain, not customized in any way. It makes a stable desktop that stays out of your way though. I had no problems whatsoever with Xfce on Debian and while the update to 4.14 looks like a nice one, especially the potential speed boost, not much is going to change in terms of looks or functionality. It will arrive when Debian is ready. If that bothers you, Debian is not the distro for you.

+

I was also curious about Wayland in Debian 10 though, so I ran the Sway tiling window manager for a while. I still have clipboard sharing issues under Wayland though. I could not get copy-and-paste working between Wayland and XWayland apps (Vim and a browser for instance), which is deal breaker for me. That said, the rest of my Wayland experience with Sway on Debian 10 was flawless.

+

Conclusion

+

I’ve been using Debian 10 for three months now (yes, before it was officially released via a testing channel) and, as you would expect, it is a super solid release. This is remarkable only because I did not have the same experience at all on Debian 9. My initial foray into Debian 9 was fraught with problems and I went scurrying back to Debian 8 in a hurry. I tried again after a year and had better luck, but this time around I’ve had no problems at all on either the desktop or server (it’s worth noting here though, before you upgrade, back up any PostgreSQL data, Debian 10 moves from PostgreSQL 9.6 to 11, a significant migration for any live servers).

+

While I plan to wait for at least one point release before I test updating any production servers, Debian 10 looks to be a great release. I full expect to be running Debian 10 servers well into the mid 2020s.

+

On the desktop side I still prefer Arch Linux to Debian on my main machine. This might sound like diametrically opposed distros to compare – Debian is focused on stability and changes at a glacial pace, while Arch is a rolling release with updates on a daily basis – but in my experience these have both been the most stable, reliable distos I’ve used. The chief difference is that one updates all the time to achieve that stability while other updates hardly at all. Different approaches leading to the same result.

+

In the end I stick with Arch on my daily use machine, primarily because I like having the latest releases of photo and video editing software, which is hard to do on Debian. I once thought that Flatpaks, which bundle their own dependencies independent of the system, would solve this problem, but in practice I’ve had far more problems with Flatpaks on Debian than AUR apps on Arch.

+

That said, every machine I don’t touch on a daily basis, including all my servers, run Debian and will soon be running Debian 10.

diff --git a/ars-technica/debian10-review.txt b/ars-technica/debian10-review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fc49217 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/debian10-review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,89 @@ +The Debian project, upstream mother of [countless Linux distributions](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/DebianFamilyTree1210.svg), has released Debian 10, also known as "Buster". And yes, that's a reference to the character from *Toy Story*. All Debian releases are named after Toy Story characters. + +Debian has a well-deserved reputation as a rock solid distro for those who don't want the latest and greatest, preferring instead the stability that comes from sticking with what works. Naturally Debian gets security updates, bug fixes and maintenance releases like any distro, but don't expect major updates to applications or desktop environments. + +Right now, as with every release, Debian is pretty close to up-to-date with what the rest of the Linux world is doing. But Buster will be supported for five years and Debian 11 won't arrive for at least two years (Buster comes 26 months after Debian 9). As time goes on, Buster will look increasingly outdated. + +But wait, isn't Ubuntu based on Debian and it's not out of date? Ubuntu pulls its Debian base from what Debian calls the Testing Channel. Debian Linux consists of three major development branches: Stable, Testing and Unstable. Work on new versions progresses through each, starting life in Unstable and eventually ending up in Stable. Ubuntu plucks its base from Testing, which, from Debian's point of view is only about half-baked. Like I said, Debian is conservative. + +At the same time, in decades of using it, I have never had Debian break on me. I am still running several Debian 8 servers and they continue to chug along with very little input from me. They're set to automatically update to pull in security and bug fixes and they just work. + +In a desktop though, that kind of stability can be a mixed bag. Sure, your system is unlikely to break, but you're also unlikely to get the latest version of applications, which means you may find yourself waiting on new features in GIMP or Darktable long after every other distro has rolled them out. + +I used to hope that Flatpaks -- an application packaging method that separates app from underlying system -- would mitigate this somewhat, allowing Debian fans to run stable systems but still get the latest versions of key applications. In practice I have not been able to make this work for me, though I may give it another try now that Debian 10 is here. + +## What's New + +Debian is always a tough distro to get excited about because, while there's a ton of new things in this release, most of them long ago arrived in nearly every other distro. Debian releases look like the distro is playing catch-up with the rest of the Linux world and in some ways that's exactly what's happening. + +This time around though it feels like there's more to it than that. Most of the major updates in this release involve security in one way or another, making Buster feel a bit like Debian hardened. + +A good example of this is one of the headlining features of Debian 10, support for Secure Boot. Debian 10 can now, in most cases, install without a hitch on UEFI-enabled laptops. Lack of Secure Boot support has long been a stumbling block for anyone wanting to use Debian with all the features of modern machines and now that that's out the way, Debian feels like a much more viable choice for larger institutions with existing security policies. + +That's also true of the move to enabled AppArmor by default. AppArmor is a framework for managing application access. You create policies that restrict which apps can access which documents. It's particularly useful on servers where it can be used, for example, to make sure that a flaw in a PHP file can't be used to access anything outside of a web root. While Debian has long supported AppArmor and offered it in the repos, Buster is the first release to ship with it enabled by default. + +The third security-related update in this release is the ability to sandbox the Apt package manager. This one is a bit complicated and not enabled by default. Instructions to enable it can be found in [the Debian release documents](https://www.debian.org/releases/buster/amd64/release-notes/ch-whats-new.en.html#apt-sandboxing). Once you turn it on, you can restrict the list of allowed system calls, and send anything not allowed to SIGSYS. + +Those three updates alone make Debian 10 worth the update, especially on a server where frequent attacks make something like AppArmor a must-have. + +There are some other changes that will affect server users though, and not necessarily in a good way, especially the move from iptables to to nftables for managing your firewall. While nftables is in many respects better than iptables -- the syntax for creating rules is simpler, it's faster, and it offers live tracing -- it is still different, and will require sysadmins to adjust their workflow and possibly re-write any scripts they have. + +The other change that strikes me as potentially problematic for some is the move to automatic upgrades to point releases when you enable Debian's unattended-upgrades package. In the past unattended-upgrades defaulted to installing only upgrades that came from the security suite. With Buster that's expanded to include upgrading to the latest stable point release. + +Now part of the stability of Debian comes from infrequent changes, but the other part of its stability comes from its very extensive testing process. Debian releases sometimes spend longer in a frozen state, just testing package updates, than Ubuntu spends on an entire release. That means stable point releases are unlikely to produce problems. Still, if you used unattended-upgrades to keep your systems up-to-date with security fixes in the past be aware that you'll need to tweak your configuration if you want the same behavior going forward. See the file NEWS.Debian in unattended-upgrades for more details. + +Also notable in this release is support for driverless printing via any AirPrint-enabled printer (most printers made within the last few years are AirPrint ready). This feature comes courtesy of the upgrade to CUPS 2.2.10. + +One final note, Buster has finally accomplished the merging of /usr which Debian has been working on for a long time. That means that on a fresh install of Buster the directories /bin, /sbin, and /lib are now aliased to `/usr/bin`, `/usr/sbin`, and `/usr/lib` respectively. + +## What you get in Debian 10 + +Aside from the project-level changes, Debian 10's release notes are relatively prosaic, as you would expect. Debian's goal of stability and the ability to work just about anywhere -- Debian supports more chip architectures than most people have probably heard of -- do not lend themselves to bleeding edge kernels or the latest and greatest graphics driver updates. + +Debian 10 ships with Linux Kernel 4.19.0-4, which is the latest LTS kernel release. It arrived back in 2018 and will be supported through 2020 (Debian 10 itself will be supported through 2024). The 4.19 series kernel brings a number of new things to Debian, notably initial support for Intel Icelake graphics, much improved power management, better support for Intel's Low Power Subsystem, better touch screen support, and quite a bit more. You can see everything that's new over at the [linux kernel mailing list announcement](https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/10/22/184). + +I've noticed running Debian 10 in my laptop that battery life is at least an hour better than Debian 9 on the same machine. Whether is due to kernel level improvements, or other improvements in the stack is difficult to say for sure, but either way, I highly recommend upgrading if you're running Debian 9 on a laptop. + +Part of Debian's original appeal was its comprehesive package availability. If it wasn't in the Debian repos, it probably wasn't a Linux app. In today's world that's less true, but Debian still offers some of the largest repos around with a grand total to 57,703 packages. Of that number 13,370 are new packages added for this release. As part of Buster's release some 35,532 packages were upgraded. + +Among the major upgrades are all the desktop environments (more on those below). Debian 10 ships with GNOME 3.30, KDE Plasma 5.14, Cinnamon 3.8, LXDE 0.99.2, LXQt 0.14, MATE 1.20, and Xfce 4.12. Yes, you read that right, the just-barely-ready-for-prime-time LXQt has an official ISO for Debian 10. + +Software you use to get work done has also been updated to the latest available releases like LibreOffice 6.1, Firefox, GIMP 2.10.8 and more. Programmers and developers will be happy to know that Debian 10, while not completely Python 2-free, is moving in that direction and has very good support for Python 3, offering Python 3.7.2 out of the box. Python 2 support will end in 2020 and like many other distros Debian is encouraging developers to migrate their applications head of Python 2's end-of-life date. + +Another under-the-hood change in this release is the use of the Calameres installer for Debian-Live images. If you install Debian from the Live CD, you'll see the distro-agnostic Calameres installer instead of the good old Debian nstaller. The Debian installer has quite a few more features, and it's still what you'll get if you use a net install or DVD installer, but the Calameres installer is unquestionably more newbie-friendly. It's also refreshing to see a distro that *doesn't* feel the need to roll its own installer, instead using an existing, relatively mature open source application. + +## Desktops + +If you needed proof that Wayland has really arrived, Debian 10 is here to provide it. The GNOME desktop in Debian to uses Wayland by default. When a distro as slow to adopt new technology as Debian makes something the default, it's a safe bet that whatever it is, it's ready for prime time. Stick a fork in X.org, because as far as GNOME is concerned it's dead. That said, the X.org display server is also still installed by default and available for those who'd like to use it. + +I have had no issues running GNOME under Wayland on Debian 10. This release brings GNOME 3.30, which is most notable for its speed boost. Developers from both Red Hat and Canonical put some time into fixing memory leaks and trying to make GNOME Shell faster and less resource hungry. The result is indeed a slightly speedier GNOME, though it is still not a fast or lightweight desktop by any stretch of the imagination. + +GNOME is also not what you want if you're a Debian user. It is the default desktop, as it has been for most of Debian's history, insofar as there is a default in Debian's sprawling array of installation methods, but these days it's not the best choice. + +GNOME Shell updates frequently, making major changes with nearly every release. And those releases arrive pretty regularly, nearly every six months. In the time since Debian 10 froze around GNOME 3.30 earlier this year, there's already been one new GNOME release and another will arrive in September. Will they eventually make their way into Buster's repositories? Maybe. Probably even, but it'll be a while. In my experience, GNOME highlights one of the drawback of Debian stable, it's, well, too stable. + +In many respects this is my favorite part of Debian. It doesn't change. It updates what needs to be updated and everything else can wait. + +If you'd like to tap that stability though, and set up a system that you don't have to think about at all for the next five years if you don't want to, I would suggest that the ideal desktop would mirror the distro's own conservative approach the development. Look for something with infrequent updates and when those updates come, nothing much ought to change. Bugs should be fixed, minor updates pushed out, but for the most part your system should be the same after your update as it was before. + +There are several desktops that fit this description to varying degrees, but my favorite desktop of Debian is Xfce. + +Like Debian, Xfce usually goes more than a year without a major update, often two years. When updates do arrive they're the kind you want, tons of bug fixes, speed improvements, and little tweaks rather than huge interface overhauls. Ironically, that may not be true this round, as Xfce 4.14 just arrived and makes a fairly major update to GTK 3 components. Still, while you might have to wait a little while for 4.14 to get to Debian 10, rest assured that there won't be nearly as many Xfce updates coming as what you'll get from GNOME or even KDE. + +I installed Debian using the net installer, which has a nice graphical installer, though I still opt for the text-based installer. Old habits die hard and something about the text-based installer just feels more Debian to me. Once the base system was running I added Xfce, which is currently at version 4.12. + +Debian's Xfce is rather plain, not customized in any way. It makes a stable desktop that stays out of your way though. I had no problems whatsoever with Xfce on Debian and while the update to 4.14 looks like a nice one, especially the potential speed boost, not much is going to change in terms of looks or functionality. It will arrive when Debian is ready. If that bothers you, Debian is not the distro for you. + +I was also curious about Wayland in Debian 10 though, so I ran the Sway tiling window manager for a while. I still have clipboard sharing issues under Wayland though. I could not get copy-and-paste working between Wayland and XWayland apps (Vim and a browser for instance), which is deal breaker for me. That said, the rest of my Wayland experience with Sway on Debian 10 was flawless. + +## Conclusion + +I've been using Debian 10 for three months now (yes, before it was officially released via a testing channel) and, as you would expect, it is a super solid release. This is remarkable only because I did not have the same experience at all on Debian 9. My initial foray into Debian 9 was fraught with problems and I went scurrying back to Debian 8 in a hurry. I tried again after a year and had better luck, but this time around I've had no problems at all on either the desktop or server (it's worth noting here though, before you upgrade, back up any PostgreSQL data, Debian 10 moves from PostgreSQL 9.6 to 11, a significant migration for any live servers). + +While I plan to wait for at least one point release before I test updating any production servers, Debian 10 looks to be a great release. I full expect to be running Debian 10 servers well into the mid 2020s. + +On the desktop side I still prefer Arch Linux to Debian on my main machine. This might sound like diametrically opposed distros to compare -- Debian is focused on stability and changes at a glacial pace, while Arch is a rolling release with updates on a daily basis -- but in my experience these have both been the most stable, reliable distos I've used. The chief difference is that one updates all the time to achieve that stability while other updates hardly at all. Different approaches leading to the same result. + +In the end I stick with Arch on my daily use machine, primarily because I like having the latest releases of photo and video editing software, which is hard to do on Debian. I once thought that Flatpaks, which bundle their own dependencies independent of the system, would solve this problem, but in practice I've had far more problems with Flatpaks on Debian than AUR apps on Arch. + +That said, every machine I don't touch on a daily basis, including all my servers, run Debian and will soon be running Debian 10. diff --git a/ars-technica/dell-xps13-review-2019.html b/ars-technica/dell-xps13-review-2019.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f2e4b88 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/dell-xps13-review-2019.html @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +

Dell’s XPS 13 Developer Edition, the company’s flagship Ubuntu-based machine, was recently refreshed and I was able to take one for a spin. This is the fourth round of XPS 13s I’ve tested and the closest to Linux-computing nirvana.

+

Dell’s XPS line is not the cheapest Linux option, nor is it the most configurable or user-upgradable. If any of those factors are a big part of your criteria, then this is not the laptop for you. Instead the XPS makes an excellent choice for anyone who wants hardware support from the manufacturer. Dell stands behind Linux on these machines in a way that, in my experience, few other computer makers do.

+

Still, many Linux users have a strong DIY streak and will turn up their noses at the XPS 13. After all, in a day and age when just about every laptop I test seems to run Linux fairly well right out of the box, do you need official support? If you know what you’re doing and don’t mind troubleshooting your own problems then the answer is probably not.

+

Still, if you want a computer that runs smoothly and for which you can pick up the phone and get help should you need it, the Dell XPS 13 is one the best options out there in my view. It doesn’t hurt that the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition is an great-looking, solidly-built piece of hardware. If you want your Linux rig to “just work” and be a powerful, minimalist package that weighs a mere 2.7lbs, the XPS 13 Developer Edition fits the bill.

+

Where it gets confusing is which Dell XPS 13 to consider. To judge by the number of machines and models available, Dell’s Project Sputnik, the company’s long-running effort to bring Ubuntu-based hardware to the masses, has been an unqualified success. Not only are there more models and configurations than ever, Dell keeps churning out hardware updates, usually on pace with the Windows models.

+

That’s no small feat considering that hardware has to undergo a completely different set of compatibility tests from the Windows machines. To be fair, some features have lagged behind in the Linux models, the fingerprint reader is a good example. The Windows version of the XPS 13 released in early 2019 features a fingerprint reader on the power button. The same feature has not been available in the Linux edition until now.

+

While I was testing the late 2019 Developer Edition update, Dell announced yet another update. The new 2020 version (the 10th-gen XPS 13 Developer Edition for those of you keeping track), gets Ice Lake processors with Gen11 graphics, and a new, larger screen. This latest Developer Edition will also be available with up to 32 GB of RAM, up from 16 GB in the model I tested. And, better late than never, support for the fingerprint reader coming. It won’t be available at launch, but Dell says support will arrive soon after.

+

I had a chance to play with this hardware recently at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where, Linux fans will be happy to know, it had a prominent spot on the display, right next to the Windows version. The 2020 Developer Edition won’t be for sale on Dell’s site until mid-February 2020.

+

As it has in the past, Dell will continue to sell the previous release as well, so you need to know your model numbers. The late 2019 release is the 9370, and the coming 2020 version is the tk9380.

+

What’s New: 2019 Versions

+

The XPS 13 line has stuck with largely the same design since it launched. The bezel seems to always diminish by some nearly immeasurable amount, but otherwise the hardware has looked about the same for years now.

+

The 2019 model is no exception to this trend, side-by-side it’s impossible to tell apart from the 2018 model I own, save for one little detail: no more nose cam.

+

As Ars noted last year when the Windows model was released, the webcam is no longer at the base of the screen staring straight up your nose. Instead the webcam is where it belongs, at the top of the screen.

+

The iteration of the XPS 13 line I’ve been testing (the fifth I’ve used over the year) features Intel’s Comet Lake 6-core i7-10710U processor. It’s a marginal step up from the previous version, but outside benchmarks I haven’t really noticed a huge speed increase. What I have noticed is that this version runs consistently cooler than my 2018 version (both running Ubuntu 18.04).

+

So what of those two extra cores? It may not sound like much, but if you push your processor, whether editing video, gaming, or compiling software, you’re going to want six cores. I happened to be editing a video while reviewing this laptop and, using Lightworks, what took 38 minutes to export on my 2018 XPS 13, took a mere 19 minutes on the Comet Lake chip.

+

The model Dell sent for testing had the max 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB solid state drive. As configured the test machine would set you back $1799. The lowest model, which has the 1080p display, an i5 chip, 128GB SSD and only 8GB of RAM, can be had for $975.

+

The build quality hasn’t changed, the XPS 13 remains a solidly built machine. The construction is excellent and the underlying aluminum frame provides a stiffness that makes it feel solid even though it’s so light. The finish holds up quite well too. My 2018 model has bounced around in my bag, slid across many a table, and scraped over tile counters in the kitchen, all without leaving many marks. I expect the same will be true of the latest model.

+

Though I’ve been using one for years now, the XPS 13’s InfinityEdge display still amazes me. No, it’s not OLED, but it manages to pack a 13-inch screen into a body that otherwise looks and feels more like an 11-inch laptop. Dell has always sent me the version with the 4K IPS touch panel. You can get the XPS 13 with a 1920x1080 screen, and it will get better battery life (more on that in a minute), but I think the higher res display is worth the extra money.

+

Previously there were quite a few pain points with HiDPI screens in Ubuntu, but that’s largely a thing of the past. The grub menu and boot screens are still impossibly small, and every now an then there’s an app that doesn’t scale properly – Zoom, I’m looking at you here – but by and large the combination of work done by the GNOME project, Ubuntu, and Dell have sorted out these issues.

+

I do find the brightest setting to be overwhelming when working indoors (the XPS 13 maxes out at 472 nits brightness), though it does mitigate the glare somewhat if you’re working outside. Honestly though, this is a screen you want to keep indoors – it’s very high gloss and glare is an issue outside. I tend to keep the screen at 70 percent brightness, which helps with battery life and is still plenty bright.

+

What’s Newer: XPS 13 2020 Edition

+

Around the time I sat down to write this review, Dell announced an update to the XPS 13 Developer Edition. The 2020 version features 10th generation Intel Core 10nm mobile processors along with a new, larger display.

+

The new screen. is one of those “of course” changes. Once you see it, you’ll wonder why it wasn’t that way from the beginning. Gone is the Dell logo that used the grace the wider bottom bezel. Instead you get more screen real estate with a new 16:10 aspect ratio (up from 16:9 on the 2019 and prior models).

+

It’s a small gain, but at this screen size, frankly, anything is welcome. For that alone, I would pick the 2020 model over the 2019 version (model 9370). The dimensions of the XPS 13 have been tweaked slightly as well. I couldn’t tell much difference holding it, but the keyboard keys are noticeably bigger. They’re also somewhat springier than previous versions (no it’s not the same as the 2-in-1 model the internet loves to hate on).

+

Performance Upgrades

+

I can’t speak the performance of the 2020 model since my hands-on time was limited, but the 2019 version’s 6-core Comet Lake i7 chip brings some speed improvements. Another bit of welcome news is the option to get 32 GB of RAM. Really, can you have too much RAM?

+

The other area of improvement is with battery life. Dell claims some crazy numbers for XPS battery life. The battery in the 1080p version of the XPS 13 purportedly lasts 18 hours. The 4K display is apparently a massive battery drain because I did not get anywhere near that number in testing mine. Playing back a 1080p video full screen on the loop, the 2019 model managed just over 9 hours. That’s very good, especially for Linux, but it’s nowhere near the claimed max life.

+

There are plenty of things you can do to squeeze some more life out of the battery though. Under my normal work load – terminal running tmux with vim, mpd, and mutt, a web browser (qutebrowser), and Slack – with the screen at 70 percent, and bluetooth off, I managed several hours more. So long as it was fully charged in the morning, I never worry about running the battery low in the course of a workday.

+

If you’re compiling software, editing video, or otherwise pushing the CPU, your battery life will decline. In these use cases, it may be worth considering the 1080p model, though personally I’d rather carry a cord and have the 4K screen.

+

Another change worth noting is support for WiFi 6. Yes, WiFi has version numbers now. What’s being called WiFi 6 is actually 802.11ax and is already shipping in many routers. Unfortunately I didn’t have one to test with, but in testing I’ve done seperately I’ve seen about 20-30 percent speed boosts over 802.11ac. If you have or plan to upgrade your router in the near future either of the new models will see the benefit.

+

What’s Not New: Ubuntu 18.04

+

If you want official support for Ubuntu, you’re always going to be looking at LTS releases. For the XPS 13s shipping now and in the near future that means Ubuntu 18.04 will be the default operating system.

+

While 18.04 is a solid release, recent updates, particularly 19.10, which arrived in October 2019, bring some huge performance improvements that would make these updated hardware profiles even better.

+

I looked at Ubuntu 19.10 for Ars Technica last year, but some of the highlights include much snappier GNOME desktop, experimental support for ZFS, and more default applications shipped as self-contained Snap packages.

+

Shortly after the 2020 XPS 13 is available, Ubuntu 20.04 will arrive, Canonical’s next LTS release. Everything that made 19.10 such a welcome update will be in 20.04, so there is that to look forward to. And quite frankly Dell’s hardware upgrades to the XPS 13 might well pale next to the software upgrade that 20.04 will bring. If previous Ubuntu/Dell upgrade cycles are anything to go by, look for 20.04 to come to the XPS line in late Summer of 2020.

+

I am impatient. As I always do with new XPS machines, I attempted to bring my 2019 XPS 13 up to Ubuntu 19.10. Unfortunately, for the first time I can recall when upgrading an XPS 13, I failed. Or rather I hit enough roadblocks that I gave up.

+

Somehow in the move from 18.04 to 19.04 the drivers for the Wifi card disappeared, and while the drivers for Ethernet showed up and claimed to work I could never actually connect to download any updates. I could download the drivers to another machine, copied them over, and then installed them, but honestly, it shouldn’t been that hard. I’d have a hard time suggesting anyone else attempt doing that.

+

Dell’s selling point on the XPS 13 Developer Edition is that it “just works” and to achieve that Dell does not support anything other than Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

+

I would suggest that, if you want that simplicity and guarantee, you stick with 18.04 until the official upgrades arrive. If you are prepared to resolve “just doesn’t work” scenarios, then you could try making the jump to 19.10. If you do, my suggestion would be to do a clean install rather than trying to upgrade through Ubuntu Software.

+

I should note that I installed both Fedora 32 and Arch Linux without issue. And one thing I definitely think is worth pointing out is how trivially easy it is to re-install the original system thanks to Dell’s recovery tools. The ability to recover so easily does make the XPS 13 a good system to experiment on.

+

Should You Upgrade or Wait for the 2020 model?

+

At this point I would wait two weeks for the 2020 model to arrive. Whether or not you want the slightly larger screen and new keyboard, the 2019 model is likely to drop slightly in price when the new one hits the market.

+

Unfortunately, the price of this model may not drop much and if you have the extra cash, I’d suggest going for the new screen. It doesn’t sound like much, but it surprised me. If you’re used to working on a 16:9 screen, it really does give you a noticeable bump in headroom.

+

Whichever model you decide to get you’re going to have a lot more configuration options than you used to. Dell has been expanding its Ubuntu-based offerings with every release and currently, the site offers no less than 18 different models and configurations for the XPS 13 Developer Edition. There’s a lot more opportunity to customize and tailor the hardware to your needs than there used to be.

diff --git a/ars-technica/dell-xps13-review-2019.txt b/ars-technica/dell-xps13-review-2019.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d4b44cb --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/dell-xps13-review-2019.txt @@ -0,0 +1,87 @@ +Dell's XPS 13 Developer Edition, the company's flagship Ubuntu-based machine, was recently refreshed and I was able to take one for a spin. This is the fourth round of XPS 13s I've tested and the closest to Linux-computing nirvana. + +Dell's XPS line is not the cheapest Linux option, nor is it the most configurable or user-upgradable. If any of those factors are a big part of your criteria, then this is not the laptop for you. Instead the XPS makes an excellent choice for anyone who wants hardware support from the manufacturer. Dell stands behind Linux on these machines in a way that, in my experience, few other computer makers do. + +Still, many Linux users have a strong DIY streak and will turn up their noses at the XPS 13. After all, in a day and age when just about every laptop I test seems to run Linux fairly well right out of the box, do you need official support? If you know what you're doing and don't mind troubleshooting your own problems then the answer is probably not. + +Still, if you want a computer that runs smoothly and for which you can pick up the phone and get help should you need it, the Dell XPS 13 is one the best options out there in my view. It doesn't hurt that the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition is an great-looking, solidly-built piece of hardware. If you want your Linux rig to "just work" *and* be a powerful, minimalist package that weighs a mere 2.7lbs, the XPS 13 Developer Edition fits the bill. + +Where it gets confusing is *which* Dell XPS 13 to consider. To judge by the number of machines and models available, Dell's Project Sputnik, the company's long-running effort to bring Ubuntu-based hardware to the masses, has been an unqualified success. Not only are there more models and configurations than ever, Dell keeps churning out hardware updates, usually on pace with the Windows models. + +That's no small feat considering that hardware has to undergo a completely different set of compatibility tests from the Windows machines. To be fair, some features have lagged behind in the Linux models, the fingerprint reader is a good example. The Windows version of the XPS 13 released in early 2019 features a fingerprint reader on the power button. The same feature has not been available in the Linux edition until now. + +While I was testing the late 2019 Developer Edition update, Dell announced yet another update. The new 2020 version (the 10th-gen XPS 13 Developer Edition for those of you keeping track), gets Ice Lake processors with Gen11 graphics, and a new, larger screen. This latest Developer Edition will also be available with up to 32 GB of RAM, up from 16 GB in the model I tested. And, better late than never, support for the fingerprint reader coming. It won't be available at launch, but Dell says support will arrive soon after. + +I had a chance to play with this hardware recently at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where, Linux fans will be happy to know, it had a prominent spot on the display, right next to the Windows version. The 2020 Developer Edition won't be for sale on Dell's site until mid-February 2020. + +As it has in the past, Dell will continue to sell the previous release as well, so you need to know your model numbers. The late 2019 release is the 9370, and the coming 2020 version is the tk9380. + +### What's New: 2019 Versions + +The XPS 13 line has stuck with largely the same design since it launched. The bezel seems to always diminish by some nearly immeasurable amount, but otherwise the hardware has looked about the same for years now. + +The 2019 model is no exception to this trend, side-by-side it's impossible to tell apart from the 2018 model I own, save for one little detail: no more nose cam. + +As Ars noted last year when the [Windows model](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/dell-finally-nixes-the-up-nose-webcam-in-the-new-dell-xps-13/) was released, the webcam is no longer at the base of the screen staring straight up your nose. Instead the webcam is where it belongs, at the top of the screen. + +The iteration of the XPS 13 line I've been testing (the fifth I've used over the year) features Intel's Comet Lake 6-core i7-10710U processor. It's a marginal step up from the previous version, but outside benchmarks I haven't really noticed a huge speed increase. What I have noticed is that this version runs consistently cooler than my 2018 version (both running Ubuntu 18.04). + +So what of those two extra cores? It may not sound like much, but if you push your processor, whether editing video, gaming, or compiling software, you're going to want six cores. I happened to be editing a video while reviewing this laptop and, using Lightworks, what took 38 minutes to export on my 2018 XPS 13, took a mere 19 minutes on the Comet Lake chip. + +The model Dell sent for testing had the max 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB solid state drive. As configured the test machine would set you back $1799. The lowest model, which has the 1080p display, an i5 chip, 128GB SSD and only 8GB of RAM, can be had for $975. + +The build quality hasn't changed, the XPS 13 remains a solidly built machine. The construction is excellent and the underlying aluminum frame provides a stiffness that makes it feel solid even though it's so light. The finish holds up quite well too. My 2018 model has bounced around in my bag, slid across many a table, and scraped over tile counters in the kitchen, all without leaving many marks. I expect the same will be true of the latest model. + +Though I've been using one for years now, the XPS 13's InfinityEdge display still amazes me. No, it's not OLED, but it manages to pack a 13-inch screen into a body that otherwise looks and feels more like an 11-inch laptop. Dell has always sent me the version with the 4K IPS touch panel. You can get the XPS 13 with a 1920x1080 screen, and it will get better battery life (more on that in a minute), but I think the higher res display is worth the extra money. + +Previously there were quite a few pain points with HiDPI screens in Ubuntu, but that's largely a thing of the past. The grub menu and boot screens are still impossibly small, and every now an then there's an app that doesn't scale properly -- Zoom, I'm looking at you here -- but by and large the combination of work done by the GNOME project, Ubuntu, and Dell have sorted out these issues. + +I do find the brightest setting to be overwhelming when working indoors (the XPS 13 maxes out at 472 nits brightness), though it does mitigate the glare somewhat if you're working outside. Honestly though, this is a screen you want to keep indoors -- it's very high gloss and glare is an issue outside. I tend to keep the screen at 70 percent brightness, which helps with battery life and is still plenty bright. + +### What's Newer: XPS 13 2020 Edition + +Around the time I sat down to write this review, Dell announced an update to the XPS 13 Developer Edition. The 2020 version features 10th generation Intel Core 10nm mobile processors along with a new, larger display. + +[The new screen](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/dell-updates-xps-13-laptop-with-1610-aspect-ratio-screen-ir-camera/). is one of those "of course" changes. Once you see it, you'll wonder why it wasn't that way from the beginning. Gone is the Dell logo that used the grace the wider bottom bezel. Instead you get more screen real estate with a new 16:10 aspect ratio (up from 16:9 on the 2019 and prior models). + +It's a small gain, but at this screen size, frankly, anything is welcome. For that alone, I would pick the 2020 model over the 2019 version (model 9370). The dimensions of the XPS 13 have been tweaked slightly as well. I couldn't tell much difference holding it, but the keyboard keys are noticeably bigger. They're also somewhat springier than previous versions (no it's not the same as the 2-in-1 model the internet loves to hate on). + +### Performance Upgrades + +I can't speak the performance of the 2020 model since my hands-on time was limited, but the 2019 version's 6-core Comet Lake i7 chip brings some speed improvements. Another bit of welcome news is the option to get 32 GB of RAM. Really, can you have too much RAM? + +The other area of improvement is with battery life. Dell claims some crazy numbers for XPS battery life. The battery in the 1080p version of the XPS 13 purportedly lasts 18 hours. The 4K display is apparently a massive battery drain because I did not get anywhere near that number in testing mine. Playing back a 1080p video full screen on the loop, the 2019 model managed just over 9 hours. That's very good, especially for Linux, but it's nowhere near the claimed max life. + +There are plenty of things you can do to squeeze some more life out of the battery though. Under my normal work load -- terminal running tmux with vim, mpd, and mutt, a web browser (qutebrowser), and Slack -- with the screen at 70 percent, and bluetooth off, I managed several hours more. So long as it was fully charged in the morning, I never worry about running the battery low in the course of a workday. + +If you're compiling software, editing video, or otherwise pushing the CPU, your battery life will decline. In these use cases, it may be worth considering the 1080p model, though personally I'd rather carry a cord and have the 4K screen. + +Another change worth noting is support for WiFi 6. Yes, WiFi has version numbers now. What's being called WiFi 6 is actually 802.11ax and is already shipping in many routers. Unfortunately I didn't have one to test with, but in testing I've done seperately I've seen about 20-30 percent speed boosts over 802.11ac. If you have or plan to upgrade your router in the near future either of the new models will see the benefit. + +### What's Not New: Ubuntu 18.04 + +If you want official support for Ubuntu, you're always going to be looking at LTS releases. For the XPS 13s shipping now and in the near future that means Ubuntu 18.04 will be the default operating system. + +While 18.04 is a [solid release](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/05/ubuntu-18-04-the-return-of-a-familiar-interface-marks-the-best-ubuntu-in-years/), recent updates, particularly 19.10, which arrived in October 2019, bring some huge performance improvements that would make these updated hardware profiles even better. + +I looked at Ubuntu [19.10 for Ars Technica last year](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/ubuntu-19-10-quite-simply-the-best-ubuntu-canonical-has-ever-released/), but some of the highlights include much snappier GNOME desktop, experimental support for ZFS, and more default applications shipped as self-contained Snap packages. + +Shortly after the 2020 XPS 13 is available, Ubuntu 20.04 will arrive, Canonical's next LTS release. Everything that made 19.10 such a welcome update will be in 20.04, so there is that to look forward to. And quite frankly Dell's hardware upgrades to the XPS 13 might well pale next to the software upgrade that 20.04 will bring. If previous Ubuntu/Dell upgrade cycles are anything to go by, look for 20.04 to come to the XPS line in late Summer of 2020. + +I am impatient. As I always do with new XPS machines, I attempted to bring my 2019 XPS 13 up to Ubuntu 19.10. Unfortunately, for the first time I can recall when upgrading an XPS 13, I failed. Or rather I hit enough roadblocks that I gave up. + +Somehow in the move from 18.04 to 19.04 the drivers for the Wifi card disappeared, and while the drivers for Ethernet showed up and claimed to work I could never actually connect to download any updates. I could download the drivers to another machine, copied them over, and then installed them, but honestly, it shouldn't been that hard. I'd have a hard time suggesting anyone else attempt doing that. + +Dell's selling point on the XPS 13 Developer Edition is that it "just works" and to achieve that Dell does not support anything other than Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. + +I would suggest that, if you want that simplicity and guarantee, you stick with 18.04 until the official upgrades arrive. If you are prepared to resolve "just doesn't work" scenarios, then you could try making the jump to 19.10. If you do, my suggestion would be to do a clean install rather than trying to upgrade through Ubuntu Software. + +I should note that I installed both Fedora 32 and Arch Linux without issue. And one thing I definitely think is worth pointing out is how trivially easy it is to re-install the original system thanks to Dell's recovery tools. The ability to recover so easily does make the XPS 13 a good system to experiment on. + +### Should You Upgrade or Wait for the 2020 model? + +At this point I would wait two weeks for the 2020 model to arrive. Whether or not you want the slightly larger screen and new keyboard, the 2019 model is likely to drop slightly in price when the new one hits the market. + +Unfortunately, the price of this model may not drop much and if you have the extra cash, I'd suggest going for the new screen. It doesn't sound like much, but it surprised me. If you're used to working on a 16:9 screen, it really does give you a noticeable bump in headroom. + +Whichever model you decide to get you're going to have a lot more configuration options than you used to. Dell has been expanding its Ubuntu-based offerings with every release and currently, the site offers no less than 18 different models and configurations for the XPS 13 Developer Edition. There's a lot more opportunity to customize and tailor the hardware to your needs than there used to be. diff --git a/ars-technica/invoices/2014-06-29_ars-invoice-02.rtf b/ars-technica/invoices/2014-06-29_ars-invoice-02.rtf new file mode 100644 index 0000000..07197ec --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/invoices/2014-06-29_ars-invoice-02.rtf @@ -0,0 +1,77 @@ +{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1265\cocoasubrtf200 +{\fonttbl\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 ArialMT;\f1\froman\fcharset0 TimesNewRomanPSMT;} +{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;} +{\info +{\keywords }}\vieww12240\viewh15840\viewkind1 +\deftab720 +\pard\tx709\tx1418\tx2127\tx2836\tx3545\tx4254\tx4963\tx5672\tx6381\tx7090\tx7799\tx8508\tx9217\pardeftab720\sl300\pardirnatural\qr + +\f0\b\fs24 \cf0 Scott Gilbertson\ +412 Holman Ave\ +Athens, GA 30601\ +706 438 4297\ +luxagraf@gmail.com +\f1\b0 +\f0\b \ +6/30/14 +\f1\b0 \ +\pard\tx709\tx1418\tx2127\tx2836\tx3545\tx4254\tx4963\tx5672\tx6381\tx7090\tx7799\tx8508\tx9217\pardeftab720\sl300\pardirnatural\qj +\cf0 \ +\ + +\f0 Ars Technica +\f1 \ +\pard\tx709\tx1418\tx2127\tx2836\tx3545\tx4254\tx4963\tx5672\tx6381\tx7090\tx7799\tx8508\tx9217\pardeftab720\sl300\pardirnatural +\cf0 \ +\ +\ +\ + +\f0 Invoice Number: +\b 002 +\f1\b0 \ +\pard\tx709\tx1418\tx2127\tx2836\tx3545\tx4254\tx4963\tx5672\tx6381\tx7090\tx7799\tx8508\tx9217\pardeftab720\sl300\pardirnatural\qc +\cf0 \ +\pard\tx709\tx1418\tx2127\tx2836\tx3545\tx4254\tx4963\tx5672\tx6381\tx7090\tx7799\tx8508\tx9217\pardeftab720\sl300\pardirnatural +\cf0 \ +\pard\tx709\tx1418\tx2127\tx2836\tx3545\tx4254\tx4963\tx5672\tx6381\tx7090\tx7799\tx8508\tx9217\pardeftab720\sl300\pardirnatural\qj + +\f0 \cf0 Article: +\b Mint 17 is the perfect place for Linux-ers to wait out Ubuntu uncertainty\ + +\b0 Word count: +\b 3196\ + +\b0 Rate of Pay: +\b $.30/word +\b0 \ +Total: +\b $1281.60\ +\ +\ +\ +\pard\tx709\tx1418\tx2127\tx2836\tx3545\tx4254\tx4963\tx5672\tx6381\tx7090\tx7799\tx8508\tx9217\pardeftab720\sl300\sa283\pardirnatural +\cf0 Total for Invoice: $958.80 +\f1\b0 \ +\pard\tx709\tx1418\tx2127\tx2836\tx3545\tx4254\tx4963\tx5672\tx6381\tx7090\tx7799\tx8508\tx9217\pardeftab720\sl300\pardirnatural + +\f0 \cf0 Bank: SchoolsFirstFCU +\f1 \ + +\f0 Address: +\f1 P.O. Box 11547\ +Santa Ana, CA 92711-1547 \ +\ +\ + +\f0 Account Name: Checking\ +\pard\tx709\tx1418\tx2127\tx2836\tx3545\tx4254\tx4963\tx5672\tx6381\tx7090\tx7799\tx8508\tx9217\pardeftab720\sl300\pardirnatural\qj +\cf0 Bank account number:0172510703 +\f1 +\f0 \ +Bank routing number: 322282001 +\f1 +\f0 \ + +\f1 \ +} \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/ars-technica/invoices/paid/2014-05-02_ars-invoice-01.rtf b/ars-technica/invoices/paid/2014-05-02_ars-invoice-01.rtf new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d3e8f36 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/invoices/paid/2014-05-02_ars-invoice-01.rtf @@ -0,0 +1,82 @@ +{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1265\cocoasubrtf190 +{\fonttbl\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 ArialMT;\f1\froman\fcharset0 TimesNewRomanPSMT;} +{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;\red0\green0\blue0;} +{\info +{\title } +{\subject } +{\author } +{\*\company } +{\keywords }}\vieww12240\viewh15840\viewkind1 +\deftab720 +\pard\tx709\tx1418\tx2127\tx2836\tx3545\tx4254\tx4963\tx5672\tx6381\tx7090\tx7799\tx8508\tx9217\pardeftab720\sl300\pardirnatural\qr + +\f0\b\fs24 \cf2 Scott Gilbertson\ +412 Holman Ave\ +Athens, GA 30601\ +706 438 4297\ +luxagraf@gmail.com +\f1\b0 +\f0\b \ +5/02/14 +\f1\b0 \ +\pard\tx709\tx1418\tx2127\tx2836\tx3545\tx4254\tx4963\tx5672\tx6381\tx7090\tx7799\tx8508\tx9217\pardeftab720\sl300\pardirnatural\qj +\cf2 \ +\ + +\f0 Ars Technica +\f1 \cf0 \ +\pard\tx709\tx1418\tx2127\tx2836\tx3545\tx4254\tx4963\tx5672\tx6381\tx7090\tx7799\tx8508\tx9217\pardeftab720\sl300\pardirnatural +\cf0 \ +\ +\cf2 \ +\ + +\f0 Invoice Number: +\b 001 +\f1\b0 \ +\pard\tx709\tx1418\tx2127\tx2836\tx3545\tx4254\tx4963\tx5672\tx6381\tx7090\tx7799\tx8508\tx9217\pardeftab720\sl300\pardirnatural\qc +\cf2 \ +\pard\tx709\tx1418\tx2127\tx2836\tx3545\tx4254\tx4963\tx5672\tx6381\tx7090\tx7799\tx8508\tx9217\pardeftab720\sl300\pardirnatural +\cf2 \ +\pard\tx709\tx1418\tx2127\tx2836\tx3545\tx4254\tx4963\tx5672\tx6381\tx7090\tx7799\tx8508\tx9217\pardeftab720\sl300\pardirnatural\qj + +\f0 \cf2 Article: +\b Ubuntu 14.04 review: Missing the boat on big changes\ + +\b0 Word count: +\b 4272\ +\pard\tx709\tx1418\tx2127\tx2836\tx3545\tx4254\tx4963\tx5672\tx6381\tx7090\tx7799\tx8508\tx9217\pardeftab720\sl300\pardirnatural\qj + +\b0 \cf0 Rate of Pay: +\b $.30/word +\b0 \cf2 \ +Total: +\b $1281.60\ +\ +\ +\ +\pard\tx709\tx1418\tx2127\tx2836\tx3545\tx4254\tx4963\tx5672\tx6381\tx7090\tx7799\tx8508\tx9217\pardeftab720\sl300\sa283\pardirnatural +\cf2 Total for Invoice: $1281.60 +\f1\b0 \ +\pard\tx709\tx1418\tx2127\tx2836\tx3545\tx4254\tx4963\tx5672\tx6381\tx7090\tx7799\tx8508\tx9217\pardeftab720\sl300\pardirnatural + +\f0 \cf2 Bank: SchoolsFirstFCU +\f1 \ + +\f0 Address: +\f1 P.O. Box 11547\ +Santa Ana, CA 92711-1547 \ +\ +\ + +\f0 Account Name: Checking\ +\pard\tx709\tx1418\tx2127\tx2836\tx3545\tx4254\tx4963\tx5672\tx6381\tx7090\tx7799\tx8508\tx9217\pardeftab720\sl300\pardirnatural\qj +\cf2 Bank account number:0172510703 +\f1 +\f0 \ +Bank routing number: 322282001 +\f1 +\f0 \ + +\f1 \ +} \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/ars-technica/published/allaregreen.html b/ars-technica/published/allaregreen.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9942738 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/allaregreen.html @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +

Nicholas Rubin, a 16-year-old programmer from Seattle, has created a browser add-on that makes it incredibly easy to see the influence of money in U.S. politics.

+

Rubin calls the add-on Greenhouse and it does something so brilliantly simple that once you use it you'll wonder why news sites didn't think of this themselves.

+

You can install Greenhouse for Firefox, Chrome and Safari over at allaregreen.us.

+

Greenhouse pulls in campaign contribution data for every Senator and Representative, including the total amount of money received, as well as a breakdown by industry and size of donation. It then combines this with a parser that finds the names of Senators and Representatives in the current page and highlights them. Hover your mouse over the highlighted names and it displays their top campaign contributors.

+

Greenhouse adds another layer to the news, showing you the story behind the story. In politics, as in many other things, if you want to know the why behind the what, you need to follow the money. Somewhat depressingly, in politics it seems that it's money all the way down.

+

For example, suppose you read this story in the New York Times, in which three Senators take G.M. to task for failing to recall millions of small cars. What do the three have in common? Just that their top campaign donors are lawyers and law firms.

+

Or try Greenhouse on this story on House Republicans who think the Affordable Health Care Act is an illegal overreach by President Barack Obama. Greenhouse will highlight six names in that story. All but one get the majority of their campaign funds from a combination of two groups -- health professionals and the pharmaceutical industry.

+ +[image="screenshot01.png" caption="Greenhouse in action. Opposed to Health Are reform? Check. Primarily funded by Healthcare Industry? Check."] + +

Cynical yet? No? There's plenty more examples; follow the [@allaregreen](https://twitter.com/allaregreen) Twitter account for your daily dose of money in U.S. politics. As allaregreen.us puts it, playing of the color encoding of U.S. politics: "Some are red. Some are blue. All are green."

+

There is one ray of hope in Greenhouse's data. Near the top of the panel it displays you'll see the percentage of contributions under $200. In other words, the percentage of contributions from people like you and me. There's also a small badge indicating the member's position on campaign finance reform.

+

For his part Rubin says building and using the add-on hasn't made him cynical. "Actually, I think Greenhouse is making me hopeful," Rubin said when I asked about cynicism in U.S. politics. "I've received such great feedback from people around the world... people want transparency like this and Greenhouse may actually play a role in the solution."

+

Among the early users offering positive feedback is Harvard Law professor and author of Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It, Lawrence Lessig, who calls Greenhouse "easily the coolest plugin that I use".

+

Indeed Greenhouse does something most attempts at transparency do not -- it gives context to data. Transparency in government is good, few would argue otherwise, but as Lessig wrote recently on his blog, "merely making data available isn't enough to deal with an underlying corruption problem."

+

Open government data tends to be very big data with little context to it. For example, all the data Greenhouse uses comes from opensecrets.org, which has had that data available for years. Chances are though, you've never bothered to dig through opensecrets.org and follow the money. By taking that data and injecting it into the context of the news, Rubin has managed to turn raw information into useful knowledge.

+

Did I mention Rubin is just 16?

+

The idea for Greenhouse came from a presentation Rubin gave back in 7th grade when a teacher assigned him to the topic of Corporate Personhood and campaign finance. Rubin came away from that experience thinking that more people should know about how corporations run U.S. politics. But, "the information about sources of funding ... wasn't simple and easily accessible when people needed it." Later when Rubin started to teach himself to code he decided to try to combine the two interests and Greenhouse was born.

+

Rubin plans to keep expanding Greenhouse. He's looking to build a sort of reverse Greenhouse -- a tool that would, for example, highlight all mentions of Google on a webpage and show which campaigns the company contributes to -- as well as a tool for other countries, though the latter will depend on whether or not the data is actually available. He also hopes to build Greenhouse into an interactive community rather than simply a browser add-on.

+

If you want to participate or just follow along, grab the add-on and follow @allaregreen on Twitter.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/allaregreen.us.txt b/ars-technica/published/allaregreen.us.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7b316db --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/allaregreen.us.txt @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +Nicholas Rubin, a 16-year-old programmer from Seattle, has created a browser add-on that makes it incredibly easy to see the influence of money in U.S. politics. + +Rubin calls the add-on Greenhouse and it does something so brilliantly simple that once you use it you'll wonder why news sites didn't think of this themselves. + +You can install Greenhouse for Firefox, Chrome and Safari over at [allaregreen.us](http://allaregreen.us/). + +Greenhouse pulls in campaign contribution data for every Senator and Representative, including the total amount of money received, as well as a breakdown by industry and size of donation. It then combines this with a parser that finds the names of Senators and Representatives in the current page and highlights them. Hover your mouse over the highlighted names and it displays their top campaign contributors. + +Greenhouse adds another layer to the news, showing you the story behind the story. In politics, as in many other things, if you want to know the why behind the what, you need to follow the money. Somewhat depressingly, in politics it seems that it's money all the way down. + +For example, suppose you read [this story](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/business/senate-hearing-on-general-motors.html) in the New York Times, in which three Senators take G.M. to task for failing to recall millions of small cars. What do the three have in common? Just that their top campaign donors are lawyers and law firms. + +Or try Greenhouse on this story on House Republicans who think the Affordable Health Care Act is an [illegal overreach](http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/house-republicans-obamacare-lawsuit-108957.html) by President Barack Obama. Greenhouse will highlight six names in that story. All but one get the majority of their campaign funds from a combination of two groups -- health professionals and the pharmaceutical industry. + +[image="screenshot01.png" caption="Greenhouse in action. Opposed to Health Are reform? Check. Primarily funded by Healthcare Industry? Check."] + +Cynical yet? No? There's plenty more examples; follow the [@allaregreen](https://twitter.com/allaregreen) Twitter account for your daily dose of money in U.S. politics. As allaregreen.us puts it, playing of the color encoding of U.S. politics: "Some are red. Some are blue. All are green." + +There is one ray of hope in Greenhouse's data. Near the top of the panel it displays you'll see the percentage of contributions under $200. In other words, the percentage of contributions from people like you and me. There's also a small badge indicating the member's position on campaign finance reform. + +For his part Rubin says building and using the add-on hasn't made him cynical. "Actually, I think Greenhouse is making me hopeful," Rubin said when I asked about cynicism in U.S. politics. "I've received such great feedback from people around the world... people want transparency like this and Greenhouse may actually play a role in the solution." + +Among the early users offering positive feedback is Harvard Law professor and author of Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It, Lawrence Lessig, who [calls Greenhouse](http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/88073919937/incredibly-cool-politic-code-get-it) "easily the coolest plugin that I use". + +Indeed Greenhouse does something most attempts at transparency do not -- it gives context to data. Transparency in government is good, few would argue otherwise, but as Lessig [wrote recently on his blog](http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/93500567957/escapethe1990s), "merely making data available isn't enough to deal with an underlying corruption problem." + +Open government data tends to be very big data with little context to it. For example, all the data Greenhouse uses comes from [opensecrets.org](http://www.opensecrets.org/), which has had that data available for years. Chances are though, you've never bothered to dig through opensecrets.org and follow the money. By taking that data and injecting it into the context of the news, Rubin has managed to turn raw information into useful knowledge. + +Did I mention Rubin is just 16? + +The idea for Greenhouse came from a presentation Rubin gave back in 7th grade when a teacher assigned him to the topic of [Corporate Personhood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Corporations_as_persons_in_the_United_States) and campaign finance. Rubin came away from that experience thinking that more people should know about how corporations run U.S. politics. But, "the information about sources of funding ... wasn't simple and easily accessible when people needed it." Later when Rubin started to teach himself to code he decided to try to combine the two interests and Greenhouse was born. + +Rubin plans to keep expanding Greenhouse. He's looking to build a sort of reverse Greenhouse -- a tool that would, for example, highlight all mentions of Google on a webpage and show which campaigns the company contributes to -- as well as a tool for other countries, though the latter will depend on whether or not the data is actually available. He also hopes to build Greenhouse into an interactive community rather than simply a browser add-on. + +If you want to participate or just follow along, grab the add-on and follow @allaregreen on Twitter. + diff --git a/ars-technica/published/allaregreennotes.txt b/ars-technica/published/allaregreennotes.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c5c3fe4 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/allaregreennotes.txt @@ -0,0 +1,53 @@ + + +Greenhouse + + + +It sounds cynical, but if you want to understand why politicians make the decisions they make and vote the way they vote you just need to follow the money. + +For every story there is a story behind that story. + + +Robert Anton Wilson often used a playful idea of seeing the "fnords", that is seeing the story behind the story. + + +In other words Greenhouse isn't doing anything thousands of other people couldn't have done. But they didn't. Nicholas Rubin did. + +Rubin has received a lot of attention from the press in part because he's just 16 years old, but that catchy factoid sometimes hides just how fantastically useful Greenhouse is regardless of who built it and how old they might be. It's fantastically useful if you want to see the threads behind the news, to follow the money as it were. + + + + + +1. how did you come up with the idea for Greenhouse? + +Corporate personhood and + +(if he talks about corporate personhood, mention that most people don't know that, can he expand a bit on that idea) + +1a) ask about relationship to Lessig. + +2. One of the things I found interesting about Greenhouse is that on one hand staring this data in face can make you cynical about politics, how did you feel about that? Has it been depressing to discover the sort of almost 1 to 1 equation that seems to exist between money and the way politicians vote on issues? + +2a) at the top there you have a little ray of hope -- AKA, the contributions from ordinary people +like you and I. Was that there from the beginning? and do you see those numbers +as a kind of solution? (can follow up with Lessigs Grant and Franklin proposal + +3. In reading some of the past coverage of greenhouse I noticed that you had a lot of people from all sides of the political spectrum -- pretty unusual to have Tea Party supports say nice things said about at the same time anti-Tea PArty supporters are saying the same thing. It's a bit like uncovering the money might unite some pretty dissparate ideologies around a common goal -- have you found that to be true, +that money is the common enemy of pretty much everyone seeking political reform? + +3a) what's the most egregious example you know of -- who is the most paid for politician in america? + +4. What are your goals for greenhouse? + +5. i noticed that cory doctorow suggested a sort of reverse tool, where any time the name of a company or individual who makes massive donations comes up it shows the politicians who benefit from that money. Is there data out there for that sort of thing? + +6. Can you share any plans for the future of greenhouse? + +Lessig said recently on his blog that " +Opensecrets.org can tell you. Next time you read an article about how you local representatives voted, head over to opensecrets.org and check to see if the vote happens to -- coincidentally I'm sure -- to benefit the your representative's top donors in any way. Congrats, you've followed the money to the why behind the what. + + + +In this case the "green" in Greenhouse refers to money, as in campaign contributions and how they influence the U.S. political system. The download page gives away the answer in its slogan -- "some are red, some are blue, all are green". diff --git a/ars-technica/published/amp.html b/ars-technica/published/amp.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..884a190 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/amp.html @@ -0,0 +1,85 @@ +

There's a story going around in these days that the web is too slow, especially over mobile networks. It's a pretty good story. It's a perpetual story. The web, while certainly improved from the days of 14.4k modems, has never been as fast as we want it to be, which is to say the web has never been instant.

+

Curiously though, rather than focusing on possible cures like increasing network speeds, finding ways to decrease network latency or even speed up web browsers, the latest version of the "web-is-too-slow" story turns the blame on the web itself. And perhaps more pointedly, the people who make it.

+

Certainly there is some truth to the slow web story. The average web page has been increasing in size at a fantastic rate. In January of 2012 the average page tracked by HTTPArchive transferred 1239kb and made 86 requests. Fast forward to September 2015 and the numbers are 2162kb of data and 103 requests. Overall size doesn't directly correlate to page load time, but it is a pretty good indicator that the web is slow and things are actually getting worse, not better.

+

While the web is slow and getting slower, native mobile applications are getting faster. Mobile devices get more powerful with every release cycle and applications take advantage of that. Apps get faster, the web gets slower.

+

This, so the story goes, is why Facebook must invent Facebook Instant Articles, why Apple News must come to exist and why Google must now go and create Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). Users have come to expect that everything should be as fast as native apps so Facebook, Apple and Google need to make sure the web feels the same way.

+

Google is late to the game, but its new Accelerated Mobile Pages project has the same goals as Facebook and Apple's efforts -- make the web feel like a native application on mobile devices. It's worth noting that all three companies seem utterly unconcerned with speeding up the web on the desktop.

+

All of these efforts -- Instant Articles, Apple News and AMP -- are to help speed up our experience of the web on mobile devices by stripping out all that junk that messy web developers and publishers have included in their websites. All those ads, all those images, all those interactive graphics, all those comment sections, all those extras that take too long to load.

+

Instead, Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News and now AMP will present stripped down pages that load quickly even over the paltry 3G speeds still found in much of the United States.

+

In the case of AMP there are apparently two things playing the role of villains in the "web is too slow" story: JavaScript and advertisements that use JavaScript.

+

It sounds like a pretty good story. It has good guys (Google) and bad guys (everyone not using Google Ads) and it's true to most of our experiences. Who isn't sick of intrusive ads and terrible JavaScript libraries begging for us to sign up for some terrible newsletter?

+

But this story has some fundamental problems. For example, Google owns the largest ad server network on the web, if ads are the problem, why doesn't Google get to work speeding up the ads? More on that in a bit.

+

But first, AMP.

+

What is AMP?

+

To understand AMP first you need to understand Facebook's Instant Articles. Instant Articles uses RSS and standard HTML tags to create an optimized, slightly stripped down version of an article. Facebook then allows for some extra rich-content like auto-playing video or audio clips. Despite this Facebook claims Instant Articles are up to 10 times faster than their siblings on the open web. Some of that speed gain comes from stripping things out, some likely comes from aggressive caching.

+

But the key is that Instant Articles are only available via Facebook's mobile apps and only to established publishers who sign a deal with Facebook. That means reading articles from Facebook's Instant Article partners like National Geographic, BBC, Buzzfeed and others is a faster, richer multimedia experience than those same articles when they appear on the publisher's site.

+

Apple News appears to work roughly the same way, taking RSS feeds from publishers and then optimizing the content for delivery within Apple's application.

+

All this app-based content delivery cuts out the web. That's a problem for the web and by extension, Google, which leads us to Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages project.

+

Oddly though, unlike Facebook Articles and Apple News, AMP eschews standards like RSS and HTML in favor of its own little modified subset of HTML. AMP HTML looks a lot like HTML without the bells and whistles. In fact, if you head over to the AMP project announcement you'll see an AMP page rendered in your browser. It looks like any other page on the web.

+

AMP markup uses a basic set of tags from HTML. An extremely limited set of tags. Form tags? Nope. Audio or video tags? Nope. Embed? Certainly not. Script tags? Nope. There's a very short list of the HTML tags in allowed in AMP documents available over on the project page. There's also no JavaScript allowed. Those ads and tracking scripts will never be part of AMP documents (don't worry, Google will still be tracking you).

+

AMP defines several of its own tags, things like amp-youtube, amp-ad or amp-pixel. The extra tags are part of what's known as web components, which is not now, but likely will eventually be a web standard (or possibly ActiveX part 2, only the future knows for sure).

+

So far AMP probably sounds like a pretty good idea to most readers. Faster pages, no tracking scripts, no JavaScript at all so no overlay ads about signing up for newsletters or downloading apps no one needs.

+

But then there are some problematic design choices in AMP. The more you look at AMP the less it looks like a good idea.

+

Let's start with some of the poor technical decisions in the current incarnation of AMP. Or at least they're poor decisions if you like the open web and the current HTML standards.

+

AMP re-invents the wheel for images using a custom component amp-img instead of HTML's img tag (not only does Google ignore RSS, JSON and RDF, it ignores HTML). AMP doesn't stop there. It does the same things with amp-audio and amp-video rather than the HTML standard audio and video. AMP developers argue that this allows AMP to only serve images when required, which isn't possible with the HTML img tag. That, however, is a limitation of web browsers, not HTML itself. AMP also very clearly has treated accessibility as an after thought, or more likely, not a thought at all. You lose more than just HTML tags with AMP.

+

In other words AMP is technically half baked at best. The good news is that AMP developers are listening. One of the worst things about AMP's initial code was the decision to disable pinch and zoom on articles. Thankfully Google has reversed course and eliminated the tag that prevented pinch and zoom.

+

There are also dozens of other open issues calling out some of the most egregious decisions in AMP's technical design. There are already open issues surrounding nearly every technical shortcoming mentioned in this article.

+

But the markup that is AMP is really only one part of the picture. After all, as pointed out above, if all they really wanted to do is strip out all the enhancements and just present the content of a page there are quite a few already existing ways to do that, including RSS, JSON and RDF. In fact, Google used to have an RSS reader that did just this. So why AMP?

+

Speeding things up for users is a nice side benefit, but the point of AMP, like Facebook Articles, is to lock in users to a particular site/format/service. In this case the users aren't you and I reading, it's the publishers putting the content on the web.

+

It's the Ads Stupid

+

The goal of Facebook Instant Articles is to keep you on Facebook. No need to explore the larger web when it's all right there in Facebook, especially when it loads so much faster in the Facebook app than it does in a browser on the web.

+

AMP exists because Google recognized what a threat Facebook Instant Articles is to Google's ability to serve ads.

+

This is why it's called Accelerated Mobile Pages. Sorry desktop users, Google already knows how to get ads to you.

+

If you watch the AMP demo, which shows how AMP might work when it's integrated into search results next year, you'll notice that the viewer effectively never leaves Google. The AMP pages are laid over the Google search page much the way outside webpages are loaded in native applications on most mobile platforms. The experience from the user's point of view is just like the experience of a mobile app.

+

Google needs the web to be on par with the speeds in mobile apps. Google has been trying for some time to speed up the web, but as the stats at the start of this piece indicate, it hasn't really worked.

+

To its credit the company has some of the smartest engineers around working on just this problem. Google has made one of the fastest web browsers around (if not the fastest) and in doing so has pushed other vendors to speed up their browsers as well. Since Chrome debuted web browsers have become faster and better at an astonishing rate. Score one for Google.

+

It's also been touting the benefits of mobile-friendly pages, first by labeling them as such in search results on mobile devices and then later by ranking mobile friendly pages above not-so-friendly ones when other factors are the same. It's also been quick to adopt speed improving new HTML standards like the responsive images effort, which was first supported by Chrome. Score another one or two for Google.

+

The company has also been championing speed through its various page speed tools and has even gone so far as to include speed as a factor in search engine rankings. And yet, look at those page size charts again. Pages keep getting bigger, networks speeds do not. So the web keeps slowing down. Score one for nobody.

+

In other words Google has tried just about everything within its considerable power as a search monopoly to get web developers and publishers large and small to speed up their pages.

+

It just isn't working.

+

Content Blockers 'comin'

+

Google is hardly alone in wanting the web to be fast. You and I want that too. And when web pages slow down we go looking for a way to speed them up again.

+

One increasingly popular reaction to slow web pages are content blockers, typically in the form of browser add-ons that stop pages from loading anything but the primary content of the page. Content blockers have been around for over a decade now (No Script first appeared for Firefox in 2005), but their use has always been limited. That changed with Apple's iOS 9, which for the first time has put content blocking tools in the hands of millions.

+

It's worth noting that the existence of content blockers is not entirely the result of slow websites, much of the appeal also lies in blocking intrusive ads and stopping the intrusive tracking which often comes with those ads.

+

But it's those two things, advertisements and trackers -- which typically mean loading at least a few, and in the most egregious examples dozens, of third-party scripts -- that form no small part of why even some of the web's most popular sites are, frankly, dog slow.

+

And dog slow sites are a problem for Google. If a site takes too long to load users leave and never see those Google ads. But dog slow sites are even more of a problem if sites are only dog slow in the web browser -- where Google has free reign -- and not in native apps like Facebook and Apple News, where Google has limited, if any access at all. Given a choice between fast walled gardens and slow open web Google is worried that most of us will chose fast walled garden.

+

Combine all the eyeballs using iOS with content blockers, reading the web via Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News and you suddenly have a whole lot of eyeballs that will never see any Google ads. That's a problem for Google, one that AMP is designed to fix.

+

AMP: Static Pages that Require Google's JavaScript

+

The most basic thing you can do on the web is create a flat HTML file that sits on a server and contains some basic tags. This type of page will always be lightning fast. It's also insanely simple. This is literally all you need to do to put information on the web. There's no need for JavaScript, no need even for CSS.

+

This is more or less what AMP wants you to create (AMP doesn't care if your pages are actually static or -- more likely -- generated from a database, the point is what's rendered is static).

+

But then AMP wants to turn around and require that pages include a third-party script in order to load. AMP deliberately sets the opacity of the entire page to 0 until the script loads and only then is the page revealed.

+

As developer Justin Avery asks, "surely the document itself is going to be faster than loading a library to try and make it load faster." Pinboard.in creator Maciej Cegłowski did just that, putting together a demo page that duplicates the AMP-based AMP homepage, but without that JavaScript. Over a 3G connection Cegłowski's page fills the viewport in 1.9 seconds. The AMP homepage takes 9.2 seconds.

+

JavaScript slows down page load times, even when that JavaScript is part of Google's plan to speed up the web.

+

Ironically, for something that is ostensibly trying to encourage better behavior from developers and publishers, this means that pages using progressive enhancement, keeping scripts to a minimum and aggressively caching content -- in other words sites following best practices and trying to do things right -- will potentially be slower in AMP.

+

In the end, developers and publishers who have been following best practices for web development and don't rely on dozens of tracking networks and ads have little to gain from AMP.

+

Unfortunately, the publishers building their sites like that right now are few and far between. Most publishers have much to gain from generating AMP pages -- at least in terms of speed. Google says that AMP can improve page speed index scores by between 15-85%. That huge range is likely a direct result of how many third-party scripts are being loaded on some sites.

+

The dependency on JavaScript has another detrimental effect, AMP documents depend on JavaScript, which is to say that if their (albeit small) script fails to load for some reason -- you're going through a tunnel on a train, only have a flaky one bar connection at the beach or any other myriad familiar mobile web scenarios -- the AMP page is completely blank.

+

When an AMP page fails, it fails spectacularly. Google knows better than this. Even Gmail still offers a pure HTML-based fallback version of itself.

+

AMP for Publishers

+

Why require a bit of JavaScript to load what amounts to one of the simplest possible pages on the web? Well, the developers would argue (correctly) that it's needed to parse, among other things, those amp-img, amp-youtube and other non-standard elements.

+

It also creates a kind of lock-in. Not nearly the sort of lock-in that publishers get into with Facebook Instant Articles, AMP is after all available for everyone, not just big name publishers who sign a deal with Google.

+

In this deal, all big media has to do is give up their ad networks. And their interactive maps. And their data visualizations. And their comment systems. And their community of readers.

+

So why would publishers want to use AMP? Google, while its influence has dipped a tad across industries (as Facebook and Twitter continue to drive more traffic), is still a powerful driver of traffic. When Google promises more eyeballs on their stories, big media listens.

+

Unlike Facebook Instant Articles though, this deal isn't just for big media, your WordPress blog can get in on the stripped down action as well.

+

Given that WordPress powers roughly 24 percent of all sites on the web, having an easy way to generate AMP documents from WordPress means a huge boost in adoption for AMP. It's certainly possible to build fast websites using WordPress, but it's also easy to do the opposite. WordPress plugins often have dramatic and negative impact on load times. It isn't uncommon to see a WordPress site loading not just one, but often several external JavaScript libraries because the user installed 3 plugins that each used a different library.

+

AMP neatly solves that problem by stripping everything out.

+

Why would anyone want to do this? Well, most probably wouldn't want to do just this. That is, AMP isn't trying to get rid of the web as we know it, it just wants to create a parallel one.

+

Publishers will not stop generating regular pages, they will simply also generate AMP files, usually, judging by the early adopter examples, by appending /amp to the end of the URL.

+

The AMP page and canonical page would reference each other through standard HTML tags. User agents could then pick and choose between them, that is, Google's web crawler might grab the AMP page, but desktop Firefox might hit the AMP page and redirect to the canonical URL.

+

On one hand what this amounts to is that, after years of telling the web to stop making m. mobile-specific websites, Google is telling the web to make /amp-specific mobile pages. Potato, potato.

+

On the other hand this nudges publishers toward an idea that's big in the IndieWeb movement: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, or POSSE for short.

+

The idea is own the canonical copy of your content on your own site, but then send that content everywhere you can. Or rather, everywhere you want to reach your readers. Facebook Instant Article? Sure, hook up the RSS feed. Apple News? Send the feed over there too. AMP? Sure, generate an AMP page. No need to stop there either, tap the new Medium API and half a dozen others as well.

+

Reading is a fragmented experience. Some people will love reading on the web, some via RSS in their favorite reader, some in Facebook Instant Articles, some via AMP pages on Twitter, some via Lynx in their terminal running on a restored TRS-80. The beauty of the POSSE approach is that you can reach them all from a single, canonical source.

+

AMP and the Open Web

+

AMP is not going to help the open web. With luck though, it won't hurt it either, which isn't true of either of its forerunners.

+

If you want to be optimistic, you could look at AMP as the carrot that Google has been looking for in its effort to speed up the web.

+

As noted web developer (and AMP optimist) Jeremy Keith writes in a piece on AMP, "my hope is that the current will flow in both directions. As well as publishers creating AMP versions of their pages in order to appease Google, perhaps they will start to ask 'Why can't our regular pages be this fast?' By showing that there is life beyond big bloated invasive web pages, perhaps the AMP project will work as a demo of what the whole web could be."

+

Not everyone is that optimistic about AMP though. Developer and Author Tim Kadlec writes, "[AMP] doesn't feel like something helping the open web so much as it feels like something bringing a little bit of the walled garden mentality of native development onto the web... Using a very specific tool to build a tailored version of my page in order to 'reach everyone' doesn't fit any definition of the 'open web' that I've ever heard."

+

Indeed AMP is very much Google's moderately walled garden response to Facebook's impenetrable fortress of a garden.

+

There's one other important aspect to AMP that helps speed up their pages -- Google will cache your pages on its CDN for free.

+

As developer and creator of RSS, Dave Winer says in a post on AMP, "AMP is caching... You can use their caching if you conform to certain rules. If you don't you can use your own caching. I can't imagine there's a lot of difference unless Google weighs search results based on whether you use their code."

+

And therein lies the biggest potential problem with AMP. If Google decides to abuse its position as the default search provider for the web and prioritize AMP pages above others then AMP becomes a threat to the open web.

+

So far Google has said that AMP pages will not get any priority over regular pages in search results. But that could change. It's hard to imagine why that wouldn't change. Why would Google have faster pages at its disposal and not prioritize them over slower pages? After all speed is already a factor in rankings and AMP does make pages faster.

+

Of course it's hard to tell what AMP will do in the long run. Google throws out new projects all the time, sometimes seemingly at random. Some, like GMail, redefine the world's experience of something previously taken for granted. Other projects go the way of Wave. Remember Google Author? That was the last time Google set out to "help" the publishing industry.

+

For the web's sake let's hope Google sticks with AMP long enough to convince publishers that the real future is speeding up their own pages and embracing a POSSE-style approach. As Cegłowski writes on his AMP satire page, "it is 2015, and websites should be small and fast enough to render on mobile devices rapidly using minimal resources... Requiring a readable version of these sites is a great idea. Let's take it one step further and make it the only version."

+

Let's just make sure that fast, readable version is one that lives at a URL on the open web.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/amp.txt b/ars-technica/published/amp.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..efe2ea5 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/amp.txt @@ -0,0 +1,118 @@ +There's a story going around today that the Web is too slow, especially over mobile networks. It's a pretty good story—and it's a perpetual story. The Web, while certainly improved from the days of 14.4k modems, has never been as fast as we want it to be, which is to say that the Web has never been instantaneous. + +Curiously, though, rather than focusing on possible cures like increasing network speeds, finding ways to decrease network latency or even speeding up Web browsers, the latest version of the "Web is too slow" story pins the blame on the Web itself. And, perhaps more pointedly, on the people who make it. + +Certainly the story has some truth to it. The average Web page has increased in size at a terrific rate. In January 2012, the average page tracked by HTTPArchive transferred 1,239kB and made 86 requests. Fast forward to September 2015 and the average page loads 2,162kB of data and makes 103 requests. These numbers don't directly correlate to longer page load-and-render times, of course, especially if download speeds are increasing too, but they are one indicator of how quickly Web pages are bulking up. + +Native mobile applications, on the other hand, are getting faster. Mobile devices get more powerful with every release cycle, and native apps take better advantage of that power. Apps get faster, the Web gets slower. This, so the story goes, is why Facebook must invent Facebook Instant Articles, why Apple News must be built, and why Google must now create Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). Google is late to the game, but AMP has the same goal as Facebook's and Apple's efforts—making the Web feel like a native application on mobile devices. (It's worth noting that all three solutions focus exclusively on mobile content.) + +For AMP, two things in particular stand in the way of a lean, mean browsing experience: JavaScript... and advertisements that use JavaScript. The AMP story is compelling. It has good guys (Google) and bad guys (everyone not using Google Ads), and it's true to most of our experiences. But the story also has some fundamental problems. For example, Google owns the largest ad server network on the Web. If ads are such a problem, why doesn't Google get to work speeding up the ads? + +More on that in bit. But first, AMP. +

What is AMP?

+To understand AMP first you need to understand Facebook's Instant Articles. Instant Articles uses RSS and standard HTML tags to create an optimized, slightly stripped down version of an article. Facebook then allows for some extra rich-content like auto-playing video or audio clips. Despite this Facebook claims Instant Articles are up to 10 times faster than their siblings on the open web. Some of that speed gain comes from stripping things out, some likely comes from aggressive caching. + +But the key is that Instant Articles are only available via Facebook's mobile apps and only to established publishers who sign a deal with Facebook. That means reading articles from Facebook's Instant Article partners like National Geographic, BBC, Buzzfeed and others is a faster, richer multimedia experience than those same articles when they appear on the publisher's site. + +Apple News appears to work roughly the same way, taking RSS feeds from publishers and then optimizing the content for delivery within Apple's application. + +All this app-based content delivery cuts out the web. That's a problem for the web and by extension, Google, which leads us to Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages project. + +Oddly though, unlike Facebook Articles and Apple News, AMP eschews standards like RSS and HTML in favor of its own little modified subset of HTML. AMP HTML looks a lot like HTML without the bells and whistles. In fact, if you head over to the AMP project announcement you'll see an AMP page rendered in your browser. It looks like any other page on the web. + +AMP markup uses a basic set of tags from HTML. An extremely limited set of tags. Form tags? Nope. Audio or video tags? Nope. Embed? Certainly not. Script tags? Nope. There's a very short list of the HTML tags in allowed in AMP documents available over on the project page. There's also no JavaScript allowed. Those ads and tracking scripts will never be part of AMP documents (don't worry, Google will still be tracking you). + +AMP defines several of its own tags, things like `amp-youtube`, `amp-ad` or `amp-pixel`. The extra tags are part of what's known as web components, which is not now, but likely will eventually be a web standard (or possibly ActiveX part 2, only the future knows for sure). + +So far AMP probably sounds like a pretty good idea to most readers. Faster pages, no tracking scripts, no JavaScript at all so no overlay ads about signing up for newsletters or downloading apps no one needs. + +But then there are some problematic design choices in AMP. The more you look at AMP the less it looks like a good idea. + +Let's start with some of the poor technical decisions in the current incarnation of AMP. Or at least they're poor decisions if you like the open web and the current HTML standards. + +AMP re-invents the wheel for images by using the custom component `amp-img` instead of HTML's `img` tag, and it does the same thing with `amp-audio` and `amp-video` rather than the HTML standard `audio` and `video`. AMP developers argue that this allows AMP to serve images only when required, which isn't possible with the HTML `img` tag. That, however, is a limitation of web browsers, not HTML itself. AMP has also very clearly treated accessibility as an after thought. You lose more than just a few HTML tags with AMP. + +In other words AMP is technically half baked at best. The good news is that AMP developers are listening. One of the worst things about AMP's initial code was the decision to disable pinch and zoom on articles. Thankfully Google has reversed course and eliminated the tag that prevented pinch and zoom. + +There are also dozens of other open issues calling out some of the most egregious decisions in AMP's technical design. There are already open issues surrounding nearly every technical shortcoming mentioned in this article. + +But AMP's markup language is really just one part of the picture. After all, as pointed out above, if all AMP really wanted to do was strip out all the enhancements and just present the content of a page, there are existing ways to do that. Speeding things up for users is a nice side benefit, but the point of AMP, as with Facebook Articles, looks to be more about locking in users to a particular site/format/service. In this case, though, the "users" aren't you and I as readers; the "users" are the publishers putting content on the Web. + +

It's the ads, stupid

+ +The goal of Facebook Instant Articles is to keep you on Facebook. No need to explore the larger Web when it's all right there in Facebook, especially when it loads so much faster in the Facebook app than it does in a browser. (As Facebook puts it, "articles load instantly, as much as 10 times faster than the standard mobile Web." + +Google seems to have recognized what a threat Facebook Instant Articles could be to Google's ability to serve ads. This is why Google's project is called Accelerated Mobile Pages. Sorry, desktop users, Google already knows how to get ads to you. + +If you watch the AMP demo, which shows how AMP might work when it's integrated into search results next year, you'll notice that the viewer effectively never leaves Google. AMP pages are laid over the Google search page in much the same way that outside webpages are loaded in native applications on most mobile platforms. The experience from the user's point of view is just like the experience of using a mobile app. + +Google needs the web to be on par with the speeds in mobile apps. And to its credit the company has some of the smartest engineers around working on the problem. Google has made one of the fastest web browsers around (if not the fastest) and in doing so has pushed other vendors to speed up their browsers as well. Since Chrome debuted web browsers have become faster and better at an astonishing rate. Score one for Google. + +The company also been touting the benefits of mobile-friendly pages, first by labeling them as such in search results on mobile devices and then later by ranking mobile friendly pages above not-so-friendly ones when other factors are the same. It's also been quick to adopt speed improving new HTML standards like the responsive images effort, which was first supported by Chrome. Score another one or two for Google. + +But pages keep growing faster than network speeds, and the Web slows down. In other words, Google has tried just about everything within its considerable power as a search behemoth to get Web developers and publishers large and small to speed up their pages. + +It just isn't working. + +One increasingly popular reaction to slow Web pages has been the use of content blockers, typically in the form of browser add-ons that stop pages from loading anything but the primary content of the page. Content blockers have been around for over a decade now (No Script first appeared for Firefox in 2005), but their use has largely been limited to the desktop. That changed in Apple's iOS 9, which for the first time put simple content-blocking tools in the hands of millions of mobile users. + +Combine all the eyeballs that are using iOS with content blockers, reading Facebook Instant Articles, and using Apple News, and you suddenly have a whole lot of eyeballs that will never see any Google ads. That's a problem for Google, one that AMP is designed to fix. +

Static pages that require Google's JavaScript

+The most basic thing you can do on the web is create a flat HTML file that sits on a server and contains some basic tags. This type of page will always be lightning fast. It's also insanely simple. This is literally all you need to do to put information on the web. There's no need for JavaScript, no need even for CSS. + +This is more or less the sort of page AMP wants you to create (AMP doesn't care if your pages are actually static or—more likely—generated from a database. The point is what's rendered is static). But then AMP wants to turn around and require that each page include a third-party script in order to load. AMP deliberately sets the opacity of the entire page to 0 until this script loads. Only then is the page revealed. + +This is a little odd; as developer Justin Avery writes, "Surely the document itself is going to be faster than loading a library to try and make it load faster." + +Pinboard.in creator Maciej Cegłowski did just that, putting together a demo page that duplicates the AMP-based AMP homepage, but without that JavaScript. Over a 3G connection Cegłowski's page fills the viewport in 1.9 seconds. The AMP homepage takes 9.2 seconds. + +JavaScript slows down page load times, even when that JavaScript is part of Google's plan to speed up the web. + +Ironically, for something that is ostensibly trying to encourage better behavior from developers and publishers, this means that pages using progressive enhancement, keeping scripts to a minimum and aggressively caching content -- in other words sites following best practices and trying to do things right -- will potentially be slower in AMP. + +In the end, developers and publishers who have been following best practices for web development and don't rely on dozens of tracking networks and ads have little to gain from AMP. + +Unfortunately, the publishers building their sites like that right now are few and far between. Most publishers have much to gain from generating AMP pages -- at least in terms of speed. Google says that AMP can improve page speed index scores by between 15-85%. That huge range is likely a direct result of how many third-party scripts are being loaded on some sites. + +The dependency on JavaScript has another detrimental effect, AMP documents depend on JavaScript, which is to say that if their (albeit small) script fails to load for some reason -- say, you're going through a tunnel on a train, only have a flaky one bar connection at the beach -- the AMP page is completely blank. When an AMP page fails, it fails spectacularly. + +Google knows better than this. Even Gmail still offers a pure HTML-based fallback version of itself. + +

AMP for publishers

+Under the AMP bargain, all big media has to do is give up its ad networks. And interactive maps. And data visualizations. And comment systems. + +The deal isn't just for big media, either; your WordPress blog can get in on the stripped-down AMP action as well. Given that WordPress powers roughly 24 percent of all sites on the web, having an easy way to generate AMP documents from WordPress means a huge boost in adoption for AMP. It's certainly possible to build fast websites using WordPress, but it's also easy to do the opposite. WordPress plugins often have a dramatic (negative) impact on load times. It isn't uncommon to see a WordPress site loading not just one but several external JavaScript libraries because the user installed three plugins that each use a different library. AMP neatly solves that problem by stripping everything out. + +So why would publishers want to use AMP? Google, while its influence has dipped a tad across industries (as Facebook and Twitter continue to drive more traffic), remains a powerful driver of traffic. When Google promises more eyeballs on their stories, big media listens. + +AMP isn't trying to get rid of the Web as we know it; it just wants to create a parallel one. Under this system, publishers would not stop generating regular pages, but they would also start generating AMP files, usually (judging by the early adopter examples) by appending /amp to the end of the URL. The AMP page and the canonical page would reference each other through standard HTML tags. User agents could then pick and choose between them. That is, Google's Web crawler might grab the AMP page, but desktop Firefox might hit the AMP page and redirect to the canonical URL. + +On one hand what this amounts to is that, after years of telling the web to stop making m. mobile-specific websites, Google is telling the web to make `/amp`-specific mobile pages. Potato, potato. + +On the other hand this nudges publishers toward an idea that's big in the IndieWeb movement: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, or POSSE for short. + +The idea is own the canonical copy of your content on your own site, but then send that content everywhere you can. Or rather, everywhere you want to reach your readers. Facebook Instant Article? Sure, hook up the RSS feed. Apple News? Send the feed over there too. AMP? Sure, generate an AMP page. No need to stop there either, tap the new Medium API and half a dozen others as well. + +Reading is a fragmented experience. Some people will love reading on the web, some via RSS in their favorite reader, some in Facebook Instant Articles, some via AMP pages on Twitter, some via Lynx in their terminal running on a restored TRS-80. The beauty of the POSSE approach is that you can reach them all from a single, canonical source. + +  +

AMP and the open Web

+While has problems and just might be designed to lock publishers into a Google-controlled format, it does so far seem to be friendlier to the open Web than Facebook Instant Articles. + +In fact, if you want to be optimistic, you could look at AMP as the carrot that Google has been looking for in its effort to speed up the Web. As noted Web developer (and AMP optimist) Jeremy Keith writes in a piece on AMP, "My hope is that the current will flow in both directions. As well as publishers creating AMP versions of their pages in order to appease Google, perhaps they will start to ask 'Why can't our regular pages be this fast?' By showing that there is life beyond big bloated invasive web pages, perhaps the AMP project will work as a demo of what the whole Web could be." + +Not everyone is that optimistic about AMP, though. Developer and Author Tim Kadlec writes, "[AMP] doesn't feel like something helping the open web so much as it feels like something bringing a little bit of the walled garden mentality of native development onto the Web... Using a very specific tool to build a tailored version of my page in order to 'reach everyone' doesn't fit any definition of the 'open Web' that I've ever heard." + +There's one other important aspect to AMP that helps speed up their pages -- Google will cache your pages on its CDN for free. + +As the developer and creator of RSS, Dave Winer, says in a post on AMP, "AMP is caching... You can use their caching if you conform to certain rules. If you don't, you can use your own caching. I can't imagine there's a lot of difference unless Google weighs search results based on whether you use their code." + +And therein lies the biggest potential problem with AMP. If Google decides to abuse its position as the default search provider for the web and prioritize AMP pages above others then AMP becomes a threat to the open web. + +So far Google has said that AMP pages will not get any priority over regular pages in search results. But that could change. It's hard to imagine why that wouldn't change. Why would Google have faster pages at its disposal and not prioritize them over slower pages? After all speed is already a factor in rankings and AMP does make pages faster. + +Of course it's hard to tell what AMP will do in the long run. Google throws out new projects all the time, sometimes seemingly at random. Some, like GMail, redefine the world's experience of something previously taken for granted. Other projects go the way of Wave. Remember Google Author? That was the last time Google set out to "help" the publishing industry. + +For the web's sake let's hope Google sticks with AMP long enough to convince publishers that the real future is speeding up their own pages and embracing a POSSE-style approach. As Cegłowski writes on his AMP satire page, "it is 2015, and websites should be small and fast enough to render on mobile devices rapidly using minimal resources... Requiring a readable version of these sites is a great idea. Let's take it one step further and make it the only version." + +Let's just make sure that fast, readable version is one that lives at a URL on the open web. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/ars-ubuntu1510/kubuntu1510-desktop.png b/ars-technica/published/ars-ubuntu1510/kubuntu1510-desktop.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8a64762 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/ars-ubuntu1510/kubuntu1510-desktop.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/ars-ubuntu1510/ubuntu1510-desktop.png b/ars-technica/published/ars-ubuntu1510/ubuntu1510-desktop.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6635156 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/ars-ubuntu1510/ubuntu1510-desktop.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/ars-ubuntu1510/ubuntu1510-scrollbars.png b/ars-technica/published/ars-ubuntu1510/ubuntu1510-scrollbars.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e33e244 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/ars-ubuntu1510/ubuntu1510-scrollbars.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/ars-ubuntu1510/ubuntu1510-unity-8.png b/ars-technica/published/ars-ubuntu1510/ubuntu1510-unity-8.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..057bd79 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/ars-ubuntu1510/ubuntu1510-unity-8.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/debian8review.html b/ars-technica/published/debian8review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..400b996 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/debian8review.html @@ -0,0 +1,80 @@ +

Last week the Debian project released Debian 8, the first major update to the stable branch of the venerable Linux distro in two years.

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Debian Linux consists of three major development branches: Stable, Testing and Unstable. Work on new versions progresses through each, starting life in Unstable and eventually ending up in Stable.

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Debian 8, nicknamed "Jessie" after the cowgirl character in Toy Story 2 and 3 (all Debian releases are named after Toy Story characters), has been in development in the Testing channel for quite a while. But it wasn't until the official feature freeze for this release (in November of last year) that the contents of Testing really become what you'll actually find in Debian 8 today.

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If all that sounds complicated and slow that's because it is. And that's kind of the point.

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Debian Stable is designed to be, well, stable, and that means long development cycles and a conservative approach to application updates.

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As a general rule Debian Stable lags behind pretty much every other distro on the market when it comes to package updates. If you want the latest and greatest, Debian Stable is not the distro for you. Which is to say that, while Debian 8 may bring a ton of new stuff to Debian, it has almost nothing the rest of the Linux world hasn't been using for, in some cases, years. What's more, many things in Debian 8 are still not going to be the latest available versions.

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Debian 8 has one giant except to that general rule -- systemd. More on that in a few paragraphs.

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Why use Debian then? There are plenty of philosophical reasons -- the legendary Debian social contract, the community and all included software in the repos is free as in freedom, which has long been a hallmark of Debian.

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The more practical appeal of Debian is in its legendary stability. I've been running Debian servers since 2005 (Sarge) and have never had a server crash. This stability is part of the reason Debian is the base for dozens of downstream distros.

+ +[image="debian-family-tree.png" caption="The Debian Family tree (image: Wikimedia)"] + +

Not everything downstream uses the Stable channel as its base. In fact it's worth noting that perhaps the most famous project downstream from Debian, Ubuntu, is built off the package base in the Unstable channel. Still, Debian Stable remains one of the most popular distros out there. This is particularly true for web servers where, according to stats from W3Techs.com (which should be taken with a grain, if not a generous helping, of salt), Debian accounts for the largest percentage of Linux servers on the web -- 32.3 percent.

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All of this makes Debian Stable updates a much bigger deal than faster moving distros like Ubuntu or Fedora.

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And because Debian 8 makes the leap to systemd it just might be the biggest change in Debian since the first release back in 1993. Debian is justifiably famous for being so stable you could blindly type apt-get dist-upgrade upgrade on a production box and get away with it. This time though, there's systemd to contend with.

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What's New in Debian 8

+ +[image="debian-gnome-desktop.png" caption="It might not be new, but it's new to Debian"] + +

There is far more to Debian 8 than I can cover here. There's probably more than even John Siracusa would be willing to cover. Debian's official release notes report that 24573 software packages have been updated (that's 66 percent of the distro), but amidst that firehose of updates there's one that stands out -- systemd.

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systemd

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Unless you've been living under a rock you've probably heard at least something about systemd in the last year or two. Most likely what you heard was some froth-mouthed vitriol about how it's either the second coming of the Penguin or the NSA-backed devil incarnate. There are, it seems, no moderate opinions about systemd and the debate surrounding it has been anything but civil, even in the normally pretty civil Debian community.

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To understand why you need to understand how your operating system starts up and runs all the various processes it runs. Pardon the analogy, but just as there was one ring that controlled all the rest, there is one application that controls all the rest. This is the init (short for initialization) system. The init system is the first process started when you boot and the last to shutdown. In the time between startup and shutdown the init system is the master controller of all processes and is traditionally assigned the process ID 1.

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There are quite a few init systems out there, but most Linux distros (Slackware and Gentoo being notable exceptions) have been using SystemV. SystemV is outdated and riddled with crufty, often no longer needed code and is long overdue for a replacement. Few debate that, but start asking what should replace it and you'll soon see the knives come out.

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Systemd is designed to replace SystemV, providing an init system that's cleaner, faster and considerably easier to use. Or at least that's the sales pitch.

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Most of the contention about systemd arises because systemd isn't just an init system. Or rather it's an init system that wants to manage far more than processes. If your distro of choice opts to run systemd with all the bells and whistles it will be running some 69 binaries. Some call that monolithic, systemd creator Lennart Poettering disputes that charge arguing that what people don't like is that it all ships as a single tarball and is all updated and maintained in a single codebase.

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Indeed the very centralized nature of the project is what led Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth to call systemd "hugely invasive". He went on to say that, "one of the ideas in systemd that we think is really bad is to bring lots of disparate pieces of technology into a single process. So lots of formerly-independent pieces of code, which happen to be under the control of folks driving systemd, have been rolled into that codebase."

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Shuttleworth went on to acknowledge that "it’s still possible to build independent packages of the different pieces from that code," which has long been Poettering's response to the monolithic charge, but there's no denying that systemd throws out the Unix philosophy of small things with narrowly defined functionality. That doesn't necessarily mean it's bad though.

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Much of the debate about systemd is academic at this point because here's a truth that you'll discover in Debian 8, Ubuntu 15.04 and just about every other major distro around: systemd is here.

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Sure, you can disable it, boot with SysV if you like, but systemd isn't going away. Your long term options are to either embrace it or cast your lot with Devuan or make the switch to FreeBSD.

+ +[image="debian-systemd.png" caption="Systemd it's in your Debian and it's not going away."] + +

I decided that, since systemd appears to be here to stay, and is the default starting with Jessie, it was time to roll up my sleeves and RTFM.

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My experience with systemd had been decidedly mixed. On the desktop I hardly notice it. Indeed I doubt anyone using desktop Linux for everyday tasks like email, web browsing, office docs, photo editing and the like will either know or care that they're running systemd. I have encountered a couple problems with the systemd journal feature when running Debian 8 in a virtual machine, but on actual hardware the same problem has not come up.

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Debian 8 on the server is a different story though. I've been slowly migrating my sites to Jessie-based servers over the past six months and have had a few hiccups here and there. For example, while systemd likes to say it's fully compatible with older init scripts, that's not completely true.

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In my case, enough has gone wrong that I suggest you don't jump in immediately with both feet.

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Before you even think of upgrading a server to Debian 8 be sure to read through the systemd incompatibilities list. In particular note that if you use tools like /sbin/chkconfig you'll quite possibly be getting incorrect or at the very least incomplete information when systemd is in charge. Also note that systemd services are "executed in completely clean contexts", which means not even $HOME is set, so if you have init scripts depending on such variables they will break.

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Then there's the systemd's journal tool which takes some getting used to if you're more familiar with syslog. That said, you can run syslog alongside journal if you prefer not to switch up your workflow too much.

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In fact, you can still run Jessie without systemd. All you need to do is use preseed to replace systemd with sysvinit at the end of the install. Check out the Debian wiki for details. This method works well enough on the server, but don't try it with a desktop environment installed.

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In the end, after finding some new systemd service scripts for the handful of things I need --Nginx, Gunicorn and some other web app tools -- and figuring out how to set up the journal to actually log useful information I've managed to upgrade to Jessie. On one hand no one likes changes and I could have done without learning a new syntax for init scripts -- though systemd files are at least much easier to read and write -- and all the other headaches. But once you're over the migration hurdles I've found systemd is, well, just fine.

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Debian 8 on the Desktop

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There's more to Debian 8 than systemd, particularly on the desktop where, as noted, most users will probably not even notice it.

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The first thing you'll likely notice when installing Debian 8 on the desktop is that there are more desktop choices and picking one is much simpler than before.

+ +[image="debian-installer-tasksel.png" caption="The wide variety of Desktop options in Debian 8"] + +

Quite a bit of work has gone into Debian's tasksel app in this release. That's the application that helps you set up Debian and install all the software you need. The installer now offers a list of desktop environments under the generic "Debian Desktop Environment" option. If you just leave everything at the defaults you'll end up with GNOME 3.14 for your desktop, but you can change that by selecting the options to install Xfce (briefly considered for the default option), KDE, Cinnamon, MATE or LXDE. You can of course opt to install nothing and then install the alternate desktop environment of your choice after the base installation. If you prefer something really lightweight like Openbox or Xmonad this is the way to install it.

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In short it's tough to really say that Debian has a default desktop. To test things out I tried Debian with GNOME, Xfce and Cinnamon.

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Again, Debian takes a conservative approach so you'll only get GNOME 3.14, though 3.16 was released a few months ago. GNOME 3.14 has a few new tricks up its sleeve, most of which I've covered in past reviews.

+ +[image="debian-gnome-shell2.png" caption="The default Debian desktop: GNOME 3.14"] + +

The standout new features in 3.14 include better high resolution display support, several of the new GNOME apps like Photos and the redesigned Weather, a new geolocation framework, which the aforementioned Weather takes advantage of, and the first signs of support for Wayland. With 3.14, Mutter (GNOME's default display manager) can work as a Wayland compositor. It's not the default though, you'll have to select this option from the GNOME login screen.

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GNOME 3.14 is a step up from previous versions, but it still feels a bit crippled next to more full featured desktops like Cinnamon or Unity. The Nautilus file manager in particular is a shell of its former self.

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Debian's version of GNOME 3.14 is pretty close to stock, but then there aren't many ways to customize GNOME or give it a distro-specific feel.

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If GNOME is not to your liking there's plenty of other choices, including the increasingly popular Xfce. This being Debian don't expect to see the latest version of Xfce (which is a huge update and well worth upgrading to as soon as you can by the way), instead you'll get Xfce 4.10. In fact Debian's Xfce is a bit of an outlier compared to other distros.

+ +[image="debian-xfce.png" caption="Debian with a barebone install of Xfce"] + +

Debian treats Xfce as a very minimalist desktop and the experience might be a bit different if you're accustomed to the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach of, for example, Xubuntu. In Debian optional things like the Xfce extras package are not included by default. Naturally you can install the extras from the repositories, but Linux newcomers might not even realize that's an option, which makes Xubuntu's approach seem a bit friendlier.

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The best desktop experience in my testing has undoubtedly been Cinnamon. Cinnamon atop Debian has been every bit as reliable and nice to use as Cinnamon is in Linux Mint. The only downside is that you'll only get Cinnamon version 2.2.16, while the latest version of Linux Mint shipped with version 2.4, a not insignificant update.

+ +[image="debian-cinnamon.jpg" caption="Debian with Cinnamon (not to be confused with Linux Mint Debian Edition)"] + +

As for default desktop software, Debian ships with favorites like LibreOffice (v4.3.3) and GIMP 2.8, but you'll also find a few extra apps like GNUcash, GNUmeric and Abiword. There's also Icedove 31.6.0 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird) and Iceweasel 31.6.0esr (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox). Yes, Debian opts to ship with the little-used Firefox Extended Support Release, which lags behind its faster-developing counterpart when it comes to the latest and greatest features on the web.

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You've probably noticed a theme here, Debian is behind the curve when it comes to version numbers. Why run Debian on the desktop when similar downstream distros like Xubuntu or Ubuntu GNOME or Linux Mint offer arguably the same thing with newer packages and a more polished interface? These are after all Debian derivatives so aren't you in effect using Debian?

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The answer I suspect lies in that legendary Debian stability. And many developers like to mimic the server in their local environment. For the average Linux user though the downstream derivatives are probably a better bet in many cases. Ubuntu and Linux Mint might not be quite as stable, but they deliver more frequent updates to the applications that most people use every day. That means more new features and arguably a better experience. If you want something similar, but for philosophical reasons feel more comfortable with Debian there's always Debian Testing.

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Debian on the server

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If Debian on the desktop is perhaps a bit too far behind to entice today's user, nearly the opposite is true on the server. There's systemd to deal with, but once you get past the systemd changes there's much to love about Jessie on the server.

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Debian's conservative approach to package updates leads to stability it also sometimes leads to terrible packages hanging around. For example Python developers have had to deal with Python 3.2 package for what seems like an eternity in Debian 7 (unless of course you use backports). Thankfully Jessie bumps Python to 3.4.

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Perl, PHP, and most other common development tools have been similarly updated, if not to the bleeding edge then at least to the latest stable versions. Web server packages like Apache and lighttpd see similar incremental updates in Jessie.

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Some things are thankfully missing in this release as well, notably the secure sockets layer protocol SSLv3 is gone by default, which should make for more secure HTTPS connections on the web (assuming people update).

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Kernel

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Jessie ships with the 3.16 series Linux kernel, which might sound a tad out of date until you consider that its predecessor, Wheezy was using the 3.2 series.

+

There's been an incredible number of changes since 3.2, far too many to cover in details, but some of the highlights include a host of graphics card improvements (particularly open source Nvidia drivers), EFI boot support, ARM 64-bit support, RAID5 multithreading, Automatic GPU switching in laptops with dual GPUs and support for nftables, the successor of iptables among many, many other new features.

+

There's also been a ton of work put into filesystem improvements with ext4 support getting a lot attention and much better support for Btrfs.

+

Should You Upgrade?

+

In a word: Yes. This is Debian, releases are infrequent and rather massive so there's more than enough in the way of new features and package updates to make the update worth it. The caveat is that you should do a lot of testing before migrating your servers to systemd. VPS instances are cheap, fire one up, install Jessie and spend a few weeks testing because while it's stable Jessie's systemd init is a big change that takes some time to wrap your head around.

+

If Debian is your desktop of choice you don't have as much to worry about with systemd. In fact you're unlikely to even notice it.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/debian8review.txt b/ars-technica/published/debian8review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..581e1f0 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/debian8review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,130 @@ +Last week the Debian project released Debian 8, the first major update to the stable branch of the venerable Linux distro in two years. + +Debian Linux consists of three major development branches: Stable, Testing and Unstable. Work on new versions progresses through each, starting life in Unstable and eventually ending up in Stable. + +Debian 8, nicknamed "Jessie" after the cowgirl character in Toy Story 2 and 3 (all Debian releases are named after Toy Story characters), has been in development in the Testing channel for quite a while. But it wasn't until the official feature freeze for this release (in November of last year) that the contents of Testing really become what you'll actually find in Debian 8 today. + +If all that sounds complicated and slow that's because it is. And that's kind of the point. + +Debian Stable is designed to be, well, stable, and that means long development cycles and a conservative approach to application updates. + +As a general rule Debian Stable lags behind pretty much every other distro on the market when it comes to package updates. If you want the latest and greatest, Debian Stable is not the distro for you. Which is to say that, while Debian 8 may bring a ton of new stuff to Debian, it has almost nothing the rest of the Linux world hasn't been using for, in some cases, years. What's more, many things in Debian 8 are still not going to be the latest available versions. + +Debian 8 has one giant except to that general rule -- systemd. More on that in a few paragraphs. + +Why use Debian then? There are plenty of philosophical reasons -- the legendary [Debian social contract](https://www.debian.org/social_contract), the community and all included software in the repos is free as in freedom, which has long been a hallmark of Debian. + +The more practical appeal of Debian is in its legendary stability. I've been running Debian servers since 2005 (Sarge) and have never had a server crash. This stability is part of the reason Debian is the base for dozens of downstream distros. + +[tk pic Debian family tree] + +Not everything downstream uses the Stable channel as its base. In fact it's worth noting that perhaps the most famous project downstream from Debian, Ubuntu, is built off the package base in the Unstable channel. Still, Debian Stable remains one of the most popular distros out there. This is particularly true for web servers where, according to stats from [W3Techs.com](http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux/all/all) (which should be taken with a grain, if not a generous helping, of salt), Debian accounts for the largest percentage of Linux servers on the web -- 32.3 percent. + +All of this makes Debian Stable updates a much bigger deal than faster moving distros like Ubuntu or Fedora. + +And because Debian 8 makes the leap to systemd it just might be the biggest change in Debian since the first release back in 1993. Debian is justifiably famous for being so stable you could blindly type `apt-get dist-upgrade` upgrade on a production box and get away with it. This time though, there's systemd to contend with. + +##What's New in Debian 8 + +[tk Debian Gnome] + +There is far more to Debian 8 than I can cover here. There's probably more than even John Siracusa would be willing to cover. Debian's official release notes report that 24573 software packages have been updated (that's 66 percent of the distro), but amidst that firehose of updates there's one that stands out -- systemd. + +### systemd + +Unless you've been living under a rock you've probably heard at least something about systemd in the last year or two. Most likely what you heard was some froth-mouthed vitriol about how it's either the second coming of the Penguin or the NSA-backed devil incarnate. There are, it seems, no moderate opinions about systemd and the debate surrounding it has been anything but civil, even in the normally pretty civil Debian community. + +To understand why you need to understand how your operating system starts up and runs all the various processes it runs. Pardon the analogy, but just as there was one ring that controlled all the rest, there is one application that controls all the rest. This is the init (short for initialization) system. The init system is the first process started when you boot and the last to shutdown. In the time between startup and shutdown the init system is the master controller of all processes and is traditionally assigned the process ID 1. + +There are quite a few init systems out there, but most Linux distros (Slackware and Gentoo being notable exceptions) have been using SystemV. SystemV is outdated and riddled with crufty, often no longer needed code and is long overdue for a replacement. Few debate that, but start asking what should replace it and you'll soon see the knives come out. + +Systemd is designed to replace SystemV, providing an init system that's cleaner, faster and considerably easier to use. Or at least that's the sales pitch. + +Most of the contention about systemd arises because systemd isn't just an init system. Or rather it's an init system that wants to manage far more than processes. If your distro of choice opts to run systemd with all the bells and whistles it will be running some 69 binaries. Some call that monolithic, systemd creator Lennart Poettering [disputes that charge](http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html) arguing that what people don't like is that it all ships as a single tarball and is all updated and maintained in a single codebase. + +Indeed the very centralized nature of the project is what led Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth to call systemd "[hugely invasive](http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1295)". He went on to say that, "one of the ideas in systemd that we think is really bad is to bring lots of disparate pieces of technology into a single process. So lots of formerly-independent pieces of code, which happen to be under the control of folks driving systemd, have been rolled into that codebase." + +Shuttleworth went on to [acknowledge](http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1295#comment-403228) that "it’s still possible to build independent packages of the different pieces from that code," which has long been Poettering's response to the monolithic charge, but there's no denying that systemd throws out the Unix philosophy of small things with narrowly defined functionality. That doesn't necessarily mean it's bad though. + +Much of the debate about systemd is academic at this point because here's a truth that you'll discover in Debian 8, Ubuntu 15.04 and just about every other major distro around: systemd is here. + +Sure, you can disable it, boot with SysV if you like, but systemd isn't going away. Your long term options are to either embrace it or cast your lot with [Devuan](http://debianfork.org/) or make the switch to FreeBSD. + +I decided that, since systemd appears to be here to stay, and is the default starting with Jessie, it was time to roll up my sleeves and RTFM. + +My experience with systemd had been decidedly mixed. On the desktop I hardly notice it. +Indeed I doubt anyone using desktop Linux for everyday tasks like email, web browsing, office docs, photo editing and the like will either know or care that they're running systemd. I have encountered a couple problems with the systemd journal feature when running Debian 8 in a virtual machine, but on actual hardware the same problem has not come up. + +Debian 8 on the server is a different story though. I've been slowly migrating my sites to Jessie-based servers over the past six months and have had a few hiccups here and there. For example, while systemd likes to say it's fully compatible with older init scripts, that's not completely true. + +In my case, enough has gone wrong that I suggest you don't jump in immediately with both feet. + +Before you even think of upgrading a server to Debian 8 be sure to read through the [systemd incompatibilities](http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Incompatibilities/) list. In particular note that if you use tools like /sbin/chkconfig you'll quite possibly be getting incorrect or at the very least incomplete information when systemd is in charge. Also note that systemd services are "executed in completely clean contexts", which means not even $HOME is set, so if you have init scripts depending on such variables they will break. + +Then there's the systemd's journal tool which takes some getting used to if you're more familiar with syslog. That said, you can run syslog alongside journal if you prefer not to switch up your workflow too much. + +In fact, you can still run Jessie without systemd. All you need to do is use preseed to replace systemd with sysvinit at the end of the install. Check out the [Debian wiki](https://wiki.debian.org/systemd#Installing_without_systemd) for details. This method works well enough on the server, but don't try it with a desktop environment installed. + +In the end, after finding some new systemd service scripts for the handful of things I need --Nginx, Gunicorn and some other web app tools -- and figuring out how to set up the journal to actually log useful information I've managed to upgrade to Jessie. On one hand no one likes changes and I could have done without learning a new syntax for init scripts -- though systemd files are at least much easier to read and write -- and all the other headaches. But once you're over the migration hurdles I've found systemd is, well, just fine. + +## Debian 8 on the Desktop + +There's more to Debian 8 than systemd, particularly on the desktop where, as noted, most users will probably not even notice it. + +The first thing you'll likely notice when installing Debian 8 on the desktop is that there are more desktop choices and picking one is much simpler than before. + +[tk tasksel image] + +Quite a bit of work has gone into Debian's tasksel app in this release. That's the application that helps you set up Debian and install all the software you need. The installer now offers a list of desktop environments under the generic "Debian Desktop Environment" option. If you just leave everything at the defaults you'll end up with GNOME 3.14 for your desktop, but you can change that by selecting the options to install Xfce (briefly considered for the default option), KDE, Cinnamon, MATE or LXDE. You can of course opt to install nothing and then install the alternate desktop environment of your choice after the base installation. If you prefer something really lightweight like Openbox or Xmonad this is the way to install it. + +In short it's tough to really say that Debian has a default desktop. To test things out I tried Debian with GNOME, Xfce and Cinnamon. + +Again, Debian takes a conservative approach so you'll only get GNOME 3.14, though 3.16 was released a few months ago. GNOME 3.14 has a few new tricks up its sleeve, most of which I've [covered in past reviews](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/01/16/fedora-21-review-linuxs-sprawliest-distro-finds-a-new-focus/). + +[tk Debian Gnome] + +The standout new features in 3.14 include better high resolution display support, several of the new GNOME apps like Photos and the redesigned Weather, a new geolocation framework, which the aforementioned Weather takes advantage of, and the first signs of support for Wayland. With 3.14, Mutter (GNOME's default display manager) can work as a Wayland compositor. It's not the default though, you'll have to select this option from the GNOME login screen. + +GNOME 3.14 is a step up from previous versions, but it still feels a bit crippled next to more full featured desktops like Cinnamon or Unity. The Nautilus file manager in particular is a shell of its former self. + +Debian's version of GNOME 3.14 is pretty close to stock, but then there aren't many ways to customize GNOME or give it a distro-specific feel. + +If GNOME is not to your liking there's plenty of other choices, including the increasingly popular Xfce. This being Debian don't expect to see the latest version of Xfce (which is a huge update and well worth upgrading to as soon as you can by the way), instead you'll get Xfce 4.10. In fact Debian's Xfce is a bit of an outlier compared to other distros. + +[tk Debian XFCE] + +Debian treats Xfce as a very minimalist desktop and the experience might be a bit different if you're accustomed to the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach of, for example, Xubuntu. In Debian optional things like the Xfce extras package are not included by default. Naturally you can install the extras from the repositories, but Linux newcomers might not even realize that's an option, which makes Xubuntu's approach seem a bit friendlier. + +The best desktop experience in my testing has undoubtedly been Cinnamon. Cinnamon atop Debian has been every bit as reliable and nice to use as Cinnamon is in Linux Mint. The only downside is that you'll only get Cinnamon version 2.2.16, while the latest version of Linux Mint shipped with version 2.4, a not insignificant update. + +[tk Debian Cinnamon] + +As for default desktop software, Debian ships with favorites like LibreOffice (v4.3.3) and GIMP 2.8, but you'll also find a few extra apps like GNUcash, GNUmeric and Abiword. There's also Icedove 31.6.0 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird) and Iceweasel 31.6.0esr (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox). Yes, Debian opts to ship with the little-used Firefox Extended Support Release, which lags behind its faster-developing counterpart when it comes to the latest and greatest features on the web. + +You've probably noticed a theme here, Debian is behind the curve when it comes to version numbers. Why run Debian on the desktop when similar downstream distros like Xubuntu or Ubuntu GNOME or Linux Mint offer arguably the same thing with newer packages and a more polished interface? These are after all Debian derivatives so aren't you in effect using Debian? + +The answer I suspect lies in that legendary Debian stability. And many developers like to mimic the server in their local environment. For the average Linux user though the downstream derivatives are probably a better bet in many cases. Ubuntu and Linux Mint might not be quite as stable, but they deliver more frequent updates to the applications that most people use every day. That means more new features and arguably a better experience. If you want something similar, but for philosophical reasons feel more comfortable with Debian there's always Debian Testing. + +## Debian on the server + +If Debian on the desktop is perhaps a bit too far behind to entice today's user, nearly the opposite is true on the server. There's systemd to deal with, but once you get past the systemd changes there's much to love about Jessie on the server. + +Debian's conservative approach to package updates leads to stability it also sometimes leads to terrible packages hanging around. For example Python developers have had to deal with Python 3.2 package for what seems like an eternity in Debian 7 (unless of course you use backports). Thankfully Jessie bumps Python to 3.4. + +Perl, PHP, and most other common development tools have been similarly updated, if not to the bleeding edge then at least to the latest stable versions. Web server packages like Apache and lighttpd see similar incremental updates in Jessie. + +Some things are thankfully missing in this release as well, notably the secure sockets layer protocol SSLv3 is gone by default, which should make for more secure HTTPS connections on the web (assuming people update). + +## Kernel + +Jessie ships with the 3.16 series Linux kernel, which might sound a tad out of date until you consider that its predecessor, Wheezy was using the 3.2 series. + +There's been an incredible number of changes since 3.2, far too many to cover in details, but some of the highlights include a host of graphics card improvements (particularly open source Nvidia drivers), EFI boot support, ARM 64-bit support, RAID5 multithreading, Automatic GPU switching in laptops with dual GPUs and support for nftables, the successor of iptables among many, many other new features. + +There's also been a ton of work put into filesystem improvements with ext4 support getting a lot attention and much better [support for Btrfs](http://linuxfoundation.ubicast.tv/videos/btrfs-filesystem-status-and-new-features/). + +## Should You Upgrade? + +In a word: Yes. This is Debian, releases are infrequent and rather massive so there's more than enough in the way of new features and package updates to make the update worth it. The caveat is that you should do a lot of testing before migrating your servers to systemd. VPS instances are cheap, fire one up, install Jessie and spend a few weeks testing because while it's stable Jessie's systemd init is a big change that takes some time to wrap your head around. + +If Debian is your desktop of choice you don't have as much to worry about with systemd. In fact you're unlikely to even notice it. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/dell7520.txt b/ars-technica/published/dell7520.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..55d1a18 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/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/ars-technica/published/dell7520review.html b/ars-technica/published/dell7520review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3efd7ba --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/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.

+

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Hardware

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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Software

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Good

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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
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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
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The Ugly

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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/ars-technica/published/dellreview.html b/ars-technica/published/dellreview.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d4538fa --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/dellreview.html @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +

Hardware that ships with Linux installed isn't as rare as it used to be. System 76, Purism, ZaReason and others have been cranking out hardware with Linux pre-installed for quite a while now. But, while those of us who use Linux may know these companies, there's only one household name that ships laptops with Linux installed -- Dell.

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Dell's Project Sputnik has been dedicating resources to creating a "just works" experience for Dell Ultrabooks running Ubuntu for nearly four years now. Barton George, who leads the effort, and other developers have been writing code where necessary (and contributing that code back upstream) and refining the user experience to a point where everything does indeed just work.

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I reviewed the original Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition for Wired and found that it had a few rough edges. Since then I sat on the sidelines watching as George and Dell polished off those rough edges and tweaked the hardware options to better meet the needs of developers -- like expanding the available RAM to 16GB, adding a matte screen option (albeit only on the low end model) and shrinking the dimensions down considerably.

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The result is the sixth iteration of the XPS 13 developer edition. This might be the best supported Linux ultrabook on the market. It actually might be one of the only officially supported Linux ultrabooks on the market.

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Not only does the hardware work nearly flawlessly with the stock Ubuntu installation, but Dell stands behind it with the same level of support it offers for Windows users. That doesn't make it the best Linux laptop around, but for many people the ability to know that your hardware will work, rather than hoping for the best, will make Dell's premium price worth it.

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Before I dive into the review though, first a little context. I am a Linux user and have been using it full time since Ubuntu 9.04 was released. I split my time between writing (which I can do on pretty much any hardware), photography (Darktable and Gimp) and web-based software development (Python, various web servers, and sysadmin tasks).

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I've been using Linux off and on for long enough to have edited xorg.conf, have my own tweaked Xmodmap file, and to be all too familiar with audio and video codecs. Which is to say I generally know my way around what used to be the somewhat torturous process of making Linux work on hardware that was never intended to work with Linux. Currently I dual boot Debian and OS X on a MacBook Pro, which took no small amount of tweaking to get working at all.

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I consider all of the problem solving and troubleshooting I've done to get Linux working on various pieces of hardware to be a learning experience. But these days I know longer enjoy staying up until the predawn hours trying to figure out which @#$Sing Broadcom driver I need just to get online without an ethernet cable. I prefer hardware that has already been tested and is known to work. Typically that means avoiding the latest and greatest hardware in favor of laptops from a couple of years ago. Slightly older hardware usually means some other poor user has already figured out how to solve all the problems.

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Would I like the latest and greatest? Sure. But I dislike Arch, so getting everything working can be a pain. Enter Dell, System 76 and all the rest.

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To be clear, I don't often have much trouble getting Linux working these days. But there's usually at least one thing that requires some research. Especially if you prefer less popular setups like I do (I like minimal setups even on good hardware, which typically revolve around Openbox). So, while I don't have much trouble with Linux and hardware, that doesn't mean that everything always "just works".

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When Linux does "just work" it's usually luck. Windows just works because people make it just work. Windows doesn't have any better hardware support than Linux. Manufacturers have better Windows support. Which is to say, Windows machines just work because the manufacturer has spent the time and effort to make it just work. There's absolutely no reason the manufacturer couldn't do the same with Linux.

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And that's what Dell has done with the Developer Edition laptops.

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If you're looking for the cheapest way to get a powerful Linux machine, the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition is not for you. If, on the other hand, you're willing to spend a little extra to avoid late night hardware debugging sessions, the new XPS 13 is worth considering.

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The Specs

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First the bad news. This is an ultrabook, which is a marketing term for "not upgradable".

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The latest XPS 13 DE comes in a few pre-built configurations with variations in RAM, hard drive size and screen type. At the low end there's an $1100 option that ships with a Core i5, 8GB of RAM, 256GB PCIe SSD and a 1920x1080 display with the Intel HD Graphics 520 card. At the high end you get a Core i7-6560U, 16GB of RAM, 1 TB SSD and Dell's QHD+ (3200x1800) InfinityEdge touch display with an Intel Iris 540 graphics card, but all that will set you back $2500.

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There are two models in the middle with specs identical to the high end model, though less RAM and/or less SSD space. The model I tested featured 16GB of RAM, a 512 GB SSD, the QHD+ 3200x1800 display and the Iris graphics card. It lists for $2,079.

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The first and most notable thing about the XPS when it arrived is just how small it is for a 13 inch laptop. It's tiny. The InfinityEdge display is very close to borderless, which cuts out a lot of space. It essentially means that Dell can squeeze a 13.3 inch display into the size more typical of 11‐inch machines (it's also worth noting that there's a 15" model that manages to be more the size of a 14" if you're looking for a larger display).

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The screen is gorgeous, colors are rich and edges sharp. The screen is also the source of what will likely been the biggest complaint from many users -- it's glossy (it's Gorilla glass though). There is a matte option, but it's limited to the lower resolution 1920x1080 display in the low end model. As someone who mainly stares at a near black terminal window with light colored text, glossy screens don't bother me. When I work with photos and video I tend to do so indoors and relatively dim lighting that I can control, which mitigates the glare problem on glossy screens. If your use case is different, or if you just hate glossy screens, stop reading now.

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Gorgeous and sharp as the screen is this is the one place I ran into some Linux-related shortcomings.

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The XPS 13 DE ships with Ubuntu 14.04, which frankly, has mediocre support for high resolution displays. GNOME's high res display support doesn't really get to be very good until GNOME 3.16, which you won't get in Ubuntu 14.04. This means that some applications end up with tiny interfaces. To be clear, 95 percent of the applications I tried worked just fine, but there were some outliers, like Gimp, which is basically unusable at this resolution.

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There are some custom themes available that make Gimp tolerable, if not ideal, at this resolution but they all require newer versions of the underlying GNOME components than you'll get with Ubuntu 14.04.

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Dell does not officially support the just released Ubuntu 16.04 yet, but I went for it anyway. Most of Dell's hardware support revolves around a half dozen or so PPAs that come installed and which may or may not work with 16.04. Since it's a review laptop I threw caution to the wind and upgraded it to 16.04. I had no problems, but I don't necessarily suggest doing it unless you're comfortable troubleshooting Linux. Dell plans to eventually migrate to 16.04, but did not have a date available when I asked.

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It's also worth noting that if you wish to use a different flavor of Ubuntu, Dell recommends installing it via the Software Center (or apt-get) rather than starting from scratch. That way the extra Dell PPAs are still there. It's also possible to install other distros, but in my experience this is hit or miss. Mint 17.3 with Cinnamon worked pretty well after I added the Dell PPAs by hand. Arch most likely works perfectly. Fedora seems to work except for the microphone. Debian testing on the other hand was rough. Rough enough that I went back to Ubuntu. You can see some helpful bios update advice on Barton George's site. Suffice to say that you can get other distros working, but you may lose some of the "just works" aspect that you're paying for.

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The rest of the XPS 13's specs are roughly what you'd expect from a 13" laptop in 2016: there's 2 USB 3.0 ports, one with PowerShare, a thunderbolt port that supports charging, a 3-in-1 Card Reader, DisplayPort 1.2 video output, VGA, HDMI and Ethernet is available via an adapter (sold separately).

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There's the same 720p webcam that's been in the last couple of models, though with the infinity display it's at the bottom left side of the screen. The palm rests are carbon fiber composite that's very comfortable and wraps around a backlit chiclet keyboard with 1.3mm of travel in the keys. As chiclet keyboards go this one is very nice, though it is still a chiclet keyboard, which might send some developers reaching for something more substantial. Unlike some Linux hardware makers Dell sticks with the Windows logo on the "Win" or super key. I should also mention that there are three levels of brightness for the keyboard, bright, half and off, which you can toggle with the F10 key. I also like the five light battery life indicator on the left side. It's a quick way to see if you need to plugin without having to open it up and boot the OS.

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The touch pad is large and, as is the current style, lacks dedicated buttons though there is a visual line near the base to differentiate left and right clicks at a glance. I didn't mind the feel of it, it has a satisfying click to it when you press, but I did occasionally find it unresponsive for a few seconds. It happens seemingly at random and I only noticed it after I upgraded to 16.04 -- though I'm not positive that was the reason -- so I won't count it against Dell, but be aware that similar problems seem to have plagued previous releases as well.

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Inside the full aluminum exterior there's an aluminum frame as well which gives the XPS 13 DE a very solid feel. This is not some flimsy off-brand plastic with a Linux logo on it by any means. In fact in terms of construction the Dell is far superior to any of the other Linux-friendly hardware offerings currently on the market. The aluminum exterior held up to several weeks of being shoved in my bag and bounced around with nary a scratch to show for the experience.

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Real World Performance

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The XPS 13 DE is fast, even with Ubuntu's Unity interface, which I find to be one of the more RAM hungry sluggish desktops around. It's not a desktop replacement by any means, particularly if you're going to be building C#, F#, C++, C, etc, but it's no slouch either. It could use more RAM though.

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Aside from the high resolution display issues -- which are neither Dell, nor Linux's fault -- my other gripe with the XPS 13 is the 16GB RAM limit. For the typical consumer 16GB of RAM is probably sufficient, but Dell is billing this as a "developer" laptop and these days 16GB of RAM feels like the bare minimum. An option for 32GB in the high end model would make the XPS line feel a bit more future-proof, especially given how RAM hungry Ubuntu's Unity interface is: doing absolutely nothing but displaying the desktop and running terminal window with the "free -t -m" command, Unity manages to use over a gigabyte of RAM.

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The XPS 13 features 56wHR, 4-cell not user replaceable battery. Dell claims up to 17 hours, though it's not clear on the company's site which XPS 13 this refers to. While I never got that long in my real work use, turning down brightness to below 50 percent (still very bright) I was able to get very near the 10 hour mark doing basic things like web browsing, email, etc (i.e. no software compiling). That's far and away the best battery life I've ever seen with Linux.

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I also ran Ars Technica's standard web browsing battery life test, with the screen brightness at 50 percent. In Ars' test the XPS 13 managed just under 6 hours (347 minutes).

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I ran into one other technical glitch where occasionally (again somewhat randomly) the XPS 13 would not wake from sleep/suspend properly. It would wake up, display to login screen for a second or two and then the screen would go black. Nothing seemed to fix this save restarting, which makes it a pretty serious bug if you have unsaved work. A bit of digging revealed this is a known issue though and there is a fix available. Dell has a solution on its support site, though I fixed things by simply upgrading to 16.04, after which the problem disappeared.

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As with previous models it's near impossible to open the XPS 13 with one hand, which I find irrationally irritating. It's a tiny thing and probably it won't bother you, but the hinge is too stiff and the edge meets too closely for one handed operation. Other than that though I found the ergonomics of it to be very comfortable, particularly the carbon fiber palm rests which are much nicer than the hard, sharp-edged experience I'm used to with the MacBook Pro. And at 2.9 pounds it's a wonderfully light machine you'll hardly notice in your bag.

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Conclusion

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The XPS is a lightweight, well-specced, Linux-supporting laptop. That in and of itself is notable, but Dell heavily touts it as a "developer" laptop. What exactly makes the XPS a developer laptop? Essentially Dell has saved you a few apt-get commands. The XPS continues to oriented toward "DevOps" work, which means you get Virtualbox pre-installed, the more popular-with-developers Chromium browser replaces Firefox and reasonably up-to-date packages of most popular programming languages are included.

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Dell has made the sound decision to err on the side of not enough here though. There's no massive IDEs or any monolithic tools to get in your way. Instead there's nice little additions like an icon that launches htop or a pre-installed remote desktop client. Dell's own devops tools, like "Cloud Launcher" and "Profile Tool," are available on Project Sputnik's Github page as well, though none of them have seen updates in several years.

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Most of Dell's efforts though have gone into getting Linux working with hardware. The developer bit seems primarily to refer to the idea that only developers are interested in Linux. That's not to belittle the effort Dell has made, which is considerable, rather I think at this point Dell could probably just drop the developer pretense and call this the XPS 13 Ubuntu Edition.

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And that is probably the best thing about the XPS 13 Developer Edition: it works so well it's really no different than the experience anyone would have with a Windows machine. The only difference is of course, no Windows.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/dellreview.txt b/ars-technica/published/dellreview.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b0b7b7e --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/dellreview.txt @@ -0,0 +1,79 @@ +Hardware that ships with Linux installed isn't as rare as it used to be. System 76, Purism, ZaReason and others have been cranking out hardware with Linux pre-installed for quite a while now. But, while those of us who use Linux may know these companies, there's only one household name that ships laptops with Linux installed -- Dell. + +Dell's Project Sputnik has been dedicating resources to creating a "just works" experience for Dell Ultrabooks running Ubuntu for nearly four years now. Barton George, who leads the effort, and other developers have been writing code where necessary (and contributing that code back upstream) and refining the user experience to a point where everything does indeed just work. + +I reviewed the original Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition for Wired and found that it had a few rough edges. Since then I sat on the sidelines watching as George and Dell polished off those rough edges and tweaked the hardware options to better meet the needs of developers -- like expanding the available RAM to 16GB, adding a matte screen option (albeit only on the low end model) and shrinking the dimensions down considerably. + +The result is the sixth iteration of the XPS 13 developer edition. This might be the best supported Linux ultrabook on the market. It actually might be one of the only officially supported Linux ultrabooks on the market. + +Not only does the hardware work nearly flawlessly with the stock Ubuntu installation, but Dell stands behind it with the same level of support it offers for Windows users. That doesn't make it the best Linux laptop around, but for many people the ability to know that your hardware will work, rather than hoping for the best, will make Dell's premium price worth it. + +Before I dive into the review though, first a little context. I am a Linux user and have been using it full time since Ubuntu 9.04 was released. I split my time between writing (which I can do on pretty much any hardware), photography (Darktable and Gimp) and web-based software development (Python, various web servers, and sysadmin tasks). + +I've been using Linux off and on for long enough to have edited xorg.conf, have my own tweaked Xmodmap file, and to be all too familiar with audio and video codecs. Which is to say I generally know my way around what used to be the somewhat torturous process of making Linux work on hardware that was never intended to work with Linux. Currently I dual boot Debian and OS X on a MacBook Pro, which took no small amount of tweaking to get working at all. + +I consider all of the problem solving and troubleshooting I've done to get Linux working on various pieces of hardware to be a learning experience. But these days I know longer enjoy staying up until the predawn hours trying to figure out which @#$Sing Broadcom driver I need just to get online without an ethernet cable. I prefer hardware that has already been tested and is known to work. Typically that means avoiding the latest and greatest hardware in favor of laptops from a couple of years ago. Slightly older hardware usually means some other poor user has already figured out how to solve all the problems. + +Would I like the latest and greatest? Sure. But I dislike Arch, so getting everything working can be a pain. Enter Dell, System 76 and all the rest. + +To be clear, I don't often have much trouble getting Linux working these days. But there's usually at least one thing that requires some research. Especially if you prefer less popular setups like I do (I like minimal setups even on good hardware, which typically revolve around Openbox). So, while I don't have much trouble with Linux and hardware, that doesn't mean that everything always "just works". + +When Linux does "just work" it's usually luck. Windows just works because people make it just work. Windows doesn't have any better hardware support than Linux. Manufacturers have better Windows support. Which is to say, Windows machines just work because the manufacturer has spent the time and effort to make it just work. There's absolutely no reason the manufacturer couldn't do the same with Linux. + +And that's what Dell has done with the Developer Edition laptops. + +If you're looking for the cheapest way to get a powerful Linux machine, the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition is not for you. If, on the other hand, you're willing to spend a little extra to avoid late night hardware debugging sessions, the new XPS 13 is worth considering. + +## The Specs + +First the bad news. This is an ultrabook, which is a marketing term for "not upgradable". + +The latest XPS 13 DE comes in a few pre-built configurations with variations in RAM, hard drive size and screen type. At the low end there's an $1100 option that ships with a Core i5, 8GB of RAM, 256GB PCIe SSD and a 1920x1080 display with the Intel HD Graphics 520 card. At the high end you get a Core i7-6560U, 16GB of RAM, 1 TB SSD and Dell's QHD+ (3200x1800) InfinityEdge touch display with an Intel Iris 540 graphics card, but all that will set you back $2500. + +There are two models in the middle with specs identical to the high end model, though less RAM and/or less SSD space. The model I tested featured 16GB of RAM, a 512 GB SSD, the QHD+ 3200x1800 display and the Iris graphics card. It lists for $2,079. + +The first and most notable thing about the XPS when it arrived is just how small it is for a 13 inch laptop. It's tiny. The InfinityEdge display is very close to borderless, which cuts out a lot of space. It essentially means that Dell can squeeze a 13.3 inch display into the size more typical of 11‐inch machines (it's also worth noting that there's a 15" model that manages to be more the size of a 14" if you're looking for a larger display). + +The screen is gorgeous, colors are rich and edges sharp. The screen is also the source of what will likely been the biggest complaint from many users -- it's glossy (it's Gorilla glass though). There is a matte option, but it's limited to the lower resolution 1920x1080 display in the low end model. As someone who mainly stares at a near black terminal window with light colored text, glossy screens don't bother me. When I work with photos and video I tend to do so indoors and relatively dim lighting that I can control, which mitigates the glare problem on glossy screens. If your use case is different, or if you just hate glossy screens, stop reading now. + +Gorgeous and sharp as the screen is this is the one place I ran into some Linux-related shortcomings. + +The XPS 13 DE ships with Ubuntu 14.04, which frankly, has mediocre support for high resolution displays. GNOME's high res display support doesn't really get to be very good until GNOME 3.16, which you won't get in Ubuntu 14.04. This means that some applications end up with tiny interfaces. To be clear, 95 percent of the applications I tried worked just fine, but there were some outliers, like Gimp, which is basically unusable at this resolution. + +There are some custom themes available that make Gimp tolerable, if not ideal, at this resolution but they all require newer versions of the underlying GNOME components than you'll get with Ubuntu 14.04. + +Dell does not officially support the just released Ubuntu 16.04 yet, but I went for it anyway. Most of Dell's hardware support revolves around a half dozen or so PPAs that come installed and which may or may not work with 16.04. Since it's a review laptop I threw caution to the wind and upgraded it to 16.04. I had no problems, but I don't necessarily suggest doing it unless you're comfortable troubleshooting Linux. Dell plans to eventually migrate to 16.04, but did not have a date available when I asked. + +It's also worth noting that if you wish to use a different flavor of Ubuntu, Dell recommends installing it via the Software Center (or apt-get) rather than starting from scratch. That way the extra Dell PPAs are still there. It's also possible to install other distros, but in my experience this is hit or miss. Mint 17.3 with Cinnamon worked pretty well after I added the Dell PPAs by hand. Arch most likely works perfectly. Fedora seems to work except for the microphone. Debian testing on the other hand was rough. Rough enough that I went back to Ubuntu. You can see some helpful bios update advice on [Barton George's site](https://bartongeorge.net/2015/04/09/4th-gen-dell-xps-13-developer-edition-available/). Suffice to say that you *can* get other distros working, but you may lose some of the "just works" aspect that you're paying for. + +The rest of the XPS 13's specs are roughly what you'd expect from a 13" laptop in 2016: there's 2 USB 3.0 ports, one with PowerShare, a thunderbolt port that supports charging, a 3-in-1 Card Reader, DisplayPort 1.2 video output, VGA, HDMI and Ethernet is available via an adapter (sold separately). + +There's the same 720p webcam that's been in the last couple of models, though with the infinity display it's at the bottom left side of the screen. The palm rests are carbon fiber composite that's very comfortable and wraps around a backlit chiclet keyboard with 1.3mm of travel in the keys. As chiclet keyboards go this one is very nice, though it is still a chiclet keyboard, which might send some developers reaching for something more substantial. Unlike some Linux hardware makers Dell sticks with the Windows logo on the "Win" or super key. I should also mention that there are three levels of brightness for the keyboard, bright, half and off, which you can toggle with the F10 key. I also like the five light battery life indicator on the left side. It's a quick way to see if you need to plugin without having to open it up and boot the OS. + +The touch pad is large and, as is the current style, lacks dedicated buttons though there is a visual line near the base to differentiate left and right clicks at a glance. I didn't mind the feel of it, it has a satisfying click to it when you press, but I did occasionally find it unresponsive for a few seconds. It happens seemingly at random and I only noticed it after I upgraded to 16.04 -- though I'm not positive that was the reason -- so I won't count it against Dell, but be aware that similar problems seem to have plagued previous releases as well. + +Inside the full aluminum exterior there's an aluminum frame as well which gives the XPS 13 DE a very solid feel. This is not some flimsy off-brand plastic with a Linux logo on it by any means. In fact in terms of construction the Dell is far superior to any of the other Linux-friendly hardware offerings currently on the market. The aluminum exterior held up to several weeks of being shoved in my bag and bounced around with nary a scratch to show for the experience. + +## Real World Performance + +The XPS 13 DE is fast, even with Ubuntu's Unity interface, which I find to be one of the more RAM hungry sluggish desktops around. It's not a desktop replacement by any means, particularly if you're going to be building C#, F#, C++, C, etc, but it's no slouch either. It could use more RAM though. + +Aside from the high resolution display issues -- which are neither Dell, nor Linux's fault -- my other gripe with the XPS 13 is the 16GB RAM limit. For the typical consumer 16GB of RAM is probably sufficient, but Dell is billing this as a "developer" laptop and these days 16GB of RAM feels like the bare minimum. An option for 32GB in the high end model would make the XPS line feel a bit more future-proof, especially given how RAM hungry Ubuntu's Unity interface is: doing absolutely nothing but displaying the desktop and running terminal window with the "free -t -m" command, Unity manages to use over a gigabyte of RAM. + +The XPS 13 features 56wHR, 4-cell not user replaceable battery. Dell claims up to 17 hours, though it's not clear on the company's site which XPS 13 this refers to. While I never got that long in my real work use, turning down brightness to below 50 percent (still very bright) I was able to get very near the 10 hour mark doing basic things like web browsing, email, etc (i.e. no software compiling). That's far and away the best battery life I've ever seen with Linux. + +I also ran Ars Technica's standard web browsing battery life test, with the screen brightness at 50 percent. In Ars' test the XPS 13 managed just under 6 hours (347 minutes). + +I ran into one other technical glitch where occasionally (again somewhat randomly) the XPS 13 would not wake from sleep/suspend properly. It would wake up, display to login screen for a second or two and then the screen would go black. Nothing seemed to fix this save restarting, which makes it a pretty serious bug if you have unsaved work. A bit of digging revealed this is a known issue though and there is a fix available. Dell has a [solution on its support site](http://www.dell.com/support/article/uk/en/ukdhs1/SLN297551/en), though I fixed things by simply upgrading to 16.04, after which the problem disappeared. + +As with previous models it's near impossible to open the XPS 13 with one hand, which I find irrationally irritating. It's a tiny thing and probably it won't bother you, but the hinge is too stiff and the edge meets too closely for one handed operation. Other than that though I found the ergonomics of it to be very comfortable, particularly the carbon fiber palm rests which are much nicer than the hard, sharp-edged experience I'm used to with the MacBook Pro. And at 2.9 pounds it's a wonderfully light machine you'll hardly notice in your bag. + +## Conclusion + +The XPS is a lightweight, well-specced, Linux-supporting laptop. That in and of itself is notable, but Dell heavily touts it as a "developer" laptop. What exactly makes the XPS a developer laptop? Essentially Dell has saved you a few apt-get commands. The XPS continues to oriented toward "DevOps" work, which means you get Virtualbox pre-installed, the more popular-with-developers Chromium browser replaces Firefox and reasonably up-to-date packages of most popular programming languages are included. + +Dell has made the sound decision to err on the side of not enough here though. There's no massive IDEs or any monolithic tools to get in your way. Instead there's nice little additions like an icon that launches htop or a pre-installed remote desktop client. Dell's own devops tools, like "Cloud Launcher" and "Profile Tool," are available on Project Sputnik's Github page as well, though none of them have seen updates in several years. + +Most of Dell's efforts though have gone into getting Linux working with hardware. The developer bit seems primarily to refer to the idea that only developers are interested in Linux. That's not to belittle the effort Dell has made, which is considerable, rather I think at this point Dell could probably just drop the developer pretense and call this the XPS 13 Ubuntu Edition. + +And that is probably the best thing about the XPS 13 Developer Edition: it works so well it's really no different than the experience anyone would have with a Windows machine. The only difference is of course, no Windows. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/dellxps-review.html b/ars-technica/published/dellxps-review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bfdee79 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/dellxps-review.html @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +

Dell's XPS Developer Edition laptop family has produced some of the best Linux "ultrabooks" in recent memory. The company's Developer Edition moniker refers specifically to the XPS models that ship with Ubuntu Linux installed instead of Windows.

+

This month, November 2018, marks the six year anniversary of the first Ubuntu-based version of the Dell XPS 13.

+

To see where Project Sputnik is at after six years, Dell sent Ars the latest model of the XPS 13, the 13in version, which received a serious overhaul earlier this year (see Ars' earlier review for more details). While Dell bumped the the hardware specs, revamped the thermal system and introduced a new rose and white version, the big news in the latest Developer Edition, which began shipping earlier this year, is the upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04.

+

It's true that Linux users did have a wait bit, but it was more Ubuntu's release schedule than Dell's that caused the delay. The Windows version of the XPS 13 (model 9370) arrived before the release of Ubuntu 18.04, the latest long term support release from Canonical. Since its debut in 2012, the XPS Developer Edition line has always tracked Canonical's LTS releases. That means that even the XPS DE released in February of this year still shipped Ubuntu 16.04. While I've never had a problem upgrading to the latest Ubuntu release on any of the three XPSes I've tested over the years, nothing beyond 16.04 has ever been supported by Dell.

+

The latest release of the XPS 13 Developer Edition model 9370 changes that. The latest and greatest hardware now features full support for Ubuntu 18.04, which is no small feat considering that the move from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 means a completely new desktop, GNOME 3, a major revamp of underlying technologies (more modern GTK libraries), and a new very different user interface to contend with. On the hardware side there's quite a bit of newer tech in the XPS 13, including USB C and Thunderbolt, all of which now work under Ubuntu without a hitch.

+

After a few weeks living with the XPS 13, I'm happy to say that, with a few small exceptions, Dell has pulled off the transition to Ubuntu 18.04 with remarkable aplomb.

+

Some might argue that Linux has reached a stage where it tends to work out of the box on almost any hardware. But, while the situation is certainly better than it once was, my experience has been that it's rare to buy a brand new laptop and get everything working right away. Stick with last year's model and you'll likely be fine, but with new hardware there almost always seems to be an edge case, a trackpad that's missing drivers in all but the latest kernel (which might not be available immediately in your distro of choice, unless that happens to be Arch Linux), some application that lacks good support for HiDPI screens, or other small glitches. Nothing deal breaking, but always something annoying.

+

It's true that most of the hardware I've installed Linux on in the last few years has not had any show stopping problems, but there's typically some problems that require a bit of research to solve when they turn out to be solvable, or some patience when the solution turns out to be waiting for upstream updates to be released.

+

If you depend on Linux to get your work done every day, that's just not acceptable, which is where Dell's official Linux support becomes not just nice to have, but a necessity. You don't want to be tracking down hardware drivers or trying to figure out the best Xrandr settings for your display when you have work to get done and deadlines to meet.

+

If you want a Linux rig that "just works", weighs under 3lbs, and has the battery life you need to work most of the day power-cable free, the XPS 13 is the laptop you've been looking for. The upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 means you'll also have the latest and greatest tools that Ubuntu has to offer, including much-improved support for Snap packages, which is a game changer for anyone sticking with the LTS base system.

+

Hardware

+

The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition has always been an exceptionally well built, great-looking piece of hardware. The revamped version is no exception and the new new white and rose-gold version, while not my style exactly, looks pretty slick. On the rose-and-white model, the palm rest area and space around the keyboard are covered with a very nice fiberglass-like weave that gives it a bit of texture and makes for a little bit softer edge that's easier on my wrists than the last model I used.

+ +[image="dellxps-top.jpg" caption="The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition"] + +

I was hesitant to take a white laptop out and about for fear of sending Dell back a gray-brown laptop, but in the six weeks I've been using it, it hasn't picked up a single spot of dirt or a mark that didn't easily disappear with the quick swipe of a rag.

+

The Infinity Edge display on the XPS 13 comes in two flavors -- 3840 x 2160 touchscreen 4k or an FHD non-touch option. There's a roughly $200 difference between the two, but the big catch, as far as I could tell on the Dell website, is that the 16GB RAM model is only available with the HiDPI screen. Since most developers are going to want the max RAM possible, that pretty much means you're going to get the HiDPI display.

+ +[image="dellxps-front.jpg" caption="Ubuntu on the XPS 13's HiDPI screen"] + +

There's two things to note about the 4K display (which is what came with the model I tested). First, it's wonderfully bright and sharp. Ubuntu's GNOME interface works well at this resolution, but keep in mind there's there's no half scaling -- it's 2x or 1X. KDE supports arbitrary scaling, which might make Kubuntu a compelling option for some users. The downside to the HiDPI screen is that battery life isn't a good as the FHD non-touch version, and, if you're buying it with the idea of running some other distro, well, do your research, not every desktop/distro combo is going to work well with this display (I happen to really like LXQT these days, but even the Lubuntu version did not play well with the HiDPI screen out of the box).

+

The 16GB model comes equipped with a 8th Generation Intel Core i7-8550U Processor (8M Cache, up to 4.0 GHz, 4 cores) and has the onboard Intel UHD Graphics 620. There are two Thunderbolt 3 ports, and Dell has made it possible to use four-lane PCI connections, which means in theory you could add an external graphics card for a better gaming experience. At least that's possible with the Windows version, I did not test how well this works under Ubuntu because I am not a gamer and this is a serious developer laptop, no playing games here. I did throw some video rendering tasks at it, (using Blender) and the XPS 13 cranked through them with impressive ease.

+

Despite the new case color, not everything on XPS 13 comes up roses. There's still that webcam. Yes it's still at the bottom of the screen, aimed up your nose. At this point is seems safe to assume Dell isn't changing it. I found some nice white electrical tape at my local hardware store and stuck it over the camera and had no further problems with it. If you're going to do any teleconferencing or the like, the $20 you spend on an external USB webcam will not be wasted.

+

On the upside, some of the earlier models of the XPS 13 I tested had a tendency to produce a high pitched whine in some situations. If you read users' complaints around the web you'll get a mix of theories, the most likely being coil whine. Whatever it was, I have not noticed it with this model.

+

Aside from the aforementioned Thunderbolt ports, you'll find that, like a certain other laptop maker, the latest version of the XPS 13 ditches USB A in favor of a USB Type C port. Technically the XPS 13 has three USB type C ports, two of which are Thunderbolt 3 enabled, the other is USB 3.1.

+

While I understand this move somewhat -- USB C is the future and I want my laptop to last a few years, which means I want at least one USB C port; and you aren't getting that 4mm edge with USB A ports in there -- from a purely practical standpoint I find it irritating. The USB C future still feels a long way off. I have plenty of devices that are USB A and I'm not going to be replacing perfectly capable accessories just because hardware ports are disappearing. Dell does helpfully include a USB C to A dongle, but really, I did not need yet another dongle.

+

Other ports include a microSD card reader, headset jack, and Noble lock slot. The included power supply remains small enough that toting it around does not significantly alter the weight of your bag. Just remember to throw in that USB C to A dongle as well. And the USB A to Ethernet dongle if you're hoping to use the internet from a hotel room. It's not really criticism of Dell so much as the industry at large, but the potential daisy chain of dongles necessary to connect modern ultrabooks to any technology older than six months is quickly approaching the ridiculous.

+

Ubuntu 18.04 on the XPS

+

What's not approaching the ridiculous is Ubuntu 18.04, this is perhaps the best mainstream version of Linux ever released. Coupled with Dell's hardware and support, Ubuntu 18.04 makes for an outstanding desktop experience that will, for many developers, trump both Windows and macOS.

+

That said, it's worth noting that if you're coming from Ubuntu 16.04 or earlier, for example upgrading from a previous XPS model, you're in for something of a shock. The Ubuntu that ships with the latest XPS 13 is significantly different from the moment you first turn it on -- there’s a new desktop, a new lock screen, some new default apps and of course a new kernel under the hood. For a full review of everything that's new, see Ars' earlier review.

+ +[image="dellxps-default1804desk.jpg" caption="The new Welcome to Ubuntu guide in 18.04"] + +

To help users transition from previous releases to this one, Canonical has a little "first-run" app called "Welcome to Ubuntu", which Dell includes as well. The app does a good job of highlighting some of the most used new features and points out where things are in GNOME.

+

The Developer slant to the XPS 13 DE starts to show as soon as you configure Ubuntu and book to the desktop for the first time. Regular Ubuntu users will note that Dell has included quite a few things out of the box that Ubuntu does not such as both the Chrome and Chromium web browsers and the very nice Dellrecovery tool that allows you to create an image of your XPS as it arrived. If you plan to do any distro experimenting, I strongly suggest you create a backup image with Dell's extra repos and tools before you do anything else.

+

One bit of hardware support I immediately noticed is missing out of the box is support for two-finger clicks for right-click. From what I can tell this is a shortcoming of GNOME, not Dell. Still, it would be nice for Dell to include the GNOME Tweaks tool by default since it allows for customization options that the GNOME devs have seen fit to remove from GNOME proper. You could of course also enable two-finger right clicks and some other tweaks using included tools like xinput.

+

One of the big things you get with Ubuntu 18.04 is much-improved support for Snap applications. It's a little bit of an oversimplification, but a Snap application is an app packaged in a container, which ships separately from Ubuntu itself. That doesn't sound all that great, but what it allows you to do is stay up to date with releases of the Snap application, without needing to worry about updating Ubuntu itself.

+

Snaps are useful as a way to keep up to date with desktop apps that may be developing faster than Ubuntu's package maintainers can package them. For example, I used both Darktable and Gimp as Snaps to be able to have the latest releases of both, which are sometimes a bit of head of what's in Ubuntu's repositories.

+ +[image="dell-snaps-inappcenter.png" caption="Install Skype as a Snap package in Ubuntu 18.04"] + +

Snaps are also useful for developers because Snaps contain all their own dependencies. This means it's easy, for instance, to run a Snap app that requires a specific version of Python, without worrying about that conflicting with the system-wide version of Python. Developers wanting the latest version of any number of tools would do well to look at Canonical's Snapcraft store, where you'll find Snaps for developer necessities like Docker, LXD and PostgreSQL, as well as the latest version of nearly every language you can think of, from Go to Javascript, even .NET if you've got one of "those" jobs.

+

Conclusion

+

While the update to 18.04 is a welcome one, and there are a couple of bones thrown to developers, it feels a little bit like Dell is moving away from the developer angle to a more mainstream Linux laptop. I think that's a good thing.

+

Previous releases shipped with a quite a few developer tools pre-installed, Virtualbox, some extra programming languages, and there were a couple of Dell-developed devops tools called Cloud Launcher and Profile Tool, which could be easily installed, but neither seemed to get much traction with developers.

+

Aside from the extra web browsers though, there's nothing particularly developer-oriented about the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition. Aside from the marketing. And I think that's a good thing. I appreciate that Dell chooses to err on the side of not enough rather than throwing in a bunch of IDEs or tools that not every developer is going to want. Part of the reason Linux is so popular with developers is that it allows everyone to work in their own way using whatever toolset they happen to like out the vast array of tools available in the open source world.

+

Rather than worrying about some custom tools developers aren't going to use anyway, Dell's efforts have instead gone where it should: into getting Linux working with the hardware. In other words Dell gets out of your way. That's not to belittle the effort Dell has made here, which is considerable, rather I think at this point Dell should drop the developer pretense and call this the XPS 13 Linux Edition.

+

And that is probably the best thing about the XPS 13 Developer Edition. It provides a solid platform from which you can build up your workflow and tools to suit your tastes, whether you're a developer or just want a solid laptop with an operating system that stays out of your way and lets you do what you want to do.

+

The Good + Light weight hardware with a brilliant screen + Solid performance + Ubuntu 18.04 + No bloatware +The Bad + No USB Type A ports. + Max 16GB of RAM feels limited for a "Developer" machine +The Ugly +* The webcam. Still.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/dellxps-review.txt b/ars-technica/published/dellxps-review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3c7c746 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/dellxps-review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,83 @@ +Dell's XPS Developer Edition laptop family has produced some of the best Linux "ultrabooks" in recent memory. The company's Developer Edition moniker refers specifically to the [XPS models](https://pilot.search.dell.com/ubuntu%20xps%2013#products) that ship with Ubuntu Linux installed instead of Windows. + +This month, November 2018, marks the six year anniversary of the first Ubuntu-based version of the Dell XPS 13. + +To see where Project Sputnik is at after six years, Dell sent Ars the latest model of the XPS 13, the 13in version, which received a serious overhaul earlier this year (see Ars' [earlier review](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/review-improved-dell-xps-13-laptop-holds-its-own-against-other-ultrabooks/) for more details). While Dell bumped the the hardware specs, revamped the thermal system and introduced a new rose and white version, the big news in the latest Developer Edition, which began shipping earlier this year, is the upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04. + +It's true that Linux users did have a wait bit, but it was more Ubuntu's release schedule than Dell's that caused the delay. The Windows version of the XPS 13 (model 9370) arrived before the release of Ubuntu 18.04, the latest long term support release from Canonical. Since its debut in 2012, the XPS Developer Edition line has always tracked Canonical's LTS releases. That means that even the XPS DE released in February of this year still shipped Ubuntu 16.04. While I've never had a problem upgrading to the latest Ubuntu release on any of the three XPSes I've tested over the years, nothing beyond 16.04 has ever been supported by Dell. + +The latest release of the XPS 13 Developer Edition model 9370 changes that. The latest and greatest hardware now features full support for Ubuntu 18.04, which is no small feat considering that the move from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 means a completely new desktop, GNOME 3, a major revamp of underlying technologies (more modern GTK libraries), and a new very different user interface to contend with. On the hardware side there's quite a bit of newer tech in the XPS 13, including USB C and Thunderbolt, all of which now work under Ubuntu without a hitch. + +After a few weeks living with the XPS 13, I'm happy to say that, with a few small exceptions, Dell has pulled off the transition to Ubuntu 18.04 with remarkable aplomb. + +Some might argue that Linux has reached a stage where it tends to work out of the box on almost any hardware. But, while the situation is certainly better than it once was, my experience has been that it's rare to buy a brand new laptop and get everything working right away. Stick with last year's model and you'll likely be fine, but with new hardware there almost always seems to be an edge case, a trackpad that's missing drivers in all but the latest kernel (which might not be available immediately in your distro of choice, unless that happens to be Arch Linux), some application that lacks good support for HiDPI screens, or other small glitches. Nothing deal breaking, but always something annoying. + +It's true that most of the hardware I've installed Linux on in the last few years has not had any show stopping problems, but there's typically some problems that require a bit of research to solve when they turn out to be solvable, or some patience when the solution turns out to be waiting for upstream updates to be released. + +If you depend on Linux to get your work done every day, that's just not acceptable, which is where Dell's official Linux support becomes not just nice to have, but a necessity. You don't want to be tracking down hardware drivers or trying to figure out the best Xrandr settings for your display when you have work to get done and deadlines to meet. + +If you want a Linux rig that "just works", weighs under 3lbs, and has the battery life you need to work most of the day power-cable free, the XPS 13 is the laptop you've been looking for. The upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 means you'll also have the latest and greatest tools that Ubuntu has to offer, including much-improved support for Snap packages, which is a game changer for anyone sticking with the LTS base system. + +## Hardware + +The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition has always been an exceptionally well built, great-looking piece of hardware. The revamped version is no exception and the new new white and rose-gold version, while not my style exactly, looks pretty slick. On the rose-and-white model, the palm rest area and space around the keyboard are covered with a very nice fiberglass-like weave that gives it a bit of texture and makes for a little bit softer edge that's easier on my wrists than the last model I used. + +I was hesitant to take a white laptop out and about for fear of sending Dell back a gray-brown laptop, but in the six weeks I've been using it, it hasn't picked up a single spot of dirt or a mark that didn't easily disappear with the quick swipe of a rag. + +The Infinity Edge display on the XPS 13 comes in two flavors -- 3840 x 2160 touchscreen 4k or an FHD non-touch option. There's a roughly $200 difference between the two, but the big catch, as far as I could tell on the Dell website, is that the 16GB RAM model is only available with the HiDPI screen. Since most developers are going to want the max RAM possible, that pretty much means you're going to get the HiDPI display. + +There's two things to note about the 4K display (which is what came with the model I tested). First, it's wonderfully bright and sharp. Ubuntu's GNOME interface works well at this resolution, but keep in mind there's there's no half scaling -- it's 2x or 1X. KDE supports arbitrary scaling, which might make Kubuntu a compelling option for some users. The downside to the HiDPI screen is that battery life isn't a good as the FHD non-touch version, and, if you're buying it with the idea of running some other distro, well, do your research, not every desktop/distro combo is going to work well with this display (I happen to really like LXQT these days, but even the Lubuntu version did not play well with the HiDPI screen out of the box). + +The 16GB model comes equipped with a 8th Generation Intel Core i7-8550U Processor (8M Cache, up to 4.0 GHz, 4 cores) and has the onboard Intel UHD Graphics 620. There are two Thunderbolt 3 ports, and Dell has made it possible to use four-lane PCI connections, which means in theory you could add an external graphics card for a better gaming experience. At least that's possible with the Windows version, I did not test how well this works under Ubuntu because I am not a gamer and this is a serious *developer* laptop, no playing games here. I did throw some video rendering tasks at it, (using Blender) and the XPS 13 cranked through them with impressive ease. + +Despite the new case color, not everything on XPS 13 comes up roses. There's still that webcam. Yes it's still at the bottom of the screen, aimed up your nose. At this point is seems safe to assume Dell isn't changing it. I found some nice white electrical tape at my local hardware store and stuck it over the camera and had no further problems with it. If you're going to do any teleconferencing or the like, the $20 you spend on an external USB webcam will not be wasted. + +On the upside, some of the earlier models of the XPS 13 I tested had a tendency to produce a high pitched whine in some situations. If you read users' complaints around the web you'll get a mix of theories, the most likely being coil whine. Whatever it was, I have not noticed it with this model. + +Aside from the aforementioned Thunderbolt ports, you'll find that, like a certain other laptop maker, the latest version of the XPS 13 ditches USB A in favor of a USB Type C port. Technically the XPS 13 has three USB type C ports, two of which are Thunderbolt 3 enabled, the other is USB 3.1. + +While I understand this move somewhat -- USB C is the future and I want my laptop to last a few years, which means I want at least one USB C port; and you aren't getting that 4mm edge with USB A ports in there -- from a purely practical standpoint I find it irritating. The USB C future still feels a long way off. I have plenty of devices that are USB A and I'm not going to be replacing perfectly capable accessories just because hardware ports are disappearing. Dell does helpfully include a USB C to A dongle, but really, I did not need yet another dongle. + +Other ports include a microSD card reader, headset jack, and Noble lock slot. The included power supply remains small enough that toting it around does not significantly alter the weight of your bag. Just remember to throw in that USB C to A dongle as well. And the USB A to Ethernet dongle if you're hoping to use the internet from a hotel room. It's not really criticism of Dell so much as the industry at large, but the potential daisy chain of dongles necessary to connect modern ultrabooks to any technology older than six months is quickly approaching the ridiculous. + +## Ubuntu 18.04 on the XPS + +What's not approaching the ridiculous is Ubuntu 18.04, this is perhaps the best mainstream version of Linux ever released. Coupled with Dell's hardware and support, Ubuntu 18.04 makes for an outstanding desktop experience that will, for many developers, trump both Windows and macOS. + +That said, it's worth noting that if you're coming from Ubuntu 16.04 or earlier, for example upgrading from a previous XPS model, you're in for something of a shock. The Ubuntu that ships with the latest XPS 13 is significantly different from the moment you first turn it on -- there’s a new desktop, a new lock screen, some new default apps and of course a new kernel under the hood. For a full review of everything that's new, see Ars' [earlier review](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/05/ubuntu-18-04-the-return-of-a-familiar-interface-marks-the-best-ubuntu-in-years/). + +To help users transition from previous releases to this one, Canonical has a little "first-run" app called "Welcome to Ubuntu", which Dell includes as well. The app does a good job of highlighting some of the most used new features and points out where things are in GNOME. + +The Developer slant to the XPS 13 DE starts to show as soon as you configure Ubuntu and book to the desktop for the first time. Regular Ubuntu users will note that Dell has included quite a few things out of the box that Ubuntu does not such as both the Chrome and Chromium web browsers and the very nice Dellrecovery tool that allows you to create an image of your XPS as it arrived. If you plan to do any distro experimenting, I strongly suggest you create a backup image with Dell's extra repos and tools before you do anything else. + +One bit of hardware support I immediately noticed is missing out of the box is support for two-finger clicks for right-click. From what I can tell this is a shortcoming of GNOME, not Dell. Still, it would be nice for Dell to include the GNOME Tweaks tool by default since it allows for customization options that the GNOME devs have seen fit to remove from GNOME proper. You could of course also enable two-finger right clicks and some other tweaks using included tools like `xinput`. + +One of the big things you get with Ubuntu 18.04 is much-improved support for Snap applications. It's a little bit of an oversimplification, but a Snap application is an app packaged in a container, which ships separately from Ubuntu itself. That doesn't sound all that great, but what it allows you to do is stay up to date with releases of the Snap application, without needing to worry about updating Ubuntu itself. + +Snaps are useful as a way to keep up to date with desktop apps that may be developing faster than Ubuntu's package maintainers can package them. For example, I used both Darktable and Gimp as Snaps to be able to have the latest releases of both, which are sometimes a bit of head of what's in Ubuntu's repositories. + +Snaps are also useful for developers because Snaps contain all their own dependencies. This means it's easy, for instance, to run a Snap app that requires a specific version of Python, without worrying about that conflicting with the system-wide version of Python. Developers wanting the latest version of any number of tools would do well to look at Canonical's [Snapcraft store](https://snapcraft.io/), where you'll find Snaps for developer necessities like Docker, LXD and PostgreSQL, as well as the latest version of nearly every language you can think of, from Go to Javascript, even .NET if you've got one of "those" jobs. + +## Conclusion + +While the update to 18.04 is a welcome one, and there are a couple of bones thrown to developers, it feels a little bit like Dell is moving away from the developer angle to a more mainstream Linux laptop. I think that's a good thing. + +Previous releases shipped with a quite a few developer tools pre-installed, Virtualbox, some extra programming languages, and there were a couple of Dell-developed devops tools called Cloud Launcher and Profile Tool, which could be easily installed, but neither seemed to get much traction with developers. + +Aside from the extra web browsers though, there's nothing particularly developer-oriented about the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition. Aside from the marketing. And I think that's a good thing. I appreciate that Dell chooses to err on the side of not enough rather than throwing in a bunch of IDEs or tools that not every developer is going to want. Part of the reason Linux is so popular with developers is that it allows everyone to work in their own way using whatever toolset they happen to like out the vast array of tools available in the open source world. + +Rather than worrying about some custom tools developers aren't going to use anyway, Dell's efforts have instead gone where it should: into getting Linux working with the hardware. In other words Dell gets out of your way. That's not to belittle the effort Dell has made here, which is considerable, rather I think at this point Dell should drop the developer pretense and call this the XPS 13 Linux Edition. + +And that is probably the best thing about the XPS 13 Developer Edition. It provides a solid platform from which you can build up your workflow and tools to suit your tastes, whether you're a developer or just want a solid laptop with an operating system that stays out of your way and lets you do what you want to do. + + +The Good +* Light weight hardware with a brilliant screen +* Solid performance +* Ubuntu 18.04 +* No bloatware +The Bad +* No USB Type A ports. +* Max 16GB of RAM feels limited for a "Developer" machine +The Ugly +* The webcam. Still. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/dellxps13-2.html b/ars-technica/published/dellxps13-2.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4ad639b --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/dellxps13-2.html @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +

Dell recently updated the company's extremely popular XPS 13 Developer Edition.

+

Dell's Linux effort, known as Project Sputnik, is led by developer Barton George, who, along with the rest of the Sputnik team, has done an excellent job of bringing a "just works" Linux experience to Dell Ultrabooks. The XPS 13 Developer Edition has been available for 4 years now and this release marks the 7th version of Dell's Ubuntu powered ultrabook.

+

Dell isn't the only manufacturer producing great Linux machines. In fact there's almost an embarrassment of riches for Linux fans these days. System76, whose Oryx Pro remains my top pick for anyone who needs massive power, Purism, ZaReason and others are all producing solid offerings that work with Linux out of the box.

+

Even hardware not explicitly made for Linux tends to work out of box these days. I recently installed Fedora on a Sony Vaio and was shocked that the only problem I encountered was that the default trackpad configuration was terribly slow.

+

Admittedly, the Vaio is a few years old, which means there's been more time for hardware issues to be addressed. Sometimes getting Linux running on the bleeding edge hardware is still a bit tricky -- or requires running 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.

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It also doesn't hurt that the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition is an exceptionally well built, great-looking piece of hardware. If you want your Linux rig to "just work" and be a powerful, svelte little package that weighs under 3lbs, the XPS 13 is the laptop you've been looking for.

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The latest iteration of the XPS 13 line, and the third I've tested, features Intel's new Kaby Lake chip that bumps the clock speed by about 10 percent. The more impressive side of the chipset upgrade is the different graphics architecture which is said to improve performance in 3D graphics and 4K video. The results in this Linux-based model make especially 4K video playback incredibly smooth and not nearly as battery-draining as previous models.

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The Specs

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Outwardly there's nothing new to see here. The 7th generation Dell XPS 13 DE uses the same wonderful InfinityEdge display that manages to pack a 13 in screen into a body that looks and feels more like an 11 inch laptop. The model I tested came with the 3200x1800 IPS touch panel. There's also a version with a 1920x1080 IPS non-touch panel, but I think the higher res display is worth the extra money.

+

This is quite simply the best looking display I've seen in a laptop. Naturally the HiDPI model suffers a little in battery life compared to the lower res model. I've never used the lower res version so I can't compare battery life times, but more pixels takes more power, so if battery life is your top priority don't go with the HiDPI model. That said, I find the brightest setting (400 nit brightness) to be a bit much indoors. It's great for working outside and goes a long way to compensate for the inevitable glare on glossy screens, but indoors I rarely push the brightness past 60 percent, which improves battery life considerably.

+

The model Dell sent me featured a i7-7500U Kaby Lake chip with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB solid state drive. As configured the model I tested would set you back $1799. The lowest model, which has the 1920x1080 display, an i5 chip, 128GB SSD and only 8GB of RAM, can be had for $975. For an extra $375 you can step up to the higher res screen and a 256GB SSD. There's also a new option in there for what Dell calls a "Rose Gold" exterior.

+

The model I tested had the same full aluminum exterior as previous models. Underneath it there's an aluminum frame as well, which provides a stiffness that makes the XPS line feel very solid even at their minimal weight. As has been my experience with most Dell machines, the construction is excellent. I used the previous model for over six months, shoving it in and out of my bag on several times a day every day and it doesn't have a scratch on it. I can see no reason to think the latest model would be any different.

+

Also unchanged in this release are the ports and layout. There are still two USB 3.0 ports, one with PowerShare for charging your devices (note that USB charging generally requires a trip into the BIOS settings to enable, see Dell's support site for more info). There's also a Thunderbolt port that supports charging, a 3-in-1 card reader, DisplayPort 1.2 video output, VGA and HDMI. As with any laptop this thin, Ethernet requires an adapter (sold separately).

+

There's the same 720p webcam that has been in the last couple of models, and yes, it's still at the bottom of the lid. And yes, it still sucks that it's down there, though in fairness to Dell, there is nowhere else to put it, the InfinityEdge display comes within 1/8 inch of the edge of the lid. Still, like fellow Ars reviewer Peter Bright, I find this decision irritating: why not just move the display panel down an 1/8 inch and put the camera at the top so it's usable? Or stop pretending that the bottom camera is useful and just ditch the camera altogether.

+

The palm rests are made of a carbon fiber composite that I found very comfortable. The keyboard also appears to be the same as previous models. It's a very thin chiclet-style keyboard that works just fine, though coming from the ThinkPad world I still find these keyboards disappointing. More disappointing for some Linux fans, Dell still uses the Windows logo on the super key.

+

The touch pad is reportedly the same, though using the testing model next to the previous I felt a noticeable difference with the newer model being somewhat "stickier", which doesn't sound good, but I found my movements were actually more precise with the new trackpad. This was particularly noticeable in Darktable, a photo editing app with some of the tiniest imaginable control elements, which that can be a real pain to adjust, especially on such a HiDPI screen like the one the XPS 13 uses. The problem I experienced previously, where the trackpad would unaccountably freeze at times appears to have been related to something in Ubuntu 14.04, because the new XPS, which comes with Ubuntu 16.04, did nothing of the sort.

+

Another common complaint about the XPS 13 is a high pitched coil whine that plagues some models. At least in Reddit threads. In the three models I've used I've never encountered this issue. It's possible that the whine comes from something related to Windows drivers (some people report fixing the problem by reinstalling drivers), though I have seen reports of the whine being present on the Ubuntu-based models as well.

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Performance

+

The previous iteration of the XPS 13 DE was plenty fast and the much hyped Kaby Lake should give performance a roughly 10 percent boost overall, though some tasks, particularly things that involve hi-res video, may see an even bigger performance improvement. In terms of everyday tasks like compiling small programs, browsing the web and so on I did not notice a huge difference from the previous release. One things I did notice, however, was that the Unity interface is considerably snappier, though that may well be a combination of hardware and software improvements. Even for more significant tasks, like say compiling the Linux kernel on a regular basis, the previous version seems to be good enough for Linus Torvalds.

+

As with previous models the RAM limit is 16GB, which is disappointing but makes sense given the space available inside the very compact chassis. There's only room for one RAM card and so far compatible, low-powered RAM chips at 32GB don't exist. Would it make sense to have a slightly larger profile and ability to go up to 32 or even 64 GB? Sure it would, but for that scenario there's the XPS 15.

+

After the Kaby Lake upgrade, The other major improvement is the move from a 56wHR 4 cell battery to a slightly greater capacity 60wHR model. That doesn't sound like much, but Dell now claims an astounding 21 hour battery life for the 1080p version of the XPS 13. That claim was largely borne out in Ars testing of that model, which managed to last for over 18 hours in Ars' standard WiFi browsing test.

+

If Linux on laptops has an Achilles heel it's power consumption. Straight out of the box, running stock Ubuntu 16.04 I only managed to get 11 hours of battery life in Ars' standard WiFi browsing test. The difference may well be largely attributable to the HiDPI screen, but the good news is that it's possible to get more life of the XPS 13 if you take a dive into the world of laptop-mode-tools. To get started install the package from the Ubuntu repositories. The project has some documentation on how to configure things, but I find the Arch Wiki entry to be more helpful.

+

After playing with customizations like disabling Bluetooth and tweaking some of the disk-related parts of laptop-mode-tools, I re-ran the Ars WiFi browsing test and managed to get 13 hours, a score I can only beat with my Lenovo x240, which has a far inferior screen, a larger battery and a second battery, making it a less than fair comparison. Suffice to say, in my experience, the Dell XPS 13 is as good as battery life is going to get with such a hi-res screen in such a small package. It's good enough that in all my time with the XPS models I've tested I have never really had to think about battery life.

+

Another change worth noting is the move to "Killer Wireless". Killer is marketing-speak for Qualcomm Atheros cards. There's a bunch of technical upgrades compared to the older Broadcom chips, like much improved throughput and traffic prioritization, which are all good news, but for Linux users the move away from Broadcom more importantly means there are open source Linux drivers that don't suck.

+

Ubuntu 16.04

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For a complete rundown of Ubuntu 16.04, see my earlier review. The short story is that I have found Ubuntu 16.04 fairly buggy. Dell does not officially support the just-released Ubuntu 16.10, and given that Dell sticks with LTS releases, it likely never will. Most of Dell's hardware support revolves around a half dozen or so PPAs that come installed and which may or may not work with 16.10. But since this is a review laptop I went for the upgrade to 16.10 and have had no problems in my week of testing. That said, I don't necessarily suggest doing it unless you're comfortable troubleshooting Linux.

+

The "developer edition" in the XPS 13 line isn't just a code word for ships with Linux installed, you actually get some tools pre-installed. For example Virtualbox is pre-installed, which means you can get your Vagrant-based development environment set up quickly. Ubuntu isn't always completely up to date with every programming language, but with 16.04 things are reasonable. For example, gcc is at 5.3.1 and most languages are current -- Python is at 2.7, with version 3.5 available via the python3 command. Ruby is not installed by default.

+

Other little touches include the more popular-with-developers Chromium browser (and Chrome if you want the bundled Flash player) instead of the Ubuntu default, Firefox. Dell's own devops tools, like "Cloud Launcher" and "Profile Tool," are available on Project Sputnik's Github page as well, though none of them have seen updates in several years.

+

In my view though what's more impressive about Dell's developer tools is that it doesn't ship with any massive IDEs or any monolithic tools. If you want those they're in the repos, but out of the box there's nothing to get in your way, just a few nice little additions that save you a few apt-get commands.

+

Finally, there's some good news on the horizon for those of us who like the HiDPI screens. For now, my criticisms of Ubuntu in HiDPI environments still stand from the last review. Things have improved a bit in the move to 16.04 (versus 14.04 in the last model), but most of the improvement comes from Ubuntu moving to newer version of GNOME and GTK+ elements. The problems specific to LightDM and Ubuntu's own interface customizations remain in this release, as do problems with any third-party software, for example GIMP.

+

All that said, a recent partnership between System76 and Canonical may provide some improvements to the HiDPI situation in Ubuntu (specifically Unity 7, not the great white whale that is Unity 8). Canonical recently released a statement about the improvements, noting that "some patches that improve HiDPI support are in review and they are expected to land in Ubuntu soon." It seems safe to assume -- judging by the new emphasis on HiDPI bugs in Ubuntu's Launchpad bug tracker -- that many of these fixes will land in 17.04. There's one bug in particular that you'll see if you buy the XPS 13 DE, during the setup process there will be two header bars across the screen. It doesn't affect anything and it goes away once you get done with the setup, but it's a disconcerting way to start out with a brand new machine that supposedly supports Ubuntu.

+

While these are welcome improvements, they don't help outside applications like GIMP or Virtualbox. The latter will work with HiDPI screens, but it sometimes takes considerable work to get the guest OS looking good. There are in other words, workarounds for most the HiDPI problems you're likely to encounter, but be aware that HiDPI on Ubuntu, even with Dell tweaking things for you, is far from a "just works" experience right now.

+

I should probably note here as well that I did install and test both Fedora 25 and Arch on the new hardware and had no problems in either case. For Fedora I went with the default GNOME 3.22 desktop, which, frankly, it's what I think Dell should ship out of the box. It's got far better HiDPI support than Ubuntu and the developer tools available through Fedora are considerably more robust than most of what you'll find in Ubuntu's repos.

+

Conclusion

+

The XPS Developer Edition has developed a strong following over the years and the big question for many fans will be, is this worth the upgrade? If you've got the previous release I would say probably not. If you do a lot of video editing (what kind of developer are you?) or want it to do double duty as a gaming machine then you might see some benefit to the upgrade, but that's a lot of money for not much gain.

+

If you've got an XPS 13 from further back, say the first InfinityEdge version with a Haswell chip then the upgrade becomes more appealing. The gains in battery life, coupled with performance improvements make a much more convincing case for the upgrade.

+

If you're new to the idea of buying hardware specifically tailored to Linux and you're wondering why you should, the answer is more complicated. The XPS 13 DE is a fantastic machine, web cam aside, regardless of what OS it's running. But it's an especially fantastic machine for anyone who's tired of wrestling with their hardware just to get their OS of choice set up. If you want a machine that's stylish, reasonably powerful, light in your bag and runs Linux without a hitch the Dell XPS 13 DE continues to make a great choice.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/dellxps13-2.txt b/ars-technica/published/dellxps13-2.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9fca4c3 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/dellxps13-2.txt @@ -0,0 +1,73 @@ +Dell recently updated the company's extremely popular XPS 13 Developer Edition. + +Dell's Linux effort, known as Project Sputnik, is led by developer Barton George, who, along with the rest of the Sputnik team, has done an excellent job of bringing a "just works" Linux experience to Dell Ultrabooks. The XPS 13 Developer Edition has been available for 4 years now and this release marks the 7th version of Dell's Ubuntu powered ultrabook. + +Dell isn't the only manufacturer producing great Linux machines. In fact there's almost an embarrassment of riches for Linux fans these days. System76, whose [Oryx Pro](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/system76-oryx-pro-review-linux-in-a-laptop-has-never-been-better/) remains my top pick for anyone who needs massive power, Purism, ZaReason and others are all producing solid offerings that work with Linux out of the box. + +Even hardware not explicitly made for Linux tends to work out of box these days. I recently installed Fedora on a Sony Vaio and was shocked that the only problem I encountered was that the default trackpad configuration was terribly slow. + +Admittedly, the Vaio is a few years old, which means there's been more time for hardware issues to be addressed. Sometimes getting Linux running on the bleeding edge hardware is still a bit tricky -- or requires running 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. + +It also doesn't hurt that the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition is an exceptionally well built, great-looking piece of hardware. If you want your Linux rig to "just work" *and* be a powerful, svelte little package that weighs under 3lbs, the XPS 13 is the laptop you've been looking for. + +The latest iteration of the XPS 13 line, and the third I've tested, features Intel's new Kaby Lake chip that bumps the clock speed by about 10 percent. The more impressive side of the chipset upgrade is the different graphics architecture which is said to improve performance in 3D graphics and 4K video. The results in this Linux-based model make especially 4K video playback incredibly smooth and not nearly as battery-draining as previous models. + +## The Specs + +Outwardly there's nothing new to see here. The 7th generation Dell XPS 13 DE uses the same wonderful InfinityEdge display that manages to pack a 13 in screen into a body that looks and feels more like an 11 inch laptop. The model I tested came with the 3200x1800 IPS touch panel. There's also a version with a 1920x1080 IPS non-touch panel, but I think the higher res display is worth the extra money. + +This is quite simply the best looking display I've seen in a laptop. Naturally the HiDPI model suffers a little in battery life compared to the lower res model. I've never used the lower res version so I can't compare battery life times, but more pixels takes more power, so if battery life is your top priority don't go with the HiDPI model. That said, I find the brightest setting (400 nit brightness) to be a bit much indoors. It's great for working outside and goes a long way to compensate for the inevitable glare on glossy screens, but indoors I rarely push the brightness past 60 percent, which improves battery life considerably. + +The model Dell sent me featured a i7-7500U Kaby Lake chip with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB solid state drive. As configured the model I tested would set you back $1799. The lowest model, which has the 1920x1080 display, an i5 chip, 128GB SSD and only 8GB of RAM, can be had for $975. For an extra $375 you can step up to the higher res screen and a 256GB SSD. There's also a new option in there for what Dell calls a "Rose Gold" exterior. + +The model I tested had the same full aluminum exterior as previous models. Underneath it there's an aluminum frame as well, which provides a stiffness that makes the XPS line feel very solid even at their minimal weight. As has been my experience with most Dell machines, the construction is excellent. I used the previous model for over six months, shoving it in and out of my bag on several times a day every day and it doesn't have a scratch on it. I can see no reason to think the latest model would be any different. + +Also unchanged in this release are the ports and layout. There are still two USB 3.0 ports, one with PowerShare for charging your devices (note that USB charging generally requires a trip into the BIOS settings to enable, see [Dell's support site](http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/SLN155147/EN) for more info). There's also a Thunderbolt port that supports charging, a 3-in-1 card reader, DisplayPort 1.2 video output, VGA and HDMI. As with any laptop this thin, Ethernet requires an adapter (sold separately). + +There's the same 720p webcam that has been in the last couple of models, and yes, it's still at the bottom of the lid. And yes, it still sucks that it's down there, though in fairness to Dell, there is nowhere else to put it, the InfinityEdge display comes within 1/8 inch of the edge of the lid. Still, like fellow Ars reviewer Peter Bright, I find [this decision irritating](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/review-dells-kaby-lake-xps-13-isnt-quite-good-enough-to-keep-its-crown/): why not just move the display panel down an 1/8 inch and put the camera at the top so it's usable? Or stop pretending that the bottom camera is useful and just ditch the camera altogether. + +The palm rests are made of a carbon fiber composite that I found very comfortable. The keyboard also appears to be the same as previous models. It's a very thin chiclet-style keyboard that works just fine, though coming from the ThinkPad world I still find these keyboards disappointing. More disappointing for some Linux fans, Dell still uses the Windows logo on the super key. + +The touch pad is reportedly the same, though using the testing model next to the previous I felt a noticeable difference with the newer model being somewhat "stickier", which doesn't sound good, but I found my movements were actually more precise with the new trackpad. This was particularly noticeable in Darktable, a photo editing app with some of the tiniest imaginable control elements, which that can be a real pain to adjust, especially on such a HiDPI screen like the one the XPS 13 uses. The problem I experienced previously, where the trackpad would unaccountably freeze at times appears to have been related to something in Ubuntu 14.04, because the new XPS, which comes with Ubuntu 16.04, did nothing of the sort. + +Another common complaint about the XPS 13 is a high pitched coil whine that plagues some models. At least in Reddit threads. In the three models I've used I've never encountered this issue. It's possible that the whine comes from something related to Windows drivers (some people report fixing the problem by reinstalling drivers), though I have seen reports of the whine being present on the Ubuntu-based models as well. + +## Performance + +The previous iteration of the XPS 13 DE was plenty fast and the much hyped Kaby Lake should give performance a roughly 10 percent boost overall, though some tasks, particularly things that involve hi-res video, may see an even bigger performance improvement. In terms of everyday tasks like compiling small programs, browsing the web and so on I did not notice a huge difference from the previous release. One things I did notice, however, was that the Unity interface is considerably snappier, though that may well be a combination of hardware and software improvements. Even for more significant tasks, like say compiling the Linux kernel on a regular basis, the previous version seems to be good enough for Linus Torvalds. + +As with previous models the RAM limit is 16GB, which is disappointing but makes sense given the space available inside the very compact chassis. There's only room for one RAM card and so far compatible, low-powered RAM chips at 32GB don't exist. Would it make sense to have a slightly larger profile and ability to go up to 32 or even 64 GB? Sure it would, but for that scenario there's the XPS 15. + +After the Kaby Lake upgrade, The other major improvement is the move from a 56wHR 4 cell battery to a slightly greater capacity 60wHR model. That doesn't sound like much, but Dell now claims an astounding 21 hour battery life for the 1080p version of the XPS 13. That claim was largely borne out in Ars testing of that model, which managed to last for over 18 hours in Ars' standard WiFi browsing test. + +If Linux on laptops has an Achilles heel it's power consumption. Straight out of the box, running stock Ubuntu 16.04 I only managed to get 11 hours of battery life in Ars' standard WiFi browsing test. The difference may well be largely attributable to the HiDPI screen, but the good news is that it's possible to get more life of the XPS 13 if you take a dive into the world of laptop-mode-tools. To get started install the package from the Ubuntu repositories. The project has some documentation on how to configure things, but I find the Arch Wiki entry to be more helpful. + +After playing with customizations like disabling Bluetooth and tweaking some of the disk-related parts of laptop-mode-tools, I re-ran the Ars WiFi browsing test and managed to get 13 hours, a score I can only beat with my Lenovo x240, which has a far inferior screen, a larger battery and a second battery, making it a less than fair comparison. Suffice to say, in my experience, the Dell XPS 13 is as good as battery life is going to get with such a hi-res screen in such a small package. It's good enough that in all my time with the XPS models I've tested I have never really had to think about battery life. + +Another change worth noting is the move to "Killer Wireless". Killer is marketing-speak for Qualcomm Atheros cards. There's a bunch of technical upgrades compared to the older Broadcom chips, like much improved throughput and traffic prioritization, which are all good news, but for Linux users the move away from Broadcom more importantly means there are open source Linux drivers that don't suck. + +## Ubuntu 16.04 + +For a complete rundown of Ubuntu 16.04, see my earlier review. The short story is that I have found Ubuntu 16.04 fairly buggy. Dell does not officially support the just-released Ubuntu 16.10, and given that Dell sticks with LTS releases, it likely never will. Most of Dell's hardware support revolves around a half dozen or so PPAs that come installed and which may or may not work with 16.10. But since this is a review laptop I went for the upgrade to 16.10 and have had no problems in my week of testing. That said, I don't necessarily suggest doing it unless you're comfortable troubleshooting Linux. + +The "developer edition" in the XPS 13 line isn't just a code word for ships with Linux installed, you actually get some tools pre-installed. For example Virtualbox is pre-installed, which means you can get your Vagrant-based development environment set up quickly. Ubuntu isn't always completely up to date with every programming language, but with 16.04 things are reasonable. For example, gcc is at 5.3.1 and most languages are current -- Python is at 2.7, with version 3.5 available via the python3 command. Ruby is not installed by default. + +Other little touches include the more popular-with-developers Chromium browser (and Chrome if you want the bundled Flash player) instead of the Ubuntu default, Firefox. Dell's own devops tools, like "Cloud Launcher" and "Profile Tool," are available on Project Sputnik's Github page as well, though none of them have seen updates in several years. + +In my view though what's more impressive about Dell's developer tools is that it doesn't ship with any massive IDEs or any monolithic tools. If you want those they're in the repos, but out of the box there's nothing to get in your way, just a few nice little additions that save you a few apt-get commands. + +Finally, there's some good news on the horizon for those of us who like the HiDPI screens. For now, my criticisms of Ubuntu in HiDPI environments still stand from the last review. Things have improved a bit in the move to 16.04 (versus 14.04 in the last model), but most of the improvement comes from Ubuntu moving to newer version of GNOME and GTK+ elements. The problems specific to LightDM and Ubuntu's own interface customizations remain in this release, as do problems with any third-party software, for example GIMP. + +All that said, a recent partnership between System76 and Canonical may provide some improvements to the HiDPI situation in Ubuntu (specifically Unity 7, not the great white whale that is Unity 8). Canonical recently released a statement about the improvements, noting that "some patches that improve HiDPI support are in review and they are expected to land in Ubuntu soon." It seems safe to assume -- judging by the new emphasis on HiDPI bugs in Ubuntu's Launchpad bug tracker -- that many of these fixes will land in 17.04. There's one bug in particular that you'll see if you buy the XPS 13 DE, during the setup process there will be [two header bars](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/1622686) across the screen. It doesn't affect anything and it goes away once you get done with the setup, but it's a disconcerting way to start out with a brand new machine that supposedly supports Ubuntu. + +While these are welcome improvements, they don't help outside applications like GIMP or Virtualbox. The latter will work with HiDPI screens, but it sometimes takes considerable work to get the guest OS looking good. There are in other words, workarounds for most the HiDPI problems you're likely to encounter, but be aware that HiDPI on Ubuntu, even with Dell tweaking things for you, is far from a "just works" experience right now. + +I should probably note here as well that I did install and test both Fedora 25 and Arch on the new hardware and had no problems in either case. For Fedora I went with the default GNOME 3.22 desktop, which, frankly, it's what I think Dell should ship out of the box. It's got far better HiDPI support than Ubuntu and the developer tools available through Fedora are considerably more robust than most of what you'll find in Ubuntu's repos. + +## Conclusion + +The XPS Developer Edition has developed a strong following over the years and the big question for many fans will be, is this worth the upgrade? If you've got the previous release I would say probably not. If you do a lot of video editing (what kind of developer are you?) or want it to do double duty as a gaming machine then you might see some benefit to the upgrade, but that's a lot of money for not much gain. + +If you've got an XPS 13 from further back, say the first InfinityEdge version with a Haswell chip then the upgrade becomes more appealing. The gains in battery life, coupled with performance improvements make a much more convincing case for the upgrade. + +If you're new to the idea of buying hardware specifically tailored to Linux and you're wondering why you should, the answer is more complicated. The XPS 13 DE is a fantastic machine, web cam aside, regardless of what OS it's running. But it's an especially fantastic machine for anyone who's tired of wrestling with their hardware just to get their OS of choice set up. If you want a machine that's stylish, reasonably powerful, light in your bag and runs Linux without a hitch the Dell XPS 13 DE continues to make a great choice. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/elementaryos-review.html b/ars-technica/published/elementaryos-review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6a3f51a --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/elementaryos-review.html @@ -0,0 +1,71 @@ +

The elementaryOS project, which bills itself as an open, privacy-respecting alternative to Windows and macOS, recently released "Juno", version 5 of its Linux-based desktop.

+

Linux is a strange beast. You'd be hard pressed to come up with another tool so widely used, so widely deployed, so absolutely necessary to the functioning of the modern world, and yet so utterly unknown outside the tech community.

+

Everyone is a Linux user, but almost no one knows it.

+

From ATMs, to phones, to in flight displays, to the web server your browser got this page from, we are all using Linux every day even if we don't know it. But despite that ubiquity there's one place Linux has never really succeeded: the desktop. Windows and macOS dominate the desktop and that's unlikely to change in the near term, but if it ever does it will likely be because of projects like elementaryOS, which seeks to bring the polish of commercial desktops to the world of Linux.

+

ElementaryOS began life over a decade ago as a set of icons. Yes, seriously. If ever there was a group of developers who started at the bottom and worked their way up to the top it's Daniel Foré and the rest of today's elementaryOS team. From a set of icons designed to improve the look of Ubuntu's then GNOME 2 desktop, the elementary project expanded to include some custom apps, including a fork of the default GNOME files app, Nautilus, called nautilus-elementary. As with most open source, the borrowing went both ways, Ubuntu's Humanity theme was a fork of elementaryOS's icon set.

+

As the project grew to encompass ever more apps and ever more customizations for the desktop it became more cumbersome for users to install everything. Eventually there was enough momentum behind the project that Foré decided the logical thing to to was to create their own distribution. The project took Ubuntu as a base and began layering in their custom apps, and highly refined look and feel and elementaryOS was born.

+

ElementaryOS launched with considerable fanfare thanks to its revolutionary idea of asking users to pay for it. Unfortunately for elementaryOS, a blog post about the pay-what-you-want model rubbed a lot of people in the Linux community the wrong way. Most of the kerfuffle was not about the money, it was about the wording of the post, which essentially called non-paying users thieves.

+

When I spoke with Foré he was quick to point out how little experience the team had had with PR at the time and clearly regretted the post. It was poorly worded, but as with all things in Linux, it was something of a tempest in a teapot even at the time and it is well behind the project at this point. I bring it up not to revisit the controversy, but because the funding model elementaryOS established early on has succeeded.

+

Today elementaryOS is a bootstrapped business with quite a few full time employees. It's not Canonical by any means, but it is self-sustaining and it has a model for how to continue sustaining itself, which is more than a lot of open source projects can say. If I were an open source project heavily dependent on contributions from Red Hat employees, I might, right about now, have a closer look at how elementaryOS's funding model works. Of course the elementaryOS model doesn't necessarily work at the scale of Red Hat, but it doesn't have to to sustain elementaryOS.

+

And its funding model does work, so well in fact that the project has extended it to developers in its app store. There are quite a few apps out there targeting specifically the elementaryOS desktop and if you head to elementaryOS's app store you can choose to support the developers of those apps using the same pay-what-you-want system that elementaryOS uses at the distro level. Every app developer can set a price that they feel is fair, but users can ultimately decide what they want to pay, including nothing.

+

ElementaryOS 5 Juno

+

The latest release of elementaryOS is nicknamed Juno, and should be version .5, following the previous release, .4 or Loki. However since .5 implies incomplete and elementaryOS is more or less complete (in terms of stability certainly) the project is calling this release elementaryOS 5.

+ +[image="eos-desktop.jpg" caption="The default look of ElementaryOS Juno"] + +

Whatever the version number may be, one thing is for sure -- there's ton of new stuff in Juno. Enough features in fact that the release notes, written by elementaryOS's Cassidy James Blaede, are an impressive John Sircusa-style essay of some 8,000 words. If you want to know everything that's new, Blaede's notes are worth a read, if you want to know what it's like to actually use all that stuff, read on.

+

One thing to note before we get started: Linux users wanting to try elementaryOS be forewarned, it doesn't work very well in a virtual machine. I installed it, but it was very slow. According to Foré, it's an upstream problem. GTK requires hardware acceleration for animations, which does not currently work in Virtualbox. That may change soon though. One of the big lessons Canonical has learned from collecting hardware metrics is that Ubuntu ends up in virtual machines a lot. Improvements are apparently in the works. That will help downstream distros like elementaryOS, as well as others like Linux Mint Cinnamon edition, which also doesn't run very well in a virtual machine.

+

In the mean time though, to get an accurate sense of performance, you'll need to install elementaryOS. The Juno installer is a thinly skinned version of Ubuntu's Ubiquity Installer, which means you can easily install elementaryOS alongside your existing OS just as you would Ubuntu. The installer is perfectly functional, but it doesn't really convey elementaryOS's unique look and feel, which is why there's a new installer in the works. It's a collaboration between elementaryOS and System76 (creators of PopOS) and will be, I assume, what you'll see installing future versions of PopOS as well. The new installer isn't ready for Juno though, so for now you'll have to make do with the Ubiquity installer.

+ +[image="eos-desktop-comp.jpg" caption="Composite screenshot of some of the top bar menus in ElementaryOS Juno"] + +

I went ahead and installed elementaryOS on a separate partition to keep my existing Arch Linux installation isolated.

+

ElementaryOS was plenty snappy on my Lenovo x240 (i5 with 8GB of RAM), but I also installed it on a brand new Dell XPS 13 where it really shined. ElementaryOS's theme, typography and icons all looked really nice on the XPS's HiDPI screen. My only gripe is that elementaryOS's scaling is either 1X or 2X, there's no in-between. My preference on the XPS would be more like 1.5X, but as far as I know only the KDE and Cinnamon desktops support incremental scaling without command line fiddling.

+

Once you've got elementaryOS installed and you reboot, you'll be greeted by the Pantheon desktop. While Pantheon is based on GNOME, it's very much its own thing. Like GNOME, Pantheon has a top menu bar, but it functions very differently in that it's never used for application menus (something GNOME is getting rid of as well). Instead the top bar in elementaryOS is a global bar -- it never changes. The top bar shows the date and time in the middle, status notifications, a power menu, settings for audio, power, and wireless to the right and an application launcher to the left.

+ +[image="eos-files.jpg" caption="The dock and Files file browser in Juno"] + +

ElementaryOS also sports a dock-style app launcher along the bottom of the screen that is, well, somewhat macOSish. ElementaryOS has taken some flack over the years for being heavily macOS-inspired and it does have some element of macOS -- the dock, a column view in Files (which KDE used to offer as well), and, perhaps more than anything else an obsession with details. ElementaryOS clearly sweats the small stuff, paying careful attention to typography, icon design, color use, shading, and so on, which ends up creating a kind of feel that's perhaps reminiscent of macOS. Having played with elementaryOS since version .2, I would say the macOS influence has been declining with every new release and I really don't see it at all in Juno, beyond the use of the dock.

+

Another possible reason some users find elementaryOS to be macOS-like is that it lacks the level of customization many Linux desktops offer. There's really no way to change the look and feel of elementaryOS, and little way to customize the behavior of its default apps. It's a take it or leave it operating system -- you either like it or you don't, and if you don't you're better off using something else than trying to tweak elementaryOS to suit your whims.

+

ElementaryOS is not a Linux desktop in the traditional sense. Rather it's an operating system in the same sense that Windows and macOS are.

+

That said, you can make certain customizations without too much trouble. For example, elementaryOS puts the windows close button on the left, which, for me, messes with 25 years of muscle memory. There's no setting to change this in elementaryOS, but since GNOME is under the hood you can use gsettings to change the button layout. In other words, little adjustments are possible, but I'd suggest staying away from the tweak apps.

+

Juno ships with the ability to remap the Super key. By default it brings up a list keyboard shortcuts (mostly inherited from GNOME), but you can set it to open the main menu, which, combined with the ability to immediately search by typing, turns the main menu into an application launcher as well.

+

Juno doesn't make any sweeping changes to the basic look and feel that elementaryOS has been working with for some time. It's made some refinements and given third-party developers some much-improved guidelines and a new color palette, but most of the work in Juno has come into the compliment of tightly integrated applications that ship with elementaryOS.

+

Unlike most GNOME-based distros, elementaryOS does not ship with the usual slew of GNOME applications. Instead you'll get elementaryOS's own versions of the same. In this release that means Files, a terminal app, Photos, Noise (music player), Code (previously known as Scratch), and then a few outside apps like the Epiphany web browser and the Geary mail client.

+

For the most part elementaryOS's homegrown apps are quite capable, though again, there's a notable lack of customization available. The Terminal app, for instance, offers three color schemes and not much else in way of preferences. It also, by default, uses ctrl-v for paste and ctrl-c for copy, which is annoying if you're used to ctrl-c killing a process. Since there's no preferences for Terminal, there's no way to fix this beyond installing a more powerful terminal like rxvt-unicode.

+ +[image="eos-terminal.jpg" caption="The Terminal app showing memory use with nothing open (596MB)."] + +

ElementaryOS has often been seen as a good option for new users, which is to say users not entirely comfortable with Linux. I'd say this it true to a point, but elementaryOS has appeal beyond that, or at least it would like to. Juno has seen a lot of work geared toward developers, especially the changes to AppCenter which make it easier than ever for developers to get paid for their work (more on that in a minute), but also in the tools available for developers. As mentioned above there are quite a few new toolkits under the hood, but there's also completely revamped code editor known, appropriately enough, as Code.

+

Code is quite nice, reminiscent of GNOME's Gedit, but without the abandonware feel. As with most of elementaryOS Code doesn't have a ton of customization options, but it does have the important ones -- control over tab/space settings, code folding, automatic syntax highlighting, and a quick toggle comments feature. And unlike the Terminal, Code manages to allow for complexity through a plugin system that can add extra features. You can actually add a terminal to Code and run your tests without leaving your editor, and you can install a plugin to give you "Vim style" shortcuts, which is, well, not Vim, but does allow some Vim-like features.

+ +[image="eos-code.jpg" caption="The Code app in elementaryOS."] + +

Code is a very pretty editor -- it has nice anti-aliased text and a lot of attention has been paid to the visual details -- but if you're coming from an IDE like Eclipse or powerful text editors Vim or Emacs, to be frank, Code isn't going to cut it. It may be that the gray is showing in my beard here, but I feel like the effort put into Code might have been better spent elsewhere given that IDEs and text editors seem like a problem that's already been solved several hundred times.

+

The other homegrown elementaryOS apps take a similar approach, reinventing the wheel a little, though the results are always very nice and fit well with the rest of elementaryOS. For instance, Files is a good, if simple, file manager. But that simplicity is by design. As Blaede puts it in the release notes, elementaryOS encourages "a workflow where users access content from the related apps instead of worrying about the intricacies of moving files around their device’s storage." Files does have one feature I wish more file managers offered: a column view.

+ +[image="eos-photos.jpg" caption="The Code app in elementaryOS."] + +

The Photos and Noise apps are photo and music managers respectively. Photos is very close to GNOME's Photos app, allowing for basic organization and editing of photos (including RAW files). Noise integrates well with system, allowing you to control your music from the menu bar. The default web browser is Epiphany, which, like many default web browsers, is best used to download and install a real web browser (just kidding, in elementaryOS you should use AppCenter to install a real web browser).

+

One things you won't find in elementaryOS is an office suite. LibreOffice and more lightweight alternatives like Abiword and Gnumeric, are all available via the AppCenter, but are not part of the initial installation.

+

The default software suite for elementaryOS does a good job of balancing simplicity and ease-of-use against powerful features, this only falls down in two places really, Code, while nice, probably isn't going to cut it for most programmers and Epiphany is pretty simplistic if you're used to Firefox or Chrome.

+

One of the more interesting and innovative new features in this release is a picture-in-picture video feature that allows you to watch a video while doing something else.

+

The easiest way to use picture-in-picture, is to hit the keyboard shortcut super-F, which will change your cursor into a crosshairs. Just drag the cursor over the video to clip it and elementaryOS will pull the portion of the page out and display it in its own window. The only catch is that, for web video at least, you'll need to leave the browser window open (I just sent it to another desktop). It's a pretty cool feature, but unfortunately I found it a little buggy. Twice playback stopped for no apparent reason, and resizing the window sometimes caused the "clipped" video window to disappear entirely.

+ +[image="eos-pip.jpg" caption="The new picture-in-picture in elementaryOS. When it works, it's awesome."] + +

The AppCenter

+

Perhaps the biggest news in elementaryOS Juno is the new and improved AppCenter, which offers some improvements to AppCenter's pay-what-you-want model. The biggest improvement is the option to try an app before you buy.

+ +[image="eos-app-center.jpg" caption="The AppCenter in elementaryOS."] + +

Previously you could, as you would now, put in $0 to download an app for free. Now, however, you'll be prompted to pay for that app after you've tried it, not with some nagging reminder, but with a lack of updates. If you opt not to pay for a paid app, you won't get automatic updates. The exception is security updates, those will be automatically applied regardless of whether you paid or not. As Foré, said in an announcement earlier this year, "we will never withhold security updates based on payment status."

+

That means you can continue to get updates for paid apps for free, you just have to re-download each one individually. It is, as Foré puts it, "a convenience tax." If you pay you get the convenience of automatic updates, if you don't pay you don't.

+ +[image="eos-app-center-paying.jpg" caption="Paying for an app in the elementaryOS AppCenter."] + +

This will, no doubt, rub some people the wrong way, but elementaryOS is in uncharted waters here and is trying to build a sustainable development model in a world where most things are free. That's no easy task and there will inevitably be some pushback. It also may not work. So far developing for elementaryOS is not exactly lucrative. The project released some numbers earlier this year, reporting that it had processed $1,700 worth of payments from about 750 charges. That puts the average price of an app at $2.26. Divide that among the paid apps in the app center and unfortunately it becomes rather obvious that not only is building apps for elementaryOS not going to pay the bills, it's probably not even going to buy you coffee.

+

Will the new model change that? That remains to be seen. It certainly makes it easier to pay for an app after you've been using it for a while, something that was impossible before. There's also a new button to send money to a developer any time you like, just look up the app in the AppCenter and scroll to the bottom and you'll find a button to send money.

+

Conclusion

+

ElementaryOS has a reputation of being a good distro for Linux newcomers. Juno continues to that legacy and is one of the easiest ways I know of to dip a toe in the Linux waters without needing to learn a whole new way of working. It's especially familiar for macOS users and makes a good choice to install on your Apple hardware, since elementaryOS ships with most of the drivers you'll need for Apple hardware, which makes it easy to install. The exception would be that shiny new the Apple hardware with the T2 chip which (as of November 2018) currently blocks Linux bootloaders.

+

What about for developers though? Clearly with the improvements to Code, elementaryOS is aiming to provide a usable desktop that's also a good platform for development. I suspect most developers will probably want more familiar tools, but elementaryOS does make a good development platform. One thing elementaryOS does well that so many desktops these days refuse to do is get out of the way. The month I spent using Juno was not spectacularly different for me than using my usual i3, or LXQT on my wife's machine. Like the simpler, lightweight i3 and LXQT, elementaryOS does a good job of giving you the tools you need, but also, and often more importantly, it gets out of the way and lets you focus on what you need to get done.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/elementaryos-review.txt b/ars-technica/published/elementaryos-review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3e1f92d --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/elementaryos-review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,87 @@ +The elementaryOS project, which bills itself as an open, privacy-respecting alternative to Windows and macOS, recently released "Juno", version 5 of its Linux-based desktop. + +Linux is a strange beast. You'd be hard pressed to come up with another tool so widely used, so widely deployed, so absolutely necessary to the functioning of the modern world, and yet so utterly unknown outside the tech community. + +Everyone is a Linux user, but almost no one knows it. + +From ATMs, to phones, to in flight displays, to the web server your browser got this page from, we are all using Linux every day even if we don't know it. But despite that ubiquity there's one place Linux has never really succeeded: the desktop. Windows and macOS dominate the desktop and that's unlikely to change in the near term, but if it ever does it will likely be because of projects like elementaryOS, which seeks to bring the polish of commercial desktops to the world of Linux. + +ElementaryOS began life over a decade ago as a set of icons. Yes, seriously. If ever there was a group of developers who started at the bottom and worked their way up to the top it's Daniel Foré and the rest of today's elementaryOS team. From a set of icons designed to improve the look of Ubuntu's then GNOME 2 desktop, the elementary project expanded to include some custom apps, including a fork of the default GNOME files app, Nautilus, called nautilus-elementary. As with most open source, the borrowing went both ways, Ubuntu's Humanity theme was a fork of elementaryOS's icon set. + +As the project grew to encompass ever more apps and ever more customizations for the desktop it became more cumbersome for users to install everything. Eventually there was enough momentum behind the project that Foré decided the logical thing to to was to create their own distribution. The project took Ubuntu as a base and began layering in their custom apps, and highly refined look and feel and elementaryOS was born. + +ElementaryOS launched with considerable fanfare thanks to its revolutionary idea of asking users to pay for it. Unfortunately for elementaryOS, a blog post about the pay-what-you-want model rubbed a lot of people in the Linux community the wrong way. Most of the kerfuffle was not about the money, it was about the wording of the post, which essentially called non-paying users thieves. + +When I spoke with Foré he was quick to point out how little experience the team had had with PR at the time and clearly regretted the post. It was poorly worded, but as with all things in Linux, it was something of a tempest in a teapot even at the time and it is well behind the project at this point. I bring it up not to revisit the controversy, but because the funding model elementaryOS established early on has succeeded. + +Today elementaryOS is a bootstrapped business with quite a few full time employees. It's not Canonical by any means, but it is self-sustaining and it has a model for how to continue sustaining itself, which is more than a lot of open source projects can say. If I were an open source project heavily dependent on contributions from Red Hat employees, I might, right about now, have a closer look at how elementaryOS's funding model works. Of course the elementaryOS model doesn't necessarily work at the scale of Red Hat, but it doesn't have to to sustain elementaryOS. + +And its funding model does work, so well in fact that the project has extended it to developers in its app store. There are quite a few apps out there targeting specifically the elementaryOS desktop and if you head to elementaryOS's app store you can choose to support the developers of those apps using the same pay-what-you-want system that elementaryOS uses at the distro level. Every app developer can set a price that they feel is fair, but users can ultimately decide what they want to pay, including nothing. + +## ElementaryOS 5 Juno + +The latest release of elementaryOS is nicknamed Juno, and should be version .5, following the previous release, .4 or Loki. However since .5 implies incomplete and elementaryOS is more or less complete (in terms of stability certainly) the project is calling this release elementaryOS 5. + +Whatever the version number may be, one thing is for sure -- there's ton of new stuff in Juno. Enough features in fact that the release notes, written by elementaryOS's Cassidy James Blaede, are an impressive John Sircusa-style [essay](https://medium.com/elementaryos/elementary-os-5-juno-is-here-471dfdedc7b3) of some 8,000 words. If you want to know everything that's new, Blaede's notes are worth a read, if you want to know what it's like to actually use all that stuff, read on. + +One thing to note before we get started: Linux users wanting to try elementaryOS be forewarned, it doesn't work very well in a virtual machine. I installed it, but it was very slow. According to Foré, it's an upstream problem. GTK requires hardware acceleration for animations, which does not currently work in Virtualbox. That may change soon though. One of the big lessons Canonical has learned from collecting hardware metrics is that Ubuntu ends up in virtual machines a lot. Improvements are apparently in the works. That will help downstream distros like elementaryOS, as well as others like Linux Mint Cinnamon edition, which also doesn't run very well in a virtual machine. + +In the mean time though, to get an accurate sense of performance, you'll need to install elementaryOS. The Juno installer is a thinly skinned version of Ubuntu's Ubiquity Installer, which means you can easily install elementaryOS alongside your existing OS just as you would Ubuntu. The installer is perfectly functional, but it doesn't really convey elementaryOS's unique look and feel, which is why there's a new installer in the works. It's a [collaboration](https://blog.system76.com/post/170167029168/installer-elementary-and-popos-collaboration) between elementaryOS and System76 (creators of PopOS) and will be, I assume, what you'll see installing future versions of PopOS as well. The new installer isn't ready for Juno though, so for now you'll have to make do with the Ubiquity installer. + +I went ahead and installed elementaryOS on a separate partition to keep my existing Arch Linux installation isolated. + +ElementaryOS was plenty snappy on my Lenovo x240 (i5 with 8GB of RAM), but I also installed it on a brand new Dell XPS 13 where it really shined. ElementaryOS's theme, typography and icons all looked really nice on the XPS's HiDPI screen. My only gripe is that elementaryOS's scaling is either 1X or 2X, there's no in-between. My preference on the XPS would be more like 1.5X, but as far as I know only the KDE and Cinnamon desktops support incremental scaling without command line fiddling. + +Once you've got elementaryOS installed and you reboot, you'll be greeted by the Pantheon desktop. While Pantheon is based on GNOME, it's very much its own thing. Like GNOME, Pantheon has a top menu bar, but it functions very differently in that it's never used for application menus (something GNOME is getting rid of as well). Instead the top bar in elementaryOS is a global bar -- it never changes. The top bar shows the date and time in the middle, status notifications, a power menu, settings for audio, power, and wireless to the right and an application launcher to the left. + +ElementaryOS also sports a dock-style app launcher along the bottom of the screen that is, well, somewhat macOSish. ElementaryOS has taken some flack over the years for being heavily macOS-inspired and it does have some element of macOS -- the dock, a column view in Files (which KDE used to offer as well), and, perhaps more than anything else an obsession with details. ElementaryOS clearly sweats the small stuff, paying careful attention to typography, icon design, color use, shading, and so on, which ends up creating a kind of feel that's perhaps reminiscent of macOS. Having played with elementaryOS since version .2, I would say the macOS influence has been declining with every new release and I really don't see it at all in Juno, beyond the use of the dock. + +Another possible reason some users find elementaryOS to be macOS-like is that it lacks the level of customization many Linux desktops offer. There's really no way to change the look and feel of elementaryOS, and little way to customize the behavior of its default apps. It's a take it or leave it operating system -- you either like it or you don't, and if you don't you're better off using something else than trying to tweak elementaryOS to suit your whims. + +ElementaryOS is not a Linux desktop in the traditional sense. Rather it's an operating system in the same sense that Windows and macOS are. + +That said, you can make certain customizations without too much trouble. For example, elementaryOS puts the windows close button on the left, which, for me, messes with 25 years of muscle memory. There's no setting to change this in elementaryOS, but since GNOME is under the hood you can use `gsettings` to change the button layout. In other words, little adjustments are possible, but I'd suggest staying away from the tweak apps. + +Juno ships with the ability to remap the Super key. By default it brings up a list keyboard shortcuts (mostly inherited from GNOME), but you can set it to open the main menu, which, combined with the ability to immediately search by typing, turns the main menu into an application launcher as well. + +Juno doesn't make any sweeping changes to the basic look and feel that elementaryOS has been working with for some time. It's made some refinements and given third-party developers some much-improved guidelines and a new color palette, but most of the work in Juno has come into the compliment of tightly integrated applications that ship with elementaryOS. + +Unlike most GNOME-based distros, elementaryOS does not ship with the usual slew of GNOME applications. Instead you'll get elementaryOS's own versions of the same. In this release that means Files, a terminal app, Photos, Noise (music player), Code (previously known as Scratch), and then a few outside apps like the Epiphany web browser and the Geary mail client. + +For the most part elementaryOS's homegrown apps are quite capable, though again, there's a notable lack of customization available. The Terminal app, for instance, offers three color schemes and not much else in way of preferences. It also, by default, uses `ctrl-v` for paste and `ctrl-c` for copy, which is annoying if you're used to `ctrl-c` killing a process. Since there's no preferences for Terminal, there's no way to fix this beyond installing a more powerful terminal like rxvt-unicode. + +ElementaryOS has often been seen as a good option for new users, which is to say users not entirely comfortable with Linux. I'd say this it true to a point, but elementaryOS has appeal beyond that, or at least it would like to. Juno has seen a lot of work geared toward developers, especially the changes to AppCenter which make it easier than ever for developers to get paid for their work (more on that in a minute), but also in the tools available for developers. As mentioned above there are quite a few new toolkits under the hood, but there's also completely revamped code editor known, appropriately enough, as Code. + +Code is quite nice, reminiscent of GNOME's Gedit, but without the abandonware feel. As with most of elementaryOS Code doesn't have a ton of customization options, but it does have the important ones -- control over tab/space settings, code folding, automatic syntax highlighting, and a quick toggle comments feature. And unlike the Terminal, Code manages to allow for complexity through a plugin system that can add extra features. You can actually add a terminal to Code and run your tests without leaving your editor, and you can install a plugin to give you "Vim style" shortcuts, which is, well, not Vim, but does allow some Vim-like features. + +Code is a very pretty editor -- it has nice anti-aliased text and a lot of attention has been paid to the visual details -- but if you're coming from an IDE like Eclipse or powerful text editors Vim or Emacs, to be frank, Code isn't going to cut it. It may be that the gray is showing in my beard here, but I feel like the effort put into Code might have been better spent elsewhere given that IDEs and text editors seem like a problem that's already been solved several hundred times. + +The other homegrown elementaryOS apps take a similar approach, reinventing the wheel a little, though the results are always very nice and fit well with the rest of elementaryOS. For instance, Files is a good, if simple, file manager. But that simplicity is by design. As Blaede puts it in the release notes, elementaryOS encourages "a workflow where users access content from the related apps instead of worrying about the intricacies of moving files around their device’s storage." Files does have one feature I wish more file managers offered: a column view. + +The Photos and Noise apps are photo and music managers respectively. Photos is very close to GNOME's Photos app, allowing for basic organization and editing of photos (including RAW files). Noise integrates well with system, allowing you to control your music from the menu bar. The default web browser is Epiphany, which, like many default web browsers, is best used to download and install a real web browser (just kidding, in elementaryOS you should use AppCenter to install a real web browser). + +One things you won't find in elementaryOS is an office suite. LibreOffice and more lightweight alternatives like Abiword and Gnumeric, are all available via the AppCenter, but are not part of the initial installation. + +The default software suite for elementaryOS does a good job of balancing simplicity and ease-of-use against powerful features, this only falls down in two places really, Code, while nice, probably isn't going to cut it for most programmers and Epiphany is pretty simplistic if you're used to Firefox or Chrome. + +One of the more interesting and innovative new features in this release is a picture-in-picture video feature that allows you to watch a video while doing something else. + +The easiest way to use picture-in-picture, is to hit the keyboard shortcut super-F, which will change your cursor into a crosshairs. Just drag the cursor over the video to clip it and elementaryOS will pull the portion of the page out and display it in its own window. The only catch is that, for web video at least, you'll need to leave the browser window open (I just sent it to another desktop). It's a pretty cool feature, but unfortunately I found it a little buggy. Twice playback stopped for no apparent reason, and resizing the window sometimes caused the "clipped" video window to disappear entirely. + +## The AppCenter + +Perhaps the biggest news in elementaryOS Juno is the new and improved AppCenter, which offers some improvements to AppCenter's pay-what-you-want model. The biggest improvement is the option to try an app before you buy. + +Previously you could, as you would now, put in $0 to download an app for free. Now, however, you'll be prompted to pay for that app after you've tried it, not with some nagging reminder, but with a lack of updates. If you opt not to pay for a paid app, you won't get automatic updates. The exception is security updates, those will be automatically applied regardless of whether you paid or not. As Foré, said in an [announcement](https://medium.com/elementaryos/about-appcenter-payments-daa76a1a3b59) earlier this year, "we will never withhold security updates based on payment status." + +That means you can continue to get updates for paid apps for free, you just have to re-download each one individually. It is, as Foré puts it, "a convenience tax." If you pay you get the convenience of automatic updates, if you don't pay you don't. + +This will, no doubt, rub some people the wrong way, but elementaryOS is in uncharted waters here and is trying to build a sustainable development model in a world where most things are free. That's no easy task and there will inevitably be some pushback. It also may not work. So far developing for elementaryOS is not exactly lucrative. The project released some numbers earlier this year, reporting that it had processed $1,700 worth of payments from about 750 charges. That puts the average price of an app at $2.26. Divide that among the paid apps in the app center and unfortunately it becomes rather obvious that not only is building apps for elementaryOS not going to pay the bills, it's probably not even going to buy you coffee. + +Will the new model change that? That remains to be seen. It certainly makes it easier to pay for an app after you've been using it for a while, something that was impossible before. There's also a new button to send money to a developer any time you like, just look up the app in the AppCenter and scroll to the bottom and you'll find a button to send money. + +## Conclusion + +ElementaryOS has a reputation of being a good distro for Linux newcomers. Juno continues to that legacy and is one of the easiest ways I know of to dip a toe in the Linux waters without needing to learn a whole new way of working. It's especially familiar for macOS users and makes a good choice to install on your Apple hardware since elementaryOS also ships with a lot of drivers for Apple hardware, which makes it easy to install. The exception would be that shiny new the Apple hardware with the T2 chip which (as of November 2018) currently blocks Linux bootloaders. + +What about for developers though? Clearly with the improvements to Code, elementaryOS is aiming to provide a usable desktop that's also a good platform for development. One thing elementaryOS does well that so many desktops these days refuse to do is get out of the way. The month I spent using Juno was not spectacularly different for me than using my usual i3 or the LXQT on my wife's machine. Like the simpler, lightweight i3 and LXQT, elementaryOS does a good job of giving you the tools you need, but also, often more importantly, keeping out of the way and letting you focus on what you need to get done. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/fedora21review.html b/ars-technica/published/fedora21review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2f393b4 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/fedora21review.html @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +

The Fedora Project recently rolled out a major update in the form of Fedora 21. This release marks the first that's built around the newly restructured Fedora Project.

+

Like most Linux distros Fedora is a massive, sprawling project that has, frankly, felt unfocused and a bit lost at times. Just what is Fedora? Fedora has served as a kind of showcase distro of GNOME 3 ever since GNOME 3 hit the beta stage, which would seem to target everyday users, but then at the same time the project pours tremendous energy into building developer tools like DevAssistant. So is Fedora a developer distro? A newbie-friendly GNOME showcase? A server distro? An obscure robotics distro?

+

Recently Fedora did a bit of soul searching and discovered that the answer to all those questions is yes. The way to make sense of it all is what Fedora calls Fedora.Next.

+

Fedora.Next is Fedora's term for its new organization and release structure. There is a core (no, not like the old Fedora Core/Extras division, this is different), then there is a second layer, the APIs and such, and then the "Environments" that users like you and I interact with.

+

You can think of Fedora.Next's structure as a series of concentric rings where each ring is supported by the one inside it. At the center are the core components of the system, APIs that applications hook into and so on. Up from that are the actual system components and then the most visible of the new layers, what Fedora calls "Environments." For now the available Environments consist of Workstation (Desktop), Server and Cloud. Each environment is optimized to suit what it says on the tin. Because these are very modular it won't be hard for Fedora to add new Environments as needed. For example perhaps there will one day be a Mobile Environment.

+

The new pre-packaged Environments don't mean you can't configure Fedora however you like, just that these three Environments represent the primary areas of focus for developers. This offers Fedora a bit of direction and focus internally and more targeted "products" for users.

+

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller likens the Fedora.Next structure to Lego: "One of the related (and perpetual) community discussions centers around what exactly Fedora is. Traditionally, the answer is: we take the 'raw plastic' of the software out there in the universe and we mold it into high-precision Lego bricks, and users can plug them together."

+

"The idea [with Environments] is," continues Miller, "we can take some of our bricks, and we can ship those as sets." That doesn't mean though that you can't build your own thing as well. Miller is quick to reassure long-time Fedora fans that the project is "not getting rid of the basic supply of bricks... we want you to build other things."

+

The renewed sense of focus apparent in the new Fedora.Next release structure seems to have re-invigorated the Fedora project -- at least it looks that way from an outsider's perspective. Whatever the case, Fedora 21 is one of the strongest releases the project has put out in recent memory and is well worth the upgrade.

+

Fedora 21 Workstation

+

The Workstation Environment is what you would have installed previously if you had just downloaded Fedora Live CD and installed the defaults.

+

In Fedora 21 that will get you a GNOME desktop. The old "spins", which consist primarily of different desktops, are still available (and presumably build on the same basic set of packages found in the GNOME Workstation release), but as noted earlier Fedora has long been a showcase distro of GNOME 3.x and with that in mind I stuck with the default GNOME 3.14 desktop.

+ +[image="fedora21-desktop.jpg" caption="The basic GNOME Shell search screen in Fedora 21."] + +

First though you have to install Fedora using what I think is supposed to be an intuitive installer that's so simple you can't fail. Except that instead of "can't fail", it's so simple you can't tell what you need to do. Perhaps I'm just too brainwashed by the form-based installers found in Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE, ElementaryOS and well, just about everywhere, but Fedora's button-based installer -- buttons, which hide forms mind you -- drives me crazy. Why make me click an extra button to set up a user account for a workstation environment when I will obviously need a user account?

+ +[image="fedora21-installer.jpg" caption="Fedora's nearly inscrutable installer, complete with instructions in the form of a tiny-font error message."] + +

The Fedora installer isn't part of the GNOME project, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn the same developer who turned the Nautilus file browser into a useless toy also had a go at the Fedora installer. I'm sure you'll figure it out, it's not Arch (at least Arch's arcane install process is well documented), but it gets things off the bumpy start.

+

The best thing I can say about Fedora's installer is that you only have to use it once. Just remember to create a new user and set your root password.

+

GNOME 3.14

+

Once Fedora 21 is installed you'll be greeted by the GNOME 3.14 desktop (assuming you found the button to create a user account).

+

Fedora leap-frogged over GNOME 3.12 -- Fedora 20 shipped with GNOME 3.10 -- so this is a major leap forward for Fedora fans. GNOME 3.14 brings plenty of new features, including a couple new applications, an updated theme and some more improvements in HiDPI screen support. In fact GNOME has long boasted some of the best HiDPI support around and this release continues to build on that, polishing the little details to the point that I haven't seen anything amiss running Fedora 21 in a virtual machine on a retina Macbook Pro.

+

Fedora's nearly stock GNOME 3.14 looks great on HiDPI screens and the updated GNOME theme gives the desktop a clean, simple look and feel.

+

If you're updating all the way from GNOME 3.10 you'll notice a completely rewritten Weather app that taps GNOME's new geolocation API to automatically pull in your local forecast. Fedora 21 does not, however, ship with some of the other new GNOME apps like Photos. Fedora 21 has elected to stick with the slightly more feature-rich Shotwell. GNOME Photos is available in the Fedora repos and has some new online account support, but in my experience it's a bit buggy for actually working with something as important as your photo library.

+ +[image="fedora21-weather.jpg" caption="GNOME's revamped weather app with geolocation API."] + +

This release also brings the first real support for Wayland -- Mutter (GNOME's default display manager) can now work as a Wayland compositor. Just log out of the default session and click the gear icon to choose the "GNOME on Wayland" option. Fedora should seamlessly fall back to X where Wayland isn't supported.

+

GNOME 3.14 makes for a different, but perfectly usable desktop. At this point the 3.x line is well polished and feels mature. Its rather different take on the desktop interface is not for everyone, in fact it's not my choice for everyday use, but if you come around to its way of thinking GNOME 3 is perfectly capable of getting out of your way and letting you do what you want to do. The only real downside to GNOME I found is the default file manager, Nautilus, which is pretty limited. I swapped it out with the Nautilus fork, Nemo, and found I liked GNOME 3 a lot more after that.

+

If you haven't taken GNOME for a spin in a while it might be worth another look and Fedora 21 makes hands down the best GNOME platform I've tested.

+

Yum, Now With More Yuminess

+

As much as I love some of the developer tools and little side projects Fedora churns out (like the GNOME color management tools it pioneered), I've never been a fan of Fedora's package manager. Fedora 21 changes that. Yum is no longer the slow, awkward beast it used to be and by extension neither is the Software center tools (which is the pretty-much-only-works-in-Fedora GNOME Software app).

+

There was a time when Ubuntu's Software Center was perhaps one of the best graphical software installation tools out there and yum-based distros like Fedora looked slow and ugly in comparison. These days more or less the opposite is true. Not only is Fedora's graphical software app one of the fastest I've ever used (speed will obviously depend somewhat on your internet connection speeds and available mirrors) but it's also clean, well organized and offers a great search tool.

+ +[image="fedora21-software.jpg" caption="GNOME's Software app in Fedora 21."] + +

And Fedora continues to target the developer audience with very up-to-date versions of Perl, Python, Ruby and most other languages you can think of. Anything that isn't there out of the box is most likely available in single DevAssistant command. If you're a developer and you haven't checked out DevAssistant you need to, it's the simplest way I've seen to get a complete development stack up and running.

+

Kernel Updates

+

Fedora 21 ships with Linux kernel 3.17.1, which brings the usual slew of latest hardware support, but is also notable for giving Fedora 21 tentative support for ARM 64 chips. ARM 64 is not yet considered a "primary architecture" for Fedora, but most things should work according to Fedora Magazine.

+

Fedora's kernel team has also adopted a more modular approach with this release, stripping things back a bit at the request of the Cloud environment developers. The result is a considerably smaller footprint for the Cloud environment, though both Workstation and Server will be roughly the same as the previous releases size-wise.

+

Fedora Server

+

While the Workstation environment is a good base on which to build your desktop experience, the new Fedora Server Environment is more specifically tailored to the needs of sysadmins and the like.

+

The first release of the Server Environment features a few new tools, like Cockpit, a server monitoring tool with a web-based interface you can connect to with your browser. If you're new to sysadmin tasks -- things like starting and stopping services, storage admin, and so on, or, if you just dislike doing everything through an SSH session, then Cockpit is worth checking out. It's more or less everything you're already doing on the command line, but available via a web-based GUI. It's all the same processes in the end, you can start Apache in the web panel and stop it from the command line. It's probably not going to replace your hand crafted shell scripts and preferred command line tools, but it's a nice option for newcomers.

+ +[image="fedora21-server-cockpit.jpg" caption="Cockpit running on locally on Fedora 21 Workstation."] + +

This release also bundles in a couple new-to-Fedora tools like OpenLMI, perhaps best thought of as a remote API for system management, and FreeIPA, which aims to simplify the process of managing user and groups securely.

+

Then there's RoleKit, which is a brand new Fedora creation that looks like it will be very handy in the future, though it's limited right now. In a sense RoleKit is the sysadmin equivalent of Fedora's DevAssistant. That is, RoleKit will help you install and configure packages aimed a specific role. For example, call up everything you need to run a mail server, or everything you need to run a LAMP stack. Promising, but thus far incomplete.

+

Conclusion

+

I've used Fedora off and on since Fedora 6 (which at that time known as Fedora Core 6) and can say without reservation that this is the best release I've ever used.

+

That said, the GNOME desktop is not for me. Fortunately there are plenty of other "spins" available, including a version with the MATE-desktop, which can now use Compiz if you'd like to re-experience Fedora with wobbly windows just like the days of yore. There are also spins featuring KDE, Xfce and LXDE among other desktops.

+

More importantly, Fedora 21 sees the project plowing into the future with what feels like a renewed sense of direction and purpose.

+

If you're a desktop user there's a Fedora for you. If you're a sysadmin there's a Fedora for you. If you're chasing the dream of cloud server futures there's a Fedora for you. And of course if you're just looking for a distro on which to build the ultimate robot, there's still a Fedora for you.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/fedora21review.txt b/ars-technica/published/fedora21review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..979db7e --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/fedora21review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,79 @@ +The Fedora Project recently rolled out a major update in the form of [Fedora 21](https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/download/). This release marks the first that's built around the newly restructured Fedora Project. + +Like most Linux distros Fedora is a massive, sprawling project that has, frankly, felt unfocused and a bit lost at times. Just what is Fedora? Fedora has served as a kind of showcase distro of GNOME 3 ever since GNOME 3 hit the beta stage, which would seem to target everyday users, but then at the same time the project pours tremendous energy into building developer tools like [DevAssistant](http://devassistant.org/). So is Fedora a developer distro? A newbie-friendly GNOME showcase? A server distro? An obscure robotics distro? + +Recently Fedora did a bit of soul searching and discovered that the answer to all those questions is yes. The way to make sense of it all is what Fedora calls [Fedora.Next](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora.next). + +Fedora.Next is Fedora's term for its new organization and release structure. There is a core (no, not like the old Fedora Core/Extras division, this is different), then there is a second layer, the APIs and such, and then the "Environments" that users like you and I interact with. + +You can think of Fedora.Next's structure as a series of concentric rings where each ring is supported by the one inside it. At the center are the core components of the system, APIs that applications hook into and so on. Up from that are the actual system components and then the most visible of the new layers, what Fedora calls "Environments." For now the available Environments consist of Workstation (Desktop), Server and Cloud. Each environment is optimized to suit what it says on the tin. Because these are very modular it won't be hard for Fedora to add new Environments as needed. For example perhaps there will one day be a Mobile Environment. + +The new pre-packaged Environments don't mean you can't configure Fedora however you like, just that these three Environments represent the primary areas of focus for developers. This offers Fedora a bit of direction and focus internally and more targeted "products" for users. + +Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller [likens](http://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-present-and-future-a-fedora-next-2014-update-part-ii-whats-happening/) the Fedora.Next structure to Lego: "One of the related (and perpetual) community discussions centers around what exactly Fedora is. Traditionally, the answer is: we take the 'raw plastic' of the software out there in the universe and we mold it into high-precision Lego bricks, and users can plug them together." + +"The idea [with Environments] is," continues Miller, "we can take some of our bricks, and we can ship those as sets." That doesn't mean though that you can't build your own thing as well. Miller is quick to reassure long-time Fedora fans that the project is "not getting rid of the basic supply of bricks... we want you to build other things." + +The renewed sense of focus apparent in the new Fedora.Next release structure seems to have re-invigorated the Fedora project -- at least it looks that way from an outsider's perspective. Whatever the case, Fedora 21 is one of the strongest releases the project has put out in recent memory and is well worth the upgrade. + +## Fedora 21 Workstation + +The Workstation Environment is what you would have installed previously if you had just downloaded Fedora Live CD and installed the defaults. + +In Fedora 21 that will get you a GNOME desktop. The old "spins", which consist primarily of different desktops, are still available (and presumably build on the same basic set of packages found in the GNOME Workstation release), but as noted earlier Fedora has long been a showcase distro of GNOME 3.x and with that in mind I stuck with the default GNOME 3.14 desktop. + +First though you have to install Fedora using what I think is supposed to be an intuitive installer that's so simple you can't fail. Except that instead of "can't fail", it's so simple you can't tell what you need to do. Perhaps I'm just too brainwashed by the form-based installers found in Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE, ElementaryOS and well, just about everywhere, but Fedora's button-based installer -- buttons, which hide forms mind you -- drives me crazy. Why make me click an extra button to set up a user account for a workstation environment when I will obviously need a user account? + +The Fedora installer isn't part of the GNOME project, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn the same developer who turned the Nautilus file browser into a useless toy also had a go at the Fedora installer. I'm sure you'll figure it out, it's not Arch (at least Arch's arcane install process is well documented), but it gets things off the bumpy start. + +The best thing I can say about Fedora's installer is that you only have to use it once. Just remember to create a new user and set your root password. + +### GNOME 3.14 + +Once Fedora 21 is installed you'll be greeted by the GNOME 3.14 desktop (assuming you found the button to create a user account). + +Fedora leap-frogged over GNOME 3.12 -- Fedora 20 shipped with GNOME 3.10 -- so this is a major leap forward for Fedora fans. GNOME 3.14 brings plenty of new features, including a couple new applications, an updated theme and some more improvements in HiDPI screen support. In fact GNOME has long boasted some of the best HiDPI support around and this release continues to build on that, polishing the little details to the point that I haven't seen anything amiss running Fedora 21 in a virtual machine on a retina Macbook Pro. + +Fedora's nearly stock GNOME 3.14 looks great on HiDPI screens and the updated GNOME theme gives the desktop a clean, simple look and feel. + +If you're updating all the way from GNOME 3.10 you'll notice a completely rewritten Weather app that taps GNOME's new geolocation API to automatically pull in your local forecast. Fedora 21 does not, however, ship with some of the other new GNOME apps like Photos. Fedora 21 has elected to stick with the slightly more feature-rich Shotwell. GNOME Photos is available in the Fedora repos and has some new online account support, but in my experience it's a bit buggy for actually working with something as important as your photo library. + +This release also brings the first real support for Wayland -- Mutter (GNOME's default display manager) can now work as a Wayland compositor. Just log out of the default session and click the gear icon to choose the "GNOME on Wayland" option. Fedora should seamlessly fall back to X where Wayland isn't supported. + +GNOME 3.14 makes for a different, but perfectly usable desktop. At this point the 3.x line is well polished and feels mature. Its rather different take on the desktop interface is not for everyone, in fact it's not my choice for everyday use, but if you come around to its way of thinking GNOME 3 is perfectly capable of getting out of your way and letting you do what you want to do. The only real downside to GNOME I found is the default file manager, Nautilus, which is pretty limited. I swapped it out with the Nautilus fork, [Nemo](http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/?p=198), and found I liked GNOME 3 a lot more after that. + +If you haven't taken GNOME for a spin in a while it might be worth another look and Fedora 21 makes hands down the best GNOME platform I've tested. + +### Yum, Now With More Yuminess + +As much as I love some of the developer tools and little side projects Fedora churns out (like the GNOME color management tools it pioneered), I've never been a fan of Fedora's package manager. Fedora 21 changes that. Yum is no longer the slow, awkward beast it used to be and by extension neither is the Software center tools (which is the pretty-much-only-works-in-Fedora GNOME Software app). + +There was a time when Ubuntu's Software Center was perhaps one of the best graphical software installation tools out there and yum-based distros like Fedora looked slow and ugly in comparison. These days more or less the opposite is true. Not only is Fedora's graphical software app one of the fastest I've ever used (speed will obviously depend somewhat on your internet connection speeds and available mirrors) but it's also clean, well organized and offers a great search tool. + +And Fedora continues to target the developer audience with very up-to-date versions of Perl, Python, Ruby and most other languages you can think of. Anything that isn't there out of the box is most likely available in single DevAssistant command. If you're a developer and you haven't checked out DevAssistant you need to, it's the simplest way I've seen to get a complete development stack up and running. + +### Kernel Updates + +Fedora 21 ships with Linux kernel 3.17.1, which brings the usual slew of latest hardware support, but is also notable for giving Fedora 21 tentative support for ARM 64 chips. ARM 64 is not yet considered a "primary architecture" for Fedora, but most things should work according to [Fedora Magazine](http://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-21-to-ship-the-3-16-linux-kernel-and-a-smaller-minimal-install-set/). + +Fedora's kernel team has also adopted a more modular approach with this release, stripping things back a bit at the request of the Cloud environment developers. The result is a considerably smaller footprint for the Cloud environment, though both Workstation and Server will be roughly the same as the previous releases size-wise. + +## Fedora Server + +While the Workstation environment is a good base on which to build your desktop experience, the new Fedora Server Environment is more specifically tailored to the needs of sysadmins and the like. + +The first release of the Server Environment features a few new tools, like Cockpit, a server monitoring tool with a web-based interface you can connect to with your browser. If you're new to sysadmin tasks -- things like starting and stopping services, storage admin, and so on, or, if you just dislike doing everything through an SSH session, then Cockpit is worth checking out. It's more or less everything you're already doing on the command line, but available via a web-based GUI. It's all the same processes in the end, you can start Apache in the web panel and stop it from the command line. It's probably not going to replace your hand crafted shell scripts and preferred command line tools, but it's a nice option for newcomers. + +This release also bundles in a couple new-to-Fedora tools like OpenLMI, perhaps best thought of as a remote API for system management, and FreeIPA, which aims to simplify the process of managing user and groups securely. + +Then there's RoleKit, which is a brand new Fedora creation that looks like it will be very handy in the future, though it's limited right now. In a sense RoleKit is the sysadmin equivalent of Fedora's DevAssistant. That is, RoleKit will help you install and configure packages aimed a specific role. For example, call up everything you need to run a mail server, or everything you need to run a LAMP stack. Promising, but thus far incomplete. + +## Conclusion + +I've used Fedora off and on since Fedora 6 (which at that time known as Fedora Core 6) and can say without reservation that this is the best release I've ever used. + +That said, the GNOME desktop is not for me. Fortunately there are plenty of other "spins" available, including a version with the MATE-desktop, which can now use Compiz if you'd like to re-experience Fedora with wobbly windows just like the days of yore. There are also spins featuring KDE, Xfce and LXDE among other desktops. + +More importantly, Fedora 21 sees the project plowing into the future with what feels like a renewed sense of direction and purpose. + +If you're a desktop user there's a Fedora for you. If you're a sysadmin there's a Fedora for you. If you're chasing the dream of cloud server futures there's a Fedora for you. And of course if you're just looking for a distro on which to build the ultimate robot, there's still a Fedora for you. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/fedora23review.html b/ars-technica/published/fedora23review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..10edb1b --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/fedora23review.html @@ -0,0 +1,67 @@ +

The Fedora project recently released Fedora 23. The last time Ars looked at Fedora was two releases ago, Fedora 21, which saw Fedora introducing its "Fedora Next" plan.

+

Fedora Next's goal was to bring the massive, sprawling entity that is Fedora into some neatly organized categories that would clearly define each of Fedora's aims. Since Next launched, Fedora has been busy doing just that and the results are impressive.

+

Fedora Next's structure is like a series of concentric rings where each ring is supported by the one inside it. At the center are the core components of the system, APIs that applications hook into and so on. On the outside are the visible layers that users interact with, what Fedora calls "Environments." It's this last layer that users interact with. For Fedora 23, as with the two releases prior, those Environments consist of Workstation (Desktop), Server, and Cloud. The latter still has the feel of an also-ran, but the Workstation and Server releases see quite a bit of welcome new packages in this release, particularly the GNOME-based Workstation.

+

Fedora 23 Workstation

+

The biggest change in Fedora 23's default Workstation release comes from upstream in the form of GNOME 3.18. But before you get to enjoy what's new in GNOME 3.18, you have to get Fedora installed and to do that you have to make it through Anaconda.

+

In the Fedora 21 review I gave Anaconda a hard time, its button-based approach felt clunky compared to similar offerings from other distros. Most of those criticism stand with Fedora 23. For example, it still takes an extra click of the button to create a user account on the desktop when everyone installing Fedora 23 Workstation will need an account -- why not just present a screen to create one?

+ +[image="fedora23-install.jpg" caption="The user creation and root password screens hidden away behind buttons."] + +

Two things in Fedora 23 make Anaconda a bit more tolerable though. First, it's better at guessing defaults. For example, it successfully set my timezone and keyboard preferences with no input from me at all. That's one win for the button based approach since there was no need to click those buttons. Provided you stick with single partition, the default disk partitioning setup in Fedora 23 also may not require much input on your part either, which is nice. The second change that makes Anaconda a bit better this time around is a new orange bar across the bottom which helps call your attention to any unfinished business you may have in the installer, for example, creating that user account.

+

It's a marginal improvement over past releases, but I stand by my last assessment: the best you can say about Fedora's installer is that you only have to use it once.

+

GNOME 3.18

+

Once you get past Anaconda, Fedora 23 will land you in what might well be one of the nicest, and certainly one of the newest, GNOME desktops around.

+

Fedora 23 ships with the just-released GNOME 3.18, which is one of the best GNOME releases to date and features dozens of new features, better Wayland support and a new option to update your firmware through GNOME Software. Regrettably it also, as all GNOME releases seem to, has a few steps backward.

+

The first thing you'll likely notice when you set up Fedora 23 Workstation is the new Google Drive integration in GNOME 3.18. Google Drive joins Facebook and Microsoft in the GNOME online accounts panel (along with what I like to hope is the more popular option for Linux users, ownCloud). The new Google Drive support makes all your Google documents into first class citizens on the GNOME desktop.

+ +[image="fedora23-drive.jpg" caption="Google Drive joins ownCloud, Microsoft and Facebook in the GNOME online accounts dialog. Set up is just a matter of granting GNOME access to your account."] + +

To set up Drive all you need to do is follow the prompts to sign in to Google and authorize GNOME to access your account. In about 10 seconds you'll have complete access to everything in your Drive within the GNOME Files app (AKA, Nautilus). Your Google Drive account is displayed as a network share in the file browser sidebar. Interacting with your Google Drive documents is no different than local documents. You can set your documents to open in any application you like (by default they'll open in the web editor) and creating new files and folders in Drive is just like it is for ordinary drives. Like the ownCloud integration, Google Drive in GNOME, "just works".

+ +[image="fedora23-drive-files.jpg" caption="Interacting with documents stored in Google Drive is just like interacting with any other file on your machine."] + +

There's still no Google Drive client for Linux, but for GNOME users anyway, GNOME's integration is good enough that you won't miss it. If you're not a Google Drive user there's nothing to see here other than the possibility that now that Drive support is done perhaps the GNOME team can move on to integrating other online sync services.

+

Support for Drive isn't the only thing new in the Files app, although it is the only thing that's new and good. The other change, while relatively minor, is yet another step backward for usability in GNOME. The file copy dialog has been moved to a tiny icon at the top right of the file browser window. An indicator circle animates large file copy operations and clicking the icon reveals more details and a drop down that looks roughly like the file copy dialog you'd see in most other applications. It works quite well enough if you know it's there. If you don't know, well, good luck finding any feedback on what your machine is doing when you drag and drop files.

+ +[image="fedora23-files-copy.jpg" caption="If you know it's there the new file copy dialog isn't so bad, but it's certainly not easy to discover."] + +

For example, if you're backing up say your photo folder with many gigabytes of data to an external drive you might accidentally copy it 3, perhaps even 4, times before you realized that, despite the totally absence of feedback, something is in fact happening. Don't ask me how I know this, just know that you will not suffer the same because now you know -- look for the tiny icon. At least GNOME is getting closer to its goal of making the command line look downright discoverable.

+

This release will also send you hunting for your network drives since those no longer appear in the sidebar by default, to, in the words of GNOME's announcement, "reduce clutter". Instead those drives now require an extra click on the new "Other Locations" menu item which will reveal all that unsightly clutter should you actually need to access those cluttered drives.

+ +[image="fedora23-files-network.jpg" caption="Networked drives, known as 'clutter' in GNOME parlance, are now hidden behind 'Other Locations' in the sidebar."] + +

There is one other actual improvement of note in the UI of GNOME 3.18, which is that you can now search by typing in open and save dialogs. One step forward, two back.

+

Most of the other big changes in Fedora 23 and GNOME 3.18 are less visible, though more welcome.

+

Fedora has long been an early adopter of Wayland and Fedora 23 is no different, offering considerably more support than any other distro to date. In fact the Wayland support is getting close enough to feature complete that it appears Fedora 24 may boot to Wayland by default. By and large you won't notice much difference should you try out Wayland in Fedora 23 (just logout of your current session and select Wayland from the menu that drops down from the gear icon at the lower right side of the login dialog). The lack of noticeable difference is a good thing since you really shouldn't need to know what your display manager is up to, but there are some new features available if you need them.

+

The most notable thing Wayland can do right now is run DPI-independent monitors. That is, if you have a normal resolution display and something more like a 4K display, Wayland can handle that scenario. Not having a high-res monitor I haven't been able to test this one, but the GNOME forums are full of success reports. Other new Wayland-specific features include trackpad support for gestures like pinch-to-zoom, twirling to rotate and four-finger swipes to switch workspaces. All of these gestures were previously available if you've got a touch screen, but they're now available to supported trackpads under Wayland. That said, I wasn't able to get them working in Fedora 23.

+

Fedora 23 does support GNOME 3.18's new "automatic brightness" support, which taps your laptop's integrated light sensor to automatically dim and brighten the screen based on the lighting around you. It saves fiddling with the brightness buttons and can help cut down on power use since it will dim without you having to remember anything. However, if you're really trying to eke the last bit out of your battery you'll probably want to disable automatic screen brightness in the power settings, since it tends to err on the brighter side. Most of the time though this feature works well.

+

There are quite a few notable updates for GNOME's stock applications, as well as two brand new applications -- Calendar and GNOME To Do. Possibly the best part though is that GNOME Software now supports firmware updates via fwupd. That means you don't need any proprietary tools or original install DVDs just to update your firmware, provided of course that the firmware you need is available via the Linux Vendor Firmware Service.

+ +[image="fedora23-software.jpg" caption="GNOME Software can now update firmware."] + +

As a side note, Ubuntu users, take a good look at GNOME software, it's in your future. Canonical has decided to abandon its homegrown software center in favor of GNOME software for Ubuntu 16.04. First Upstart gave way to systemd, then Unity 8 moved to Qt, then the scrollbars went to stock GNOME and now the Ubuntu Software Center is abandoned in favor of GNOME Software... makes you wonder about Mir.

+

GNOME 3.18 adds two new default apps to the ever-increasing GNOME app suite, Calendar and GNOME To Do. The lack of a good GUI calendar app for Linux has always been puzzling. There's Evolution of course, but until now there hasn't really been a nice simple stand alone Calendar app. GNOME Calendar is that app. Or rather, it's close to being that app. If you stick with the integrated GNOME online accounts -- Google Calendar, ownCloud, etc -- Calendar works as expected. Regrettably I have not been able to get it working with any of my CalDav servers, including my primary calendar which resides on Fastmail's CalDav servers.

+ +[image="fedora23-software.jpg" caption="GNOME Calendar, simple but functional — provided your online calendar resides in one of GNOME's supported online account options."] + +

The other newcomer is GNOME To Do (not to be confused with the older, independent application launcher, GNOME-Do), which is, as the name suggests, a to do list manager. GNOME To Do is still a "technical preview" in GNOME 3.18, but it has most of what you'd want in a task manager application. You can enter new tasks, group them, add colors and priorities, and attach notes to them. Tasks also integrate and sync with, for example, Gmail's Tasks. It was perfectly stable in my testing (including syncing with Gmail), but bear in mind that it is still a preview release -- you might not want to trust your entire life schedule to it just yet.

+ +[image="fedora23-software.jpg" caption="GNOME To Do, a nice, if still experimental, task manager."] + +

I should also note that while Fedora mentions both new GNOME apps in its release notes, in the case of the live CD I used to install Fedora 23, neither were installed by default. They're both in the repos though and thanks to GNOME's helpful ability to search for apps not installed yet they're easy enough to install on your own.

+

The last big update of note in Fedora 23's GNOME desktop is support for what might be the biggest change coming soon in the GNOME world: the Xdg project. Xdg is a new effort designed to help developers build and distribute Linux applications. Ultimately Xdg wants to be a kind of one-package-to-rule-them-all, that developers can use to package apps across distros. Xdg will also add some much stricter application sandboxing.

+

In Fedora 23 Xdg is not much more than an outline. None of the apps that ship in Fedora's repos are packaged this way yet, but Xdg does indeed look to be part of the GNOME roadmap, which likely means Fedora will be an early adopter as Xdg expands.

+

Kernel

+

Like the recently released Ubuntu 15.10, Fedora 23 ships with Linux Kernel 4.2. The biggest news in 4.2 is support for recent Radeon GPUs and Intel's new Broxton chips, though let's face it Fedora running on mobile chips is about as likely as this being the year of the Linux desktop.

+

On the more useful side there are some new encryption options for ext4 disks and the new live kernel patching features. The encryption features should make using whole disk encryption a bit faster.

+

Other under the hood changes in Fedora 23 include some improvements for Fedora's new DNF package manager, which replaced Yum a few releases ago (Yum is aliased to DNF now). With this release DNF takes over from fedup, becoming the new way to perform system upgrade. Aside from the welcome unification of purpose -- that Fedora had to build a separate tool for system upgrades says something about Yum -- DNF's new upgrade support hooks into systemd's support for offline updates and allows you to easily roll back updates if necessary.

+

Server

+

Fedora 23 Server includes everything found in the Workstation release (minus the desktop itself) and layers in some great tools for sysadmins, most notably Cockpit. Cockpit is Fedora's effort to bring the tools of the sysadmin into an interface anyone can use. Want to deploy a Docker container? Search for what you want, click install, done.

+

Cockpit also feels a bit like a covert effort to build a more secure web since it makes deploying secure servers something that anyone with a bit of Linux experience can figure out. Cockpit is really just a graphical interface layered on top of all the, let's face it, often inscrutable tools, sysadmins already use. Cockpit adds a welcome layer of abstraction and while it isn't a substitute for experience, it can point you in the right direction.

+

Fedora 23 Server beefs up Cockpit security with support for SSH key authentication and the ability to configure user accounts with authorized keys.

+

In this release Fedora rolekit gains the ability to deploy Server Roles as containerized applications. This allows better isolation of roles from the rest of the system and paves the way for roles to migrate into cloud-based systems like Fedora's Project Atomic.

+

Conclusion

+

Fedora 23 is such a strong release it highlights what feels like Fedora's Achilles heel -- there's no Long Term Support release.

+

If you want an LTS release in the Red Hat world it's RHEL you're after (or CentOS and other derivatives). Fedora is a bleeding edge and as such Fedora 23 will, as always, be supported for 12 months after which you'll need upgrade.

+

The good news is that DNF's new upgrade tools with transactional updates and rollbacks temper the missing LTS release a bit. After all, if updating is simple and you can roll back if something goes wrong then there's less risk to updating. Still, what if you do need to rollback because something went wrong? What if that something isn't something you can quickly fix?

+

The lack of an LTS release isn't likely to stop desktop users, but it does make Fedora feel like a riskier bet on the server. In the end though, that's probably how Red Hat likes things, if you want stable RHEL is there, if you want the latest and greatest, Fedora 23 delivers.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/fedora23review.txt b/ars-technica/published/fedora23review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..24e8b6b --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/fedora23review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,85 @@ +The Fedora project recently released Fedora 23. The last time Ars looked at Fedora was two releases ago, [Fedora 21](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/01/fedora-21-review-linuxs-sprawliest-distro-finds-a-new-focus/), which saw Fedora introducing its "Fedora Next" plan. + +Fedora Next's goal was to bring the massive, sprawling entity that is Fedora into some neatly organized categories that would clearly define each of Fedora's aims. Since Next launched, Fedora has been busy doing just that and the results are impressive. + +Fedora Next's structure is like a series of concentric rings where each ring is supported by the one inside it. At the center are the core components of the system, APIs that applications hook into and so on. On the outside are the visible layers that users interact with, what Fedora calls "Environments." It's this last layer that users interact with. For Fedora 23, as with the two releases prior, those Environments consist of Workstation (Desktop), Server, and Cloud. The latter still has the feel of an also-ran, but the Workstation and Server releases see quite a bit of welcome new packages in this release, particularly the GNOME-based Workstation. + +## Fedora 23 Workstation + +The biggest change in Fedora 23's default Workstation release comes from upstream in the form of GNOME 3.18. But before you get to enjoy what's new in GNOME 3.18, you have to get Fedora installed and to do that you have to make it through Anaconda. + +In the Fedora 21 review I gave Anaconda a hard time, its button-based approach felt clunky compared to similar offerings from other distros. Most of those criticism stand with Fedora 23. For example, it still takes an extra click of the button to create a user account on the desktop when everyone installing Fedora 23 Workstation will need an account -- why not just present a screen to create one? + +Two things in Fedora 23 make Anaconda a bit more tolerable though. First, it's better at guessing defaults. For example, it successfully set my timezone and keyboard preferences with no input from me at all. That's one win for the button based approach since there was no need to click those buttons. Provided you stick with single partition, the default disk partitioning setup in Fedora 23 also may not require much input on your part either, which is nice. The second change that makes Anaconda a bit better this time around is a new orange bar across the bottom which helps call your attention to any unfinished business you may have in the installer, for example, creating that user account. + +It's a marginal improvement over past releases, but I stand by my last assessment: the best you can say about Fedora's installer is that you only have to use it once. + +### GNOME 3.18 + +Once you get past Anaconda, Fedora 23 will land you in what might well be one of the nicest, and certainly one of the newest, GNOME desktops around. + +Fedora 23 ships with the just-released GNOME 3.18, which is one of the best GNOME releases to date and features dozens of new features, better Wayland support and a new option to update your firmware through GNOME Software. Regrettably it also, as all GNOME releases seem to, has a few steps backward. + +The first thing you'll likely notice when you set up Fedora 23 Workstation is the new Google Drive integration in GNOME 3.18. Google Drive joins Facebook and Microsoft in the GNOME online accounts panel (along with what I like to hope is the more popular option for Linux users, ownCloud). The new Google Drive support makes all your Google documents into first class citizens on the GNOME desktop. + +To set up Drive all you need to do is follow the prompts to sign in to Google and authorize GNOME to access your account. In about 10 seconds you'll have complete access to everything in your Drive within the GNOME Files app (AKA, Nautilus). Your Google Drive account is displayed as a network share in the file browser sidebar. Interacting with your Google Drive documents is no different than local documents. You can set your documents to open in any application you like (by default they'll open in the web editor) and creating new files and folders in Drive is just like it is for ordinary drives. Like the ownCloud integration, Google Drive in GNOME, "just works". + +There's still no Google Drive client for Linux, but for GNOME users anyway, GNOME's integration is good enough that you won't miss it. If you're not a Google Drive user there's nothing to see here other than the possibility that now that Drive support is done perhaps the GNOME team can move on to integrating other online sync services. + +Support for Drive isn't the only thing new in the Files app, although it is the only thing that's new and good. The other change, while relatively minor, is yet another step backward for usability in GNOME. The file copy dialog has been moved to a tiny icon at the top right of the file browser window. An indicator circle animates large file copy operations and clicking the icon reveals more details and a drop down that looks roughly like the file copy dialog you'd see in most other applications. It works quite well enough *if you know it's there*. If you don't know, well, good luck finding any feedback on what your machine is doing when you drag and drop files. + +For example, if you're backing up say your photo folder with many gigabytes of data to an external drive you might accidentally copy it 3, perhaps even 4, times before you realized that, despite the totally absence of feedback, something is in fact happening. Don't ask me how I know this, just know that you will not suffer the same because now you know -- look for the tiny icon. At least GNOME is getting closer to its goal of making the command line look downright discoverable. + +This release will also send you hunting for your network drives since those no longer appear in the sidebar by default, to, in the words of GNOME's announcement, "reduce clutter". Instead those drives now require an extra click on the new "Other Locations" menu item which will reveal all that unsightly clutter should you actually need to access those cluttered drives. + +There is one other actual improvement of note in the UI of GNOME 3.18, which is that you can now search by typing in open and save dialogs. One step forward, two back. + +Most of the other big changes in Fedora 23 and GNOME 3.18 are less visible, though more welcome. + +Fedora has long been an early adopter of Wayland and Fedora 23 is no different, offering considerably more support than any other distro to date. In fact the Wayland support is getting close enough to feature complete that it appears Fedora 24 may boot to Wayland by default. By and large you won't notice much difference should you try out Wayland in Fedora 23 (just logout of your current session and select Wayland from the menu that drops down from the gear icon at the lower right side of the login dialog). The lack of noticeable difference is a good thing since you really shouldn't need to know what your display manager is up to, but there are some new features available if you need them. + +The most notable thing Wayland can do right now is run DPI-independent monitors. That is, if you have a normal resolution display and something more like a 4K display, Wayland can handle that scenario. Not having a high-res monitor I haven't been able to test this one, but the GNOME forums are full of success reports. Other new Wayland-specific features include trackpad support for gestures like pinch-to-zoom, twirling to rotate and four-finger swipes to switch workspaces. All of these gestures were previously available if you've got a touch screen, but they're now available to supported trackpads under Wayland. That said, I wasn't able to get them working in Fedora 23. + +Fedora 23 does support GNOME 3.18's new "automatic brightness" support, which taps your laptop's integrated light sensor to automatically dim and brighten the screen based on the lighting around you. It saves fiddling with the brightness buttons and can help cut down on power use since it will dim without you having to remember anything. However, if you're really trying to eke the last bit out of your battery you'll probably want to disable automatic screen brightness in the power settings, since it tends to err on the brighter side. Most of the time though this feature works well. + +There are quite a few notable updates for GNOME's stock applications, as well as two brand new applications -- Calendar and GNOME To Do. Possibly the best part though is that GNOME Software now supports firmware updates via fwupd. That means you don't need any proprietary tools or original install DVDs just to update your firmware, provided of course that the firmware you need is available via the Linux Vendor Firmware Service. + +As a side note, Ubuntu users, take a good look at GNOME software, it's in your future. Canonical has decided to abandon its homegrown software center in favor of GNOME software for Ubuntu 16.04. First Upstart gave way to systemd, then Unity 8 moved to Qt, then the scrollbars went to stock GNOME and now the Ubuntu Software Center is abandoned in favor of GNOME Software... makes you wonder about Mir. + +GNOME 3.18 adds two new default apps to the ever-increasing GNOME app suite, Calendar and GNOME To Do. The lack of a good GUI calendar app for Linux has always been puzzling. There's Evolution of course, but until now there hasn't really been a nice simple stand alone Calendar app. GNOME Calendar is that app. Or rather, it's close to being that app. If you stick with the integrated GNOME online accounts -- Google Calendar, ownCloud, etc -- Calendar works as expected. Regrettably I have not been able to get it working with any of my CalDav servers, including my primary calendar which resides on Fastmail's CalDav servers. + +The other newcomer is GNOME To Do (not to be confused with the older, independent application launcher, GNOME-Do), which is, as the name suggests, a to do list manager. GNOME To Do is still a "technical preview" in GNOME 3.18, but it has most of what you'd want in a task manager application. You can enter new tasks, group them, add colors and priorities, and attach notes to them. Tasks also integrate and sync with, for example, Gmail's Tasks. It was perfectly stable in my testing (including syncing with Gmail), but bear in mind that it is still a preview release -- you might not want to trust your entire life schedule to it just yet. + +I should also note that while Fedora mentions both new GNOME apps in its release notes, in the case of the live CD I used to install Fedora 23, neither were installed by default. They're both in the repos though and thanks to GNOME's helpful ability to search for apps not installed yet they're easy enough to install on your own. + +The last big update of note in Fedora 23's GNOME desktop is support for what might be the biggest change coming soon in the GNOME world: the Xdg project. Xdg is a new effort designed to help developers build and distribute Linux applications. Ultimately Xdg wants to be a kind of one-package-to-rule-them-all, that developers can use to package apps across distros. Xdg will also add some much stricter application sandboxing. + +In Fedora 23 Xdg is not much more than an outline. None of the apps that ship in Fedora's repos are packaged this way yet, but Xdg does indeed look to be part of the GNOME roadmap, which likely means Fedora will be an early adopter as Xdg expands. + +## Kernel + +Like the recently released [Ubuntu 15.10](arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/ubuntu-15-10-review-wily-werewolf-leaves-scary-experimentation-for-next-year/), Fedora 23 ships with Linux Kernel 4.2. The biggest news in 4.2 is support for recent Radeon GPUs and Intel's new Broxton chips, though let's face it Fedora running on mobile chips is about as likely as this being the year of the Linux desktop. + +On the more useful side there are some new encryption options for ext4 disks and the new live kernel patching features. The encryption features should make using [whole disk encryption a bit faster](https://lwn.net/Articles/639427/). + +Other under the hood changes in Fedora 23 include some improvements for Fedora's new DNF package manager, which replaced Yum a few releases ago (Yum is aliased to DNF now). With this release DNF takes over from `fedup`, becoming the new way to perform system upgrade. Aside from the welcome unification of purpose -- that Fedora had to build a separate tool for system upgrades says something about Yum -- DNF's new upgrade support hooks into systemd's support for offline updates and allows you to easily roll back updates if necessary. + +## Server + +Fedora 23 Server includes everything found in the Workstation release (minus the desktop itself) and layers in some great tools for sysadmins, most notably Cockpit. Cockpit is Fedora's effort to bring the tools of the sysadmin into an interface anyone can use. Want to deploy a Docker container? Search for what you want, click install, done. + +Cockpit also feels a bit like a covert effort to build a more secure web since it makes deploying secure servers something that anyone with a bit of Linux experience can figure out. Cockpit is really just a graphical interface layered on top of all the, let's face it, often inscrutable tools, sysadmins already use. Cockpit adds a welcome layer of abstraction and while it isn't a substitute for experience, it can point you in the right direction. + +Fedora 23 Server beefs up Cockpit security with support for SSH key authentication and the ability to configure user accounts with authorized keys. + +In this release Fedora rolekit gains the ability to deploy [Server Roles as containerized applications](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Containerized_Server_Roles). This allows better isolation of roles from the rest of the system and paves the way for roles to migrate into cloud-based systems like Fedora's Project Atomic. + +## Conclusion + +Fedora 23 is such a strong release it highlights what feels like Fedora's Achilles heel -- there's no Long Term Support release. + +If you want an LTS release in the Red Hat world it's RHEL you're after (or CentOS and other derivatives). Fedora is a bleeding edge and as such Fedora 23 will, as always, be supported for 12 months after which you'll need upgrade. + +The good news is that DNF's new upgrade tools with transactional updates and rollbacks temper the missing LTS release a bit. After all, if updating is simple and you can roll back if something goes wrong then there's less risk to updating. Still, what if you do need to rollback because something went wrong? What if that something isn't something you can quickly fix? + +The lack of an LTS release isn't likely to stop desktop users, but it does make Fedora feel like a riskier bet on the server. In the end though, that's probably how Red Hat likes things, if you want stable RHEL is there, if you want the latest and greatest, Fedora 23 delivers. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/fedora24.html b/ars-technica/published/fedora24.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bdd70fe --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/fedora24.html @@ -0,0 +1,64 @@ +

Earlier this year the Fedora project released Fedora 24. Fedora 24 is very near the best Linux distro release I've used, certainly the best release I've tested this year. That said, it, like many Fedora releases before it, it got off to rocky start.

+

Long time Fedora users are more than likely conservative when it comes to system upgrades. Historically, new Fedora releases tend to be rough around the edges. The wise Fedora user gives a new Fedora release a couple of months to let the kinks work out and the updates flow in. Giving a new Fedora release time before updating also means all the latest packages in RPM Fusion have been updated as well. Suffice to say that being the first to jump on a Fedora upgrade -- which come every eight or so months -- can be risky.

+

Patience will, however, reward you with a really great Linux distro. And far more valuable than updated apps, waiting means you can skip catastrophic bugs like the one that completely broke Fedora 24 on Skylake systems after a kernel update. Fedora 24 shipped with Linux kernel 4.5 and managed to miss kernel 4.6 by about two weeks, which is a shame because no less than Linus Torvalds himself called kernel 4.6 "a fairly big release - more commits than we've had in a while." In other words, potentially something worth waiting a few weeks to ship.

+

The Fedora project elected to not postpone their release though. To be fair, the whole "let's wait a bit" logic is a slippery slope, but in this case Fedora seems to have erred on the wrong side and updating to Fedora 24 has been fraught with problems for many users, particularly those with Skylake chips. And the problems go above and beyond the problems that already plague Linux on Skylake.

+

It's been almost two months since Fedora 24 was released and at this point most of the bugs have been worked out. In fact I did most of my Fedora testing on the Dell XPS 13 I reviewed early for Ars and found Fedora 24 to be a far smoother experience than Ubuntu 16.04. That said, if you have a Skylake chip, proceed cautiously.

+

Fedora 24: A GNOME 3.20 Showcase

+

Fedora 24 ships with a slew of desktop options, everything from the very lightweight LXDE to the flagship offering: GNOME 3.20. Because Fedora is closely tied to GNOME, I've done the majority of my testing on GNOME 3.20, which includes a host of new features, including a revamped Software app, images editing in Photos, and my personal favorite, GNOME Maps. There's also the beginning of what might eventually (finally) be a decent GUI Calendar app for Linux.

+ +[image="fedora-desktop.jpg" caption="The default GNOME 3.20 desktop in Fedora 24"]

+ +

The first thing you'll want to do with a fresh install is grab the updates that have come since the installer was packaged, which means your first stop will be GNOME Software. The good news in GNOME 3.20 is that the Software app is a lot more stable than it used to be in Fedora (previous releases crashed constantly for me) and it now supports Flatpak apps. More on those in a minute. For now let's just say that Flatpaks are the least stable aspect of GNOME Software in 3.20. Still, if you enjoy graphical software installers, GNOME Software has one of the nicest interfaces you'll find among Linux desktops.

+ +[image='fedora-software.jpg' caption='GNOME Software in Fedora 24'] + +[image='fedora-software-2.jpg' caption='Searching and installing applications via GNOME Software in Fedora 24'] + +

Also note that as of installing Fedora 24 you can now update to future releases directly within the Software app. Yes, the magic eight ball says Fedora updates might possibly be a bit less painful going forward. I'll let you know for sure when Fedora 25 rolls around.

+

Also new in Software is the ability to install device firmware, provided your device supports it.

+

Once Fedora 24 is up-to-date and the 4.6 kernel is installed, it's worth checking out the rest of the GNOME suite of apps. The GNOME development team has been hard at work putting together a suite of basic applications that will fit the 80 percent use case and take GNOME beyond just a desktop and window manager to be a full-featured, unified ecosystem.

+

Apps like GNOME Photos, GNOME Calendar, GNOME Videos, GNOME Software go along way to simplifying the first-time user experience. GNOME 3.20 sees some big updates for several of these apps, in particular Photos and Maps. Photos started life as a very basic viewer with minimal features. Basically you could browse your photos and upload them to any online accounts you had set up through GNOME. With 3.20, GNOME Photos gains its first image editing capabilities.

+ +

[image='fedora-photos.jpg' caption='GNOME Photos organizer looks a lot like Shotwell.']

+ +

[image='fedora-photos-edit.jpg' caption='Basic editing features in GNOME Photos.']

+ +

GNOME Photos can now crop, rotate and perform some basic color adjustments to your photos. There's a new "enhance" option (which will sharpen and denoise) and of course there's some Instagram-style filters.

+

One thing I really liked about Photos is that all edits are are non-destructive. The original photo is preserved and always available should you change your mind about your edits. Another nice feature is the option to resize photos before emailing. For the love of bandwidth, please use this feature.

+

GNOME Photos is still not quite as capable as Shotwell when it comes to editing, which is probably why Fedora sticks with Shotwell as the default image app in Fedora 24, but Photos is getting there. If you're looking for a fast, simple way to organize, share and make basic edits to your photos, GNOME Photos is worth a try. Shotwell is still definitely more powerful, but Photos is faster and has a simpler interface.

+ +

[image="fedora-maps.jpg" caption="Changes to the MapQuest TOS briefly eliminated maps from Maps, but that's since been fixed and everything is working again, including a new feature, contributing to OpenStreetMap from Maps."]

+ +

Another new GNOME app that's worth a look is GNOME Calendar. If all you want is a calendar, not a complete all-in-one monstrosity of email, notes, todos, calendars and kitchen sinks there really aren't any good Linux apps out there. The one solution most will point to is Thunderbird, but it's all but abandoned at this point. Evolution works, but it's serious overkill if all you need is a calendar. GNOME Calendar has been looking like a great solution since it was quietly released a few years ago, but it still only really supports calendars hosted on Google or ownCloud (presumably NextCloud as well). It didn't make this release, but the good news is that support for calendar files like .ics are coming in GNOME 3.22.

+

One thing that hasn't changed much in this release is the GNOME Shell environment, which has a couple new features but by and large looks and behaves just like the last couple of releases. This time around GNOME gains a new set of multimedia controls that live in the little applet that comes up when you click the clock in the menu bar.

+

Fedora opts for a very stock GNOME installation, with no customization at all that I could see, beyond the wallpaper. The result is a very usable --albeit somewhat RAM hungry -- desktop. But while GNOME is certainly no lightweight, Fedora 24 with GNOME 3.20 worked reasonably well on a Chromebook with only 4GB of RAM.

+

The standard set of GNOME apps has also been updated to the latest versions, including LibreOffice, which is now at version 5.1, Shotwell, which is at v.23 and Firefox 48.

+

Fedora 24 and Flatpaks

+

Fedora's repos remain as they always have been, generally complete, not on the scale of Debian, but 95% of what most users will want are there, with a few curious exceptions like VLC (which is in the EPEL repos) and Chromium (which is in the RPM Fusion repos) but neither are available in any of the repos that ship with a new release of Fedora.

+

However, the number of packages in a distro's repos might not matter much in the near future. Thanks to Flatpak and Snap packages, both of which enjoy preliminary support in Fedora 24, you're not limited to installing just the packages available via repos. Just what is a Flatpak app and how is it different from a good old RPM package?

+

The big difference is that Flatpak apps are self-contained packages that ship all their dependencies in a single container. This neatly solves dependency conflicts. With RPM (or Deb) apps if one app requires someusefullib-1.0 and another app needs someusefullib-2.0 you have a problem. With Flatpaks that will never come up because both versions of someusefullib can be installed in each app's respective sandbox container.

+

There is a potential way to eat up more disk space with this method. After all, what happens when two apps require the exact same dependency? Installing it twice would be wasteful, but linking the two would ruin the self-contained part of the process. Right now that is indeed a problem for both Flatpak and Ubuntu's Snap packages, which also work in Fedora 24. For example the Snap version of LibreOffice is nearly four times the size of the distro package. The same is true of Gimp. This is, as they say, a known issue. Unfortunately, from what I can tell the solution means bundling fewer dependencies (and relying on the underlying system to provide the non-bundled dependencies), which puts Flatpak/Snap app right back with RPM for Deb packages.

+

It's still early days for both technologies though and frankly the increased disk size is the least of Flatpak and Snap's problems. Getting either system installed and working is still disappointingly complex and involves adding gpg keys, which is pretty much the usability kiss of death. There is support for Flatpak in GNOME Software, which will solve much of the usability problem, but it was a bit buggy in my experience (in some cases Flatpak apps would not install). Still, assuming that the user experience is improved, which, granted, may be a huge assumption to make, containerized apps have much to recommend them -- it's sort of like enabling the AUR for every distro.

+

And that's a big part of the appeal -- Flatpaks put the actual app developers in control. There's no need to restrict your app to using older versions of dependencies that ship with a distro when you can just bundle the latest and greatest as part of your package. In that sense Flatpaks are most appealing for seldom updated distros like Debian, but have much less to offer rolling distros like Arch.

+

If you want to be cynical, Flatpak and Snaps are just the latest effort in a long line of attempts to create a cross-distro, write-once, run-anywhere system for Linux. Past efforts include systems like AppImage and of course the current hotness driving the development of Flatpaks -- Docker and friends. Docker (and similar efforts with smaller publicity departments) have changed the way apps are deployed on servers, but it's still unclear whether the same sort of system will succeed on the desktop. Which is to say that there turn out to be more challenges to overcome on the desktop. To pick one small example, Flatpak apps do not seem to take advantage of the new improved font rendering in Fedora 24, which leaves them looking out of place in the same way that a Qt app often looks out of place in a GTK-based desktop (or vice versa).

+

There are also some issues that come with the restricted sandboxing. Flatpak-based apps often have trouble passing data to other applications. The Flatpak version of LibreOffice would not open links in Firefox in my testing, presumably because it's not allowed to pass data to other apps.

+

As it stands I've been playing with Snap and Flatpaks, but I can't recommend them for anyone but the Linux enthusiast who wants to experiment. Setting them up is complicated and frankly the apps available aren't apps you really want. Most distros ship with the current stable version of apps like LibreOffice, Inkscape and Gimp anyway -- Fedora 24 does anyway -- and for now I suggest sticking with those versions.

+

The Kernel, Wayland and Fedora Polish

+

Fedora 24 will install with kernel 4.5 by default. The aforementioned 4.6 update is, however, available and is well worth updating. Several other important low level tools have been updated as well, including GCC, which moves to version 6 and glibc which will update to version 2.23.

+

In addition, the hinting was changed from ‘medium', the Fedora 23 default, to ‘slight'. A change that is consistent with the hinting on Ubuntu and other distributions and that is generally considered the best default choice.

+

Fedora 24 continues to improve support for the next-generation display server, Wayland. Wayland is still not the default for Fedora 24, but it worked well enough that I would not be surprised to see it the default option for Fedora 25. That said there are still some quirks (like the inability to reliably get screenshots working, which is a deal breaker for me).

+

Fedora has also put considerable effort into polishing up the UI with some new font rendering that looks very good. Almost as good as Ubuntu, which has long had the best fonts and default font rendering settings of any Linux distro I've tested. Much of the work on fonts in Fedora 24 comes from upstream GNOME developers, who've been improving Cantarell, the default GNOME font. Much of the work has been making sure that Cantarell works well on a variety of resolution and screen sizes. Since the improvements are mainly happening at the GNOME level, other distros should benefit from this work as well.

+

It has always been possible to get great font rendering on nearly any distro using tools like Infinality, which allow fine-grained control over hinting and smoothing, but with Fedora 24 I no longer feel the need to do anything additional to the fonts. They're quite nice out of the box, especially on a high resolution display.

+

It's worth noting that the font improvements should apply to any Qt apps as well thanks to the QGnomePlatform. Often, because KDE-specific apps use a different toolkit (Qt) than GNOME apps (GTK) they look very out of place in a GNOME environment. The QGnomePlatform is a new project designed to overcome that out-of-place look by synchronizing settings between GNOME and newer Qt tools. That means that in Fedora 24, when you change the font settings using something like GNOME Tweak Tool, the change will also apply to Qt-5 based applications. The plan is for QGnomePlatform to expand to include other settings as well, but for now it just applies to fonts, and it just applies to Qt-5 apps, apps using older versions of Qt will not be affected (it also does not seem to work with Flatpak or Snap packages).

+

Another nice touch in this release is that the DNF package manager is now considered complete. I've been very impressed with DNF, especially the little touches that move it beyond most package managers. For example, if you type a command that's not found DNF will step in, and, if the application is available in the repos, it will ask if you'd like to install it.

+ +

[image='fedora-dnf.jpg' caption='A sampling of dnf's various "command not found" handlers.']

+ +

It's a small thing, but as someone who sets up a lot of Linux machines it's incredibly helpful and saves not just a small step, but the frustration of needing to take that small step. It's also worth noting that Fedora's GNOME setup will do something similar when you search for an application that's not installed, directing you to the Software app to install that application.

+

Conclusion

+

Fedora 24 is one of the best Linux distro releases you're likely to see this year. And there's also two other releases that I did not have room to cover in depth here -- the Server and Cloud variants of Fedora 24, which pack in a ton of new features specific to those environments. The cloud platform especially continues to churn out the container-related features, with some new tools for OpenShift Origin, Fedora's Platform as a Service system built around Google's around Kubernetes project. Check out Fedora Magazine's release announcment for more on everything that's new in Server and Cloud.

+

As always Fedora WorkStation also comes in a variety of "Spins" which are pre-packaged setups for specific use cases. There's prepacked spins of all the major desktops, including Xfce, KDE, MATE, Cinnamon and LXDE (you can also get alternative desktops in one go by downloading the DVD installer). Spins aren't just for desktops though. For example there's an astronomy spin, a design suite spin, robotics-focused spin, a security spin and several more. None of these spins have anything you can't set up yourself, but if you don't want to put in the time and effort Fedora can handle that for you.

+

If Fedora has a downfall it's the release cycle: 8 months is not a long time.

+

Given the hiccups involved in this update, updating again in 8 or 9 months sounds daunting. There is the rolling version of Fedora, Rawhide, which is not quite as unstable as it once was (thanks to DNF's default --skip-broken setting), but it's still a rougher release than Fedora proper.

+

In the end, despite how much I enjoyed using Fedora 24 for a couple of months, it hasn't convinced me to give up Arch. That's not a totally fair comparison since much of what I like about Arch is that it's a rolling release, but I would be more inclined to embrace Fedora if it had either a long term support type of release that would last several years, or a rolling release that dealt out updates as they were ready. As it stands Fedora sits somewhere in the middle and ends up with an often awkward update process happening all too frequently. It's possible that the new tools in DNF (and GNOME Software) will make things easier on the update front, but for now that's far from certain.

+

Still, if you're okay with the frequency of Fedora updates and want a release-oriented distro I would not hesitate to recommend Fedora 24. Even with a couple of issues, it's leaps and bounds beyond anything else I've tested this year, including Ubuntu 16.04 and Mint 18 -- just make sure you take it for a test drive before you jump in with both feet.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/fedora24.txt b/ars-technica/published/fedora24.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1b2170d --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/fedora24.txt @@ -0,0 +1,107 @@ +Earlier this year the Fedora project released Fedora 24. Fedora 24 is very near the best Linux distro release I've used, certainly the best release I've tested this year. That said, it, like many Fedora releases before it, it got off to rocky start. + +Long time Fedora users are more than likely conservative when it comes to system upgrades. Historically, new Fedora releases tend to be rough around the edges. The wise Fedora user gives a new Fedora release a couple of months to let the kinks work out and the updates flow in. Giving a new Fedora release time before updating also means all the latest packages in RPM Fusion have been updated as well. Suffice to say that being the first to jump on a Fedora upgrade -- which come every eight or so months -- can be risky. + +Patience will, however, reward you with a really great Linux distro. And far more valuable than updated apps, waiting means you can skip catastrophic bugs like the one that completely broke Fedora 24 on Skylake systems after a kernel update. Fedora 24 shipped with Linux kernel 4.5 and managed to miss kernel 4.6 by about two weeks, which is a shame because no less than Linus Torvalds himself called kernel 4.6 "a fairly big release - more commits than we've had in a while." In other words, potentially something worth waiting a few weeks to ship. + +The Fedora project elected to not postpone their release though. To be fair, the whole "let's wait a bit" logic is a slippery slope, but in this case Fedora seems to have erred on the wrong side and updating to Fedora 24 has been fraught with problems for many users, particularly those with [Skylake chips](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1353103). And the problems go above and beyond the problems that already plague Linux on Skylake. + +It's been almost two months since Fedora 24 was released and at this point most of the bugs have been worked out. In fact I did most of my Fedora testing on the [Dell XPS 13](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/the-xps-13-de-dell-continues-to-build-a-reliable-linux-lineage/) I reviewed early for Ars and found Fedora 24 to be a far smoother experience than Ubuntu 16.04. That said, if you have a Skylake chip, proceed cautiously. + +## Fedora 24: A GNOME 3.20 Showcase + +Fedora 24 ships with a slew of desktop options, everything from the very lightweight LXDE to the flagship offering: GNOME 3.20. Because Fedora is closely tied to GNOME, I've done the majority of my testing on GNOME 3.20, which includes a host of new features, including a revamped Software app, images editing in Photos, and my personal favorite, GNOME Maps. There's also the beginning of what might eventually (finally) be a decent GUI Calendar app for Linux. + +[image="fedora-desktop.jpg" caption="The default GNOME 3.20 desktop in Fedora 24"] + +The first thing you'll want to do with a fresh install is grab the updates that have come since the installer was packaged, which means your first stop will be GNOME Software. The good news in GNOME 3.20 is that the Software app is a lot more stable than it used to be in Fedora (previous releases crashed constantly for me) and it now supports Flatpak apps. More on those in a minute. For now let's just say that Flatpaks are the least stable aspect of GNOME Software in 3.20. Still, if you enjoy graphical software installers, GNOME Software has one of the nicest interfaces you'll find among Linux desktops. + +[image="fedora-software.jpg" caption="GNOME Software in Fedora 24"] + + +[image="fedora-software-2.jpg" caption="Searching and installing applications via GNOME Software in Fedora 24"] + +Also note that as of installing Fedora 24 you can now update to future releases directly within the Software app. Yes, the magic eight ball says Fedora updates might possibly be a bit less painful going forward. I'll let you know for sure when Fedora 25 rolls around. + +Also new in Software is the ability to install device firmware, provided your device supports it. + +Once Fedora 24 is up-to-date and the 4.6 kernel is installed, it's worth checking out the rest of the GNOME suite of apps. The GNOME development team has been hard at work putting together a suite of basic applications that will fit the 80 percent use case and take GNOME beyond just a desktop and window manager to be a full-featured, unified ecosystem. + +Apps like GNOME Photos, GNOME Calendar, GNOME Videos, GNOME Software go along way to simplifying the first-time user experience. GNOME 3.20 sees some big updates for several of these apps, in particular Photos and Maps. Photos started life as a very basic viewer with minimal features. Basically you could browse your photos and upload them to any online accounts you had set up through GNOME. With 3.20, GNOME Photos gains its first image editing capabilities. + +[image="fedora-photos.jpg" caption="GNOME Photos organizer looks a lot like Shotwell."] + +[image="fedora-photos-edit.jpg" caption="Basic editing features in GNOME Photos."] + +GNOME Photos can now crop, rotate and perform some basic color adjustments to your photos. There's a new "enhance" option (which will sharpen and denoise) and of course there's some Instagram-style filters. + +One thing I really liked about Photos is that all edits are are non-destructive. The original photo is preserved and always available should you change your mind about your edits. Another nice feature is the option to resize photos before emailing. For the love of bandwidth, please use this feature. + +GNOME Photos is still not quite as capable as Shotwell when it comes to editing, which is probably why Fedora sticks with Shotwell as the default image app in Fedora 24, but Photos is getting there. If you're looking for a fast, simple way to organize, share and make basic edits to your photos, GNOME Photos is worth a try. Shotwell is still definitely more powerful, but Photos is faster and has a simpler interface. + +[image="fedora-maps.jpg" caption="Changes to the MapQuest TOS briefly eliminated maps from Maps, but that's since been fixed and everything is working again, including a new feature, contributing to OpenStreetMap from Maps."] + +Another new GNOME app that's worth a look is GNOME Calendar. If all you want is a calendar, not a complete all-in-one monstrosity of email, notes, todos, calendars and kitchen sinks there really aren't any good Linux apps out there. The one solution most will point to is Thunderbird, but it's all but abandoned at this point. Evolution works, but it's serious overkill if all you need is a calendar. GNOME Calendar has been looking like a great solution since it was quietly released a few years ago, but it still only really supports calendars hosted on Google or ownCloud (presumably NextCloud as well). It didn't make this release, but the good news is that support for calendar files like .ics are coming in GNOME 3.22. + +One thing that hasn't changed much in this release is the GNOME Shell environment, which has a couple new features but by and large looks and behaves just like the last couple of releases. This time around GNOME gains a new set of multimedia controls that live in the little applet that comes up when you click the clock in the menu bar. + +Fedora opts for a very stock GNOME installation, with no customization at all that I could see, beyond the wallpaper. The result is a very usable --albeit somewhat RAM hungry -- desktop. But while GNOME is certainly no lightweight, Fedora 24 with GNOME 3.20 worked reasonably well on a Chromebook with only 4GB of RAM. + +The standard set of GNOME apps has also been updated to the latest versions, including LibreOffice, which is now at version 5.1, Shotwell, which is at v.23 and Firefox 48. + +## Fedora 24 and Flatpaks + +Fedora's repos remain as they always have been, generally complete, not on the scale of Debian, but 95% of what most users will want are there, with a few curious exceptions like VLC (which is in the [EPEL repos](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL)) and Chromium (which is in the RPM Fusion repos) but neither are available in any of the repos that ship with a new release of Fedora. + +However, the number of packages in a distro's repos might not matter much in the near future. Thanks to Flatpak and Snap packages, both of which enjoy preliminary support in Fedora 24, you're not limited to installing just the packages available via repos. Just what is a Flatpak app and how is it different from a good old RPM package? + +The big difference is that Flatpak apps are self-contained packages that ship all their dependencies in a single container. This neatly solves dependency conflicts. With RPM (or Deb) apps if one app requires someusefullib-1.0 and another app needs someusefullib-2.0 you have a problem. With Flatpaks that will never come up because both versions of someusefullib can be installed in each app's respective sandbox container. + +There is a potential way to eat up more disk space with this method. After all, what happens when two apps require the exact same dependency? Installing it twice would be wasteful, but linking the two would ruin the self-contained part of the process. Right now that is indeed a problem for both Flatpak and Ubuntu's Snap packages, which also work in Fedora 24. For example the Snap version of LibreOffice is nearly four times the size of the distro package. The same is true of Gimp. This is, as they say, a known issue. Unfortunately, from what I can tell the solution means bundling fewer dependencies (and relying on the underlying system to provide the non-bundled dependencies), which puts Flatpak/Snap app right back with RPM for Deb packages. + +It's still early days for both technologies though and frankly the increased disk size is the least of Flatpak and Snap's problems. Getting either system installed and working is still disappointingly complex and involves adding gpg keys, which is pretty much the usability kiss of death. There is support for Flatpak in GNOME Software, which will solve much of the usability problem, but it was a bit buggy in my experience (in some cases Flatpak apps would not install). Still, assuming that the user experience is improved, which, granted, may be a huge assumption to make, containerized apps have much to recommend them -- it's sort of like enabling the AUR for every distro. + +And that's a big part of the appeal -- Flatpaks put the actual app developers in control. There's no need to restrict your app to using older versions of dependencies that ship with a distro when you can just bundle the latest and greatest as part of your package. In that sense Flatpaks are most appealing for seldom updated distros like Debian, but have much less to offer rolling distros like Arch. + +If you want to be cynical, Flatpak and Snaps are just the latest effort in a long line of attempts to create a cross-distro, write-once, run-anywhere system for Linux. Past efforts include systems like AppImage and of course the current hotness driving the development of Flatpaks -- Docker and friends. Docker (and similar efforts with smaller publicity departments) have changed the way apps are deployed on servers, but it's still unclear whether the same sort of system will succeed on the desktop. Which is to say that there turn out to be more challenges to overcome on the desktop. To pick one small example, Flatpak apps do not seem to take advantage of the new improved font rendering in Fedora 24, which leaves them looking out of place in the same way that a Qt app often looks out of place in a GTK-based desktop (or vice versa). + +There are also some issues that come with the restricted sandboxing. Flatpak-based apps often have trouble passing data to other applications. The Flatpak version of LibreOffice would not open links in Firefox in my testing, presumably because it's not allowed to pass data to other apps. + +As it stands I've been playing with Snap and Flatpaks, but I can't recommend them for anyone but the Linux enthusiast who wants to experiment. Setting them up is complicated and frankly the apps available aren't apps you really want. Most distros ship with the current stable version of apps like LibreOffice, Inkscape and Gimp anyway -- Fedora 24 does anyway -- and for now I suggest sticking with those versions. + +## The Kernel, Wayland and Fedora Polish + +Fedora 24 will install with kernel 4.5 by default. The aforementioned 4.6 update is, however, available and is well worth updating. Several other important low level tools have been updated as well, including GCC, which moves to version 6 and glibc which will update to version 2.23. + +In addition, the hinting was changed from ‘medium', the Fedora 23 default, to ‘slight'. A change that is consistent with the hinting on Ubuntu and other distributions and that is generally considered the best default choice. + +Fedora 24 continues to improve support for the next-generation display server, Wayland. Wayland is still not the default for Fedora 24, but it worked well enough that I would not be surprised to see it the default option for Fedora 25. That said there are still some quirks (like the inability to reliably get screenshots working, which is a deal breaker for me). + +Fedora has also put considerable effort into polishing up the UI with some new font rendering that looks very good. Almost as good as Ubuntu, which has long had the best fonts and default font rendering settings of any Linux distro I've tested. Much of the work on fonts in Fedora 24 comes from upstream GNOME developers, who've been improving Cantarell, the default GNOME font. Much of the work has been making sure that Cantarell works well on a variety of resolution and screen sizes. Since the improvements are mainly happening at the GNOME level, other distros should benefit from this work as well. + +It has always been possible to get great font rendering on nearly any distro using tools like [Infinality](http://infinality.net/), which allow fine-grained control over hinting and smoothing, but with Fedora 24 I no longer feel the need to do anything additional to the fonts. They're quite nice out of the box, especially on a high resolution display. + +It's worth noting that the font improvements should apply to any Qt apps as well thanks to the QGnomePlatform. Often, because KDE-specific apps use a different toolkit (Qt) than GNOME apps (GTK) they look very out of place in a GNOME environment. The QGnomePlatform is a new project designed to overcome that out-of-place look by synchronizing settings between GNOME and newer Qt tools. That means that in Fedora 24, when you change the font settings using something like GNOME Tweak Tool, the change will also apply to Qt-5 based applications. The plan is for QGnomePlatform to expand to include other settings as well, but for now it just applies to fonts, and it just applies to Qt-5 apps, apps using older versions of Qt will not be affected (it also does not seem to work with Flatpak or Snap packages). + +Another nice touch in this release is that the DNF package manager is now considered complete. I've been very impressed with DNF, especially the little touches that move it beyond most package managers. For example, if you type a command that's not found DNF will step in, and, if the application is available in the repos, it will ask if you'd like to install it. + +[image="fedora-dnf.jpg" caption="A sampling of dnf's various 'command not found' handlers."] + +It's a small thing, but as someone who sets up a lot of Linux machines it's incredibly helpful and saves not just a small step, but the frustration of needing to take that small step. It's also worth noting that Fedora's GNOME setup will do something similar when you search for an application that's not installed, directing you to the Software app to install that application. + +## Conclusion + +Fedora 24 is one of the best Linux distro releases you're likely to see this year. And there's also two other releases that I did not have room to cover in depth here -- the Server and Cloud variants of Fedora 24, which pack in a ton of new features specific to those environments. The cloud platform especially continues to churn out the container-related features, with some new tools for OpenShift Origin, Fedora's Platform as a Service system built around Google's around Kubernetes project. Check out Fedora Magazine's [release announcment](https://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-24-released/) for more on everything that's new in Server and Cloud. + +As always Fedora WorkStation also comes in a variety of "Spins" which are pre-packaged setups for specific use cases. There's prepacked [spins of all the major desktops](https://spins.fedoraproject.org/), including Xfce, KDE, MATE, Cinnamon and LXDE (you can also get alternative desktops in one go by downloading the DVD installer). Spins aren't just for desktops though. For example there's an astronomy spin, a design suite spin, robotics-focused spin, a security spin and [several more](https://labs.fedoraproject.org/). None of these spins have anything you can't set up yourself, but if you don't want to put in the time and effort Fedora can handle that for you. + +If Fedora has a downfall it's the release cycle: 8 months is not a long time. + +Given the hiccups involved in this update, updating again in 8 or 9 months sounds daunting. There is the rolling version of Fedora, Rawhide, which is not quite as unstable as it once was (thanks to DNF's default `--skip-broken` setting), but it's still a rougher release than Fedora proper. + +In the end, despite how much I enjoyed using Fedora 24 for a couple of months, it hasn't convinced me to give up Arch. That's not a totally fair comparison since much of what I like about Arch is that it's a rolling release, but I would be more inclined to embrace Fedora if it had either a long term support type of release that would last several years, or a rolling release that dealt out updates as they were ready. As it stands Fedora sits somewhere in the middle and ends up with an often awkward update process happening all too frequently. It's possible that the new tools in DNF (and GNOME Software) will make things easier on the update front, but for now that's far from certain. + +Still, if you're okay with the frequency of Fedora updates and want a release-oriented distro I would not hesitate to recommend Fedora 24. Even with a couple of issues, it's leaps and bounds beyond anything else I've tested this year, including Ubuntu 16.04 and Mint 18 -- just make sure you take it for a test drive before you jump in with both feet. + + + diff --git a/ars-technica/published/fedora25.txt b/ars-technica/published/fedora25.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7a2353c --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/fedora25.txt @@ -0,0 +1,114 @@ +The Fedora project has released Fedora 25, a major update for the Linux distribution. + +For the past several releases Fedora has been pursuing what it calls Fedora Next. Essentially Fedora Next took a step back and looked at how Fedora is used and came up with editions specifically tailored to those use cases. The most notable of these are Fedora WorkStation and Fedora Server, which are the desktop/laptop and server versions respectively. + +Previous Fedora releases also had a "cloud" edition, but that's now been replaced by Fedora Atomic. Fedora Cloud, aside from having a meaningless name, didn't quite pan out. Since "cloud" is just a word for "someone else's server", it doesn't make much sense to release a "cloud" distro. + +What does make sense is to package up a version of Fedora specifically tailored for running container-based systems that uses a stable base system and the latest and greatest package. Using it is a bit like checking Fedora out from a Git repo. More on that in a minute. + +Interesting as Fedora Atomic is, much of the headlining news in Fedora 25 is in the WorkStation edition and can be summed up in a single word: Wayland. + +Yes, after being pushed back from release after release, Fedora 25 defaults to using Wayland (assuming you have a supported graphics card). This is perhaps the biggest change to come in the Linux world since the move to systemd, but unlike systemd the switch to Wayland was so seamless I had to logout and double check that I was in fact using Wayland. + +I called Fedora 24, released earlier this year, "the year’s best Linux distro" but one that I would have a hard time recommending thanks to some ugly kernel-related bugs. Well, Fedora 25 is here with an updated kernel, the bugs appear to be gone and I have no problem recommending it. Not only is Fedora 25 a great release, the updated GNOME 3.22 running on top of Wayland is slick and very stable in my testing. + +## Wayland, New Kernel, and Updates + +The biggest change in this release is undoubtedly the move to Wayland as the default, erm, protocol, replacing the venerable X Server. Wayland's goal is to be easier to develop and maintain and, to a lesser degree, to get rid of the X's confusing clutter of accumulated bits that have been bolted on over the years. + +Wayland is not, strictly speaking, a display server like X. Wayland is a protocol for a compositor to talk through. To make things more confusing the compositor can be a Wayland client itself. It could also be an X application, some input device or a standalone display server. Wayland doesn't actually do much and that's by design. As the Wayland FAQ puts it, "the compositor sends input events to the clients. The clients render locally and then communicate video memory buffers and information about updates to those buffers back to the compositor." + +[image="fedora25-desktop.jpg" caption="The stock Fedora 25 desktop with GNOME 3.22"] + +What's perhaps most remarkable for a change that's so low-level, and in fact one that's taking a lot of X functionality and moving lower down into the stack, is how unlikely you are to notice it. In my experience so far -- about two weeks of use as I write this -- the transition to Wayland has been totally transparent. Even better, GNOME 3.22 feels considerably smoother with Wayland. It's difficult to describe without seeing it, but little moments of tearing that used to happen under X are gone and common tasks like dragging windows are much smoother. + +To be clear there are still plenty of things that don't work with Wayland. In fact there likely will always be legacy system elements that don't know what to make of Wayland and will never be updated. For that situation there's XWayland, which is a plugin for Wayland compositors that runs a real X server inside Wayland. XWayland is a big part of why you're unlikely to notice the move to Wayland. + +There are also some things to bear in mind about using Wayland with GNOME, more than a few GNOME hacks won't work anymore. For example desktop icons, which aren't really a GNOME 3.x thing, though you could use Gnome Tweak Tools if you can get them, are not supported in Wayland and never will be. I've also been unable to find a clipboard manager that works properly under Wayland. + +The other problem I've run into is that neither of the tint-shifting applications I use work with Wayland. Neither f.lux nor redshift do anything when running under Wayland. Judging by posts from around the web, video playback is sometimes an issue too, though I have not actually experienced this problem. In terms of hardware support and Wayland, I would definitely suggest sticking with kernel 4.8.x or newer, which is exactly what Fedora 25 ships with. + +The other major gripe I have with Wayland is that it doesn't appear to support fractional scaling for HiDPI screens. It works great at 2X, which covers most screens, but there are those where 1X is too small, but 2X is too much. If you have a screen that works best at 1.5X, you might want to stick with X for now. + +Those are, however, relatively minor issues. The biggest caveat to all the good news in Wayland is that Nvidia's proprietary driver does not support Wayland. The open source Nouveau drivers do, but those drivers can be a noticeable step down depending on your system and what you're trying to do. In my experience the Nouveau drivers are also a little buggy, though to be clear I haven't tested them with Wayland. + +Along with Wayland Fedora 25 brings Linux kernel 4.8.6, which means any lingering [Skylake bugs](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1353103) should be fixed. I tested Fedora 25 on the [Dell XPS 13](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/the-xps-13-de-dell-continues-to-build-a-reliable-linux-lineage/) I reviewed earlier for Ars and found Fedora 25 worked flawlessly. + +I should also note that for the first time I was able to update from Fedora 24 to 25 using the GNOME Software system upgrade tool without any issues at all. That's a first for me in over ten years of using Fedora (to be fair most of that time I didn't even try because it was flat out hopeless) and goes a long way to making Fedora a distro that's friendly to less sophisticated users. + +In the past updating Fedora meant you'd need a few days to troubleshoot all the things that broke. It was a pain point that the project has been aware of and working on for some time. The nicely named FedUp tool arrived around Fedora 23, which helped some. Then the dnf upgrade tools came along in Fedora 24 and now there's a completely graphical upgrade path via GNOME software and perhaps most surprising, it just works. + +The only caveat I would add is that, like I imagine many Linux users do, I maintain an install of Fedora primarily to get a rough idea of what's coming in future CentOS releases. Which is to say that while Fedora gets a partition on my drive, I have not heavily customized it and don't have a ton of RPM Fusion repos installed, which could make for more problematic updates. Still, judging by comments sections, forums and posts around the web, my experience is not uncommon for the move from Fedora 24 to Fedora 25. That's not to say you're guaranteed a smooth upgrade though. The real problem for most people seems to be with conflicting dependencies, often related to packages installed via RPM Fusion or other less-than-official repositories. + +My long standing criticism of Fedora is that major updates come too frequently for how terrible the updating process has been historically. Now that that seems to be changing and updates are smooth (and even have a nice GUI via GNOME Software) Fedora could start to find a wider audience. + +## The Little Things + +Fedora 25 has plenty of other little changes beyond the move to Wayland by default. For example, shocking as it sounds, Fedora 25 ships with MP3 support straight out of the box. Look for a lot of distros to start doing this since in the United States the patents covering the MP3 codecs expired earlier this year.There's no encoding support yet, which could be related to fact that two of the patents are still valid until April of next year, but it's a start. + +In a bid to make Fedora a bit easier for newcomers to try out, Fedora 25 ships with a revamped Fedora Media Writer in the repos (curiously, it's not installed by default). Media Writer gives you a nice GUI to grab the latest Fedora release (or any of the official spins) and write it to a USB stick. It's a step up from the more simplistic tools in previous versions. I actually tried to use Media Writer back in Fedora 24 and it wrote to the wrong USB stick. Fortunately I didn't have anything of value on that stick and to this day I'm not 100% sure it was Media Writer's fault and not user error, but in either case I was leery of testing it again. This time, to be extra safe I made sure that my thumb drive was the only drive plugged in and it worked as advertised, grabbing the MATE spin and burning it to disk with a mere two clicks. + +[image="fedora25-live-writer.jpg" caption="Fedora's Media Writer is a very slick and easy way to get a bootable USB stick with Fedora (or any other distro) in couple of clicks."] + +Fedora used to position itself as the distro for developers. This meant in part that Fedora was looking for users who would contribute back to the community, but it also meant that Fedora shipped the latest stable version of most programming languages and was quick to adopt new ones. This release follows in that tradition; developers can look forward to a version bump for PHP (to version 7.0), Node JS to 6.5, Ruby on Rails 5.0, and new support for the Rust language with a Rust Compiler (Cargo) installed by default. + +## GNOME 3.22 + +GNOME 3.22 arrived a bit ahead of Fedora 25, but Fedora remains the single best showcase for the GNOME desktop and, with Wayland under the hood, this is doubly true for Fedora 25. You'd be hard pressed to find a slicker, more polished looking desktop than GNOME 3.22 running on Wayland in Fedora 25. + +GNOME 3.20 made Wayland perfectly usable, though the GNOME team reports that 3.22 is "even more polished", with support for display rotation and Wacom tablets, among other things. + +Perhaps the best news for GNOME fans in this release is that GNOME 3.22 has reached a new development stability plateau. This means, for example, that GNOME shell's extension API is now considered stable, which in turn means that any shell extension you rely on will continue to work as-is when you update. Yes it's come to this: GNOME 3.22's headlining feature is that the tools you rely on to turn GNOME into a workable desktop no longer break with every new release. + +It's not entirely fair to make fun of GNOME 3's previous ever-shifting updates, it has been a perfectly usable desktop for several year's worth of releases now. Perhaps not a good choice for those who like to configure and tweak every setting, but workable nonetheless. + +[image="fedora25-software.jpg" caption="GNOME's Software app has seen a slight redesign and now offers a little more info about Flatpak apps. Still odd that it wastes a featured app spotlight on a web browser that's installed by default anyway."] + +This release also brings improved support for Flatpak apps in GNOME Software. Flatpak apps are designed to improve the software installation process in GNOME and Linux in general by making it easier for developers to package, and users to install, software across distributions. With Flatpaks you don't need to worry about dependency conflicts or even if your distro of choice has the app you want. Flatpaks also offer improved security and stability by sandboxing applications. + +With GNOME 3.22 you can add Flatpak repos, and then browse and install apps from those repos without ever needing to drop into the command line. The Software app also now shows a bit more information about Flatpak apps -- like source information and the sandboxing status. + +GNOME's Nautilus File Manager, nee Files, also gets some attention in this release, including a new tool for bulk renaming files. Just select the files you'd like to rename and then you can apply bulk renaming features, like adding a prefix, suffix or even using a completely custom template. + +[image="fedora25-files-rename.jpg" caption="The new file renaming dialog in GNOME 3.22 Files app (right click a selection or press F2)."] + +There's also a new integrated file compression utility that means you can now double click a .zip file and it just extracts the contents to a folder without opening File Roller. That should make working with compressed files much more familiar for mac and windows users making the switch to GNOME. + +[image="fedora25-files-compress.jpg" caption="Creating archives via the new compress feature in Files. Just right-click your selected files and chose 'compress'."] + +Also worth mentioning, GNOME Maps has been fixed and now uses Mapbox map tiles. + +## Fedora Spins + +While GNOME has long been Fedora's flagship desktop (and Fedora serves as GNOME's showcase distro), it's far from the only option. The Fedora installer offers up all the usual suspects like KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, and more. There are also tailored spins for most of the major desktops. + +The notable Spin for Fedora 25 is the MATE Compiz Spin, which bundles MATE Desktop with Compiz Fusion, and brings a lot more GTK+ 3 to MATE in this release. That makes for an overall more polished MATE and means that if you've ever had problems getting MATE to look good on HiDPI screens, you might want to try again because MATE 1.16 works quite well. + +Other spins like KDE, XFCE and Cinnamon have significant upgrades with Fedora 25. The Fedora Spins site has [full details](https://spins.fedoraproject.org/) and release notes for each. + + +## Fedora Next Next + +Not to be confused with Spins, Fedora Next, Fedora's reorganization that began several releases ago, consists of three "editions". As mentioned above, Fedora has rearranged the components of Fedora Next. Fedora Cloud has taken a backseat in the Fedora Next roster; Fedora Atomic edition is the replacement. The Cloud Base image continues to be available for those who'd like to build on a more traditional rpm-based foundation, but the future is looking like Atomic. + +Unless you've been living under a rock you know the new hotness in Linux server deployment is containers, and containerization is the whole point of Atomic. + +Fedora Atomic takes the Fedora 25 base and functions a bit like Git -- you check out a particular point and that's your OS. Updates come every two weeks, which makes it sort of a rolling distro with snapshots (major releases come every six months). Fedora also notes that Atomic can be run as a desktop if you'd like something lightweight and highly reconfigurable, or presumably, if your love of containers runs that deep. + +To go along with Fedora Atomic's move into the limelight, the Fedora Project has been hard at work on the other end of the container equation with expanded Docker support and a very cool looking tool that simplifies the process of building out images from the base using RPM-like tools. So the workflow becomes Fedora Atomic for your base, checked out identically across all your machines and then the expanded docker support gets your containerized apps installed and running. + +The other major edition in the Fedora Next triumvirate, Fedora Server, does not have a ton of new stuff in this release -- for that you'll have to wait for Fedora 26, which will be an experimental release that ships with a lot more apps already in containers. + +There is one thing worth mentioning here though, namely the new SELinux management tool that's part of the updated Fedora Cockpit suite of server management tools. The SELinux Troubleshooter module is, frankly, the first thing I've ever used that didn't leaving me bashing my head into my keyboard after five minutes of working with SELinux. The standout feature is simple, when SELinux encounters a denial, Cockpit lets you know. + +The SELinux Troubleshooter does take a lot of sysadmin voodoo out of SELinux though, even I can sort of figure it out now. If your job depends on the befuddlement mere mortals get when trying to use SELinux, don't update Cockpit to Fedora 25. + +## Conclusion + +Fedora 24 was very close to my favorite distro of the year and with Fedora 25 I think it's safe to say that the Fedora Project has finally nailed it. I still run a very minimal Arch install (with Openbox) on my main machine, but everywhere else -- family and friends who want to upgrade, clients looking for a stable system and so on -- I've been recommending Fedora 25. + +That said, Wayland is new and there are bugs out there in addition to the less-than-complete application support mentioned here. Just because I haven't run into any show stopping bugs in my month or so of testing, doesn't mean they aren't there so do proceed with caution. I strongly recommend researching your specific hardware to see what other people have experienced. + +The only remaining problem I have with Fedora is the release cycle, however, with the upgrade situation much better than it used to be, hopefully upgrading won't be the pain it once was in Fedora land. + +In general though, I have no qualms recommending both Fedora and Wayland, provided you have the hardware that works with the latter. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/fedora25review.html b/ars-technica/published/fedora25review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c8926f4 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/fedora25review.html @@ -0,0 +1,67 @@ +

The Fedora project has released Fedora 25, a major update for the Linux distribution.

+

For the past several releases Fedora has been pursuing what it calls Fedora Next. Essentially Fedora Next took a step back and looked at how Fedora is used and came up with editions specifically tailored to those use cases. The most notable of these are Fedora WorkStation and Fedora Server, which are the desktop/laptop and server versions respectively.

+

Previous Fedora releases also had a "cloud" edition, but that's now been replaced by Fedora Atomic. Fedora Cloud, aside from having a meaningless name, didn't quite pan out. Since "cloud" is just a word for "someone else's server", it doesn't make much sense to release a "cloud" distro.

+

What does make sense is to package up a version of Fedora specifically tailored for running container-based systems that uses a stable base system and the latest and greatest package. Using it is a bit like checking Fedora out from a Git repo. More on that in a minute.

+

Interesting as Fedora Atomic is, much of the headlining news in Fedora 25 is in the WorkStation edition and can be summed up in a single word: Wayland.

+

Yes, after being pushed back from release after release, Fedora 25 defaults to using Wayland (assuming you have a supported graphics card). This is perhaps the biggest change to come in the Linux world since the move to systemd, but unlike systemd the switch to Wayland was so seamless I had to logout and double check that I was in fact using Wayland.

+

I called Fedora 24, released earlier this year, "the year’s best Linux distro" but one that I would have a hard time recommending thanks to some ugly kernel-related bugs. Well, Fedora 25 is here with an updated kernel, the bugs appear to be gone and I have no problem recommending it. Not only is Fedora 25 a great release, the updated GNOME 3.22 running on top of Wayland is slick and very stable in my testing.

+

Wayland, New Kernel, and Updates

+

The biggest change in this release is undoubtedly the move to Wayland as the default, erm, protocol, replacing the venerable X Server. Wayland's goal is to be easier to develop and maintain and, to a lesser degree, to get rid of the X's confusing clutter of accumulated bits that have been bolted on over the years.

+

Wayland is not, strictly speaking, a display server like X. Wayland is a protocol for a compositor to talk through. To make things more confusing the compositor can be a Wayland client itself. It could also be an X application, some input device or a standalone display server. Wayland doesn't actually do much and that's by design. As the Wayland FAQ puts it, "the compositor sends input events to the clients. The clients render locally and then communicate video memory buffers and information about updates to those buffers back to the compositor."

+ +[image"fedora25-desktop.jpg" caption"The stock Fedora 25 desktop with GNOME 3.22"] + +

What's perhaps most remarkable for a change that's so low-level, and in fact one that's taking a lot of X functionality and moving lower down into the stack, is how unlikely you are to notice it. In my experience so far -- about two weeks of use as I write this -- the transition to Wayland has been totally transparent. Even better, GNOME 3.22 feels considerably smoother with Wayland. It's difficult to describe without seeing it, but little moments of tearing that used to happen under X are gone and common tasks like dragging windows are much smoother.

+

To be clear there are still plenty of things that don't work with Wayland. In fact there likely will always be legacy system elements that don't know what to make of Wayland and will never be updated. For that situation there's XWayland, which is a plugin for Wayland compositors that runs a real X server inside Wayland. XWayland is a big part of why you're unlikely to notice the move to Wayland.

+

There are also some things to bear in mind about using Wayland with GNOME, more than a few GNOME hacks won't work anymore. For example desktop icons, which aren't really a GNOME 3.x thing, though you could use Gnome Tweak Tools if you can get them, are not supported in Wayland and never will be. I've also been unable to find a clipboard manager that works properly under Wayland.

+

The other problem I've run into is that neither of the tint-shifting applications I use work with Wayland. Neither f.lux nor redshift do anything when running under Wayland. Judging by posts from around the web, video playback is sometimes an issue too, though I have not actually experienced this problem. In terms of hardware support and Wayland, I would definitely suggest sticking with kernel 4.8.x or newer, which is exactly what Fedora 25 ships with.

+

The other major gripe I have with Wayland is that it doesn't appear to support fractional scaling for HiDPI screens. It works great at 2X, which covers most screens, but there are those where 1X is too small, but 2X is too much. If you have a screen that works best at 1.5X, you might want to stick with X for now.

+

Those are, however, relatively minor issues. The biggest caveat to all the good news in Wayland is that Nvidia's proprietary driver does not support Wayland. The open source Nouveau drivers do, but those drivers can be a noticeable step down depending on your system and what you're trying to do. In my experience the Nouveau drivers are also a little buggy, though to be clear I haven't tested them with Wayland.

+

Along with Wayland Fedora 25 brings Linux kernel 4.8.6, which means any lingering Skylake bugs should be fixed. I tested Fedora 25 on the Dell XPS 13 I reviewed earlier for Ars and found Fedora 25 worked flawlessly.

+

I should also note that for the first time I was able to update from Fedora 24 to 25 using the GNOME Software system upgrade tool without any issues at all. That's a first for me in over ten years of using Fedora (to be fair most of that time I didn't even try because it was flat out hopeless) and goes a long way to making Fedora a distro that's friendly to less sophisticated users.

+

In the past updating Fedora meant you'd need a few days to troubleshoot all the things that broke. It was a pain point that the project has been aware of and working on for some time. The nicely named FedUp tool arrived around Fedora 23, which helped some. Then the dnf upgrade tools came along in Fedora 24 and now there's a completely graphical upgrade path via GNOME software and perhaps most surprising, it just works.

+

The only caveat I would add is that, like I imagine many Linux users do, I maintain an install of Fedora primarily to get a rough idea of what's coming in future CentOS releases. Which is to say that while Fedora gets a partition on my drive, I have not heavily customized it and don't have a ton of RPM Fusion repos installed, which could make for more problematic updates. Still, judging by comments sections, forums and posts around the web, my experience is not uncommon for the move from Fedora 24 to Fedora 25. That's not to say you're guaranteed a smooth upgrade though. The real problem for most people seems to be with conflicting dependencies, often related to packages installed via RPM Fusion or other less-than-official repositories.

+

My long standing criticism of Fedora is that major updates come too frequently for how terrible the updating process has been historically. Now that that seems to be changing and updates are smooth (and even have a nice GUI via GNOME Software) Fedora could start to find a wider audience.

+

The Little Things

+

Fedora 25 has plenty of other little changes beyond the move to Wayland by default. For example, shocking as it sounds, Fedora 25 ships with MP3 support straight out of the box. Look for a lot of distros to start doing this since in the United States the patents covering the MP3 codecs expired earlier this year.There's no encoding support yet, which could be related to fact that two of the patents are still valid until April of next year, but it's a start.

+

In a bid to make Fedora a bit easier for newcomers to try out, Fedora 25 ships with a revamped Fedora Media Writer in the repos (curiously, it's not installed by default). Media Writer gives you a nice GUI to grab the latest Fedora release (or any of the official spins) and write it to a USB stick. It's a step up from the more simplistic tools in previous versions. I actually tried to use Media Writer back in Fedora 24 and it wrote to the wrong USB stick. Fortunately I didn't have anything of value on that stick and to this day I'm not 100% sure it was Media Writer's fault and not user error, but in either case I was leery of testing it again. This time, to be extra safe I made sure that my thumb drive was the only drive plugged in and it worked as advertised, grabbing the MATE spin and burning it to disk with a mere two clicks.

+ +[image"fedora25-live-writer.jpg" caption"Fedora's Media Writer is a very slick and easy way to get a bootable USB stick with Fedora (or any other distro) in couple of clicks."] + +

Fedora used to position itself as the distro for developers. This meant in part that Fedora was looking for users who would contribute back to the community, but it also meant that Fedora shipped the latest stable version of most programming languages and was quick to adopt new ones. This release follows in that tradition; developers can look forward to a version bump for PHP (to version 7.0), Node JS to 6.5, Ruby on Rails 5.0, and new support for the Rust language with a Rust Compiler (Cargo) installed by default.

+

GNOME 3.22

+

GNOME 3.22 arrived a bit ahead of Fedora 25, but Fedora remains the single best showcase for the GNOME desktop and, with Wayland under the hood, this is doubly true for Fedora 25. You'd be hard pressed to find a slicker, more polished looking desktop than GNOME 3.22 running on Wayland in Fedora 25.

+

GNOME 3.20 made Wayland perfectly usable, though the GNOME team reports that 3.22 is "even more polished", with support for display rotation and Wacom tablets, among other things.

+

Perhaps the best news for GNOME fans in this release is that GNOME 3.22 has reached a new development stability plateau. This means, for example, that GNOME shell's extension API is now considered stable, which in turn means that any shell extension you rely on will continue to work as-is when you update. Yes it's come to this: GNOME 3.22's headlining feature is that the tools you rely on to turn GNOME into a workable desktop no longer break with every new release.

+

It's not entirely fair to make fun of GNOME 3's previous ever-shifting updates, it has been a perfectly usable desktop for several year's worth of releases now. Perhaps not a good choice for those who like to configure and tweak every setting, but workable nonetheless.

+ +[image"fedora25-software.jpg" caption"GNOME's Software app has seen a slight redesign and now offers a little more info about Flatpak apps. Still odd that it wastes a featured app spotlight on a web browser that's installed by default anyway."] + +

This release also brings improved support for Flatpak apps in GNOME Software. Flatpak apps are designed to improve the software installation process in GNOME and Linux in general by making it easier for developers to package, and users to install, software across distributions. With Flatpaks you don't need to worry about dependency conflicts or even if your distro of choice has the app you want. Flatpaks also offer improved security and stability by sandboxing applications.

+

With GNOME 3.22 you can add Flatpak repos, and then browse and install apps from those repos without ever needing to drop into the command line. The Software app also now shows a bit more information about Flatpak apps -- like source information and the sandboxing status.

+

GNOME's Nautilus File Manager, nee Files, also gets some attention in this release, including a new tool for bulk renaming files. Just select the files you'd like to rename and then you can apply bulk renaming features, like adding a prefix, suffix or even using a completely custom template.

+ +[image"fedora25-files-rename.jpg" caption"The new file renaming dialog in GNOME 3.22 Files app (right click a selection or press F2)."] + +

There's also a new integrated file compression utility that means you can now double click a .zip file and it just extracts the contents to a folder without opening File Roller. That should make working with compressed files much more familiar for mac and windows users making the switch to GNOME.

+ +[image"fedora25-files-compress.jpg" caption"Creating archives via the new compress feature in Files. Just right-click your selected files and chose 'compress'."] + +

Also worth mentioning, GNOME Maps has been fixed and now uses Mapbox map tiles.

+

Fedora Spins

+

While GNOME has long been Fedora's flagship desktop (and Fedora serves as GNOME's showcase distro), it's far from the only option. The Fedora installer offers up all the usual suspects like KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, and more. There are also tailored spins for most of the major desktops.

+

The notable Spin for Fedora 25 is the MATE Compiz Spin, which bundles MATE Desktop with Compiz Fusion, and brings a lot more GTK+ 3 to MATE in this release. That makes for an overall more polished MATE and means that if you've ever had problems getting MATE to look good on HiDPI screens, you might want to try again because MATE 1.16 works quite well.

+

Other spins like KDE, XFCE and Cinnamon have significant upgrades with Fedora 25. The Fedora Spins site has full details and release notes for each.

+

Fedora Next Next

+

Not to be confused with Spins, Fedora Next, Fedora's reorganization that began several releases ago, consists of three "editions". As mentioned above, Fedora has rearranged the components of Fedora Next. Fedora Cloud has taken a backseat in the Fedora Next roster; Fedora Atomic edition is the replacement. The Cloud Base image continues to be available for those who'd like to build on a more traditional rpm-based foundation, but the future is looking like Atomic.

+

Unless you've been living under a rock you know the new hotness in Linux server deployment is containers, and containerization is the whole point of Atomic.

+

Fedora Atomic takes the Fedora 25 base and functions a bit like Git -- you check out a particular point and that's your OS. Updates come every two weeks, which makes it sort of a rolling distro with snapshots (major releases come every six months). Fedora also notes that Atomic can be run as a desktop if you'd like something lightweight and highly reconfigurable, or presumably, if your love of containers runs that deep.

+

To go along with Fedora Atomic's move into the limelight, the Fedora Project has been hard at work on the other end of the container equation with expanded Docker support and a very cool looking tool that simplifies the process of building out images from the base using RPM-like tools. So the workflow becomes Fedora Atomic for your base, checked out identically across all your machines and then the expanded docker support gets your containerized apps installed and running.

+

The other major edition in the Fedora Next triumvirate, Fedora Server, does not have a ton of new stuff in this release -- for that you'll have to wait for Fedora 26, which will be an experimental release that ships with a lot more apps already in containers.

+

There is one thing worth mentioning here though, namely the new SELinux management tool that's part of the updated Fedora Cockpit suite of server management tools. The SELinux Troubleshooter module is, frankly, the first thing I've ever used that didn't leaving me bashing my head into my keyboard after five minutes of working with SELinux. The standout feature is simple, when SELinux encounters a denial, Cockpit lets you know.

+

The SELinux Troubleshooter does take a lot of sysadmin voodoo out of SELinux though, even I can sort of figure it out now. If your job depends on the befuddlement mere mortals get when trying to use SELinux, don't update Cockpit to Fedora 25.

+

Conclusion

+

Fedora 24 was very close to my favorite distro of the year and with Fedora 25 I think it's safe to say that the Fedora Project has finally nailed it. I still run a very minimal Arch install (with Openbox) on my main machine, but everywhere else -- family and friends who want to upgrade, clients looking for a stable system and so on -- I've been recommending Fedora 25.

+

That said, Wayland is new and there are bugs out there in addition to the less-than-complete application support mentioned here. Just because I haven't run into any show stopping bugs in my month or so of testing, doesn't mean they aren't there so do proceed with caution. I strongly recommend researching your specific hardware to see what other people have experienced.

+

The only remaining problem I have with Fedora is the release cycle, however, with the upgrade situation much better than it used to be, hopefully upgrading won't be the pain it once was in Fedora land.

+

In general though, I have no qualms recommending both Fedora and Wayland, provided you have the hardware that works with the latter.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/free-software-notes.txt b/ars-technica/published/free-software-notes.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1f17928 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/free-software-notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1,255 @@ + + +Creative commons gets a lot of recognition, but when you say "creative commons" what do you mean? There's so many different licenses it's hard to know. Whereas with open source you know you have the right to copy, the right to etc + + + +I help VCs with open source, most companies have a mixed model. AMA recommendations system, for a time A was the only company that had that recommendation system and so they couldn't open source it, but no everyone has that so you might as well open source it, then you get community based improvements. + +The GPL if creating a hook, but there's no requirement to support open source. + +The GPL is there to protect that. There are economic reasons that choose the licesnce. BSD is a good licence for creating a standard, works with propreitary software, easy to compile. GPL +Busybox, embedded companies added it to their products, they added 100 commands. They were each other's biggest competitor, but they could work together on busybox. Users tend to become development partners. + +There was, before open source, a reasonably large history of educational use only software, distributed. + +The central myths of American business revolve around hard-nosed businessmen chasing better bottom lines and extolling the virtues of selfishness. Free software belies these myths, or at least operates outside them to a considerable degree. The largest single contributors to projects across GitHub are Perens' assessment of the economic paradigm of open source + +I couldn't help but be struck by the parallels to ecology. Open source as a whole has often been called an ecosystem, but it seems that, as with nature, there are ecosystems within ecosystems. Considering an open source project as an ecosystem means thinking in terms of generosity. + + +It may be that free software is more of an ecosystem. + + + + +A good example of exactly that is what might be the original open source success story -- the Apache web server. +Instead Beanbooks the software suffered a fate that may well await Redis and MondoDB -- neglect and obscurity. + + +## What does work + +The Apache web server grew out of the Apache Group, which later became the Apache Foundation we know today. The Group came before the software. At the time (1994-5) working on open source software was something of a novelty. The founders of the Apache Group knew that to wrangle code contributions from volunteers spread across the globe without an organizational ties would be difficult. This was the first problem they [set out to solve](http://mockus.us/papers/apache.pdf), and the solution at the time was the Apache Group. + +Only after the community structure had been established did the developers move on to writing code. + +As System76's experience with Beanbooks illustrates, this lesson -- that the community is more important than the code -- is one that open source software projects . + +Apache went on to become the poster child of successful open source software projects, eventually becoming the most widely used server on the web, displacing Microsoft's IIS to the point that today it's a mere footnote in the evolution of web servers. gg + + + + +These licenses are not open source at all. In fact, these licenses are the reason open source software licenses exist. + +The first attempts to define free software, and give it a coherent legal structure, came about because companies were taking software, using it and not giving anything back to the creators. Yes, the reasons MongoDB, Redis and others give for not sticking with open source, are the same reasons that drove Richard Stallman to create copyleft licensing in the first place. + + + +edis has recently created something called the “Commons Clause”, which takes the Apache license and makes it a non-Open-Source license. And they still call it the Apache license. This is a problem. Someone creating yet another non-Open-Source paradigm is not a problem, if they do it correctly. + +Redis doesn’t deny that it’s not an Open Source license any longer once their clause is added. + +It’s a bad idea to add a any text whatsoever to an Open Source license, and still call that license by it’s old name. Once the Commons Clause is added, it’s no longer the Apache license, and calling it so confuses people about what is Open Source and what isn’t. Hopefully that’s not meant deliberately. Now stop it. Take the license and the clause together, and title it the Redis license or another name of your choice that doesn’t confuse people that it’s an Open Source license. “Commons” is the name of an Apache project, so that is probably a bad choice for the name of the overall license. + +You’ll note that I worked on the Business Source License with MariaDB. They paid a day’s consulting fee. I made it very clear that they were not to tell people it was Open Source, and I made changes that made the license less ambiguous and confusing than their previous version. Please follow that example. + + + + + + + + + + + +It's worth asking, given it's success as a company thus far, what is Redis worried about? What is MongoDB worried about? + +There is an elephant in the cloud. The elephant's name is Amazon AWS. + +You might be wondering, how is this different than say the license that governs Microsoft Windows? Well, you can look at the code. You can even modify it. It seems to fit the letter of the law, but it only seems that way. If there are restrictions on what you can build, then what you have is not open source software. the Redis tk license is the definition of a proprietary license -- it restricts what you can do with the code. + + + + +It's hard for MongoDB to compete with a service that offers MongoDB and every other infrastructure tool on the internet. License of the sort that MongoDB is suggesting would allow their software to be called open source, but limit how that software could be sold. + + + + + +For MongoDB this isn't a rhetorical question. + +Redis, MongoDB, Confluent and others have changed from open source licenses to proprietary licenses in recent months. The new licenses limit what you can do with the software, making it no longer open source software. + +Every good story starts with conflict. + + +Redis and MongoDB claim that open source licenses, specifically the GPL, are making it possible for other companies to take their ideas, wrap them in a cloud service and sell them without contributing anything back to the source project. + + + + + + + +The differences in the license: "My sense is that it's not philosophical... we're going to iterate until we get it right." + +There has been only one official release of the license, "We've been continually evolving the license, updating the language" + +Monitizing open source with support contracts has never been a great business model". Critics of this statement might point to Red Hat, but then for every Red Hat there are countless examples of those for whom this model did not work out. Ever heard of Yellow Dog linux? + +On why the SSPL: "I think we can do better... I want to see more investment in open source products. VC's intesting in open source products. + +On other's with MongoDB's model: "MongoDB is unique. I would like us to not be unique." + +Legally the AGPL covers us, but the SSPL clarifies that in language that will hopefully discourage the bad actors. + +Did you know about AWS DocumentDB before the license change. At first he said no comment, then he said no we did not. But if it wasn't Amazon, it would be someone. + + + +""" + + +""" + +Database guru Mark Callaghan put it this way: "I can speak from experience that 'new license' == 'must speak to lawyers'. They tend to be busy and figuring out a new license takes a long time." In other words, you've just created a legal problem, when before all you were trying to solve was a technical one. It's simply not worth the bother. + +Redis Labs modules making them no longer free and open source, GNU/Linux distributions such as Debian and Fedora are no longer able to ship Redis Labs' versions of the affected modules to their users. + +As a result, we have begun working together to create a set of module repositories forked from prior to the license change. We will maintain changes to these modules under their original open-source licenses, applying only free and open fixes and updates." + +They're looking for help with this project. + +The Common Clause sub-license forbids you from selling software it covers. It also states you may not host or offer consulting or support services as "a product or service whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the software." This is expressly designed to prevent cloud companies from profiting by using the licensed programs. + +As Redis Labs' co-founder and CTO Yiftach Shoolman said in an email, the company did this "for two reasons -- to limit the monetization of these advanced capabilities by cloud service providers like AWS and to help enterprise developers whose companies do not work with AGPL licenses." + +Be that as it + +Recently several open source projects have run into what they see as a serious problem. Free software + + +MongoDB is building a “better database for the next generation of applications,” co-founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz told TechCrunch. We aimed to “build something that makes developers way more productive.” + + + + +Still, there is something to bear in mind + +one that perhaps even the givers did not understand the significance of, but it was a gift nonetheless. + +There is almost nothing in our daily lives that Free Software has not made possible and which would not disappear if that gift had never been given. + + +That might seem like overstating the case somewhat, but consider for a moment what is built on free software and what would disappear without it. Ninety-eight percent of servers of the internet run Linux, an OS kernel, a piece of Free Software which is built on hundreds, possibly thousands of other bits of code, all free software. + + + +Agree. Private enterprise has been profiting on open-source, mostly without giving back, for as long as we’ve had open source. That’s not new. It’s literally how the GPL came about. + +data portability will be the next big issue with users of cloud computing. Use MongoDB and you can move your data to any cloud provider that offers MongoDB. Use Amazon DocumentDB and you are now married to Amazon in the most Catholic of ways. There is a MongoDB API, but because of the license changes that API is pinned to a specific version of MongoDB. In other words you can get your data out, but it might not be a form that's easy to get into MongoDB running on say, Digitalocean or Azure or Google. + +The way to avoid this provider lockin is the make sure you chose cloud provider services that stick with mainstream open source projects as a base, perhaps adding whatever user-friendly management on top of that, but under the hood your data is stored in an open source software package. Postgresql make a good example here. Half a dozen cloud providers offer managed Postgresql in some form. If I spin up an AWS tk DB instance of postgres and two years from now decide that's no longer the best option for my company, I can dump that data out, move it to any cloud provider -- or my own bare metal server -- and import it back into a postgres database without a hitch. + +Cloud providers vary in how much they seem okay with this data portability from AWS's more or less pure disdain to Azoure and Google which have turned not competeing with their customers and supporting open standards into something of an pitch. + +--- + +Carl at system76 + +The usefulness of open source is that you can connect it anything. + +beanbooks, + +I'm epathetic to their cause, but there should a way to do that without wrecking OSD. + +Our concern was that someone would wrap up the software and we would lose all that investment. We wanted patent protection for a few years. It ended up hurting us, hurting the platform and we shouldn't have had those concerns, we should have AGPLed from the beinnning. If it was good enught hat godaddy wanted it, + +You have to be good enough and stay ahead without needing a licence to protect you. If you can't stay ahead, the license won't help. + +Licenses that are more restrictive. You have to move fast and compete. + +If generosity isn't built into open source it isn't going to work. + +MS has the same problem with piracy, solutions to that led to open source. you don't have to use unlicensed ms software. + +If you come up with a solution for one thing, you try to protect the brand, OSI doesn't like that, but it's easier than touching the software. Mongo always comes with the Mongo trademark. o + +The best conversation is an open minded conversation between OSI and mongo. + +Open hardware is quiet a bit different, there's less copying of specific designs. It's less of an issue than backend code which has no face at all. + +There is always a risk of being commodity. It depends on the bottom line, who can more efficiently deliver that infrastructure. + +Differentiation is not what you've done today, but how rapidly you can advance. -- not quote: You have a head start, but where are you going. -- the only way to be successful is to stay ahead, I don't think the license has anything to do with it. + +--- + +Bruce Perens: + +In The Cathedral and the Bazaar [16], Eric Raymond attempted to explain Open Source as a gift economy, a phenomenon of computer programmers having the leisure to do creative work not connected to their employment, and an artistic motivation to have their work appreciated. Raymond explains excellently how programmers behave within their own private subculture. The motivations he explored dominated during the genesis of Open Source and continue to be effective within a critically important group of Open Source contributors today. + +Raymond edited The Cathedral and the Bazaar, then a year old, to replace the words Free Software with Open Source. + +Neither Microsoft software nor Linux and Open Source can help you differentiate your business for long, because they are available to everyone. They differentiate against each other, they just don't differentiate your business. One or the other can save you money or make you more efficient, but in general they don't make your business more attractive to your customer. + +The companies that join Open Source collaborations are seeking to use the software in a non-differentiating, cost-center role. It's not important to these companies that Open Source does not in itself produce a profit. Their profit-centers are things other than software, and software is for them an enabling technology. In order to continue to operate their profit-centers, they must make some investment in their cost centers. In the case of differentiating software, they have little choice but to make use of the in-house or contract development paradigm, because they need to prevent their differentiators from falling into the hands of their competitors. For their non-differentiators, they have the choice of the retail or Open Source paradigms. But which is more efficient? + + +Eric Raymond proposed that the volunteer's motivation is mainly intangible, and that a particularly important motivator is participation in a community of respect in which developers are recognized by their peers for the quality and innovation in their work. The FLOSS study surveyed Open Source developers regarding their motivation, found that many of them are motivated by technical curiosity and the desire to learn. I feel that their motivation is similar to that of an artist: just as a painter wants people to appreciate his paintings, a programmer wants to have users who appreciate his software. + + +--- + +Free software was the gift that made the world as we know it possible. It was an astounding gift to give, one that perhaps even the givers did not understand the significance of, but it was a gift nonetheless. + +There is almost nothing in our daily lives that Free Software has not made possible and which would not disappear if that gift had never been given. + +Free Software did not have to happen, arguably it should not have happened. The historical forces aligned against it were significant. And it did not happen randomly, it grew out of particular people, with particular beliefs, and today, in this world built on free software, we have lost sight of those beliefs, and if we do not regain our vision of them, our understanding of where Free Software came from, where it is leading us, and how we can keep it going, we risk losing all that we have built. + +That might seem like overstating the case somewhat, but consider for a moment what is built on free software and what would disappear without it. Ninety-eight percent of servers of the internet run Linux, an OS kernel, a piece of Free Software which is built on hundreds, possibly thousands of other bits of code, all free software. + + + +This notion of free software as a commons though requires some clarification lest someone trot out the tired old "tragedy of the commons" analysis, which has, in most fields of analysis, been long since abandoned. + +The notion that free softwareo + +The “Commons Clause” is a nonfree license because it forbids selling copies of the program, and even running the program as part of implementing any commercial service. Adding insult to injury, it also twists the words “commons” and “sell.” + +We urge people to reject programs under this license and to develop free replacements. Where a previous version was available as free software, continuing development of that version is an option. + + + + +“The Lord God in a particular way desired that the earth be common possession of all, and produce fruit for all; but greed produced property rights” + +In fact this hostility of the church to the private property, sustained by the franciscans (led for example by Duns Scoto and William of Occam) , was oposed by the scholastics, with Thomas Aquinas using the argument using by Aristotle in the “Politics”: +“What is common to a very large number of people gets minimal care. For all are especially concerned with their own things, and less with the common ones, or only to the extent that they concern one” + +It seems to me that Mr. Garrett Hardin attributed to himself the “Tragedy of the Commons” but this is a very old argument in societies where the market forces has detroyed the real communities, and the view of the world is that of individual people grabbing as much as possible of the common pie, as was the case in the ancient Greece + + +There are thousands of text and quotes around the injustice of private property (or property rights), for example San Ambrosius in the IV century said: +“The Lord God in a particular way desired that the earth be common possession of all, and produce fruit for all; but greed produced property rights” + +In fact this hostility of the church to the private property, sustained by the franciscans (led for example by Duns Scoto and William of Occam) , was oposed by the scholastics, with Thomas Aquinas using the argument using by Aristotle in the “Politics”: +“What is common to a very large number of people gets minimal care. For all are especially concerned with their own things, and less with the common ones, or only to the extent that they concern one” + +It seems to me that Mr. Garrett Hardin attributed to himself the “Tragedy of the Commons” but this is a very old argument in societies where the market forces has detroyed the real communities, and the view of the world is that of individual people grabbing as much as possible of the common pie, as was the case in the ancient Greece + + +In this layer, however, both community and resource boundaries are multiplied. Every single community that forms around specific instances or projects +of free software counts as a different commons, with its particular (even though +in some cases similar) rules, boundaries and systems of governance. In other +words, each group of people who not only use a certain free software, but also +help to support or develop it (in the expanded sense outlined previously), can be +seen as a commons in itself. + +Also bear in mind that there is no reason for free software occupies the position it does. + +The historical forces aligned against it were significant. And it did not happen randomly, it grew out of particular people, with particular beliefs, and today, in this world built on free software, we have lost sight of those beliefs, and if we do not regain our vision of them, our understanding of where Free Software came from, where it is leading us, and how we can keep it going, we risk losing all that we have built. + diff --git a/ars-technica/published/free-software.txt b/ars-technica/published/free-software.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8c11bb5 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/free-software.txt @@ -0,0 +1,125 @@ +Free and open source software enables the world as we know it. From web servers to kiosks to the big data algorithms mining your Facebook feed, nearly every computer system you interact with runs, at least in part, on free software. Free software has given rise to a galaxy of startups and enabled the [largest software acquisition](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/10/ibm-buys-red-hat-with-eye-on-cloud-dominance/) in the history of the world. + +Free software is a gift. It's the gift that made the world as we know it possible. It's an astounding gift to give. So astounding in fact that it made businesses unaccustomed to this kind of generosity uncomfortable. They weren't unwilling to use free software, it was too radical and by extension, too political. It had to be renamed "open source." + +Once that happened open source software took over the world. + +Recently though there's been a disturbance in the open source force. + +Redis Labs, MongoDB, and Confluent all changed their software licenses in recent months, moving away from open source licenses to more restrictive terms that limit what can be done with the software, making it no longer open source software. + +The problem, argue Redis Labs, MongoDB and others, is hosted software services. Also known as, "the cloud." Also known as Amazon AWS. + +## Cloud Burst + +MongoDB the company is built around the open source "NoSQL" database of the same name. MongoDB's database is useful for storing unstructured data, for example images, which it can handle just as well as it handles more traditional data types. Data is stored in JSON-like documents rather than the columns and rows of a relational database. Since there's no structured tables there's no "structured query language" for working with the data, hence the term "NoSQL." + +MongoDB is not the only NoSQL database out there, but it's one of the most widely used. According to industry aggregator, DB Engines, MongoDB is the [fifth most popular database](https://db-engines.com/en/ranking), with everyone from Google to Code Academy to Foursquare using MongoDB. + +MongoDB is also leading the charge to create a new kind of open source license, which CTO Eliot Horowitz believes is necessary to protect open source software businesses as computing moves into the new world of the cloud. + +The cloud, argue Horowitz and others, requires the open source community to re-think and possibly update open source licenses to "deal with new challenges in a new environment." The challenges are, essentially, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, which are all capable of taking open source software, wrapping it up as a service and reselling it. The problem with AWS or Azure wrapping up MongoDB and offering it as part of a software as a service (SaaS), is that it then competes with MongoDB's own cloud-based SaaS -- MongoDB Atlas. What's threatened then is not MongoDB's source code, but MongoDB's own SaaS derived from that source code, and which is the company's chief source of revenue. + +To combat the potential threat to its bottom line, MongoDB has moved from the Gnu Public License (GPL) to what it calls the Server Side Public License, or SSPL. The SSPL says, in essence, you can do anything you want with this software, except use it to build something that competes with MongoDB Atlas. + +MongoDB has submitted the SSPL to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the organization that oversees and approves new open source licenses, but the approval process is still in the early review stages. That said, judging by discussion on the mailing lists, and the wording of the license, the SSPL is unlikely to ever be approved by the OSI, at least as it's currently written. + +Part of MongoDB's problem is that it's not the first open source business to run into this situation. In fact, part of this problem -- companies taking software, using it as they please and contributing nothing back -- is the reason open source software exists at all. + +Open source licenses vary, but the gist is generally, you can take this code and do what you want with it, but you can’t make the code proprietary, and if you use it in another project, then that project can’t be proprietary either. These licenses were written this way to prevent companies from taking open source code, using it in their own code and not sharing any of it back to the original project. + +Horowitz argues that wrapping a piece of code in a SaaS offering is the modern equivalent of using it in an application. + +It is a novel argument, but it's in defense of a very old problem that goes well beyond licensing. It's a problem that goes all the back to the beginning of free software -- how do you make money off software if you give it away for free? + +One traditional answer has been that you sell services around your open source software. But for Horowitz that's not good enough. "Monetizing open source with support contracts has never been a great business model," he tells Ars. Red Hat would likely disagree, but Horowitz believes that more protective licenses would bring more venture capital investment and spawn more software businesses based on the open model MongoDB has used. "We're unique," he says, "I want us to be less unique." + +He may be correct. A more protective license could induce more venture capital investment because there's (arguably) a greater likelihood of return on their investment. But if that capital did come, it wouldn't be investing in open source because that kind of restriction on the software means it no longer fits the definition of open source. + +Quite a few open source advocates have already made the counter argument that the current set of licenses are fine, it's the business models that need work. + +Bruce Perens, co-author of the original [open source definition](https://opensource.org/docs/osd), says the SSPL is incompatible with the OSI's open source definition number nine, which says that the "license must not restrict other software." Since the SSPL forces any SaaS software that is aggregated with the covered software, but not a derivative of it, to nevertheless be open source, it fails this test. "I wrote number nine into the OSD to prohibit exactly this sort of conduct," says Perens, "the text is really clear." + +MongoDB is not the only one complaining that the cloud is raining on its profits. + +Redis Labs, another data storage company, was the first to sound the alarm about cloud providers threatening its business and may have the better solution. Redis Labs initially changed its license to include something called the Common Clause sub-license, which forbids anyone from selling any software it covers. Software licensed with the Common Clause is not, by anyone's definition, open source, which the company Labs acknowledged. It has never described those portions of its software as open source. + +As this article was wrapping up Redis Labs made yet another licensing change, in essence dropping all pretense of being open source software and adopting a homegrown proprietary license for some of its modules. To be clear, most of Redis is governed by the Apache 2.0 License, but some modules are not, namely RedisJSON, RedisSearch, RedisGraph, RedisML and RedisBloom. + +The license that applies to these modules says that while users can view and modify the code, use it in their applications, it restricts which types of applications they can build. With this new license you are not free to build anything you want. You cannot build database products, a caching engine, a processing engine, a search engine, an indexing engine or any kinds of ML or AI derived serving engine. You cannot in other words use Redis Labs' code to compete with Redis Labs. This violates one of the core tenants of open source licensing -- that there be no restrictions on derivative software. + +This is the same sort of protection MongoDB also wants, but MongoDB wants to retain the open source label. + +Unfortunately for MongoDB it doesn't make sense to simultaneously say that you are open source, and that only you should profit from your open source software. There *is* a business model where than does make sense: proprietary software. + +## Lessons from history + +Why does MongoDB want to be open source at all? After all there is no shortage of very successful proprietary software, so why not embrace that path and move on? + +Horowitz tells me he believes "that open source results in better systems software, especially databases," going on to cite security and community as advantages of remaining open source. While he's right about both of those things, those are often cited as reasons to use open source software, more eyes on the software means fewer bugs, in theory anyway. + +But looking at the working of the OSD, it's clear that Horowitz is missing one key component that's built into to every open source license -- generosity. Open source does not limit what you can do with the software, ever. And that may well be the reason for its success. Generosity of this kind is how you get community, the cornerstone on which any successful open source project is built. By allowing the widest possible range of users to use your software you get the biggest possible community. More eyes on bugs, more people fixing them. That community is what turns into momentum. That momentum becomes market share. Market share sometimes becomes profit, but that's not a promise of open source. + +As Bruce Perens puts it, "we have to draw a line between open source... and the right to make money with open source. The open source definition allows, but does not support your right to make money. We're not going to change the rules because you can make money better that way." + +Just because you build it and they come, does not mean massive profit. + +In fact, if you build it and they come and then you take it away, it might be worse than if you'd never built it. + +Redis Labs' move away from open source comes after it reaped all the benefits of open source -- community support, wide adoption and code contributions from a widespread sources. To put it bluntly, Redis Labs angered the community. + +When free software developers get mad, they get forking, and there is indeed a fork of Redis, [GoodFORM](https://goodformcode.com/). GoodFORM takes the re-licensed Redis modules as they were prior to the license change, and will maintain them for Debian, Fedora and other Linux distros that cannot ship proprietary software. + +The unintended consequence of Redis Labs' new license is that anyone wanting to use a full and open source version of Redis will have to use GoodFORM, not Redis. + +Individual developers might not much care, but large companies looking to use open source software aren't so cavalier. For them it usually comes down to a choice, either use clearly open source software with an OSI approved license, or call the lawyers. And no one ever wants to call the lawyers just to install a piece of software. + +Perens tells Ars that this was one of the key motivations behind the intimal open source definition (originally written for the Debian project). "The open source definition means that you shouldn't need a lawyer just to be a user," says Perns. "And one of the ways we do that is minimizing the legal load." + +Redis Labs' new license puts companies in the position of needing a lawyer, and GoodFORM becomes the more logical choice. This also may hint at why MongoDB wants to remain open source. + +Other open source projects which have changed to closed source licenses have not fared well. The Xfree86 project was the defacto standard for running X Windows for most of the 1990s, up through the early 2000s. In 2004 Xfree86 began shipping code that the Free Software Foundation felt was counter to the GPL. The downstream operating systems using Xfree86 decided that was unacceptable and a fork, X.org, was born. Today X.org occupies the place Xfree86 once did and Xfree86 is abandoned. + +Other examples are easy to find, LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice, MariaDB came out of license changes in MySQL, Wireshark came out of Ethereal, the list goes on, but the key thing to note is not just that the forks happened, but that they took with them the developers, the community, the momentum that sustains open source software over the long haul. Lose the goodwill of the open source community and it can be vicious in exacting its revenge. It's also efficient in doing so, Xfree86 was effectively dead six months after X.org began, OpenOffice disappeared into irrelevancy similarly quickly. + +The overwhelming lesson of open source history is that once you are open source, it's very unlikely you will change that and survive. + +## What makes open source work: generosity + +If open source history teaches that there is no going back, it's worth considering why. + +After years of using Quickbooks to appease accountants, I got fed up with it. I looked around for some open source accounting software and stumbled across something that fit my needs, [Beanbooks](https://beansbooks.com/opencode), a little project spun out of Linux computer manufacturer System76. + +System76's Beanbooks is a perfect example of what Perens sees as an ideal open source software scenario. In The emerging economic paradigm of Open Source Perens argues that a company's non-differentiating software is its best scenario for open source software. That is, open source the infrastructure of the business, not the core. + +To put it another way, Beanbooks was not System76's profit center, but it is an enabling technology for System76's profit center -- building Linux-based computers. + +However, despite being a perfect candidate for an open source license, Beanbooks is not open source. Why? + +System76 sells a hosted version of [Beanbooks](https://beansbooks.com/opencode), a SaaS, and at the time the company was worried that a larger company would come along, take the GPL code, essentially clone Beanbooks and get all the profit from System76's investment. + +System76 founder Carl Richell says he can empathize with MongoDB and Redis Labs, but he has already been down the worry-about-someone-stealing-your-code-for-competing-SaaS road and regrets it. "Our concern was that someone would wrap up the software and we would lose all our investment." He says System76 wanted something like patent protection for a few years, but that "ended up hurting us, hurting the platform, and we shouldn't have had those concerns." + +While the SaaS version of Beanbooks looks to be fine, the available code does not get updates and is, from a free software perspective, fairly useless. The Github page is a ghost town. There's no development, no community. + +Beanbooks the service carries on, but it does so without a community contributing ideas, code and everything else vibrant open source projects have. Richell thinks Beanbooks might have avoided its fate if it had a GPL or similar license from the beginning. + +"If it was good enough that someone wanted it that's great," says Richell. The key to success for Ritchell isn't the open source software, it's the innovation. "Differentiation is not what you've done today, but how rapidly you can advance," he says. As the software developer you have a head start, and, hopefully, a vision of where you are going, those are your differentiators, to use Perens' terms. + +"The only way to be successful is to stay ahead," says Richell, "I don't think the license has anything to do with it." + +## What the future looks like + +Everyone loves an underdog, and Redis Labs and MongoDB want to portray themselves as the open source underdogs waging a heroic battle against the forces of evil in the form of AWS. But are they? + +Redis Labs and MongoDB both look like very healthy companies. Redis Labs just raised $60 million dollars in funding and, based on the companies doing the funding, looks poised for a successful IPO. MongoDB's IPO last year was, by all accounts, a huge success. It's stock IPOed at $24 and has steadily climbed ever since then. Today it trades at at around $100 a share. Just before this article went to press one of MongoDB's biggest users, Lyft, did defect to Amazon, but after a slight stock drop, MongoDB's stock was right back up where it was before Lyft defected. + +Neither company is hurting. At least not yet. The fallout from their license changes remains to be seen, but given that much of the development of MongoDB comes from employees, it will likely be fine regardless of whether it's open source or not. The fate of either is unimportant to the fate of the larger open source paradigm. + +The open source paradigm doesn't work for everyone. As Perens put it in a conversation we had as I was wrapping this up, "you can use any license you want as long as you don't call it open source, that's your freedom. But we have certain rights that come with open source it doesn't make sense to give these up to protect a business model." + +Through all the conversations I had with developers and founders, one line kept coming back to me. System76 founder Carl Richell told me: "if generosity isn't built into open source, it isn't going to work." + +Generosity in this case is the right to use the software for any purpose. + +This has always been the basic litmus test for new open licenses -- is the license limiting the generosity of the software? What got open source where it is today is that it could be used anywhere, with anything. Need to combine open source and proprietary software? No problem. Need to re-write that open source library so it can interface with your proprietary code? No problem. Want to take that open source library, wrap it up as a service and sell it? No problem. Because in the end, that's what open source is: freedom through generosity. And as Perens points out, that's what it is even when that model doesn't work for a particular business. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/galago-pro-review.html b/ars-technica/published/galago-pro-review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..224194f --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/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/ars-technica/published/galago-pro-review.txt b/ars-technica/published/galago-pro-review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0d8bc6f --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/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/ars-technica/published/google-responsive.html b/ars-technica/published/google-responsive.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a6172df --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/google-responsive.html @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +

Google has deprecated the desktop web. It's still here, but for Google it just got less important.

+

At least that's the implicit message in Google's recent mobile search update. The company is now judging how "mobile-friendly" a site is and using that to weight search results served to mobile devices.

+

This is the third update in Google's slow push for web developers to start building mobile-friendly sites. First Google announced that it would start calling out sites that used Flash and at the same time rewarding mobile-friendly sites. At first that was just a little label next to search results on mobile devices that told viewers the site was "Mobile-friendly".

+

Now mobile-friendliness has moved from visual alerts and promos to affecting actual page rankings.

+

Web developers were apparently confused enough by the change that Google posted a lengthy FAQ along with its announcement last week.

+

Here's what the company says: "the mobile-friendly update will boost the rankings of mobile-friendly pages... in mobile search results worldwide. (Conversely, pages designed for only large screens may see a significant decrease in rankings in mobile search results.)" In other words, sites that work on mobile will outrank sites that don't when all other things are equal.

+

So what does a site need to do in order for Google to consider it "mobile-friendly"?

+

The company's guidelines suggest that the site start by avoiding any content that requires Adobe's Flash Player. That will probably sound obvious to most developers at this point, but don't forget that old YouTube and other video embeds were probably done with <object> tags, which means Flash Player. Google suggests updating to the more modern iframe embed method that's the default on most video hosting sites today.

+

The other three main criteria in Google's definition of mobile-friendly are making the site readable without zooming and ensuring that content doesn't need to be scrolled horizontally (in other words the site scales to fit on mobile screens). The last one is something that will make anyone with man hands happy: sites need to place links far enough apart so that the desired link can be easily tapped. Fat fingers love white space.

+

There's been a trend sweeping the web design world by storm of several years now that does all these things a more. In fact if you follow web design at all you know that Google more or less just outlined the central principles of what's known as responsive web design. Responsive web design means building websites that function well across devices, even if they look a bit different on each device.

+

Technically responsive websites use CSS @media queries and some other techniques based on web standards behind the scenes, but Google doesn't really care how sites do it, just that they do it. A site could build out a separate mobile site, use responsive design, or some hybrid form of server side adaptive design -- all of those are considered mobile-friendly, but the guidelines themselves could have been lifted from the classic article that started it all, Responsive Web Design.

+ +[image="ars-mobile-friendly.png" caption="ArsTechnica gets Google's mobile-friendly seal of approval."] + +

Google has a mobile-friendly test page where you can see how your favorite sites do. Ars gets the mobile-friendly label, but's worth noting that the mobile-friendliness of a page is just that -- the page. While the Ars homepage comes through with flying colors, if I drop a Rick Astley video in this article using an object tag to embed it this page will not be considered mobile-friendly and might drop in search results. That means a lot of rick roll videos that were embedded back when the object tag was the main method could be dropping out of the rankings.

+

It's also worth asking, what if a page isn't mobile-friendly, but it's still useful? What if I the user am willing to suffer through the horror of scrolling and pinching my fingers to read tiny text in search of some obscure new information on the Voynich manuscript posted on forum pages that are not, alas, mobile-friendly?

+

Fear not my crypto-curious friend, according to Google mobile-friendliness is only one ranking signal among many. As Google puts it, "if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank high if it has great content for the query."

+

Still, if there's a page with great content that's desktop only and a page with great content that uses responsive design, the second page will presumably outrank the first.

+

The only real ray of hope in there for developers who still haven't embraced some form of responsive design is that this change only affects mobile search results. Desktop searches and rankings are unaffected. So if your site doesn't work on mobile you'll only lose, roughly speaking, 35 percent of your traffic.

+

Now if only Google would start warning me about sites that are just going to hide their content with a "download our app" ad banner that's so big I can't even close it on a mobile device. Surely that's not mobile-friendly?

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/google-responsive.txt b/ars-technica/published/google-responsive.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..eee9c5c --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/google-responsive.txt @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +Google has deprecated the desktop web. It's still here, but for Google it just got less important. + +At least that's the implicit message in Google's recent [mobile search update](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/04/faqs-april-21st-mobile-friendly.html). The company is now judging how "mobile-friendly" a site is and using that to weight search results served to mobile devices. + +This is the third update in Google's slow push for web developers to start building mobile-friendly sites. First Google announced that it would start calling out sites that used Flash and at the same time rewarding mobile-friendly sites. At first that was just a little label next to search results on mobile devices that told viewers the site was "Mobile-friendly". + +Now mobile-friendliness has moved from visual alerts and promos to affecting actual page rankings. + +Web developers were apparently confused enough by the change that Google posted a [lengthy FAQ](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/04/faqs-april-21st-mobile-friendly.html) along with its announcement last week. + +Here's what the company says: "the mobile-friendly update will boost the rankings of mobile-friendly pages... in mobile search results worldwide. (Conversely, pages designed for only large screens may see a significant decrease in rankings in mobile search results.)" In other words, sites that work on mobile will outrank sites that don't when all other things are equal. + +So what does a site need to do in order for Google to consider it "mobile-friendly"? + +The company's guidelines suggest that the site start by avoiding any content that requires Adobe's Flash Player. That will probably sound obvious to most developers at this point, but don't forget that old YouTube and other video embeds were probably done with `` tags, which means Flash Player. Google suggests updating to the more modern iframe embed method that's the default on most video hosting sites today. + +The other three main criteria in Google's definition of mobile-friendly are making the site readable without zooming and ensuring that content doesn't need to be scrolled horizontally (in other words the site scales to fit on mobile screens). The last one is something that will make anyone with man hands happy: sites need to place links far enough apart so that the desired link can be easily tapped. Fat fingers love white space. + +There's been a trend sweeping the web design world by storm of several years now that does all these things a more. In fact if you follow web design at all you know that Google more or less just outlined the central principles of what's known as responsive web design. Responsive web design means building websites that function well across devices, even if they look a bit different on each device. + +Technically responsive websites use CSS @media queries and some other techniques based on web standards behind the scenes, but Google doesn't really care how sites do it, just that they do it. A site could build out a separate mobile site, use responsive design, or some hybrid form of server side adaptive design -- all of those are considered mobile-friendly, but the guidelines themselves could have been lifted from the classic article that started it all, [Responsive Web Design](http://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design). + +Google has a mobile-friendly [test page](https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/) where you can see how your favorite sites do. Ars gets the mobile-friendly label, but's worth noting that the mobile-friendliness of a page is just that -- the page. While the Ars homepage comes through with flying colors, if I drop a Rick Astley video in this article using an object tag to embed it this page will not be considered mobile-friendly and might drop in search results. That means a lot of rick roll videos that were embedded back when the object tag was the main method could be dropping out of the rankings. + +It's also worth asking, what if a page isn't mobile-friendly, but it's still useful? What if I the user am willing to suffer through the horror of scrolling and pinching my fingers to read tiny text in search of some obscure new information on the [Voynich manuscript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript) posted on forum pages that are not, alas, mobile-friendly? + +Fear not my crypto-curious friend, according to Google mobile-friendliness is only one ranking signal among many. As Google puts it, "if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank high if it has great content for the query." + +Still, if there's a page with great content that's desktop only and a page with great content that uses responsive design, the second page will presumably outrank the first. + +The only real ray of hope in there for developers who still haven't embraced some form of responsive design is that this change only affects mobile search results. Desktop searches and rankings are unaffected. So if your site doesn't work on mobile you'll only lose, roughly speaking, [35 percent of your traffic](http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop+mobile+tablet-comparison-ww-monthly-201403-201503-bar). + +Now if only Google would start warning me about sites that are just going to hide their content with a "download our app" ad banner that's so big I can't even close it on a mobile device. Surely that's not mobile-friendly? diff --git a/ars-technica/published/https-cuts.txt b/ars-technica/published/https-cuts.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5b2f3a5 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/https-cuts.txt @@ -0,0 +1,297 @@ + + + + + + +So long as browsers stop there the current plan seems well-suited to bringing more security to the web. + + + + + +This might + +Both also plan to limit many HTML APIs to HTTPS only, starting with the geo-location APIs, hardware access APIs and anything else that would be a security risk over unsecured connections. + + +It's not difficult to imagine a day and age when browsers treat HTTP sites they way the treat suspected malware sites now and simply not load them. To be clear, that's not happening right now. But it would be foolish to assume that it never will. + + + +My personal website does not ask you to log in, it loads no third-party scripts, ad networks or any other code. Yet without encryption I have no way to ensure that some other party isn't inserting code of their own. As Hoffman-Andrews says, anyone could "insert their own ads, their own tracking cookies, they can insert malware and do their own tracking". In other words, I would like to make sure no one is tracking you when you visit my site, and that you see no ads, but I can't. Unless I use HTTPS. + +Think no one is doing that to your site? Think again. ISPs are and will likely be doing more of this in the future, particularly mobile service providers. Their primary responsibility is to their shareholders and it would negligent of them to not increase profits by increasing tracking. + +It's worth noting here that this kind of manipulation is very likely at the heart of Google's love of HTTPS. Google did not respond to my inquires for this article, but it's a kind of open secret that ISPs harvest search queries. Without HTTPS it's pretty easy for ISPs to track not just search queries but which results users clicked on, which is vital information for building a better search engine. In other words, info Google would prefer its potential competitors don't get. + +Winer calls out Google specifically and he's not the only one to do so. Yes, Google is acting in its own best interests and Winer is right to question the motives of a company so massive it has the power to [potentially control elections](https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts). However, in this case, Google's interests are aligned with the web at large (for now). Google doesn't want that data captured and sold, but remember that data is actually about you. It's your data first and foremost and regardless of what you think about Google gathering it, you certainly don't want it bought and sold by others. + + + + +Read through Mozilla's bug report on the subject and you'll find quite a few people talking about this content as if it were somehow tainted. "It's time we start treating insecure connections as a Bug," writes one Mozilla developer on a bug report entitled "Switch generic icon to negative feedback for non-https sites." Mozilla is a big company, with many different voices, but even Barnes wants to make sure that the web is secure and he's not alone, the Chromium project has similar bug threads and outspoken HTTPS proponents, but the web is not Mozilla's, not Google's, not even the W3C's. The web belongs to everyone who uses it and creates things for it. + + + + + + + + + +What Winer and others fear is that at some point browsers may stop loading HTTP content entirely. For now that's still a ways off, but Mozilla's plans make it clear that it is part of the future of Firefox. Mozilla's [FAQ](https://blog.mozilla.org/security/files/2015/05/HTTPS-FAQ.pdf) on the subject reads: "Q: Does this mean my unencrypted site will stop working? Not for a long time." + +While browsers ceasing to load HTTP sites at all is wrong, as Winer puts it "the browser is broken. It has totally the wrong idea of its role." + + + + + + +The flip side to this is that if your site does serve up ads and you want to make sure that no one is stripping out those ads -- which, with companies like [Shine](https://www.getshine.com/), is starting to happen at the network level -- HTTPS is also your friend. + + +Which brings us back to today. HTTPS is becoming more and more common, easier and easier for anyone to get up and running. Where does it go from here? + + + + + +HTTPS will, however, stop some of the mass surveillance that currently happens on the web. It will stop your ISP from injecting code to track you, it will stop unknown parties from using your browser to launch DDoS attacks as you browse and it stops ISP and nation states from censoring specific pages they don't like. + + + + +In general, the pieces seems a little scattershot and could use a tighter focus. From our perspective, that HTTPS does not solve every problem is not an issue; that HTTPS is oftentimes *presented* as being synonymous with "security", however, *is* the issue. This seems like it should be the central thesis of the piece—that the meaning and importance of HTTPS has been poorly communicated by most advocates. + +Dan Goodin and Peter Bright had some further specifics about individual arguments within the piece or other larger questions if you’d like, but the following outline was suggested and I think it might be a good roadmap to recast your draft towards: + +* but it's not all good news +* the (HTTP) legacy of the Web is important, so what are we doing to ensure that doesn't break, or disappear from search engines, or cause (technically spurious) warnings in our browsers. This strikes me as probably the most interesting issue to explore, especially as it has Tim Berners-Lee on its side. +* calling HTTPS sites "secure" and non-HTTPS sites "insecure" is deeply dishonest (just because a site uses HTTPS doesn't mean it's not storing your password and credit card number in unauthenticated plaintext somewhere, and doesn't mean that it hasn't been hacked to serve malicious javascript, etc.). Browsers do not make clear that it is a statement about the connection *to* the site, and not the site itself. People are given advice like "don't send passwords to insecure sites"--how the hell would you even know? +* HTTPS's protection is actually quite narrow (tbh it's not great against nation state adversaries due to the number of certificate authorities they control), though there are schemes in place to make it more powerful (HSTS, for example) +* HTTPS is *still* burdensome and/or inconvenient (though Let's Encrypt is a good step in the right direction) +* is this the kind of thing that google, in particular, should simply decree? + +With this in mind, would you be willing to take a second crack at the topic? I’d be happy to discuss the original draft with you further over the phone (or connect you with Dan or Peter if you’d like), but hopefully the outline above is clear and makes sense to you as a strong direction. + +In terms of a second draft, I understand this will take more than an afternoon. What if we said you could take ’til the end of March if necessary? +If that sounds a bit weak to you, you're not alone. This is currently, the biggest problem with HTTPS. + +Behind the scenes what handles all the encryption and authentication is a bit of technology known as TLS, which is short for Transport Layer Security. In fact the full name of HTTPS is really HTTP over TLS. TLS is the successor to the now vulnerable Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), though to further complicate things you will often hear both referred to as "SSL". In the context of this article, HTTPS will refer to TLS connections. + +TLS is made up of two layers, the TLS Record Protocol and the TLS Handshake Protocol. Together these two tools allow your web browser to securely connect to a validated site and encrypt all your communications thereafter. + + +Unused links: + +https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2015/04/30/deprecating-non-secure-http/ +https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2015Jan/0086.html +https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-subresource-integrity/#use-casesexamples +https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-reschke-objsec-00 +http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=true&arnumber=6454330 +https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1041087 +https://caddyserver.com/ +http://www.2rosenthals.net/wordpress/googles-https-everywhere-initiative-not-so-fast-994/ +http://andreasgal.com/2015/03/30/data-is-at-the-heart-of-search-but-who-has-access-to-it/ +https://codereview.chromium.org/1530403002/ + + + + +This is why the question Winer and others would like answered is so simple: why? Why should we invest all this effort to encrypt websites that are just archived flat HTML pages? + + + +Before we get to that though, it's worth looking at some of the technical shortcomings of HTTPS the way it is currently implemented on the web. These too are costs. + +HTTPS affects a site's ability to cache data. This is a big problem in remote areas where ISP level caching can be the only realistic way for many people to connect over slow networks. HTTPS connections themselves used to be slower, but this is no longer the case with modern browsers. The [HTTP vs HTTPS test site](https://www.httpvshttps.com/) demonstrates how HTTPS can actually be faster over HTTP/2 (which is only available over secure connection). + +Another technical shortcoming is the use of Content Delivery Networks. CDNs reduce network latency by redirecting the user to a closer server, but CDNs are the man-in-the-middle, they're just not a "attack". However, the way CDNs work today website owners often need to [upload their certificates and private keys](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6956557), negating many security benefits of having those in the first place (if your secret key is not entirely in your control it's no longer secure). + +There are also a host of problems surrounding certificate authorities, the "trusted" source of certificates. CAs have been compromised in the past and will be in the future. This is in fact the weakest part of HTTPS. It's also the part that will be most difficult to fix since it will require reworking the entire trust chain from the ground up. + + +But before I get into why, it's important to know that while everything you do over HTTPS is secure and authenticated there is one one bit of data leaks out in this scenario -- the name of the site you're visiting. As noted above Russia (or anyone else) can see that you're headed to wikipedia.org, but no one knows which page on Wikipedia you're requesting. + +That means anyone snooping on your browsing session right now can get one bit of metadata -- they know you visited arstechnica.com. They don't know you're reading this specific article, but they do know you visited the site. Before you dismiss this metadata leak as unimportant, consider that the former head the NSA has publicly announced that the U.S. will "kill people based on metadata", even though, it seems, [many of those people may have been innocent](http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2016/02/the-nsas-skynet-program-may-be-killing-thousands-of-innocent-people/). +Encryption is good. It means that without the encryption key no one else can see what you're doing. If you're specifically targeted by the NSA HTTPS is not going to save you, but that's not the point. Or rather it is. The point is that HTTPS returns surveillance to being a more difficult and targeted exercise. As HTTPS proponent Eric Mill tells Ars, "HTTPS moves attacks from bulk to targeted". + +Targeted attacks are more difficult and require more resource than most interested parties have available. The NSA can still pull it off, Verizon, probably not. + + +Much of the confusion comes from our tendency to conflate security and privacy. While security is often necessary for privacy, the security you have does not guarantee anything. For example, you can have a secure HTTPS connection to Google, but that doesn't actually mean anything for your overall privacy. Google can still collect information about you, track you with cookies and then be compelled to give that information to the government. It can also just sell it to the highest bidder. Security is not a guarantee of privacy. + +All the users whose data has been compromised in any of the hundreds of major data leaks from Target, tk, tk, or tk was collected over HTTPS connection. Security is not privacy. + +In the case of HTTPS the primary things that the "S" offers is protection against what's known as a Man in the Middle (MitM) attack. Imagine you're at a coffee shop chatting with what you think is your friend tk. browsing tk for a tk. You decide to buy the tk. You're connected to tk, but someone else at the coffee shop (most likely wearing a dark hoodie and hunched furtively over a laptop if the press is to be believed) is watching you connect to tk. Hoodie can impersonate tk + +A MitM attack + + + + + +###Broad questions: + +How does HTTPS help users? +great cannon attack 2015 + +Does it stop nation state attacks by the NSA et al? +tls dns hijacking anti-virus super phish vulnerability -- fake root to inject ads. attacks go lower level cert flaws. + +Does it protect user privacy, if so how? All the tracking cookies are still there. If the NSA wants them they just subpoena Google right? + +It stops man in the middle attacks. How common are those? Does anyone have any data on that? Bogeyman, accessible metaphor, but practical use it's unlikely to happen. + + + +--- + +###Cert flaws: + +Verizon injecting code to reconstruct cookies. If they're willing to do that, what's to stop them from including compromised certs that allow them to still inject the code? They control the platfor, that's unbeatable from the security standpoint. + +"Even if the browser, OS were under your control you have no control over what the web application is doing with your data. Not only could it be being shared with servers through third-party sub-requests, it can also be passed server-server to thousands of other entities and often is. + +Link security != privacy. Privacy needs the rule of law not total secrecy." + +https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2015Jan/0091.html + +--- +> +> Also wondering whether, apropos the recent debates about moving to +> HTTPS, companies like Verizon would be able to MITM HTTPs traffic to +> play games like this. Seems to depend on the cert control provided by +> mobile browsers, and I'm concerned that in practice many of the +> browsers come from the ISPs, which supply the phones, which check the +> certs.... +> + +This has been going on for ages. What's new is categorizing it as MitM +with all the "attack" connotation baggage that brings along with it, in +the use case where it's opted into. Or considering it in terms of mobile +Internet. Others have long called it a "business model". Sometimes it's +opted into by agreeing to a TOS, where I'd prefer opt-in based on users +having to configure browser settings for it, but I see where if that +was the business I was in, I'd think otherwise. Either way, I hesitate +to call it fraudulent outright. + +https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2015Jan/0173.html + +--- + +###technical details: + +LetEncrypt is great, but it's still way beyond the capabilites of your average blogger installing wordpress (or more likely clicking a button to install wordpress). Even if it were a one-click process to create, install and configure a cert, how does the blogger even find out that this is something they need to do? + +designed for helping servera admins, the no tech are using hosting services. it's getting easier. peole are becoming more dependent on hosting services. + +Let's say I managed to figure all that out (which I have just for the record) who is going to renew my certs when I die? Or if I just stop caring/maintaining my site? + +you already need to have server patches, etc + +Tim Berners Lee has called the move from http to https, "arguably a greater threat to the integrity for the web than anything else in its history." Given that URLs breaking, changing and disappearing is already a massive problem, and that this move WILL ABSOLUTELY MEAN MORE BROKEN SITES, how is that a win for the web? + +On browser indicators, there have already been studies that show no one pays any attention to them: "We also found that the security certificate cue was not used by the participants to determine the legitimacy of the presented Websites." http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=true&arnumber=6454330 + +--- + +https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2015Jan/0080.html: + +> Also wondering whether, apropos the recent debates about moving to HTTPS, +> companies like Verizon would be able to MITM HTTPs traffic to play games +> like this. Seems to depend on the cert control provided by mobile browsers, +> and I'm concerned that in practice many of the browsers come from the ISPs, +> which supply the phones, which check the certs.... + +A code-signed browser from a trustworthy source, consulting only its +own trust anchor store and/or enforcing key pinning and/or enforcing +Certificate Transparency, can generally enforce the guarantees of +HTTPS (which include stopping these cookie insertion attacks). + +Of course, if the platform is under the control of someone other than +the owner, such as the carrier, the platform can subvert any +application at run-time. + +That underscores the importance of getting one's platform from a +trustworthy vendor. But that problem is entirely outside of TAG's +scope. + +HTTPS is what we can do. Buttressing the web PKI is what we can do. So +we do. Some companies with representatives on this list are also +trying to provide trustworthy platforms to run apps on, too. So we do. + +Surely, you weren't hoping to use evidence of application-layer +attacks as a reason to not adopt effective application-layer security +techniques. + +--- + +https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2015Jan/0083.html + +On 1/16/2015 2:54 AM, Chris Palmer wrote: +> Surely, you weren't hoping to use evidence of application-layer +> attacks as a reason to not adopt effective application-layer security +> techniques. + +No, but I think the TAG can play a useful role in documenting which of the +problems we see "in the wild" the move to HTTPS will "solve", which it +won't etc. Not everything we do as a community or that the TAG does can be +100% effective, but IMO a key role of the TAG is to document tradeoffs, and +to explain both the strengths and weaknesses of any proposed architectural +change. In this case, many readers of TAG Findings will be less informed +than the TAG. I think it will be helpful to clearly say: "This is what we +can reasonably expect the move to do for HTTPS to do for you; these are +some of the problems you might naively expect it to solve that it might not." + +--- + +### Interesting arguments + +https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2015Jan/0029.html + +As I understand the statement, it means some people would prefer privacy and security, and others prefer convenience and entertainment. + +This might just be projection. In some things, I am intensely protective of my privacy and security. In other matters, I couldn't care less about it. And while I'm far from infallible, I am regularly able to make reasonably informed decisions which demonstrate that I don't hold carefully to one or the other side of this apparent dichotomy. + +... + +FWIW I am not a fan of surveillance. But I note Russia is where Edward Snowden lives, for his own security. + +--- + + +If people want me to believe this is going to be handled competently, they need to stop pointing to vaporware as a solution, stop pointing to unusable crap as a solution, stop saying "Oh, it will work itself out." Because that's what I'm afraid of. Mozilla needs to acknowledge that at the moment, the TLS ecosystem is in absolute shambles, and switching to HTTPS-only is a terrible idea right now. Then I'll believe they're being realistic in their plans. + + +https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/35vm9r/were_deprecating_http_and_its_going_to_be_okay/cr8lg3u + +--- + +Thoughts on security: + +Yves Lafon wrote: +> +> And saying that the only solution for people with poor bandwidth is +> to get rid of their security is not really satisfying. +> + +Privacy. Again, sorry. But security, when required, makes me not care +about bandwidth or latency. If I'm after the balance in my checking +account, I don't care if logging in takes 30 seconds. What I don't need +is for every page I access to be that slow. + + +Potential future problems with tiered content : + +In a post-net-neut world, everyone would have poor bandwidth and +latency, except when accessing the "fast lane", unless shared caching. +Sacrificing shared caching in the name of privacy which can't be +guaranteed at the application-protocol layer anyway, is not really +satisfying. + +https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2015Jan/0031.html + +--- diff --git a/ars-technica/published/https-take2-final.txt b/ars-technica/published/https-take2-final.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5495d36 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/https-take2-final.txt @@ -0,0 +1,117 @@ +There's a major change sweeping the web. The familiar HTTP prefix is rapidly being replaced by HTTPS. The extra "S" in an HTTPS URL means your connection is secure and it's much harder for anyone else to see what you're doing. And on today's web everyone wants to see what you're doing. + +HTTPS has been around nearly as long as the web, but it's primarily used by sites that handle money -- your bank's website, shopping carts, social networks and webmail services like Gmail. + +Now Google, Mozilla, the EFF and others want every website to adopt HTTPS. The push for HTTPS everywhere is about to get a big boost from Mozilla and Google when both companies' web browsers begin to actively call out sites that still use HTTP. + +The plan is for browsers to start labeling HTTP connections as insecure. In other words, instead of the green lock icon that indicates a connection is secure today, there will be a red icon to indicate when a connection is insecure. Eventually secure connections would not be labeled at all, they would be the assumed default. + +Google has also been pushing HTTPS connections by "[using HTTPS as a ranking signal](https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html)". Google takes the security of a connection (or lack thereof) into consideration when ranking sites in search results. For the time being Google says that HTTPS is "a very lightweight signal... carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content". However, the company says that that it "may decide to strengthen it" as a means to encourage more sites to adopt it. + +Through efforts like these HTTPS has already moved beyond the obvious realms like banking and webmail. Popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, as well as major online retailers like Target, Home Depot and Adobe, are all served over HTTPS. + +Target, Home Depot and Adobe were not examples chosen at random though; all three have had major data breaches that exposed identifying information about users. + +HTTPS does not mean your *data* is secure, it just means your *connection* is secure. This is not semantics. It's critical for users to understand and unfortunately HTTPS advocates sometimes present HTTPS as synonymous with "security". The phrase "secure web" gets used a lot in discussions, but as those three retailers illustrate, using HTTPS does not mean a website is secure. In fact, HTTPS says nothing about the website, the server it resides on or what happens to whatever data you might give it. + +This may ultimately be the biggest challenge HTTPS faces -- helping people to understand what it means. + +## What's So Great About Encryption, TLS and Authenticity? + +If HTTPS is no guarantee of security, what does it do for you? HTTPS offers three things: secrecy, integrity and authenticity. + +The simplest of these is secrecy. HTTPS uses encryption to make sure that no one can see the data that's transmitted over the wire. When your browser connects to a website over HTTPS the connection from your browser to the page you want to view is encrypted. That means any data exchanged is not visible to anyone else snooping the network. + +The EFF's Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, lead developer on Let's Encrypt, a new tool that offers free HTTPS certificates, tells Ars, encryption is a "necessary minimum bar" for today's web. "If we were designing the internet from scratch today," he says, "we would say encryption is cheap and easy, there's no export [restrictions anymore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip), so it will be default and you won't have to worry about it." + +Without the encryption it's easy for anyone to see everything you ask for and everything the site sends back. That allows anyone who wants to to perform what's known as a Man in the Middle attack. + +With an unencrypted connection both your browser's request and the server's response are just plain text bits of data. All a Man in the Middle attack does is step into that stream of data and start reading and manipulating it. If your ISP wanted to add an advertisement to this page that requires you to click on it before reading the story, it could do that by just injecting a few packets of its own. You would have no way of knowing whether that ad came from Ars or some other source. Anyone could in fact do just about anything to the data traveling between the Ars server and your browser, including serving up an entirely different page or not showing the page at all. + +This is not a theoretical problem, Man in the Middle code injection is an active, widely used attack. In the case of Verizon Wireless's so called "Perma-Cookie", it's even a business model. + +Using a Man in the Middle attack, Verizon Wireless modifies traffic on its network to inject a tracker (it added an HTTP header called X-UIDH) that is then sent to all unencrypted sites that Verizon customers visit. This allows Verizon to, in the [words of the EFF](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh), "assemble a deep, permanent profile of visitors' web browsing habits without their consent". + +Verizon is not alone. It's a safe bet that your ISP is doing something similar. Comcast's wifi service [already does](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/09/why-comcasts-javascript-ad-injections-threaten-security-net-neutrality/), as does [AT&T's](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/atts-plan-to-watch-your-web-browsing-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/3/) (you can opt out, for a fee). What your ISP does with this data is less well known, but it's a big part of why Google wants the web to move to HTTPS. + +When you communicate in plain text over the network you have to assume that someone is, at the very least watching and very probably injecting some tracking code to record your requests. + +With the encrypted connection you get when a site uses HTTPS the transmitted data is very difficult to read. There is no way to read or manipulate cypher text without the encryption keys. Score one for HTTPS, which can guarantee that you are getting the content your browser requested. + +HTTPS also prevents the kind of censorship that happens at the state or ISP level. Examples of this abound as well, for example, Russia wanted to ban a Wikipedia article (about [charas hashish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charas)), but because Wikipedia is served over HTTPS there's no way to see which page visitors are requesting. Russia was faced with the choice: ban all of Wikipedia or none. It [opted for none](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/08/russias-wikipedia-ban-buckles-under-https-encryption). + +Score another one for HTTPS, because as it turns out unencrypted networks do not, as early web enthusiasts liked to say, "see censorship as damage and route around it". In fact, unencrypted networks make censorship very easy, just reach in and block what you want, change what you want. + +Put all this together and you discover that the web, the network on which your data travels is not just insecure, but actively hostile. As developer and HTTPS proponent Eric Mill writes, "I see companies and government asserting themselves over their network. I see a network that is not just overseen, but actively hostile. I see an internet being steadily drained of its promise to 'interpret censorship as damage'...In short, I see power moving away from the leafs and devolving back into the center, where power has been used to living for thousands of years." + +It's getting worse too. A considerably more alarming network attack has come to light in the last year that exploits the lack of HTTPS on the web to create distributed DDoS attacks using unsuspecting users who never know they're part of an attack. [Great Cannon](http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/meet-great-cannon-the-man-in-the-middle-weapon-china-used-on-github/), as this attack has been dubbed, is a very sophisticated attack. For full details see Citizen Lab's [write-up](https://citizenlab.org/2015/04/chinas-great-cannon/), but the short story is that someone hijacked a bit of JavaScript served up by Chinese search giant Baidu and added a payload to it that made frequent requests to a target website. Everyone visiting Baidu who loaded that script became part of the attack. + +This is what Mill means when he says the network is actively hostile. With Great Cannon it becomes so hostile it turns you, unknowingly, into a DDoS attacker. The only way to stop attacks like Great Cannon, or network tampering like what Verizon and others are doing, is to encrypt your traffic. + +The last thing HTTPS provides is authentication. The site you're visiting is verified by the browser as actually being that site and not some imposter. To authenticate your connection web browsers maintain a list of known, trusted certificate authorities. When your browser requests a page it gets the page's security certificate, which contains a chain that leads back to a certificate authority. If that authority matches an authority known to your browser then your browser will trust that the site you're connecting to is who it claims to be. + +Now that you know what HTTPS offers -- encryption, integrity and authentication -- it should hopefully be easy to see why your bank uses it, why Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and any other sites you log in to use it, or should. What's less immediately obvious is why *every* site on the web can benefit from HTTPS. Does HTTPS help some long archived, no longer maintained bit of ephemera from the early web? + +Software developer and blogger Dave Winer argues in a post entitled [HTTPS is expensive security theater](http://scripting.com/liveblog/users/davewiner/2015/12/18/0667.html), that not only does it not help old, archived sites, it's a waste of the site owner's time. "I have a couple dozen sites that are just archives of projects that were completed a long time ago," writes Winer. "I'm one person. I don't need make-work projects, I like to create new stuff, I don't need to make Google or Mozilla or the EFF or Nieman Lab happy." + +Winer is not alone. In fact he's in very good company, no less than Tim Berners-Lee has [questioned the move to HTTPS](https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Security-NotTheS.html), going so far as to call it "arguably a greater threat to the integrity for the web than anything else in its history". Berners-Lee does think the web should be encrypted, he just doesn't like the way it's currently being done. Berners-Lee would like to see HTTP upgraded rather than shifting to the HTTPS protocol. + +Winer and Berners-Lee highlight the two big potential problems of moving the web to HTTPS. It significantly complications to the process of setting up a website and creating something on the web, and it might break links -- billions of links. + +It's easy for savvy developers to dismiss the first problem, that HTTPS adds considerable complexity. But what makes the web great is that you don't have to be a savvy developer to be a part of it. Anyone with a few dollars a month to spare can rent their own server space somewhere, throw some HTML files in a folder and publish their thoughts on the web. A few dollars more gets you an nice URL, but that's not strictly necessary. + +Requiring sites to include a security certificate adds a significant barrier to entry to the web. + +Anyone who has put in the effort to get HTTPS working on even one site knows that it can be a tremendous hassle. Indeed this is probably the biggest obstacle to widespread HTTPS adoption among small site operators (that is, the bulk of the web). + +Until very recently there was no way to obtain a free SSL certificate (a few certificate authorities did not charge to issue you a certificate, the if you needed to revoke it there way a fee). This was the first challenge that HTTPS proponents set out to solve. The EFF and Mozilla partnered to create Let's Encrypt, which now offers free certificates -- really free, no catches and you don't have to provide any identifying information to get one. There's also a set of command line tools that make installing and configuring them pretty simple provided you have some basic sysadmin knowledge (and SSH access to your server). + +That's not the end of the headache though. Once you have a certificate you have to install it and get your web server to serve it up properly. Again, assuming you have a basic sysadmin's knowledge this isn't too hard, though tweaking it until you get a A+ grade on [SSLLab's security test](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/) can take many hours of debugging (and even top sites like [Facebook only score a B](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=facebook.com)). I've been running my own website, building my own CMSes and running servers on the web for fifteen years and I can say without hesitation that getting HTTPS working on my site was the hardest thing I've done on the web. It was hard enough that, like Winer, I haven't bothered with old archived sites. + +Over the long run Let's Encrypt is hoping to partner with popular web hosts in such a way that users looking to set up their own blog using popular CMS like WordPress get an HTTPS site up and running as easily as clicking a button. Things will, however, likely never be that simple for anyone who wants to take a more DIY approach, writing their own software. + +Simplifying the process of setting up HTTPS means more tools in your toolchain. It makes the individual more dependent on tools build by others. Developer Ben Klemens has an [essay](https://medium.com/@b_k/https-the-end-of-an-era-c106acded474#.orxikg4xp) about exactly this dependency, writing that if "solving the problem consists of just starting a tool up, my sense of wonder has gone from 'Look what I did' to 'Look what these other people did', which is time-efficient but not especially fun." + +It may seem trivial to developers employed by large companies solving complicated problems that taking the fun out of the web is a problem, but it is. If the web stops being fun for individuals it becomes solely the province of those companies. We are no longer creators of the web, but simple users. + +## Think of the Links + +Berners-Lee's concerns about HTTPS are easier to fix -- what happens to all those links to HTTP sites when all those sites become HTTPS? The answer is they break. There are quite a few proposals that would mitigate some of this at the browser level. When I asked Mozilla's Barnes about Berners-Lee's concerns he told me, "Tim has been a really useful contrarian voice. His views have driven the browser and web community to address concerns he has raised". + +To prove that Barnes actually does care about URLs, he's the co-editor of a W3C specification that aims to preserve all those old links and upgrade them to HTTPS. The spec is known as [HTST priming](https://mikewest.github.io/hsts-priming/) and it works with another proposed standard known as [Upgrade Insecure Requests](https://www.w3.org/TR/upgrade-insecure-requests/) to offer the web a kind of upgrade path around the link rot that Berners-Lee fears. + +With Upgrade Insecure Requests site authors could tell a browser that they intend all resources to be loaded over HTTPS, even if the link is HTTP. This solves the legacy content problem, particularly in cases where the content can't be updated, for example, The New York Times [archived sites](http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/embracing-https/). + +Both of these proposals are still very early drafts, but they would, if implemented, provide a way around one of the biggest problems with HTTPS -- breaking links. + +At least some of the time. Totally abandoned content will never be upgraded to HTTPS, neither will content where the authors, like Winer, elect not to. This isn't a huge problem though because browsers will still happily load the insecure content. For now anyway. + +## More Honest Web Browsers + +The web needs encryption because the web's users need it. The web needs encryption because the network needs it to remain neutral. The web needs encryption because without it just browsing can turn you into an unwitting helper in a DDoS attack. + +There are a lot of companies pushing HTTPS, most have their own interests first but for now at least those interests align with web users' interests. None of these companies have the kind of power and influence that Google and, to a lesser degree, Mozilla have as browser makers. + +And it's up to browser makers to fix the confusion that currently surrounds HTTPS. + +The current way browsers highlight HTTPS connections is misleading and needs to change. + +The green lock icon that browsers use to denote a secure connection is too easily construed as a signal that the site is "secure". Labeling HTTPS sites "secure" and non-HTTPS sites "insecure" is deeply dishonest (just because a site uses HTTPS doesn't mean it's not storing your password and credit card number in plain text somewhere, and doesn't mean that it hasn't been hacked to serve malicious JavaScript and so on). As it stands browsers do not make clear that the lock icon is a statement about the connection *to* the site, and not the site itself. + +As Hoffman-Andrews puts it, "calling HTTPS sites secure is generally not accurate, but it's definitely accurate to call HTTP sites insecure." In fact, browsers have no way of knowing if the site is truly "secure" in the broader sense. Neither do you and I. No one is every going to fix that. But browsers can fix what they show users. + +The Chromium project has already announced plans to change the way it displays the lock and start [marking HTTP connections as insecure](https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/marking-http-as-non-secure). Mozilla will do [roughly the same](https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2015/04/30/deprecating-non-secure-http/) with Firefox. + +It's tempting to see this as hostile to publishers -- the message has become fall in line with HTTPS or, as Winer writes, the browsers will "make sure everyone knows you're not to be trusted." + +However, what the broken lock is really saying is that your browser can't guarantee that the content you're reading hasn't been tampered with. It also can't guarantee that you aren't currently part of a DDoS attack against a site you've never even heard of. It also can't guarantee that you're connected to the site you think you're connected to. All it can guarantee is that there is nothing secure about your connection and anyone could be doing anything to it. + +All of these things have always been true when you connect to an HTTP site, the only thing that's changing is that your browser is telling you about it. + +The far more important change comes after that, when there will be no icon at all for HTTPS connections. All you'll ever see to indicate "security" is a large red X in the URL bar when you visit a site over HTTPS. + +Winer's fear is that Google especially, because it has a financial interest in HTTPS (HTTPS prevents Google's competitors from scraping search results), will stop loading and ranking HTTP sites altogether. It would an egregious abuse of their place in the web ecosystem for any browser to stop loading HTTP content entirely, but so far that's not happening. If it does, if Google's self-interests are no longer aligned with the web's, then the web should resist it. Warnings help users make informed decisions, prohibitions help no one. + +The web has always been a messy, complicated thing. The last thing it needs now is an artificial binary construct of "good" and "bad" as determined by browser vendors. At the same time, the current lack of encrypted connections has created a web that's no longer in the user's control. The web has become a broad surveillance tool for everyone from the NSA to Google to Verizon. Without encryption the network becomes a tool for whoever owns the largest nodes. We the people, the small creators of this thing we call web are not just at the mercy of the network owners, we're the victims of their whims. + +Giving users greater secrecy, ensuring data integrity in transit, and providing a means of establishing authenticity empower the user and help make the network decidedly less hostile than it is right now. Abuse will still happen. Surveillance will still be possible but, as Mill notes, attacks will "change from bulk to targeted" and the network can return to being just a dumb pipe. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/https-v2.html b/ars-technica/published/https-v2.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4d6f334 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/https-v2.html @@ -0,0 +1,59 @@ +

There's a major change sweeping the web. The familiar HTTP prefix is rapidly being replaced by HTTPS. The extra "S" in an HTTPS URL means your connection is secure and it's much harder for anyone else to see what you're doing. And on today's web everyone wants to see what you're doing.

+

HTTPS has been around nearly as long as the web, but it's primarily used by sites that handle money -- your bank's website, shopping carts, social networks and webmail services like Gmail.

+

Now Google, Mozilla, the EFF and others want every website to adopt HTTPS. The push for HTTPS everywhere is about to get a big boost from Mozilla and Google when both companies' web browsers begin to actively call out sites that still use HTTP.

+

The plan is for browsers to start labeling HTTP connections as insecure. In other words, instead of the green lock icon that indicates a connection is secure today, there will be a red icon to indicate when a connection is insecure. Eventually secure connections would not be labeled at all, they would be the assumed default.

+

Google has also been pushing HTTPS connections by "using HTTPS as a ranking signal". Google takes the security of a connection (or lack thereof) into consideration when ranking sites in search results. For the time being Google says that HTTPS is "a very lightweight signal... carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content". However, the company says that that it "may decide to strengthen it" as a means to encourage more sites to adopt it.

+

Through efforts like these HTTPS has already moved beyond the obvious realms like banking and webmail. Popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, as well as major online retailers like Target, Home Depot and Adobe, are all served over HTTPS.

+

Target, Home Depot and Adobe were not examples chosen at random though; all three have had major data breaches that exposed identifying information about users.

+

HTTPS does not mean your data is secure, it just means your connection is secure. This is not semantics. It's critical for users to understand and unfortunately HTTPS advocates sometimes present HTTPS as synonymous with "security". The phrase "secure web" gets used a lot in discussions, but as those three retailers illustrate, using HTTPS does not mean a website is secure. In fact, HTTPS says nothing about the website, the server it resides on or what happens to whatever data you might give it.

+

This may ultimately be the biggest challenge HTTPS faces -- helping people to understand what it means.

+

What's So Great About Encryption, TLS and Authenticity?

+

If HTTPS is no guarantee of security, what does it do for you? HTTPS offers three things: secrecy, integrity and authenticity.

+

The simplest of these is secrecy. HTTPS uses encryption to make sure that no one can see the data that's transmitted over the wire. When your browser connects to a website over HTTPS the connection from your browser to the page you want to view is encrypted. That means any data exchanged is not visible to anyone else snooping the network.

+

The EFF's Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, lead developer on Let's Encrypt, a new tool that offers free HTTPS certificates, tells Ars, encryption is a "necessary minimum bar" for today's web. "If we were designing the internet from scratch today," he says, "we would say encryption is cheap and easy, there's no export restrictions anymore, so it will be default and you won't have to worry about it."

+

Without the encryption it's easy for anyone to see everything you ask for and everything the site sends back. That allows anyone who wants to to perform what's known as a Man in the Middle attack.

+

With an unencrypted connection both your browser's request and the server's response are just plain text bits of data. All a Man in the Middle attack does is step into that stream of data and start reading and manipulating it. If your ISP wanted to add an advertisement to this page that requires you to click on it before reading the story, it could do that by just injecting a few packets of its own. You would have no way of knowing whether that ad came from Ars or some other source. Anyone could in fact do just about anything to the data traveling between the Ars server and your browser, including serving up an entirely different page or not showing the page at all.

+

This is not a theoretical problem, Man in the Middle code injection is an active, widely used attack. In the case of Verizon Wireless's so called "Perma-Cookie", it's even a business model.

+

Using a Man in the Middle attack, Verizon Wireless modifies traffic on its network to inject a tracker (it added an HTTP header called X-UIDH) that is then sent to all unencrypted sites that Verizon customers visit. This allows Verizon to, in the words of the EFF, "assemble a deep, permanent profile of visitors' web browsing habits without their consent".

+

Verizon is not alone. It's a safe bet that your ISP is doing something similar. Comcast's wifi service already does, as does AT&T's (you can opt out, for a fee). What your ISP does with this data is less well known, but it's a big part of why Google wants the web to move to HTTPS.

+

When you communicate in plain text over the network you have to assume that someone is, at the very least watching and very probably injecting some tracking code to record your requests.

+

With the encrypted connection you get when a site uses HTTPS the transmitted data is very difficult to read. There is no way to read or manipulate cypher text without the encryption keys. Score one for HTTPS, which can guarantee that you are getting the content your browser requested.

+

HTTPS also prevents the kind of censorship that happens at the state or ISP level. Examples of this abound as well, for example, Russia wanted to ban a Wikipedia article (about charas hashish), but because Wikipedia is served over HTTPS there's no way to see which page visitors are requesting. Russia was faced with the choice: ban all of Wikipedia or none. It opted for none.

+

Score another one for HTTPS, because as it turns out unencrypted networks do not, as early web enthusiasts liked to say, "see censorship as damage and route around it". In fact, unencrypted networks make censorship very easy, just reach in and block what you want, change what you want.

+

Put all this together and you discover that the web, the network on which your data travels is not just insecure, but actively hostile. As developer and HTTPS proponent Eric Mill writes, "I see companies and government asserting themselves over their network. I see a network that is not just overseen, but actively hostile. I see an internet being steadily drained of its promise to 'interpret censorship as damage'...In short, I see power moving away from the leafs and devolving back into the center, where power has been used to living for thousands of years."

+

It's getting worse too. A considerably more alarming network attack has come to light in the last year that exploits the lack of HTTPS on the web to create distributed DDoS attacks using unsuspecting users who never know they're part of an attack. Great Cannon, as this attack has been dubbed, is a very sophisticated attack. For full details see Citizen Lab's write-up, but the short story is that someone hijacked a bit of JavaScript served up by Chinese search giant Baidu and added a payload to it that made frequent requests to a target website. Everyone visiting Baidu who loaded that script became part of the attack.

+

This is what Mill means when he says the network is actively hostile. With Great Cannon it becomes so hostile it turns you, unknowingly, into a DDoS attacker. The only way to stop attacks like Great Cannon, or network tampering like what Verizon and others are doing, is to encrypt your traffic.

+

The last thing HTTPS provides is authentication. The site you're visiting is verified by the browser as actually being that site and not some imposter. To authenticate your connection web browsers maintain a list of known, trusted certificate authorities. When your browser requests a page it gets the page's security certificate, which contains a chain that leads back to a certificate authority. If that authority matches an authority known to your browser then your browser will trust that the site you're connecting to is who it claims to be.

+

Now that you know what HTTPS offers -- encryption, integrity and authentication -- it should hopefully be easy to see why your bank uses it, why Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and any other sites you log in to use it, or should. What's less immediately obvious is why every site on the web can benefit from HTTPS. Does HTTPS help some long archived, no longer maintained bit of ephemera from the early web?

+

Software developer and blogger Dave Winer argues in a post entitled HTTPS is expensive security theater, that not only does it not help old, archived sites, it's a waste of the site owner's time. "I have a couple dozen sites that are just archives of projects that were completed a long time ago," writes Winer. "I'm one person. I don't need make-work projects, I like to create new stuff, I don't need to make Google or Mozilla or the EFF or Nieman Lab happy."

+

Winer is not alone. In fact he's in very good company, no less than Tim Berners-Lee has questioned the move to HTTPS, going so far as to call it "arguably a greater threat to the integrity for the web than anything else in its history". Berners-Lee does think the web should be encrypted, he just doesn't like the way it's currently being done. Berners-Lee would like to see HTTP upgraded rather than shifting to the HTTPS protocol.

+

Winer and Berners-Lee highlight the two big potential problems of moving the web to HTTPS. It significantly complications to the process of setting up a website and creating something on the web, and it might break links -- billions of links.

+

It's easy for savvy developers to dismiss the first problem, that HTTPS adds considerable complexity. But what makes the web great is that you don't have to be a savvy developer to be a part of it. Anyone with a few dollars a month to spare can rent their own server space somewhere, throw some HTML files in a folder and publish their thoughts on the web. A few dollars more gets you an nice URL, but that's not strictly necessary.

+

Requiring sites to include a security certificate adds a significant barrier to entry to the web.

+

Anyone who has put in the effort to get HTTPS working on even one site knows that it can be a tremendous hassle. Indeed this is probably the biggest obstacle to widespread HTTPS adoption among small site operators (that is, the bulk of the web).

+

Until very recently there was no way to obtain a free SSL certificate (a few certificate authorities did not charge to issue you a certificate, the if you needed to revoke it there way a fee). This was the first challenge that HTTPS proponents set out to solve. The EFF and Mozilla partnered to create Let's Encrypt, which now offers free certificates -- really free, no catches and you don't have to provide any identifying information to get one. There's also a set of command line tools that make installing and configuring them pretty simple provided you have some basic sysadmin knowledge (and SSH access to your server).

+

That's not the end of the headache though. Once you have a certificate you have to install it and get your web server to serve it up properly. Again, assuming you have a basic sysadmin's knowledge this isn't too hard, though tweaking it until you get a A+ grade on SSLLab's security test can take many hours of debugging (and even top sites like Facebook only score a B). I've been running my own website, building my own CMSes and running servers on the web for fifteen years and I can say without hesitation that getting HTTPS working on my site was the hardest thing I've done on the web. It was hard enough that, like Winer, I haven't bothered with old archived sites.

+

Over the long run Let's Encrypt is hoping to partner with popular web hosts in such a way that users looking to set up their own blog using popular CMS like WordPress get an HTTPS site up and running as easily as clicking a button. Things will, however, likely never be that simple for anyone who wants to take a more DIY approach, writing their own software.

+

Simplifying the process of setting up HTTPS means more tools in your toolchain. It makes the individual more dependent on tools build by others. Developer Ben Klemens has an essay about exactly this dependency, writing that if "solving the problem consists of just starting a tool up, my sense of wonder has gone from 'Look what I did' to 'Look what these other people did', which is time-efficient but not especially fun."

+

It may seem trivial to developers employed by large companies solving complicated problems that taking the fun out of the web is a problem, but it is. If the web stops being fun for individuals it becomes solely the province of those companies. We are no longer creators of the web, but simple users.

+ +

Berners-Lee's concerns about HTTPS are easier to fix -- what happens to all those links to HTTP sites when all those sites become HTTPS? The answer is they break. There are quite a few proposals that would mitigate some of this at the browser level. When I asked Mozilla's Barnes about Berners-Lee's concerns he told me, "Tim has been a really useful contrarian voice. His views have driven the browser and web community to address concerns he has raised".

+

To prove that Barnes actually does care about URLs, he's the co-editor of a W3C specification that aims to preserve all those old links and upgrade them to HTTPS. The spec is known as HTST priming and it works with another proposed standard known as Upgrade Insecure Requests to offer the web a kind of upgrade path around the link rot that Berners-Lee fears.

+

With Upgrade Insecure Requests site authors could tell a browser that they intend all resources to be loaded over HTTPS, even if the link is HTTP. This solves the legacy content problem, particularly in cases where the content can't be updated, for example, The New York Times archived sites.

+

Both of these proposals are still very early drafts, but they would, if implemented, provide a way around one of the biggest problems with HTTPS -- breaking links.

+

At least some of the time. Totally abandoned content will never be upgraded to HTTPS, neither will content where the authors, like Winer, elect not to. This isn't a huge problem though because browsers will still happily load the insecure content. For now anyway.

+

More Honest Web Browsers

+

The web needs encryption because the web's users need it. The web needs encryption because the network needs it to remain neutral. The web needs encryption because without it just browsing can turn you into an unwitting helper in a DDoS attack.

+

There are a lot of companies pushing HTTPS, most have their own interests first but for now at least those interests align with web users' interests. None of these companies have the kind of power and influence that Google and, to a lesser degree, Mozilla have as browser makers.

+

And it's up to browser makers to fix the confusion that currently surrounds HTTPS.

+

The current way browsers highlight HTTPS connections is misleading and needs to change.

+

The green lock icon that browsers use to denote a secure connection is too easily construed as a signal that the site is "secure". Labeling HTTPS sites "secure" and non-HTTPS sites "insecure" is deeply dishonest (just because a site uses HTTPS doesn't mean it's not storing your password and credit card number in plain text somewhere, and doesn't mean that it hasn't been hacked to serve malicious JavaScript and so on). As it stands browsers do not make clear that the lock icon is a statement about the connection to the site, and not the site itself.

+

As Hoffman-Andrews puts it, "calling HTTPS sites secure is generally not accurate, but it's definitely accurate to call HTTP sites insecure." In fact, browsers have no way of knowing if the site is truly "secure" in the broader sense. Neither do you and I. No one is every going to fix that. But browsers can fix what they show users.

+

The Chromium project has already announced plans to change the way it displays the lock and start marking HTTP connections as insecure. Mozilla will do roughly the same with Firefox.

+

It's tempting to see this as hostile to publishers -- the message has become fall in line with HTTPS or, as Winer writes, the browsers will "make sure everyone knows you're not to be trusted."

+

However, what the broken lock is really saying is that your browser can't guarantee that the content you're reading hasn't been tampered with. It also can't guarantee that you aren't currently part of a DDoS attack against a site you've never even heard of. It also can't guarantee that you're connected to the site you think you're connected to. All it can guarantee is that there is nothing secure about your connection and anyone could be doing anything to it.

+

All of these things have always been true when you connect to an HTTP site, the only thing that's changing is that your browser is telling you about it.

+

The far more important change comes after that, when there will be no icon at all for HTTPS connections. All you'll ever see to indicate "security" is a large red X in the URL bar when you visit a site over HTTPS.

+

Winer's fear is that Google especially, because it has a financial interest in HTTPS (HTTPS prevents Google's competitors from scraping search results), will stop loading and ranking HTTP sites altogether. It would an egregious abuse of their place in the web ecosystem for any browser to stop loading HTTP content entirely, but so far that's not happening. If it does, if Google's self-interests are no longer aligned with the web's, then the web should resist it. Warnings help users make informed decisions, prohibitions help no one.

+

The web has always been a messy, complicated thing. The last thing it needs now is an artificial binary construct of "good" and "bad" as determined by browser vendors. At the same time, the current lack of encrypted connections has created a web that's no longer in the user's control. The web has become a broad surveillance tool for everyone from the NSA to Google to Verizon. Without encryption the network becomes a tool for whoever owns the largest nodes. We the people, the small creators of this thing we call web are not just at the mercy of the network owners, we're the victims of their whims.

+

Giving users greater secrecy, ensuring data integrity in transit, and providing a means of establishing authenticity empower the user and help make the network decidedly less hostile than it is right now. Abuse will still happen. Surveillance will still be possible but, as Mill notes, attacks will "change from bulk to targeted" and the network can return to being just a dumb pipe.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/https.html b/ars-technica/published/https.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..60b0ca2 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/https.html @@ -0,0 +1,88 @@ +

Google, Mozilla, the EFF and others are, and have been for some time, pushing for websites to adopt HTTPS. That push is about to get a boost from Mozilla and Google when both companies' web browsers begin to actively call out insecure websites.

+

HTTPS has been around nearly as long as the web, but it's primarily used by sites that handle money -- your bank's website, shopping carts, social networks and webmail services like Gmail. The extra "S" in an HTTPS URL means your connection is secure and it's much harder for anyone else to see what you're doing.

+

On today's web everyone wants to see what you're doing. And as long as you're using HTTP, they can.

+

Changing the web over to HTTPS will not get rid of tracking cookies, nor will it stop nation states with the resources to launch hardware-based attacks.

+

HTTPS will, however, stop some of the mass surveillance that currently happens on the web. It will stop your ISP from injecting code to track you, it will stop unknown parties from using your browser to launch DDoS attacks as you browse and it stops ISP and nation states from censoring specific pages they don't like.

+

Moving the bulk of the web from HTTP, which is an unencrypted connection that anyone can intercept, record and even manipulate, to HTTPS, which is encrypted and (reasonably) secure, is a big win for the web, which is to say it's a win for the users of the web.

+

This is important to bear in mind because it's also a win for some big companies that like to tout that it's a win for the web without mentioning that it also protects their bottom line. More on that in a minute.

+

Changing the web to HTTPS is not, however, entirely without costs and challenges for both web users and website owners.

+

The question is, do the benefits justify the costs? To answer that we have to first look at what HTTPS gets us and what it costs.

+

What HTTPS Does For You

+

Any secure protocol offers three things to the user: secrecy, integrity and authenticity. In the case of HTTPS the first two come from encryption. The major benefit of HTTPS is encryption. It provides authenticity as well, but currently authenticity is its weak point.

+

As the EFF's Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, lead developer on Let's Encrypt, tells Ars, encryption is a "necessary minimum bar" for today's web. "if we were designing the internet from scratch today," he says, "we would say encryption is cheap and easy, there's no export restrictions anymore, so it will be default and you won't have to worry about it."

+

When your browser connects to a website over HTTPS the connection from your browser to the page you want to view is encrypted. That means any data exchanged is not visible to anyone else snooping the network. Without the encryption it's easy to perform what's known as a man in the middle attack.

+

A simplified way to think about this is to think about the connection you made to get this page. When your browser requests http://arstechnica.com it sends that request out to the Ars server which then sends the requested page back as a stream of packets that your browser assembles into the page you requested.

+

Both the request and the response are just plain text bit of data. All a man in the middle attack does is step into that stream of data and start reading and manipulating it. If your ISP wanted to add an advertisement to this page that requires you to click on it before reading the story, it could do that by just injecting a few packets of its own. You would have no way of knowing whether that ad came from Ars or some other source. Anyone could in fact do just about anything to the data traveling between the Ars server and your browser, including serving up an entirely different page or not showing the page at all.

+

This is not a theoretical problem, the man in the middle code injection is an active, widely used attack. In some cases it's even a business model.

+

The list of examples here is too long to cover in such a short space, but there are a few that deserve mention. The first is Verizon Wireless's so called Perma-Cookie. Verizon Wireless modifies traffic on its network to inject a tracker (it added an HTTP header called X-UIDH) that is then sent to all unencrypted sites that Verizon customers visit. This allows Verizon to, in the words of the EFF, "assemble a deep, permanent profile of visitors' web browsing habits without their consent".

+

Verizon is not alone. It's a safe bet that your ISP is doing something similar. Comcast's wifi service already does, as does AT&T's (you can opt out, for a fee). What your ISP does with this data is less well known, but it's a big part of why Google wants the web to move to HTTPS.

+

When you communicate in plain text over the network you have to assume that someone is, at the very least watching and very probably injecting some tracking code to record your requests.

+

An encrypted connection on the other hand is not plain text anyone can read, it's encrypted text. There is no way to read or manipulate cypher text without the encryption keys. Score one for HTTPS, which can guarantee that you are getting the content your browser requested.

+

HTTPS also prevents the kind of censorship that happens at the state or ISP level. Examples of this abound as well, for example, Russia wanted to ban a Wikipedia article (about charas hashish), but because Wikipedia is served over HTTPS there's no way to see which page visitors are requesting. Russia was faced with the choice: ban all of Wikipedia or none. It opted for none.

+

Score another one for HTTPS, because as it turns out unencrypted networks do not, as early web enthusiasts liked to say, "see censorship as damage and route around it". In fact unencrypted networks make censorship very easy, just reach in and block what you want, change what you want. But with HTTPS the network doesn't actually see anything and that's a good thing.

+

Having an HTTPS connection offers one other thing that benefits users -- authentication.

+

Knowing that no one else on the network can read or tamper with your traffic is good, that gets you secrecy and integrity. But you also want to verify that the site you're visiting is actually the site you want to visit.

+

To authenticate your connection to the site you're trying to visit your browser maintains a list of known, trusted certificate authorities. When your browser requests a secure page it gets the page's security certificate, which contains a chain that leads back to a certificate authority. If that authority matches an authority known to your browser then your browser will trust that the site you're connecting to is who it claims to be. If that sounds a bit weak to you, you're not alone. This is currently, the biggest problem with HTTPS.

+

Behind the scenes what handles all the encryption and authentication is a bit of technology known as TLS, which is short for Transport Layer Security. In fact the full name of HTTPS is really HTTP over TLS. TLS is the successor to the now vulnerable Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), though to further complicate things you will often hear both referred to as "SSL". In the context of this article, HTTPS will refer to TLS connections.

+

TLS is made up of two layers, the TLS Record Protocol and the TLS Handshake Protocol. Together these two tools allow your web browser to securely connect to a validated site and encrypt all your communications thereafter.

+

Now that you know what HTTPS offers -- encryption and authentication -- it should hopefully be easy to see why your bank uses it, why Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and any other site you log in to uses it, or should (if you log in into to site without HTTPS, stop visiting that site).

+

What's less immediately obvious is why every site on the web can benefit from HTTPS. How does HTTPS help some long archived, no longer maintained bit of ephemera from the early web?

+

The answer is in many cases is it doesn't help. It does not benefit the site or its creator directly in many tangible ways.

+

It does, however, benefit the user connecting to the site, since they now know that what they see is actually data they requested from the site they wanted to visit (integrity and authenticity).

+

There's another beneficiary as well -- the network as a whole, and by extension, all of us using it.

+

Still, while there are clear benefits to HTTPS, it is not entirely without costs.

+

What HTTPS Costs

+

There has been some push back against the effort to push the web to all HTTPS, all the time. Most of the critics are worried about all the content out there that will never be ported to HTTPS -- what happens to it? Will HTTPS cost us the entirety of the early internet?

+

Read through Mozilla's bug report on the subject and you'll find quite a few people talking about this content as if it were somehow tainted. "It's time we start treating insecure connections as a Bug," writes one Mozilla developer on a bug report entitled "Switch generic icon to negative feedback for non-https sites." Mozilla is a big company, with many different voices, but even Mozilla's Richard Barnes, who is one of the main proponents of HTTPS (and editor of several specs at the W3C related to it), told me "to be completely frank, I don't care about URLs I care about secure connections."

+

The URLs Barnes is referring to is part of the debate surrounding HTTP vs HTTPS -- is HTTPS the answer or is there a way to upgrade HTTP? In the end though Barnes just wants to make sure that the web is secure and he's not alone. The Chromium project has similar bug threads and outspoken HTTPS proponents.

+

Fortunately for us the web is not Mozilla's, not Google's, not even the W3C's. The web belongs to everyone who uses it and creates things for it.

+

Software developer and blogger Dave Winer calls HTTPS "expensive security theater". Winer writes, "I have a couple dozen sites that are just archives of projects that were completed a long time ago. I'm one person. I don't need make-work projects, I like to create new stuff, I don't need to make Google or Mozilla or the EFF or Nieman Lab happy."

+

Winer is not alone. In fact he's in very good company, no less than Tim Berners-Lee has questioned the move to HTTPS, going so far as to call it "arguably a greater threat to the integrity for the web than anything else in its history". Berners-Lee does think the web should be encrypted, he just doesn't like the way it's currently being done. Berners-Lee would like to see HTTP upgraded rather than shifting to the HTTPS protocol.

+

There are two massive costs to HTTPS that have to be borne by users.

+

The first is the one Winer is concerned about -- HTTPS adds significant complications to the process of setting up a website. The second is the one Berners-Lee is concerned about, we risk breaking links, billions of links.

+

It's easy for savvy developers to dismiss the first problem, that HTTPS adds considerable complexity. But what makes the web great is that you don't have to be a savvy developer to be a part of it. Anyone with a few dollars a month to spare can rent their own server space somewhere, throw some HTML files in a folder and publish their thoughts on the web. A few dollars more gets you an nice URL, but that's not strictly necessary.

+

Requiring sites to include a security certificate adds a significant barrier to entry to the web.

+

Anyone who has put in the effort to get HTTPS working on even one site knows that it can be a tremendous hassle. Indeed this is probably the biggest obstacle to widespread HTTPS adoption among small site operators (that is, the bulk of the web).

+

Perhaps the most difficult part is actually obtaining a certificate, which, until very recently, was neither easy nor free.

+

Until the last six months there were only a handful of certificate authorities which did not charge to issue certificates -- the best known being StartSSL -- but if you ever needed to revoke your certificate for some reason there was a fee. In other words, the certificates are only free if nothing ever goes wrong. If something does go wrong and you need to revoke a dozen or more sites, these "free" certificates quickly get expensive.

+

This is one of the first problems that HTTPS proponents set out to solve. The EFF and Mozilla have partnered with some other big names to create Let's Encrypt, which offers free certificates -- yes, really free, no catches and you don't have to provide any identifying information to get one. There's also a set of command line tools that make installing and configuring them pretty simple provided you have some basic sysadmin knowledge (and SSH access to your server).

+

That's not the end of the headache though. Once you have a certificate you have to install it and get your web server to serve it up properly. Again, assuming you have a basic sysadmin's knowledge this isn't too hard, though tweaking it until you get a A+ grade on SSLLab's test can take many hours (and even top sites like Facebook only score a B). I've been running my own website, building my own CMSes and running servers on the web for fifteen years and I can say without hesitation that getting HTTPS working on my site was the hardest thing I've done on the web. It was hard enough that, like Winer, I haven't bothered with old archived sites.

+

Over the long run Let's Encrypt is hoping to partner with popular web hosts in such away that users looking to set up their own blog using popular CMS like WordPress get an HTTPS site up and running as easily as clicking a button. Things will, however, likely never be that simple for anyone who wants to take a more DIY approach, writing their own software.

+

Simplifying the process of setting up HTTPS makes the individual more dependent on tools build by others. Developer Ben Klemens has an essay about exactly this dependency, writing that if "solving the problem consists of just starting a tool up, my sense of wonder has gone from 'Look what I did' to 'Look what these other people did', which is time-efficient but not especially fun."

+

It may seem trivial to developers employed by large companies solving complicated problems that taking the fun out of the web is a problem, but it is. If the web stops being fun for individuals it becomes solely the province of those companies. We are no longer creators of the web, but simple users.

+

Berners-Lee's caution is more immediately practical -- what happens to all those links to HTTP sites when all those sites become HTTPS? The answer is they break. There are quite a few proposals that would mitigate some of this at the browser level. When I asked Mozilla's Barnes about Berners-Lee's concerns he told me, "Tim has been a really useful contrarian voice. His views have driven the browser and web community to address concerns he has raised".

+

To prove that Barnes actually does care about URLs, he's the co-editor of a W3C specification that aims to preserve all those old links and upgrade them to HTTPS. The spec is known as HTST priming and it works with another proposed standard known as Upgrade Insecure Requests to offer the web a kind of upgrade path around the link rot that Berners-Lee fears.

+

With Upgrade Insecure Requests site authors could tell a browser that they intend all resources to be loaded over HTTPS, even if the link is HTTP. This solves the legacy content problem, particularly in cases where the content can't be updated, for example, The New York Times archived sites.

+

Both of these proposals are still very early drafts, but they would, if implemented, provide a way around one of the biggest problems with HTTPS -- breaking links.

+

At least some of the time. Totally abandoned content will never be upgraded to HTTPS, neither will content where the authors, like Winer, elect not to. This isn't a huge problem though because browsers will still happily load the insecure content.

+

What Winer and others fear is that at some point browsers may stop loading HTTP content entirely. For now that's still a ways off, but Mozilla's plans make it clear that it is part of the future of Firefox. Mozilla's FAQ on the subject reads: "Q: Does this mean my unencrypted site will stop working? Not for a long time."

+

While browsers ceasing to load HTTP sites at all is wrong, as Winer puts it "the browser is broken. It has totally the wrong idea of its role."

+

At the same time, as developer and HTTPS proponent Eric Mill writes, "we're deprecating HTTP and it's going to be okay."

+

Why We Should Encrypt All The Things

+

The web needs encryption because the web's visitors need it. The web needs encryption because the network needs it to remain neutral. The web needs encryption because without it just browsing can turn you into an unwitting helper in a DDoS attack.

+

Several years ago I wrote a piece on the then nascent effort to get HTTPS more widely adopted. At the time I wrote "For sites that don't have any reason to encrypt anything... HTTPS just doesn't make sense."

+

That was then. Now I think it does make sense to encrypt everything.

+

In 2011 when I wrote that the network of the web looked fairly benign (as Snowden's leaks revealed, it was not, but most of us had no way to know back then). Since that time the network has become hostile, incredibly hostile.

+

As Mill recently wrote, "I see companies and government asserting themselves over their network. I see a network that is not just overseen, but actively hostile. I see an internet being steadily drained of its promise to "interpret censorship as damage'...In short, I see power moving away from the leafs and devolving back into the center, where power has been used to living for thousands of years."

+

Lack of encryption has created a web that's no longer in the user's control. The web has become a broad surveillance tool for everyone from the NSA to Google to Verizon.

+

As Mill writes, without encryption the network becomes a tool for whoever owns the largest nodes. We the people, the small creators of this thing we call web are not just at the mercy of the network owners, we've the victims of their whims.

+

My personal website does not ask you to log in, it loads no third-party scripts, ad networks or any other code. Yet without encryption I have no way to ensure that some other party isn't inserting code of their own. As Hoffman-Andrews says, anyone could "insert their own ads, their own tracking cookies, they can insert malware and do their own tracking". In other words, I would like to make sure no one is tracking you when you visit my site, and that you see no ads, but I can't. Unless I use HTTPS.

+

Think no one is doing that to your site? Think again. ISPs are and will likely be doing more of this in the future, particularly mobile service providers. Their primary responsibility is to their shareholders and it would negligent of them to not increase profits by increasing tracking.

+

It's worth noting here that this kind of manipulation is very likely at the heart of Google's love of HTTPS. Google did not respond to my inquires for this article, but it's a kind of open secret that ISPs harvest search queries. Without HTTPS it's pretty easy for ISPs to track not just search queries but which results users clicked on, which is vital information for building a better search engine. In other words, info Google would prefer its potential competitors don't get.

+

Winer calls out Google specifically and he's not the only one to do so. Yes, Google is acting in its own best interests and Winer is right to question the motives of a company so massive it has the power to potentially control elections. However, in this case, Google's interests are aligned with the web at large (for now). Google doesn't want that data captured and sold, but remember that data is actually about you. It's your data first and foremost and regardless of what you think about Google gathering it, you certainly don't want it bought and sold by others.

+

The flip side to this is that if your site does serve up ads and you want to make sure that no one is stripping out those ads -- which, with companies like Shine, is starting to happen at the network level -- HTTPS is also your friend.

+

The second and considerably more alarming network attack that's possible without HTTPS is what's become known as Great Cannon. Great Cannon is a very sophisticated attack, for full details see Citizen Lab's write-up, but the short story is that someone hijacked a bit of JavaScript served up by Chinese search giant Baidu and added a payload to it that made frequent requests to a target website. Great Cannon essentially turned unsuspecting browsers into part of DDoS attack.

+

This is what Mill means when he says the network is actively hostile. With Great Cannon it becomes so hostile it turns you, unknowingly, into a DDoS attacker.

+

The only way to stop attacks like Great Cannon, or network tampering like what Verizon and others are doing, is to encrypt your traffic. This is why the web needs HTTPS.

+

Which brings us back to today. HTTPS is becoming more and more common, easier and easier for anyone to get up and running. Where does it go from here?

+

What Happens Next

+

What happens next is that browser vendors are going to start pushing the web to HTTPS by limiting what HTTP sites can do and changing the URL icons from positive feedback to negative feedback. The carrot is being replaced by the stick.

+

The Chromium project has already announced plans to mark HTTP connections as insecure. Mozilla will do roughly the same with Firefox. Both also plan to limit many HTML APIs to HTTPS only, starting with the geo-location APIs, hardware access APIs and anything else that would be a security risk over unsecured connections.

+

The icon change will eventually mean that browsers show nothing at all for secure sites and display a large red X in the URL bar when you visit an HTTP site.

+

It's not difficult to imagine a day and age when browsers treat HTTP sites they way the treat suspected malware sites now and simply not load them. To be clear, that's not happening right now. But it would be foolish to assume that it never will.

+

It's tempting to see this as hostile to publishers -- the message has become fall in line with HTTPS or, as Winer writes, the browsers will "make sure everyone knows you're not to be trusted."

+

However, what the broken lock is really saying is that your browser can't guarantee that the content you're reading hasn't been tampered with. It also can't guarantee that you aren't currently part of a DDoS attack against a site you've never even heard of. It also can't guarantee that you're connected to the site you think you're connected to.

+

All of these things have always been true when you connect to an HTTP site, the only thing that's changing is that your browser is telling you about it. So long as browsers stop there the current plan seems well-suited to bringing more security to the web.

+

Giving users greater secrecy, ensuring data integrity in transit, and providing a means (flawed though it may be) of establishing authenticity empower the user and help make the network decidedly less hostile than it is right now. Abuse will still happen. Surveillance will still be possible but, as Mill notes, attacks will "change from bulk to targeted" and the network can return to being just a dumb pipe.

+

It would an egregious abuse of their place in the web ecosystem for browsers to stop loading HTTP content entirely, but so far that's not happening. If it does, the web should resist it. Warnings help users make informed decisions, prohibitions help no one.

+

The web has always been a messy, complicated thing the last thing it needs now is an artificial binary construct of "good" and "bad" as determined by browser vendors.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/https.txt b/ars-technica/published/https.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..679f5bd --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/https.txt @@ -0,0 +1,175 @@ +Google, Mozilla, the EFF and others are, and have been for some time, pushing for websites to adopt HTTPS. That push is about to get a boost from Mozilla and Google when both companies' web browsers begin to actively call out insecure websites. + +HTTPS has been around nearly as long as the web, but it's primarily used by sites that handle money -- your bank's website, shopping carts, social networks and webmail services like Gmail. The extra "S" in an HTTPS URL means your connection is secure and it's much harder for anyone else to see what you're doing. + +On today's web everyone wants to see what you're doing. And as long as you're using HTTP, they can. + +Changing the web over to HTTPS will not get rid of tracking cookies, nor will it stop nation states with the resources to launch hardware-based attacks. + +HTTPS will, however, stop some of the mass surveillance that currently happens on the web. It will stop your ISP from injecting code to track you, it will stop unknown parties from using your browser to launch DDoS attacks as you browse and it stops ISP and nation states from censoring specific pages they don't like. + +Moving the bulk of the web from HTTP, which is an unencrypted connection that anyone can intercept, record and even manipulate, to HTTPS, which is encrypted and (reasonably) secure, is a big win for the web, which is to say it's a win for the users of the web. + +This is important to bear in mind because it's also a win for some big companies that like to tout that it's a win for the web without mentioning that it also protects their bottom line. More on that in a minute. + +Changing the web to HTTPS is not, however, entirely without costs and challenges for both web users and website owners. + +The question is, do the benefits justify the costs? To answer that we have to first look at what HTTPS gets us and what it costs. + +## What HTTPS Does For You + +Any secure protocol offers three things to the user: secrecy, integrity and authenticity. In the case of HTTPS the first two come from encryption. The major benefit of HTTPS is encryption. It provides authenticity as well, but currently authenticity is its weak point. + +As the EFF's Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, lead developer on Let's Encrypt, tells Ars, encryption is a "necessary minimum bar" for today's web. "if we were designing the internet from scratch today," he says, "we would say encryption is cheap and easy, there's no export [restrictions anymore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip), so it will be default and you won't have to worry about it." + +When your browser connects to a website over HTTPS the connection from your browser to the page you want to view is encrypted. That means any data exchanged is not visible to anyone else snooping the network. Without the encryption it's easy to perform what's known as a man in the middle attack. + +A simplified way to think about this is to think about the connection you made to get this page. When your browser requests http://arstechnica.com it sends that request out to the Ars server which then sends the requested page back as a stream of packets that your browser assembles into the page you requested. + +Both the request and the response are just plain text bit of data. All a man in the middle attack does is step into that stream of data and start reading and manipulating it. If your ISP wanted to add an advertisement to this page that requires you to click on it before reading the story, it could do that by just injecting a few packets of its own. You would have no way of knowing whether that ad came from Ars or some other source. Anyone could in fact do just about anything to the data traveling between the Ars server and your browser, including serving up an entirely different page or not showing the page at all. + +This is not a theoretical problem, the man in the middle code injection is an active, widely used attack. In some cases it's even a business model. + +The list of examples here is too long to cover in such a short space, but there are a few that deserve mention. The first is Verizon Wireless's so called Perma-Cookie. Verizon Wireless modifies traffic on its network to inject a tracker (it added an HTTP header called X-UIDH) that is then sent to all unencrypted sites that Verizon customers visit. This allows Verizon to, in the [words of the EFF](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh), "assemble a deep, permanent profile of visitors' web browsing habits without their consent". + +Verizon is not alone. It's a safe bet that your ISP is doing something similar. Comcast's wifi service [already does](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/09/why-comcasts-javascript-ad-injections-threaten-security-net-neutrality/), as does [AT&T's](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/atts-plan-to-watch-your-web-browsing-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/3/) (you can opt out, for a fee). What your ISP does with this data is less well known, but it's a big part of why Google wants the web to move to HTTPS. + +When you communicate in plain text over the network you have to assume that someone is, at the very least watching and very probably injecting some tracking code to record your requests. + +An encrypted connection on the other hand is not plain text anyone can read, it's encrypted text. There is no way to read or manipulate cypher text without the encryption keys. Score one for HTTPS, which can guarantee that you are getting the content your browser requested. + +HTTPS also prevents the kind of censorship that happens at the state or ISP level. Examples of this abound as well, for example, Russia wanted to ban a Wikipedia article (about [charas hashish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charas)), but because Wikipedia is served over HTTPS there's no way to see which page visitors are requesting. Russia was faced with the choice: ban all of Wikipedia or none. It [opted for none](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/08/russias-wikipedia-ban-buckles-under-https-encryption). + +Score another one for HTTPS, because as it turns out unencrypted networks do not, as early web enthusiasts liked to say, "see censorship as damage and route around it". In fact unencrypted networks make censorship very easy, just reach in and block what you want, change what you want. But with HTTPS the network doesn't actually see anything and that's a good thing. + +Having an HTTPS connection offers one other thing that benefits users -- authentication. + +Knowing that no one else on the network can read or tamper with your traffic is good, that gets you secrecy and integrity. But you also want to verify that the site you're visiting is actually the site you want to visit. + +To authenticate your connection to the site you're trying to visit your browser maintains a list of known, trusted certificate authorities. When your browser requests a secure page it gets the page's security certificate, which contains a chain that leads back to a certificate authority. If that authority matches an authority known to your browser then your browser will trust that the site you're connecting to is who it claims to be. If that sounds a bit weak to you, you're not alone. This is currently, the biggest problem with HTTPS. + +Behind the scenes what handles all the encryption and authentication is a bit of technology known as TLS, which is short for Transport Layer Security. In fact the full name of HTTPS is really HTTP over TLS. TLS is the successor to the now vulnerable Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), though to further complicate things you will often hear both referred to as "SSL". In the context of this article, HTTPS will refer to TLS connections. + +TLS is made up of two layers, the TLS Record Protocol and the TLS Handshake Protocol. Together these two tools allow your web browser to securely connect to a validated site and encrypt all your communications thereafter. + +Now that you know what HTTPS offers -- encryption and authentication -- it should hopefully be easy to see why your bank uses it, why Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and any other site you log in to uses it, or should (if you log in into to site without HTTPS, stop visiting that site). + +What's less immediately obvious is why *every* site on the web can benefit from HTTPS. How does HTTPS help some long archived, no longer maintained bit of ephemera from the early web? + +The answer is in many cases is it doesn't help. It does not benefit the site or its creator directly in many tangible ways. + +It does, however, benefit the user connecting to the site, since they now know that what they see is actually data they requested from the site they wanted to visit (integrity and authenticity). + +There's another beneficiary as well -- the network as a whole, and by extension, all of us using it. + +Still, while there are clear benefits to HTTPS, it is not entirely without costs. + +## What HTTPS Costs + +There has been some push back against the effort to push the web to all HTTPS, all the time. Most of the critics are worried about all the content out there that will never be ported to HTTPS -- what happens to it? Will HTTPS cost us the entirety of the early internet? + +Read through Mozilla's bug report on the subject and you'll find quite a few people talking about this content as if it were somehow tainted. "It's time we start treating insecure connections as a Bug," writes one Mozilla developer on a bug report entitled "Switch generic icon to negative feedback for non-https sites." Mozilla is a big company, with many different voices, but even Mozilla's Richard Barnes, who is one of the main proponents of HTTPS (and editor of several specs at the W3C related to it), told me "to be completely frank, I don't care about URLs I care about secure connections." + +The URLs Barnes is referring to is part of the debate surrounding HTTP vs HTTPS -- is HTTPS the answer or is there a way to upgrade HTTP? In the end though Barnes just wants to make sure that the web is secure and he's not alone. The Chromium project has similar bug threads and outspoken HTTPS proponents. + +Fortunately for us the web is not Mozilla's, not Google's, not even the W3C's. The web belongs to everyone who uses it and creates things for it. + +Software developer and blogger Dave Winer [calls HTTPS](http://scripting.com/liveblog/users/davewiner/2015/12/18/0667.html) "expensive security theater". Winer writes, "I have a couple dozen sites that are just archives of projects that were completed a long time ago. I'm one person. I don't need make-work projects, I like to create new stuff, I don't need to make Google or Mozilla or the EFF or Nieman Lab happy." + +Winer is not alone. In fact he's in very good company, no less than Tim Berners-Lee has [questioned the move to HTTPS](https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Security-NotTheS.html), going so far as to call it "arguably a greater threat to the integrity for the web than anything else in its history". Berners-Lee does think the web should be encrypted, he just doesn't like the way it's currently being done. Berners-Lee would like to see HTTP upgraded rather than shifting to the HTTPS protocol. + +There are two massive costs to HTTPS that have to be borne by users. + +The first is the one Winer is concerned about -- HTTPS adds significant complications to the process of setting up a website. The second is the one Berners-Lee is concerned about, we risk breaking links, billions of links. + +It's easy for savvy developers to dismiss the first problem, that HTTPS adds considerable complexity. But what makes the web great is that you don't have to be a savvy developer to be a part of it. Anyone with a few dollars a month to spare can rent their own server space somewhere, throw some HTML files in a folder and publish their thoughts on the web. A few dollars more gets you an nice URL, but that's not strictly necessary. + +Requiring sites to include a security certificate adds a significant barrier to entry to the web. + +Anyone who has put in the effort to get HTTPS working on even one site knows that it can be a tremendous hassle. Indeed this is probably the biggest obstacle to widespread HTTPS adoption among small site operators (that is, the bulk of the web). + +Perhaps the most difficult part is actually obtaining a certificate, which, until very recently, was neither easy nor free. + +Until the last six months there were only a handful of certificate authorities which did not charge to issue certificates -- the best known being StartSSL -- but if you ever needed to revoke your certificate for some reason there was a fee. In other words, the certificates are only free if nothing ever goes wrong. If something does go wrong and you need to revoke a dozen or more sites, these "free" certificates quickly get expensive. + +This is one of the first problems that HTTPS proponents set out to solve. The EFF and Mozilla have partnered with some other big names to create Let's Encrypt, which offers free certificates -- yes, really free, no catches and you don't have to provide any identifying information to get one. There's also a set of command line tools that make installing and configuring them pretty simple provided you have some basic sysadmin knowledge (and SSH access to your server). + +That's not the end of the headache though. Once you have a certificate you have to install it and get your web server to serve it up properly. Again, assuming you have a basic sysadmin's knowledge this isn't too hard, though tweaking it until you get a A+ grade on [SSLLab's test](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/) can take many hours (and even top sites like [Facebook only score a B](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=facebook.com)). I've been running my own website, building my own CMSes and running servers on the web for fifteen years and I can say without hesitation that getting HTTPS working on my site was the hardest thing I've done on the web. It was hard enough that, like Winer, I haven't bothered with old archived sites. + +Over the long run Let's Encrypt is hoping to partner with popular web hosts in such away that users looking to set up their own blog using popular CMS like WordPress get an HTTPS site up and running as easily as clicking a button. Things will, however, likely never be that simple for anyone who wants to take a more DIY approach, writing their own software. + +Simplifying the process of setting up HTTPS makes the individual more dependent on tools build by others. Developer Ben Klemens has an [essay](https://medium.com/@b_k/https-the-end-of-an-era-c106acded474#.orxikg4xp) about exactly this dependency, writing that if "solving the problem consists of just starting a tool up, my sense of wonder has gone from 'Look what I did' to 'Look what these other people did', which is time-efficient but not especially fun." + +It may seem trivial to developers employed by large companies solving complicated problems that taking the fun out of the web is a problem, but it is. If the web stops being fun for individuals it becomes solely the province of those companies. We are no longer creators of the web, but simple users. + +Berners-Lee's caution is more immediately practical -- what happens to all those links to HTTP sites when all those sites become HTTPS? The answer is they break. There are quite a few proposals that would mitigate some of this at the browser level. When I asked Mozilla's Barnes about Berners-Lee's concerns he told me, "Tim has been a really useful contrarian voice. His views have driven the browser and web community to address concerns he has raised". + +To prove that Barnes actually does care about URLs, he's the co-editor of a W3C specification that aims to preserve all those old links and upgrade them to HTTPS. The spec is known as [HTST priming](https://mikewest.github.io/hsts-priming/) and it works with another proposed standard known as [Upgrade Insecure Requests](https://www.w3.org/TR/upgrade-insecure-requests/) to offer the web a kind of upgrade path around the link rot that Berners-Lee fears. + +With Upgrade Insecure Requests site authors could tell a browser that they intend all resources to be loaded over HTTPS, even if the link is HTTP. This solves the legacy content problem, particularly in cases where the content can't be updated, for example, The New York Times [archived sites](http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/embracing-https/). + +Both of these proposals are still very early drafts, but they would, if implemented, provide a way around one of the biggest problems with HTTPS -- breaking links. + +At least some of the time. Totally abandoned content will never be upgraded to HTTPS, neither will content where the authors, like Winer, elect not to. This isn't a huge problem though because browsers will still happily load the insecure content. + +What Winer and others fear is that at some point browsers may stop loading HTTP content entirely. For now that's still a ways off, but Mozilla's plans make it clear that it is part of the future of Firefox. Mozilla's [FAQ](https://blog.mozilla.org/security/files/2015/05/HTTPS-FAQ.pdf) on the subject reads: "Q: Does this mean my unencrypted site will stop working? Not for a long time." + +While browsers ceasing to load HTTP sites at all is wrong, as Winer puts it "the browser is broken. It has totally the wrong idea of its role." + +At the same time, as developer and HTTPS proponent Eric Mill [writes](https://konklone.com/post/were-deprecating-http-and-its-going-to-be-okay), "we're deprecating HTTP and it's going to be okay." + +## Why We Should Encrypt All The Things + +The web needs encryption because the web's visitors need it. The web needs encryption because the network needs it to remain neutral. The web needs encryption because without it just browsing can turn you into an unwitting helper in a DDoS attack. + +Several years ago I wrote a piece on the then nascent effort to get HTTPS more widely adopted. At the time I [wrote](http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/03/https-is-more-secure-so-why-isnt-the-web-using-it/) "For sites that don't have any reason to encrypt anything... HTTPS just doesn't make sense." + +That was then. Now I think it does make sense to encrypt everything. + +In 2011 when I wrote that the network of the web looked fairly benign (as Snowden's leaks revealed, it was not, but most of us had no way to know back then). Since that time the network has become hostile, incredibly hostile. + +As Mill recently wrote, "I see companies and government asserting themselves over their network. I see a network that is not just overseen, but actively hostile. I see an internet being steadily drained of its promise to "interpret censorship as damage'...In short, I see power moving away from the leafs and devolving back into the center, where power has been used to living for thousands of years." + +Lack of encryption has created a web that's no longer in the user's control. The web has become a broad surveillance tool for everyone from the NSA to Google to Verizon. + +As Mill writes, without encryption the network becomes a tool for whoever owns the largest nodes. We the people, the small creators of this thing we call web are not just at the mercy of the network owners, we've the victims of their whims. + +My personal website does not ask you to log in, it loads no third-party scripts, ad networks or any other code. Yet without encryption I have no way to ensure that some other party isn't inserting code of their own. As Hoffman-Andrews says, anyone could "insert their own ads, their own tracking cookies, they can insert malware and do their own tracking". In other words, I would like to make sure no one is tracking you when you visit my site, and that you see no ads, but I can't. Unless I use HTTPS. + +Think no one is doing that to your site? Think again. ISPs are and will likely be doing more of this in the future, particularly mobile service providers. Their primary responsibility is to their shareholders and it would negligent of them to not increase profits by increasing tracking. + +It's worth noting here that this kind of manipulation is very likely at the heart of Google's love of HTTPS. Google did not respond to my inquires for this article, but it's a kind of open secret that ISPs harvest search queries. Without HTTPS it's pretty easy for ISPs to track not just search queries but which results users clicked on, which is vital information for building a better search engine. In other words, info Google would prefer its potential competitors don't get. + +Winer calls out Google specifically and he's not the only one to do so. Yes, Google is acting in its own best interests and Winer is right to question the motives of a company so massive it has the power to [potentially control elections](https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts). However, in this case, Google's interests are aligned with the web at large (for now). Google doesn't want that data captured and sold, but remember that data is actually about you. It's your data first and foremost and regardless of what you think about Google gathering it, you certainly don't want it bought and sold by others. + +The flip side to this is that if your site does serve up ads and you want to make sure that no one is stripping out those ads -- which, with companies like [Shine](https://www.getshine.com/), is starting to happen at the network level -- HTTPS is also your friend. + +The second and considerably more alarming network attack that's possible without HTTPS is what's become known as [Great Cannon](http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/meet-great-cannon-the-man-in-the-middle-weapon-china-used-on-github/). Great Cannon is a very sophisticated attack, for full details see Citizen Lab's [write-up](https://citizenlab.org/2015/04/chinas-great-cannon/), but the short story is that someone hijacked a bit of JavaScript served up by Chinese search giant Baidu and added a payload to it that made frequent requests to a target website. Great Cannon essentially turned unsuspecting browsers into part of DDoS attack. + +This is what Mill means when he says the network is actively hostile. With Great Cannon it becomes so hostile it turns you, unknowingly, into a DDoS attacker. + +The only way to stop attacks like Great Cannon, or network tampering like what Verizon and others are doing, is to encrypt your traffic. This is why the web needs HTTPS. + +Which brings us back to today. HTTPS is becoming more and more common, easier and easier for anyone to get up and running. Where does it go from here? + +## What Happens Next + +What happens next is that browser vendors are going to start pushing the web to HTTPS by limiting what HTTP sites can do and changing the URL icons from positive feedback to negative feedback. The carrot is being replaced by the stick. + +The Chromium project has already announced plans to [mark HTTP connections as insecure](https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/marking-http-as-non-secure). Mozilla will do [roughly the same](https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2015/04/30/deprecating-non-secure-http/) with Firefox. Both also plan to limit many HTML APIs to HTTPS only, starting with the geo-location APIs, hardware access APIs and anything else that would be a security risk over unsecured connections. + +The icon change will eventually mean that browsers show nothing at all for secure sites and display a large red X in the URL bar when you visit an HTTP site. + +It's not difficult to imagine a day and age when browsers treat HTTP sites they way the treat suspected malware sites now and simply not load them. To be clear, that's not happening right now. But it would be foolish to assume that it never will. + +It's tempting to see this as hostile to publishers -- the message has become fall in line with HTTPS or, as Winer writes, the browsers will "make sure everyone knows you're not to be trusted." + +However, what the broken lock is really saying is that your browser can't guarantee that the content you're reading hasn't been tampered with. It also can't guarantee that you aren't currently part of a DDoS attack against a site you've never even heard of. It also can't guarantee that you're connected to the site you think you're connected to. + +All of these things have always been true when you connect to an HTTP site, the only thing that's changing is that your browser is telling you about it. So long as browsers stop there the current plan seems well-suited to bringing more security to the web. + +Giving users greater secrecy, ensuring data integrity in transit, and providing a means (flawed though it may be) of establishing authenticity empower the user and help make the network decidedly less hostile than it is right now. Abuse will still happen. Surveillance will still be possible but, as Mill notes, attacks will "change from bulk to targeted" and the network can return to being just a dumb pipe. + +It would an egregious abuse of their place in the web ecosystem for browsers to stop loading HTTP content entirely, but so far that's not happening. If it does, the web should resist it. Warnings help users make informed decisions, prohibitions help no one. + +The web has always been a messy, complicated thing the last thing it needs now is an artificial binary construct of "good" and "bad" as determined by browser vendors. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/interview-eric-mill-notes.txt b/ars-technica/published/interview-eric-mill-notes.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..435d4e8 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/interview-eric-mill-notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +The major players and what they want: + +Google - wants to stop ISPs from tracking search results and selling the results to competitors. HTTPS prevents verizon et al from recording the search results and then also recording which results gets clicked and then sells that to Yahoo Bing and whomever else wants it. + +EFF - Seems to want to help everyone, but has a heavy focus on dissidents whistle blowers and the like. + +Mozilla - wants to do good things, but also needs to follow Google's lead or risk slipping further into irrelevance. + +""" +When I look at all these things, I see companies and government asserting themselves over their network. I see a network that is not just overseen, but actively hostile. I see an internet being steadily drained of its promise to "interpret censorship as damage". + +In short, I see power moving away from the leafs and devolving back into the center, where power has been used to living for thousands of years. + +What animates me is knowing that we can actually change this dynamic by making strong encryption ubiquitous. We can force online surveillance to be as narrowly targeted and inconvenient as law enforcement was always meant to be. We can force ISPs to be the neutral commodity pipes they were always meant to be. On the web, that means HTTPS. + +""" - https://konklone.com/post/were-deprecating-http-and-its-going-to-be-okay + +That sucks for everybody. I also don't want my metadata sold. The network should be just a dumb pipe, what information is being shared should between. + +When things are invisible like that -- companies making deals to resell data -- it's not really reassuring it's not how the network was supposed to operate. + +The internet is this great thing, + +HTTPS is fundamentally an end-to-end protocol, makes attacks + +HTTPS moves attacks from bulk to targeted. + +You put the power back in the hands of the publishers, the site that's operating the content. + +You can't modify information on a per-page basis. + +the only reason that people would like to get to the point + +The reason the barrier is getting lower is because of pressure to make the web move [to HTTPS]. + +If we want to change the ecosystem and make it easier for individual bloggers + + diff --git a/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot-gnome.png b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot-gnome.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b8922d8 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot-gnome.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot-unity.png b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot-unity.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..39051c5 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot-unity.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot01.png b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot01.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2b36c5b Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot01.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot02.png b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot02.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..caa16ca Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot02.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot03.png b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot03.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..795a8db Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot03.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot04.png b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot04.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..29a3413 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot04.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot05.png b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot05.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..94c183c Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot05.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot06.png b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot06.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f27037c Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot06.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot07.png b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot07.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1cd1238 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot07.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot08.png b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot08.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..66591c7 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot08.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot09.png b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot09.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..03ed860 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot09.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot10.png b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot10.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2c55387 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot10.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot11.png b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot11.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2741c27 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot11.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot12.png b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot12.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fb53481 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/kde5review/screenshot12.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/kdeplasma5.txt b/ars-technica/published/kdeplasma5.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4929ed1 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/kdeplasma5.txt @@ -0,0 +1,178 @@ +The KDE project has release KDE Plasma 5, a major new version of the venerable K Desktop Environment. + +Plasma 5 arrives in the middle of an ongoing debate about the future of the Linux desktop. + +On one hand there are the brand new desktop paradigms represented by GNOME and Unity. Both break from the traditional desktop model in significant ways. Both also attempt to create interfaces that will work on the desktop and the much anticipated tablet-based future (which [may or may not ever arrive](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/08/op-ed-tables-really-are-pcsbecause-theres-no-point-in-buying-new-ones/)). + +Linux desktops like KDE, XFCE, LXDE, Mate and even Cinnamon are the other side of the fence. None have re-invented themselves too much and continue to offer users a traditional desktop experience. Which is not to say these projects aren't growing and refining. All of them continue to turn out incremental releases that fine tune what is a well-proven desktop model. + +[image="screenshot-unity.png" caption="Ubuntu's Unity desktop."] + +[image="screenshot-gnome.png" caption="GNOME 3 desktop."] + +GNOME and Unity end up getting the lion's share of attention in this debate though. They're both new and different. They're both opinionated and polarizing. For every Linux user that loves them there's another that loves to hate them, which makes for, if nothing else, lively comments and forum posts in the Linux world. But the difference between these two camps is about more than just how your desktop looks and behaves. It's about what the future of computing looks like. + +GNOME and Unity believe that the future of computing consists of multiple devices all running the same software. The new desktop paradigm both have created really only make sense in this context. Neither are really building desktops for the future, but include a hybrid desktop fallback mode for now and appear to believe that the real future is in devices. The other side of the schism largely seems to ignore devices. + +This split, with these radical new attempts at what a desktop should look like and how it should behave on one hand, and the more traditional setups on the other, amounts to a distributed discussion about what the future of computing looks like. + +Unlike the world of closed source OSes, where changes are handed down, like them or leave them, the Linux world is in the middle of a conversation about these ideas. + +That said, it can be frustrating as a user. The last thing you need when you're trying to get work done is an update that completely changes your desktop, forcing you to learn new ways of working. Even the best case scenario, moving to another desktop when your old favorite suddenly veers off in a new direction, usually means jettisoning years of muscle memory and familiarity. + +There's a simple way to navigate this mess and find the right desktop for you. Here it is in a nutshell: do you want to bend your will to your desktop or do you want to bend your desktop to your will? + +If you fall in the first camp and don't mind learning new ways of working then Unity and GNOME 3 will be your best bet. If you fall in the latter camp, XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate and a host of others will all likely prove a good fit. If you want to go non-traditional in the opposite direction from GNOME 3 and Unity, there's always Xmonad, Ratpoison and others that very few Linux users will ever try (a shame, since Xmonad may be the best thing in Linux since Linus said, uh, hey, here's a kernel for your GNU system). + +[image="screenshot01.png" caption="KDE Plasma 5's new boot screen"] + +But what if you fall somewhere in the middle? You like the traditional desktop experience and you're not ready to give up your menu and shortcuts for HUDs and other new tools. At the same time, you're curious about tablets and other form factors and you want something that will work across them all. You, my hypothetical friend, are an excellent candidate for the brand new KDE Plasma 5. + +KDE is attempting to do something no other desktop in Linux has tried to date -- move toward the tablet and mobile device future while still producing a desktop experience that's familiar, functional and infinitely customizable. + +## KDE Plasma 5 and the World of "Convergence" + +KDE users who made it through the transition from KDE 3.5 to 4 likely still flinch at the mention of a major upgrade to any part of KDE, but there's good news for KDE fans in Plasma 5 -- this is a major update yes, but with a handful of exceptions (which I'll get into in a minute) you'd never know it. + +It turns out that the incredibly bumpy move to KDE 4 really did lay the groundwork for a better future. And we are now in that future. + +With this update KDE is laying the groundwork for the future again, but in a less disruptive way. This time the future means a move to tablets and other form factors. Fear not though, KDE seems poised to do what GNOME and Unity could not -- branch out to other form factors without abandoning the traditional desktop. + +[image="screenshot02.png" caption="The KDE Plasma 5 desktop"] + +KDE has, in other words, resisted the urge to mess with the tried and true just because there's something new on the horizon. + +You'd be forgiven for not remembering this, but the whole convergence thing that Canonical goes on about with each new Unity update? KDE started using the word "convergence" way back when Canonical was still running user tests to determine the optimal shade of brown for GNOME 2 menus. + +And behold, with KDE Frameworks 5, Qt5 and some other updates to the plumbing that come along with Plasma 5, KDE's version of convergence is here. You may not notice it though; it's under the hood where it belongs. + +You also probably won't notice it because while the components are there to allow the KDE project and its developers to build different interfaces, the Plasma 5 desktop is, thus far, the only interface. But the frameworks and developer tools needed are there now. KDE calls these new frameworks the "converged Plasma shell", which is what loads up the desktop in Plasma 5. + +KDE plans to build out other interfaces, and the [official release announcement](http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0/) for Plasma 5 says that "a tablet-centric and media center user experience are under development." + +KDE's vision of convergence is not unlike what Ubuntu envisions in that the user interface will change based on the device and hardware. For example, you might have the "tablet-centric" interface that's in the works running while you're reading the web on the couch. But get up, walk back to your office, connect to your wireless keyboard and the interface would shift to something more keyboard friendly. + +This scenario has some potential problems, some of which Windows 8 users are likely already familiar with. For example, what will happen when a keyboard is plugged in, but you still want to interact with the screen via touch? What happens if you plug in a mouse, but still want to scroll with your fingers? + +I mention these small points not to say that KDE hasn't thought them through -- I hope they have -- but because this idea of "convergence" of adaptive user interfaces will be very difficult to get right. One thing KDE has long had that gives me hope for the project's ability to pull off this vision of computing is limitless configurability. + +My hope for KDE on a tablet is that I would be able to configure every last detail of the experience. That there would be a way for me to determine what *I* want to happen when a keyboard is detected rather than letting the OS determine for me. + +## The Plasma 5 Desktop + +KDE Plasma 5 is KDE 4 evolved rather than any kind of revolutionary new interface. + +I've been using this release -- still not completely stable in my testing, though most of the glitches have been graphical, not data threatening -- for over a month now in virtual machines, dual booting on a Retina MacBook Pro and, to see how well it holds up on older hardware, an aging, underpowered Toshiba laptop. I've tested it using Kubuntu (virtual machine and the Toshiba) and atop a fresh install of Arch Linux (dual boot MacBook). + +If you'd like to try out Plasma 5, the simplest way is to grab the [Neon live CD available from KDE](http://files.kde.org/snapshots/neon5-latest.iso.mirrorlist). That will get you Plasma with Ubuntu under the hood. If you want to commit and test it on an existing Kubuntu install, here's the commands for that: + +

+sudo add-apt-repository ppa:neon/kf5
+sudo apt-get update
+sudo apt-get install project-neon5-session project-neon5-utils project-neon5-konsole project-neon5-breeze project-neon5-plasma-workspace-wallpapers
+
+ +Restart your machine and you should see a new option at the login screen offering to start up a Neon session. + +Once you have Plasma 5 up and running, the first thing you'll notice is the new default KDE theme, known as Breeze. + +## Plasma 5's Breezy New Look + +Breeze is what KDE refers to as a modernized interface, with "reduced visual clutter throughout the workspace." Indeed, the busy, somewhat cluttered feel that has long been a part of the default KDE look is gone. + +[image="screenshot03.png" caption="The KDE Plasma 5 desktop's Breeze theme is most complete in the Kickoff menu. Note the type to search message."] + +The entire interface has been flattened out, with bigger fonts, better contrast and a sort of flat, "frosted" look that's somewhere between OS X Yosemite, Android L and KDE 4.x. That's not to say KDE ripped off Apple or Google. They couldn't have since Plasma 5 and the Breeze theme were well on their way before Apple revealed Yosemite or Google announced Android L. + +Still, while it would be incorrect to say KDE has ripped anyone off, Breeze's visual design and overall aesthetic are very much a product of its time. In that sense it looks "modern", so long as you define modern to mean lots of strong type, few textures or outlines, lots of translucency and monochrome iconography. + +KDE's designers have put a lot of work into Breeze and it shows. This isn't just a new coat of paint. Breeze makes KDE more approachable out of the box with cleaned up menus, a less cluttered notification center and a revamped Kickoff start menu. + +[image="screenshot04.png" caption="A cleaner, less nagging notification center"] + +How much Breeze matters depends on whether or not you'll ever even use it. KDE tends to attract users that like customizing their systems which, presumably, includes customizing the theme. One thing to look forward to is what distros that heavily customize the default KDE theme -- notably OpenSUSE -- will do now that Breeze provides a somewhat higher starting bar. + +For now at least most distros will probably not jump on Breeze since it is very much a work in progress. Indeed, Breeze is where you'll also notice some of the first signs of incompleteness in Plasma 5. While the Kickoff menu has some nice new icons, most of the rest of the interface does not. And as of the latest updates available in the Kubuntu ppa, Breeze does not use its new Window Decorations. The Window Decorations are installed, but they aren't turned on by default. You can head to the System Settings app and turn them on for a more complete, though possibly buggier, Breeze experience. + +[image="screenshot05.png" caption="Top is the default Oxygen Window Decorations, bottom the new Breeze theme."] + +Not everything is ideal and sometimes it's hard to tell what's a bug or incomplete feature and what is just poorly designed. For example, there's quite a bit of window and overlay translucency in Breeze, some of which looks nice, but at other times it gets in the way. Stacked windows and preview overlays bleed into what's behind them and become hard to read in the background. Pulling them to the foreground solves the problem, but it's hard to say what the value of the transparency is in this case. + +[image="screenshot06.png" caption="Transparency... why?"] + +So yes, Breeze is still a work in progress, and not just in terms of features and design, but also in terms of genuine bugs and glitches. I have encountered some unexpected behavior, particularly with regard to screen redraws, which happen frequently and slow enough to notice them. Windows disappear at times, the menu bar occasionally only draws half of itself. + +Plasma 5 has never crashed on me, nor has it lost any data, but little visual glitches abound and I would suggest waiting for things to stabilize and the distro of your choice to integrate it before you jump in with both feet. + +## Plasma Menus Go Vertical + +Breeze gives Plasma 5 a new look, but there are also a number of changes in behavior. For example, both the widget explorer and the alt-tab window switcher are now vertically oriented and located in the same place by default -- the far left side of the screen. + +[image="screenshot07.png" caption="The default look for the alt-tab switcher menu."] + + +While that consistency is probably good for KDE newcomers, who will learn to expect that various stuff will appear to the left of the screen, it can be a little frustrating for long-time users expecting something else. And some of these changes seem somewhat arbitrary. + +[image="screenshot08.png" caption="The widget explorer menu"] + +The KDE project claims the shift to vertical instead of horizontal lists in things like the widget explorer and window switcher, "provide better usability," but stop short of saying how exactly. The release docs also claim that moving the window switcher to the side of the screen "shifts the user's focus towards the applications and documents, clearing the stage for the task at hand". But if you only call up the window switcher when you're, ahem, switching windows, then it seems more likely that the user is between tasks rather than involved in one. + +[image="screenshot09.png" caption="KDE still loves offering options. Notice the dark gray bar to the right, that's an artifact (glitch) from dragging the window."] + +This is KDE though, not Unity, infinite customization is a feature not a bug. A trip to the System Settings will get your old style window switcher back, indeed there are some 10 different visual possibilities for the window switcher in Plasma 5. If the default is not to your liking, customize away. + +## So Long Nepomuk and Thanks for All the Spinning Fans + +If you're a heavy user of KDE's sometimes awesome, sometimes not, search features, this may be the biggest news in Plasma 5. + +It's true, KDE has ditched Nepomuk in favor of a new search engine known as Baloo. + +Nepomuk, which started life as an EU-funded metadata search project with the lofty sounding goal of creating a "Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge". By the time it trickled down to the KDE project, Nepomuk became a somewhat more mundane desktop search tool that alternated between brilliant and maddening. + +[image="screenshot10.png" caption="Searching for files in Plasma 5"] + +Baloo takes much of what made Nepomuk great -- namely full text file search and an uncanny ability to pick up on relationships between files, for example, knowing that particular document is related to a contact -- and [improves it](https://dot.kde.org/2014/02/24/kdes-next-generation-semantic-search). Actually use the search features in Plasma 5 and you'll notice two things right off the bat -- it's faster and your fan doesn't go haywire every time something new is indexed. + +Baloo significantly reduces the resource footprint of searching and, according to KDE, is more accurate. I can't vouch for the latter since I never used search much in older versions of KDE (see fan spinning comments), but in terms of accuracy, simple files searches in Plasma 5 are on par with what you'll find in Ubuntu, OS X and elsewhere. The success of more complex searches involving relationships or complex metadata will vary depending on how much you use the default KDE apps. For example, you need to use the Kontact Suite if you want to take advantage of Baloo-based searches involving relationships between contacts and files. + +That will likely change as time goes on though because another big change from Nepomuk is the new, improved developer API. The API for searching means third-party apps can tie in Plasma 5's Semantic Search infrastructure and take advantage of the same tools the default apps use. + +Curiously, for something that's seen as much work as Baloo has, the visibility and discoverability of the search feature has taken a step backward. Fire up Plasma 5's Kickoff menu -- KDE's answer to the Windows Start menu -- and search is nowhere to be found. If you look closely you'll see a tiny little reminder to "type to search", which is step up from the first release, which had no indication that you could search, but still isn't as discoverable as a dedicated search box. + +## Kickoff and its new Cousin, Kicker + +KDE's answer to the Windows Start button has always been overkill in my view, packing too much in too little space, but with Breeze the menu has been cleaned up a bit and feels less visually overwhelming. + +[image="screenshot11.png" caption="The Kickoff menu in the default theme."] + +If it's still a bit too much for your needs, Plasma 5 offers a new, more traditional menu-based launcher called Kicker. Kicker does less -- it's much closer to the Start menu in XP, a single, narrower pane that offers expanding menus where needed -- and makes a lightweight alternative if all you want to do is launch applications and files. It also has a very obvious search box. + +[image="screenshot12.png" caption="The new Kicker menu option"] + +The other side of the menu bar has been revamped and cleaned up bit as well. The most notable change is the notification app, which seems to kick up fewer notifications and does a better job of displaying them and quickly getting them out of the way. + +## OpenGL, QtQuick and HiDPI Screens + +Plasma 5 finishes up KDE's migration to Qt 5 and QtQuick, the latter of which uses a hardware-accelerated OpenGL scenegraph to render graphics. Most of what's new with OpenGL pertains to offloading graphics to any available GPU. That means, provided you've got the hardware for it, Plasma 5 can take full advantage of today's powerful GPUs. + +Indeed on newish hardware (my MacBook's NVIDIA GeForce GT graphics card, for example) Plasma 5 is snappy, considerably snappier than its predecessor. Perhaps even more impressive, take away whatever GPU advantage Plasma 5 might gain over KDE 4.x systems and it still feels faster. That is, while running on older hardware still isn't KDE's strong point, but the story is better than it used to be. Still, if you're looking to get some extra mileage out of older hardware, stick with Xfce, LXDE or something even simpler like Openbox. + +Interestingly, the revamped Frameworks that make up Plasma 5's graphics stack also pave the way for KDE to switch to the Wayland display server protocol. KDE doesn't seem to be in a hurry to make the switch to Wayland though, noting only that full support will be available in "a future release". + +This release also claims improved support for HDPI displays. But, as with the HDPI support in GNOME and Unity, the actual experience is a very mixed bag. Font rendering in particular is nowhere near as smooth as what OS X offers. Even installing and fiddling with Infinality has never produced satisfactory results for me. I'm still not sure if the problem is in my setup and I'm not in fact seeing the new HDPI features. Or, if possibly the KDE project and I just have very different definitions of what constitutes HDPI support. Hopefully it's the former. + +## What's Missing + +Earlier in this review I said that the transition from KDE 4 to the Plasma 5 desktop would not be as bumpy as the move from KDE 3.x to 4.x. For the most part that's true, but for some people there may be exceptions. + +The KDE project says the focus for this release has been "concentrated on tools that make up the central workflows" and notes that "not all features from the Plasma 4.x series are available yet." That might ring a bell for those who made it through the KDE 3 to 4 transition. + +In my testing I didn't run across any noticeable gaps in functionality or obvious missing features, save what I've mentioned -- the incomplete Breeze theme, some graphical glitches and some questionable design choices. That said, have a look at the [list of known issues](https://community.kde.org/Plasma/5.0_Errata), in particular the note about performance. + +And I suggest trying Plasma 5 first to make sure all your must-haves are there before you jump in with both feet. + +## Conclusion + +KDE's Plasma 5 release lacks the attention-grabbing, paradigm-shifting changes that keep Unity and GNOME in the spotlight. Instead the KDE project has been focused on improving its core desktop experience. Plasma 5 is not perfect by any means, but unlike Unity and GNOME it's easy to change the things you don't like. + +What's perhaps most heartening about this release is that KDE has managed to get a lot of the groundwork done for alternate interfaces without messing with their desktop interface much at all. The speed improvements are also good news. If you've tried KDE in the past and found it too "heavy" you might want to give Plasma 5 a fresh look. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/linux-mint191-review.txt b/ars-technica/published/linux-mint191-review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f02660a --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/linux-mint191-review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,78 @@ +While Ubuntu and Red Hat grabbed most of the Linux headlines last year, Linux Mint, once the darling of the tech press, had a relatively quiet year. Between IBM buying Red Hat and Canonical moving back to the GNOME desktop, Linux Mint saw very few headlines. Linux Mint churned out version 19, which brought the distro up to the Ubuntu 18.04 base, but for the most part Linux Mint and its developers seemed to keep their heads down, working away while others enjoyed the limelight. + +While Linux Mint might not have been grabbing headlines, and it probably isn't anyone's top pick for "the cloud", it nevertheless remains the distro I see most frequently in the real world. When I watch a Linux tutorial or screen cast on YouTube odds are I'll see the Linux Mint logo in the toolbar. When I see someone using Linux at the coffee shop it usually turns out to be Linux Mint. When I ask fellow Linux users which distro they use, the main answers are Ubuntu and Linux Mint. All of that is anecdotal, but it still points to a simple truth: for a distro that has seen little press lately, Linux Mint manages to remain popular with users. + +There's a good reason for that popularity. Linux Mint just works. It isn't "changing the desktop computer paradigm", or "innovating" in "groundbreaking" ways. It's just building a desktop operating system that looks and functions a lot like every other desktop operating system you've used, which is to say you'll be immediately comfortable and stop thinking about your desktop and start using it to do actual work. + +It's worth asking then, why switch from what I have now? Well if you're happy with what you have now, then stick with whatever it is, but if it happens to be Windows 10, well, hope you haven't tried to upgrade yet. If what you have now happens to be Ubuntu prior to 18.04, and you're dreading the upgrade to GNOME, well, Mint is worth a look. + +The project recently released version 19.1, which comes in three desktop flavors, two homegrown projects, Cinnamon, really Linux Mint's main desktop, and MATE, which started as a kind of Cinnamon light, and has since become a very capable desktop in its own right, and an XFCE version. Previously there was also a KDE version of Linux Mint, but it was dropped last year because the KDE stack is different enough that all the bits that make Linux Mint, well, Minty, just didn't work with KDE. Diehard Mint and KDE fans can still get KDE working via a PPA, but it's not officially supported by Linux Mint. + +## Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition + +Cinnamon is the desktop that really shines for Linux Mint. It's been a mature, stable project for some time and it hasn't seen much in the way of change in years. It uses a very familiar paradigm, a bottom panel that holds a button menu on the left, and good old Windows XP-style windows list in the middle and a system tray on the right. + +That traditional look and feel has finally been tweaked a little for Cinnamon 4.0. For Linux Mint 19.1, nicknamed "Tessa", Cinnamon has an optional new "modern" look. + +[image="linuxmint191-newtheme.jpg" caption="Cinnamon 4.0's new look in Linux Mint 19.1"] + +Fear not change haters, the old look is just a click away, and the redesign is pretty mild anyway. Still, by default, Mint 19.1 Cinnamon will look slightly different to long-time Mint users. Cinnamon 4.0 has a slightly larger task bar and icon set, but the big difference in terms of usability is that windows are grouped by application. Hover over an icon in the task bar and you'll see window previews for any open windows. It looks and behaves like the same feature in Windows and macOS. + +The new look is a result of Mint devs discovering that a lot of users were replacing the standard window list applet with a third-party window list applet to get the window grouping and previews features. Mint decided it should have that feature out of the box so it forked the code and integrated it into Cinnamon directly, along with some other customization options like icon size. + +[image="linuxmint191-oldtheme.jpg" caption="Cinnamon 4.0's old look in Linux Mint 19.1 -- that familiar look is just a click away."] + +I happen to prefer the old look and paradigm where each window gets its own button. To revert to the older style, you can either head into the Mint settings panel, or you can do it right from the start using the option in the Mint welcome screen. Click the sidebar item labeled "First Steps" and look for the Desktop option. Putting the option to select your favorite layout in the welcome screen is a nice touch and it's emblematic of Linux Mint's approach to change -- give users a choice rather than just shoving the latest and greatest down their throats. And in the end, after a couple of weeks of using it I decided I liked the new "modern" theme better. + +[image="linuxmint191-welcome.jpg" caption="Linux Mint's very nice Welcome app walks you through setting up your machine."] + +As has been the case for some time, Cinnamon itself does not see any major new features in this release. In a day and age when system updates seem to wreck havoc, I'd argue that's a feature not a bug. And there are improvements aplenty, the most notable being that the Nemo file manager is, according to Mint, three times faster than the previous release thanks to some code optimizations. I don't have an objective way to test it, but Nemo, which I've used extensively under Arch, does seem quite a bit faster than I'm used to, particularly dragging windows around. + +Cinnamon in general feels snappier, something Mint says will be even more obvious if you have an NVIDIA card. There's a new option in the Cinnamon settings to turn off VSYNC. Disabling VSYNC will get you higher FPS, thus making things feel snappier, but it pushes VSYNC tasks off to your GPU driver, which needs to handle it -- so if you see a lot of screen tearing, especially when watching videos, turn VSYNC back on. If it works without tearing you should see a performance boost and perhaps eliminate some input lag. + +Exposing low-level options like this is, I believe, why the distro tends to be a popular destination for users who are, if not fed up with, then feeling a little let down by Ubuntu. A very similarly exposed low level feature is an ability to browse and see the support status of all available mainline kernels in Mint's Update Manager. You can also now easily remove unused kernels with the click of a button. + +Mint's Software Sources tool looks slightly different in this release, more in line with the rest of Mint's Xapps since it now uses uses the Xapp sidebar and a headerbar. + +Linux Mint's Mint-Y theme, the default theme in both Cinnamon and MATE continues to be refined in subtle ways. Through a series of very slight changes Mint Y ends up with significantly improved contrast. To me this was most noticeable in background windows, or rather the opposite: the foreground window is much more noticeable as such thanks to the darker, more contrasty text. Once the kind of attention to detail you'd have to turn to macOS to find, this is the sort of polish that has become part of many Linux desktops lately -- certainly elementaryOS sweats these things, and Ubuntu got that ball rolling so speak. As someone who spends most of my time in either a terminal window or a web browser, these improvements are a little lost on me, but for those who crave them Linux Mint 19.1 delivers. + +To see the difference between old and new themes check out the screenshot below, which shows a Nemo file browser window with the Mint-Y theme as it was in Mint 19 (on the left), and using the Mint-Y theme with changes in 19.1 (on the right): + +[image="linuxmint191-contast.png" caption="Labels look sharper and stand out on top of their backgrounds, making it easier to tell foreground windows from background (image from LinuxMint)."] +. + +## Linux Mint MATE Edition + +It used to be that MATE served as the less resource intensive alternative to Cinnamon in the Linux Mint world. While that's still true, MATE has emerged to become a very full-featured, powerful desktop in its own right, so much so that there's an official Ubuntu flavor based on MATE. In fact I think Ubuntu MATE is at least as good, perhaps better than, Linux Mint MATE. + +[image="linuxmint191-mate.jpg" caption="The stock MATE desktop in Linux Mint 19.1"] + +The difference really comes down to whether you want all the Mint-based extras like the Update Manager and Software Sources tools mentioned above (which are part of MATE as well). + +One nice new feature in this release that applies to both the Cinnamon and MATE releases, is a new Firewall configuration option in the "First Steps" section of Mint's welcome screen. Security concious users can quickly and easily set up a firewall using Gufw. + +While Gufw is not a Mint app, an increasing number of the apps you get with Mint are homegrown (at least to some degree, some are forked from upstream projects). This release sees some improvements to Xreader, to my mind one of the nicest PDF readers around, I regularly use it outside of Linux Mint even though it has quite a few Linux Mint dependencies. It's that good. + +The other standout Xapp to my mind is Timeshift, which is Linux Mint's built-in backup tool. It's prominently featured at the top of the "First Steps" section when you first boot Linux Mint, but if you missed it then you can always find it in the apps menu. It's dead simple to set up, just open it and check the option to use Rsync. That will enable incremental snapshot updates where new files live in the latest snapshot, but older files are hard-linked to previous snapshot, saving considerable disk space. Select next and the little wizard will scan your disks, figure out how much space you need to make a backup and ask where you want to put that backup. This would be the time to insert your external drive. Once you've got your backup location set, just click okay and you're done. + +[image="linuxmint191-backups.jpg" caption="Linux Mint's helpful Rsync wrapper, known as Timeshift."] + +If you want to you can go into the settings tab and change how frequently snapshots are made and how many are kept on hand. By default Mint will make daily backups and keep five of them. I suggest adding a weekly backup, keeping three of those and a monthly backup and keeping 2 of those. This strategy, which I implemented years ago using a bash script, has more than once saved my bacon (for completeness sake I should also add that I keep multiple off-site copies of the weekly and monthly backups as well). It's been my experience that most people lack a good backup strategy and don't discover how important it is to have one until they learn it the very painful way. I like that Mint has put the idea front and center from the moment you install the system. + +## Linux Mint Xfce Edition + +I'll confess I had never, until this release, paid much attention to the Xfce edition of Linux Mint. Part of the reason was that it always felt like an afterthought. The main development energy clearly goes into Cinnamon and MATE, but all the tools mentioned above that are system level -- for example the Update Manager, Software Sources and the Mint-Y theme changes -- are part of the Xfce release as well. + +[image="linuxmint191-xfce.jpg" caption="The stock Xfce desktop in Linux Mint 19.1"] + +Outside of Mint's tools though there's not much new in Linux Mint Xfce 19.1. It ships with Xfce 4.12, which is nearly four years old now, but in Xfce terms that's still pretty new. Like MATE, and to a lesser degree, Cinnamon, Xfce is essentially done. Every release tends to bring some incremental improvements, but this is not the place to look for massive changes. This is the place for those looking to avoid massive changes. + +## Conclusion + +As mentioned above, for the duration of the Mint Linux 19 line the project will use the Ubuntu 18.04 package base. With 19.1 you'll get Linux kernel 4.15.0-20. You can of course easily browse and install any supported kernel available in the Mint repos via the aforementioned Update Manager tool. + +Linux Mint 19.1 is a long term support release (LTS) with critical updates and fixes coming until 2023. Because 19.1 is, like 19.0, based on an Ubuntu 18.04 base it's relatively easy to upgrade from Linux Mint 19 to 19.1. That said, there are a couple no-longer-needed packages you might want to get rid of and a couple new ones that might not be installed in the upgrade. See the Linux Mint blog for full upgrade details and be sure to make a backup of your system before you do (with the great Timeshift tool there's really no excuse not to always have a good backup of your system). + +Linux Mint is funded primarily through donations and the project recently added a [Patreon page](https://www.patreon.com/linux_mint) to the list of ways you can support it. If you prefer not to use Paypal to donate money you can now do so through Patreon. Much of that Patreon money is going toward Mint's Timeshift project. + +It's also worth mentioning that Linux Mint Debian Edition still exists as well, though it runs on an entirely different update cycle and is not part of the Ubuntu-based system reviewed here. In fact it's really an entirely different distro and I find it somewhat remarkable that Linux Mint is able to maintain and support two distros, I'm not aware of another project that does that. With Debian hard at work on version 10, which will reportedly be released later this year, expect Linux Mint Debian Edition to have a major update on the horizon as well. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/linuxmint173review.html b/ars-technica/published/linuxmint173review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..83a4e51 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/linuxmint173review.html @@ -0,0 +1,61 @@ +

The Linux Mint project recently unveiled Linux Mint 17.3. The latest release from this Ubuntu-based Linux distro just might be the best Linux desktop around.

+

Linux Mint 17.3 arrived a few days late and had a somewhat bumpy launch thanks to some server hardware issues that temporarily knocked the Linux Mint blog and forums offline. The final version of Linux Mint was out there, but few knew about it until a few weeks later.

+

This is a big release of Linux Mint 17.3 marks the final release that will be built atop Ubuntu 14.04. Linux Mint 17.3 marks the fulfillment of the project's plan to stop chasing every Ubuntu release and focus on perfecting what makes Mint, well, Mint. When Ubuntu puts out its next Long Term Support release in April of 2016, Mint will have to upgrade its base system.

+

Mint's LTS strategy was a risky move. Mint bucked several trends in opting to pass on whatever butterflies Ubuntu was chasing. Sticking with a stable base and steadfastly refusing to inflate its version numbers may well have left some users at a loss. Jests aside, turning its back on the latest and greatest GTK and kernel updates that come from tracking Ubuntu's every move is not without some costs, but overall the strategy seems to have been a huge success.

+

Linux Mint has shown that it has the vision and is willing to put in the actual work to produce one the best desktop experiences around. The Cinnamon edition is not just the most polished Linux desktop around, it's possibly the most polished desktop period. Hyperbolic? Perhaps a little, but this really is the most thoroughly thought out desktop I've ever used, Linux or otherwise.

+

Mint's lead developer Clément Lefebvre and team have done a great job of keeping most of the userspace packages much more up-to-date than the Ubuntu 14.04 base would lead you to believe. There are exceptions -- GNOME/GTK is probably the most noticeable, being stuck at 3.10, and the kernel also lags behind at version 3.19 -- but for the most part though the latest version of all the apps you're likely to use are either available in the Mint repos or just a PPA away. And thanks to Mint's amazing package management system finding, installing and keeping track of apps and even PPA's is surprisingly simple.

+

Linux Mint: Cinnamon Edition

+

If you don't want to think about the OS you're using -- that is, if you want to click a button that says "Menu" to launch an app or open a folder named "Documents" to find your files -- Cinnamon is going to make you happy.

+

Cinnamon is a desktop for people who want their desktop to get out of the way. It does not revolutionize any paradigms and it probably doesn't work very well on that mythical Linux tablet that GNOME is still waiting for, but it does offer one of the best, most polished experiences you can get on your laptop or desktop today.

+ +[image="mint173-cinnamon-desktop.jpg" caption="The default Cinnamon desktop in Linux Mint 17.3"] + +

And by polish I don't mean the theme looks nice -- though it does, albeit not much different than the last few releases -- I mean the functionality and workflow. Cinnamon has smoothed down the rough edges of common tasks you do everyday, like listening to music, browsing your files and applications, updating and installing software, and getting notifications from background applications. The things you do the most are the things Linux Mint wants to improve on, not by changing the way you do them, but by making them easier to do.

+

In this release that translates into a number of improvements in commonly used task bar applets and tools like the sound applet, power applet, system tray more generally, and Mint's package management system.

+

Let's start with the improved sound applet which resides in the far right side of the system tray by default.

+

It's a small thing, but if you like listening to music while you work you'll probably interact with the sound applet all the time. In Linux Mint 17.3 the sound applet has been improved to add playback controls over the cover art, including a progress bar you can use to skip forward and back. There's also a new right-click menu that gives you access to all the settings and adjustments you're likely to ever need are right there in the pop up window above the applet icon. If you have multiple output options you can switch between them right in the applet. As of Mint 17.3 output devices now show both their name and their origin, which makes it easier to figure out which "HDMI Audio Controller" goes with which HDMI port, for example. The applet can also quickly switch between audio players -- for example, pause Spotify and switch to your local player when you lose connectivity -- or quit audio players without actually switching apps. You can also quickly mute both input and output.

+ +[image="mint173-sound-applet.jpg" caption="The revamped sound applet in Mint 17.3 handles everything from MPD to Spotify."] + +

In my testing I never encountered any music-related task that I couldn't handle right from the applet -- no need to open your music player or dive into the system settings. In fact, if you use the venerable Music Player Daemon to play your music the applet is all you need to have running.

+

One final touch worth noting: by default the Cinnamon audio applet hides an audio application's native system tray applet (if it has one), if you prefer, for instance, Spotify's native applet, there's an option in the sound preference pane to tell the sound applet to stop hiding other sound applets. GNOME developers take note, it's possible to build something cool and still accept that some people won't like it and then to accommodate those people by giving them an option to turn it off. Strange that offering choices and options have become a Linux desktop feature that's worth mentioning.

+

Another frequently used applet that sees a makeover in this release is the power applet. The power applet now offers, like the audio applet, more detail and control. Now you can quickly see the battery state not just for your laptop, but any attached devices like a wireless mouse or keyboard.

+

The rest of Cinnamon's system tray has some improvements as well. The workspace switcher applet now shows a little visual representation of your workspaces, with little rectangles corresponding to each window inside of them. The icons are tiny, but it can be helpful if you have a lot of workspaces open.

+ +[image="mint173-workspace-switcher.jpg" caption="The taskbar's workspace switcher showing a preview of the windows in each workspace."] + +

Similarly helpful for quickly finding the window you want are the new thumbnails in the window list. This works just like its Windows equivalent -- hover a tab in the task bar's window list and you'll get a little preview of that window. Again, it's easy to turn this off in the window list applet preferences if you prefer the simpler tool tip look. Similar previews also show up in the Alt-Tab switcher if you pause between presses of the tab key.

+ +[image="mint173-win-list.jpg" caption="The taskbar's window list now features an option to show image previews."] + +

Cinnamon's Nemo file manager gets one noteworthy new feature that again, while small, simplifies an every day task, in this case renaming files. Nemo's new "quick rename" feature allows you to rename files with a "slow" double-click. You'll have to turn it on in the Nemo preferences (under the Behavior tab), but it makes it far easier to quickly rename things (it'd be nice to have a keyboard-based way to do this as well, perhaps using "enter" rather than return to trigger it).

+

Cinnamon's already excellent support for HiDPI screens has been further improved, particularly if you connect to a HiDPI TV over HDMI. There are also improvements for HiDPI support in the login screen, including a fix for a bug that would sometimes cause the login screen to be very small. Instead of simply doubling the scaling value it actually calculates the best value between 1x and 2x based on your screen.

+

Earlier I mentioned that Mint probably wouldn't work well on a tablet, but there is one place this release improves at least touchscreen support -- there's a new on-screen keyboard in the login screen which means it's easier to log in from touch screens and mobile devices.

+

Cinnamon 2.8 is a welcome update, but it's worth noting that, while Cinnamon is now available in quite a few distros, Linux Mint remains the stablest, best implementation around. In fact, in my testing Cinnamon 2.8 was considerably buggier than previous versions I have tested with the otherwise very nice Fedora 23. It's hard to say where the blame for that lies, or if anyone is to blame at all, but at the end of the day if you want the best Cinnamon experience, you'll find it in Linux Mint.

+

Linux Mint MATE Edition

+

The Cinnamon Edition of Linux Mint is very clearly the flagship release. However, while Cinnamon is Mint at it finest, there is also a MATE-based edition Linux Mint which ends up something like Cinnamon light and makes a good option for older or less powerful hardware.

+ +[image="mint173-mate-desktop.jpg" caption="The default Linux Mint 17.3 MATE desktop."] + +

Linux Mint 17.3 features MATE 1.12 and includes some very nice new features, including support for more window managers out of the box. In previous releases MATE gained support for Compiz (complete with old-school wobbly windows, not enabled by default when you switch the Compiz). Now MATE supports two more windows managers, Compton and Openbox. The latter is particularly welcome since it's very lightweight and will go a long way to make MATE feel faster on less powerful hardware. The display manager switcher itself has also been updated and can now switch on the fly, eliminating the need to log out and log back in for changes to take effect.

+

A fair bit of what's new in MATE involves porting features over form Cinnamon. For instance the power applet features mentioned above are also available in MATE, albeit through a much-simplified interface.

+

There's some added hardware support in this release as well, particularly for touchpads, which now offers support for two and three finger taps/clicks for right and middle clicks respectively. There's also now an option to use Apple's so-called "natural scrolling" which reverses the direction of scrolling.

+

Linux Mint 17.3 Under the Hood

+

The attention to detail in Linux Mint 17.3 is not limited to desktop features, but extends down into shared, lower level features like Mint's software and update managers.

+

Linux Mint has been steadily refining its package management tools for some time now and that process is still ongoing. Consider the following rather common workflow: you install Mint from a USB stick and now you want to pull down all your applications. On most distros you open up some kind of "software center" and start downloading. End of story.

+

The same process is true in Linux Mint, but before you actually start downloading Mint helpfully offers to scan all the available software repo mirrors and find the fastest one. It tests the speed of the mirrors and makes sure that the packages are up-to-date. The tests will start with the mirrors closest to you and then work down the list. In most cases the fastest mirror will likely be close, though not necessarily the closest. In my case the default mirror selected during installation tested at 872K while the top speed available ended up being 3MB. It takes an extra minute or two, but being able to download new software and get updates at (in my case) over triple the speed is well worth it.

+ +[image="mint173software.jpg" caption="The Software Sources app scanning for the fastest, up-to-date mirror."] + +

Two other very nice features new in this release include a warning in the update manager if something is wrong with a current mirror and a compatibility test for any PPAs you add. I also noticed that if you copy a PPA to the clipboard, open the software manager and click the plus button to add a new PPA Mint will automatically fill the field with what's on the clipboard. It's a small thing (and possibly not new), but it shows the level of polish and attention to detail in Linux Mint.

+

This release sees a couple of updates for a piece of software I wish more distros would copy: Mint's Driver Manager. Driver Manager now automatically refreshes, notifies you of any available updates and now indicates if drivers are Open Source or not. When Ubuntu gets back to focusing on the desktop, this would a great piece of downstream work to incorporate into Unity.

+

The Bad News: The Kernel

+

Let's talk about what you're not going to get with Mint 17.3. Namely, the latest kernel and sub-system packages.

+

The kernel has indeed been updated since 17.2, but, as noted above, the kernel in Mint 17.3 is still at 3.19. That's not exactly ancient, but it is a good year behind where nearly every of distro is today. With the exception of a few very conservative distros primarily aimed at server farms, pretty much everything is on the 4.x kernel by now. There's a good bit of hardware support Mint is missing out on.

+

The good news though is that Linux Mint 17.3 will be supported until 2019 and the project does plan to offer kernel updates. In fact an update to the 4.2 line is in the software repositories already, though the Mint blog cautions against updating just yet, especially if you're using any proprietary drivers. The 4.2 kernel in the repos is known to not work with fglrx (ATI/AMD drivers) and ndiswrapper (a fairly common set of wireless drivers). The plan is get these problems fixed "before February 2016" at which point upgrading should be safe.

+

In other words, a newer kernel is coming so if your hardware needs it just exercise some patience. Otherwise, if you're feeling like you need a potentially system destroying holiday project you can try the upgrade now on your own.

+

Conclusion

+

Linux Mint 17.3 is the final Mint 17 release and should put to rest any worries about Mint's plan to stick with Ubuntu LTS releases for its base. Mint has done what it set up to do, namely improve the Cinnamon desktop to the point that it not only matches, but in many places far exceeds the user experience found in other options like GNOME, and especially, Unity.

+

Indeed it's hard to look at Mint 17.3 without comparing it to its upstream base. While Mint has been continually working hard on the desktop and cranking out release after release, Ubuntu has stagnated. If Ubuntu wants to leapfrog past some of its pain points its developer would do well to look downstream. Mint's package management tools are simpler, more comprehensive, and easier to use than anything Ubuntu offers. Mint also manages to do all this without anything even remotely close to the resources Ubuntu enjoys.

+

Perhaps the most worrying thing about Mint is that it's based on Ubuntu, the future of which looks a lot less bright than it used to. There is of course Linux Mint Debian Edition, but it tends to lag well behind its Ubuntu-based brethren when it comes to updates and polish.

+

Despite the possibly cloudy future of Ubuntu, there's no reason to panic on Mint's behalf just yet. The next major step for Mint will be the transition to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS when it's released in April of 2016. At that point development on Mint-specific features will probably take a back seat to making sure that everything works with the new base. Once that's done though, expect Mint to return to focusing on what makes Mint great.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/linuxmint173review.txt b/ars-technica/published/linuxmint173review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..63898ba --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/linuxmint173review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,83 @@ +The Linux Mint project recently unveiled Linux Mint 17.3. The latest release from this Ubuntu-based Linux distro just might be the best Linux desktop around. + +Linux Mint 17.3 arrived a few days late and had a somewhat bumpy launch thanks to some [server hardware issues](http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2944) that temporarily knocked the Linux Mint blog and forums offline. The final version of Linux Mint was out there, but few knew about it until a few weeks later. + +This is a big release of Linux Mint 17.3 marks the final release that will be built atop Ubuntu 14.04. Linux Mint 17.3 marks the fulfillment of the project's plan to stop chasing every Ubuntu release and focus on perfecting what makes Mint, well, Mint. When Ubuntu puts out its next Long Term Support release in April of 2016, Mint will have to upgrade its base system. + +Mint's LTS strategy was a risky move. Mint bucked several trends in opting to pass on whatever butterflies Ubuntu was chasing. Sticking with a stable base and steadfastly refusing to inflate its version numbers may well have left some users at a loss. Jests aside, turning its back on the latest and greatest GTK and kernel updates that come from tracking Ubuntu's every move is not without some costs, but overall the strategy seems to have been a huge success. + +Linux Mint has shown that it has the vision and is willing to put in the actual work to produce one the best desktop experiences around. The Cinnamon edition is not just the most polished Linux desktop around, it's possibly the most polished desktop period. Hyperbolic? Perhaps a little, but this really is the most thoroughly thought out desktop I've ever used, Linux or otherwise. + +Mint's lead developer Clément Lefebvre and team have done a great job of keeping most of the userspace packages much more up-to-date than the Ubuntu 14.04 base would lead you to believe. There are exceptions -- GNOME/GTK is probably the most noticeable, being stuck at 3.10, and the kernel also lags behind at version 3.19 -- but for the most part though the latest version of all the apps you're likely to use are either available in the Mint repos or just a PPA away. And thanks to Mint's amazing package management system finding, installing and keeping track of apps and even PPA's is surprisingly simple. + +## Linux Mint: Cinnamon Edition + +If you don't want to think about the OS you're using -- that is, if you want to click a button that says "Menu" to launch an app or open a folder named "Documents" to find your files -- Cinnamon is going to make you happy. + +Cinnamon is a desktop for people who want their desktop to get out of the way. It does not revolutionize any paradigms and it probably doesn't work very well on that mythical Linux tablet that GNOME is still waiting for, but it does offer one of the best, most polished experiences you can get on your laptop or desktop today. + +And by polish I don't mean the theme looks nice -- though it does, albeit not much different than the last few releases -- I mean the functionality and workflow. Cinnamon has smoothed down the rough edges of common tasks you do everyday, like listening to music, browsing your files and applications, updating and installing software, and getting notifications from background applications. The things you do the most are the things Linux Mint wants to improve on, not by changing the way you do them, but by making them easier to do. + +In this release that translates into a number of improvements in commonly used task bar applets and tools like the sound applet, power applet, system tray more generally, and Mint's package management system. + +Let's start with the improved sound applet which resides in the far right side of the system tray by default. + +It's a small thing, but if you like listening to music while you work you'll probably interact with the sound applet all the time. In Linux Mint 17.3 the sound applet has been improved to add playback controls over the cover art, including a progress bar you can use to skip forward and back. There's also a new right-click menu that gives you access to all the settings and adjustments you're likely to ever need are right there in the pop up window above the applet icon. If you have multiple output options you can switch between them right in the applet. As of Mint 17.3 output devices now show both their name and their origin, which makes it easier to figure out which "HDMI Audio Controller" goes with which HDMI port, for example. The applet can also quickly switch between audio players -- for example, pause Spotify and switch to your local player when you lose connectivity -- or quit audio players without actually switching apps. You can also quickly mute both input and output. + +In my testing I never encountered any music-related task that I couldn't handle right from the applet -- no need to open your music player or dive into the system settings. In fact, if you use the venerable Music Player Daemon to play your music the applet is all you need to have running. + +One final touch worth noting: by default the Cinnamon audio applet hides an audio application's native system tray applet (if it has one), if you prefer, for instance, Spotify's native applet, there's an option in the sound preference pane to tell the sound applet to stop hiding other sound applets. GNOME developers take note, it's possible to build something cool and still accept that some people won't like it and then to accommodate those people by giving them an option to turn it off. Strange that offering choices and options have become a Linux desktop feature that's worth mentioning. + +Another frequently used applet that sees a makeover in this release is the power applet. The power applet now offers, like the audio applet, more detail and control. Now you can quickly see the battery state not just for your laptop, but any attached devices like a wireless mouse or keyboard. + +The rest of Cinnamon's system tray has some improvements as well. The workspace switcher applet now shows a little visual representation of your workspaces, with little rectangles corresponding to each window inside of them. The icons are tiny, but it can be helpful if you have a lot of workspaces open. Similarly helpful for quickly finding the window you want are the new thumbnails in the window list. This works just like its Windows equivalent -- hover a tab in the task bar's window list and you'll get a little preview of that window. Again, it's easy to turn this off in the window list applet preferences if you prefer the simpler tool tip look. Similar previews also show up in the Alt-Tab switcher if you pause between presses of the tab key. + +Cinnamon's Nemo file manager gets one noteworthy new feature that again, while small, simplifies an every day task, in this case renaming files. Nemo's new "quick rename" feature allows you to rename files with a "slow" double-click. You'll have to turn it on in the Nemo preferences (under the Behavior tab), but it makes it far easier to quickly rename things (it'd be nice to have a keyboard-based way to do this as well, perhaps using "enter" rather than return to trigger it). + +Cinnamon's already excellent support for HiDPI screens has been further improved, particularly if you connect to a HiDPI TV over HDMI. There are also improvements for HiDPI support in the login screen, including a fix for a bug that would sometimes cause the login screen to be very small. Instead of simply doubling the scaling value it actually calculates the best value between 1x and 2x based on your screen. + +Earlier I mentioned that Mint probably wouldn't work well on a tablet, but there is one place this release improves at least touchscreen support -- there's a new on-screen keyboard in the login screen which means it's easier to log in from touch screens and mobile devices. + +Cinnamon 2.8 is a welcome update, but it's worth noting that, while Cinnamon is now available in quite a few distros, Linux Mint remains the stablest, best implementation around. In fact, in my testing Cinnamon 2.8 was considerably buggier than previous versions I have tested with the otherwise very nice Fedora 23. It's hard to say where the blame for that lies, or if anyone is to blame at all, but at the end of the day if you want the best Cinnamon experience, you'll find it in Linux Mint. + +## Linux Mint MATE Edition + +The Cinnamon Edition of Linux Mint is very clearly the flagship release. However, while Cinnamon is Mint at it finest, there is also a MATE-based edition Linux Mint which ends up something like Cinnamon light and makes a good option for older or less powerful hardware. + +Linux Mint 17.3 features MATE 1.12 and includes some very nice new features, including support for more window managers out of the box. In previous releases MATE gained support for Compiz (complete with old-school wobbly windows, not enabled by default when you switch the Compiz). Now MATE supports two more windows managers, Compton and Openbox. The latter is particularly welcome since it's very lightweight and will go a long way to make MATE feel faster on less powerful hardware. The display manager switcher itself has also been updated and can now switch on the fly, eliminating the need to log out and log back in for changes to take effect. + +A fair bit of what's new in MATE involves porting features over form Cinnamon. For instance the power applet features mentioned above are also available in MATE, albeit through a much-simplified interface. + +There's some added hardware support in this release as well, particularly for touchpads, which now offers support for two and three finger taps/clicks for right and middle clicks respectively. There's also now an option to use Apple's so-called "natural scrolling" which reverses the direction of scrolling. + +## Linux Mint 17.3 Under the Hood + +The attention to detail in Linux Mint 17.3 is not limited to desktop features, but extends down into shared, lower level features like Mint's software and update managers. + +Linux Mint has been steadily refining its package management tools for some time now and that process is still ongoing. Consider the following rather common workflow: you install Mint from a USB stick and now you want to pull down all your applications. On most distros you open up some kind of "software center" and start downloading. End of story. + +The same process is true in Linux Mint, but before you actually start downloading Mint helpfully offers to scan all the available software repo mirrors and find the fastest one. It tests the speed of the mirrors and makes sure that the packages are up-to-date. The tests will start with the mirrors closest to you and then work down the list. In most cases the fastest mirror will likely be close, though not necessarily the closest. In my case the default mirror selected during installation tested at 872K while the top speed available ended up being 3MB. It takes an extra minute or two, but being able to download new software and get updates at (in my case) over triple the speed is well worth it. + +Two other very nice features new in this release include a warning in the update manager if something is wrong with a current mirror and a compatibility test for any PPAs you add. I also noticed that if you copy a PPA to the clipboard, open the software manager and click the plus button to add a new PPA Mint will automatically fill the field with what's on the clipboard. It's a small thing (and possibly not new), but it shows the level of polish and attention to detail in Linux Mint. + +This release sees a couple of updates for a piece of software I wish more distros would copy: Mint's Driver Manager. Driver Manager now automatically refreshes, notifies you of any available updates and now indicates if drivers are Open Source or not. When Ubuntu gets back to focusing on the desktop, this would a great piece of downstream work to incorporate into Unity. + +## The Bad News: The Kernel + +Let's talk about what you're not going to get with Mint 17.3. Namely, the latest kernel and sub-system packages. + +The kernel has indeed been updated since 17.2, but, as noted above, the kernel in Mint 17.3 is still at 3.19. That's not exactly ancient, but it is a good year behind where nearly every of distro is today. With the exception of a few very conservative distros primarily aimed at server farms, pretty much everything is on the 4.x kernel by now. There's a good bit of hardware support Mint is missing out on. + +The good news though is that Linux Mint 17.3 will be supported until 2019 and the project does plan to offer kernel updates. In fact an update to the 4.2 line is in the software repositories already, though the Mint blog cautions against updating just yet, especially if you're using any proprietary drivers. The 4.2 kernel in the repos is known to not work with fglrx (ATI/AMD drivers) and ndiswrapper (a fairly common set of wireless drivers). The plan is get these problems fixed "before February 2016" at which point upgrading should be safe. + +In other words, a newer kernel is coming so if your hardware needs it just exercise some patience. Otherwise, if you're feeling like you need a potentially system destroying holiday project you can try the upgrade now on your own. + +## Conclusion + +Linux Mint 17.3 is the final Mint 17 release and should put to rest any worries about Mint's plan to stick with Ubuntu LTS releases for its base. Mint has done what it set up to do, namely improve the Cinnamon desktop to the point that it not only matches, but in many places far exceeds the user experience found in other options like GNOME, and especially, Unity. + +Indeed it's hard to look at Mint 17.3 without comparing it to its upstream base. While Mint has been continually working hard on the desktop and cranking out release after release, Ubuntu has stagnated. If Ubuntu wants to leapfrog past some of its pain points its developer would do well to look downstream. Mint's package management tools are simpler, more comprehensive, and easier to use than anything Ubuntu offers. Mint also manages to do all this without anything even remotely close to the resources Ubuntu enjoys. + +Perhaps the most worrying thing about Mint is that it's based on Ubuntu, the future of which looks a lot less bright than it used to. There is of course Linux Mint Debian Edition, but it tends to lag well behind its Ubuntu-based brethren when it comes to updates and polish. + +Despite the possibly cloudy future of Ubuntu, there's no reason to panic on Mint's behalf just yet. The next major step for Mint will be the transition to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS when it's released in April of 2016. At that point development on Mint-specific features will probably take a back seat to making sure that everything works with the new base. Once that's done though, expect Mint to return to focusing on what makes Mint great. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/linuxmint191-review.html b/ars-technica/published/linuxmint191-review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bb5d9b9 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/linuxmint191-review.html @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +

While Ubuntu and Red Hat grabbed most of the Linux headlines last year, Linux Mint, once the darling of the tech press, had a relatively quiet year. Between IBM buying Red Hat and Canonical moving back to the GNOME desktop, Linux Mint saw very few headlines. Linux Mint churned out version 19, which brought the distro up to the Ubuntu 18.04 base, but for the most part Linux Mint and its developers seemed to keep their heads down, working away while others enjoyed the limelight.

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While Linux Mint might not have been grabbing headlines, and it probably isn’t anyone’s top pick for “the cloud”, it nevertheless remains the distro I see most frequently in the real world. When I watch a Linux tutorial or screen cast on YouTube odds are I’ll see the Linux Mint logo in the toolbar. When I see someone using Linux at the coffee shop it usually turns out to be Linux Mint. When I ask fellow Linux users which distro they use, the main answers are Ubuntu and Linux Mint. All of that is anecdotal, but it still points to a simple truth: for a distro that has seen little press lately, Linux Mint manages to remain popular with users.

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There’s a good reason for that popularity. Linux Mint just works. It isn’t “changing the desktop computer paradigm”, or “innovating” in “groundbreaking” ways. It’s just building a desktop operating system that looks and functions a lot like every other desktop operating system you’ve used, which is to say you’ll be immediately comfortable and stop thinking about your desktop and start using it to do actual work.

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It’s worth asking then, why switch from what I have now? Well if you’re happy with what you have now, then stick with whatever it is, but if it happens to be Windows 10, well, hope you haven’t tried to upgrade yet. If what you have now happens to be Ubuntu prior to 18.04, and you’re dreading the upgrade to GNOME, well, Mint is worth a look.

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The project recently released version 19.1, which comes in three desktop flavors, two homegrown projects, Cinnamon, really Linux Mint’s main desktop, and MATE, which started as a kind of Cinnamon light, and has since become a very capable desktop in its own right, and an XFCE version. Previously there was also a KDE version of Linux Mint, but it was dropped last year because the KDE stack is different enough that all the bits that make Linux Mint, well, Minty, just didn’t work with KDE. Diehard Mint and KDE fans can still get KDE working via a PPA, but it’s not officially supported by Linux Mint.

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Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition

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Cinnamon is the desktop that really shines for Linux Mint. It’s been a mature, stable project for some time and it hasn’t seen much in the way of change in years. It uses a very familiar paradigm, a bottom panel that holds a button menu on the left, and good old Windows XP-style windows list in the middle and a system tray on the right.

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That traditional look and feel has finally been tweaked a little for Cinnamon 4.0. For Linux Mint 19.1, nicknamed “Tessa”, Cinnamon has an optional new “modern” look.

+[image=“linuxmint191-newtheme.jpg” caption=“Cinnamon 4.0’s new look in Linux Mint 19.1”] +

Fear not change haters, the old look is just a click away, and the redesign is pretty mild anyway. Still, by default, Mint 19.1 Cinnamon will look slightly different to long-time Mint users. Cinnamon 4.0 has a slightly larger task bar and icon set, but the big difference in terms of usability is that windows are grouped by application. Hover over an icon in the task bar and you’ll see window previews for any open windows. It looks and behaves like the same feature in Windows and macOS.

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The new look is a result of Mint devs discovering that a lot of users were replacing the standard window list applet with a third-party window list applet to get the window grouping and previews features. Mint decided it should have that feature out of the box so it forked the code and integrated it into Cinnamon directly, along with some other customization options like icon size.

+[image=“linuxmint191-oldtheme.jpg” caption=“Cinnamon 4.0’s old look in Linux Mint 19.1 – that familiar look is just a click away.”] +

I happen to prefer the old look and paradigm where each window gets its own button. To revert to the older style, you can either head into the Mint settings panel, or you can do it right from the start using the option in the Mint welcome screen. Click the sidebar item labeled “First Steps” and look for the Desktop option. Putting the option to select your favorite layout in the welcome screen is a nice touch and it’s emblematic of Linux Mint’s approach to change – give users a choice rather than just shoving the latest and greatest down their throats. And in the end, after a couple of weeks of using it I decided I liked the new “modern” theme better.

+[image=“linuxmint191-welcome.jpg” caption=“Linux Mint’s very nice Welcome app walks you through setting up your machine.”] +

As has been the case for some time, Cinnamon itself does not see any major new features in this release. In a day and age when system updates seem to wreck havoc, I’d argue that’s a feature not a bug. And there are improvements aplenty, the most notable being that the Nemo file manager is, according to Mint, three times faster than the previous release thanks to some code optimizations. I don’t have an objective way to test it, but Nemo, which I’ve used extensively under Arch, does seem quite a bit faster than I’m used to, particularly dragging windows around.

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Cinnamon in general feels snappier, something Mint says will be even more obvious if you have an NVIDIA card. There’s a new option in the Cinnamon settings to turn off VSYNC. Disabling VSYNC will get you higher FPS, thus making things feel snappier, but it pushes VSYNC tasks off to your GPU driver, which needs to handle it – so if you see a lot of screen tearing, especially when watching videos, turn VSYNC back on. If it works without tearing you should see a performance boost and perhaps eliminate some input lag.

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Exposing low-level options like this is, I believe, why the distro tends to be a popular destination for users who are, if not fed up with, then feeling a little let down by Ubuntu. A very similarly exposed low level feature is an ability to browse and see the support status of all available mainline kernels in Mint’s Update Manager. You can also now easily remove unused kernels with the click of a button.

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Mint’s Software Sources tool looks slightly different in this release, more in line with the rest of Mint’s Xapps since it now uses uses the Xapp sidebar and a headerbar.

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Linux Mint’s Mint-Y theme, the default theme in both Cinnamon and MATE continues to be refined in subtle ways. Through a series of very slight changes Mint Y ends up with significantly improved contrast. To me this was most noticeable in background windows, or rather the opposite: the foreground window is much more noticeable as such thanks to the darker, more contrasty text. Once the kind of attention to detail you’d have to turn to macOS to find, this is the sort of polish that has become part of many Linux desktops lately – certainly elementaryOS sweats these things, and Ubuntu got that ball rolling so speak. As someone who spends most of my time in either a terminal window or a web browser, these improvements are a little lost on me, but for those who crave them Linux Mint 19.1 delivers.

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To see the difference between old and new themes check out the screenshot below, which shows a Nemo file browser window with the Mint-Y theme as it was in Mint 19 (on the left), and using the Mint-Y theme with changes in 19.1 (on the right):

+[image=“linuxmint191-contast.png” caption=“Labels look sharper and stand out on top of their backgrounds, making it easier to tell foreground windows from background (image from LinuxMint).”] +

Linux Mint MATE Edition

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It used to be that MATE served as the less resource intensive alternative to Cinnamon in the Linux Mint world. While that’s still true, MATE has emerged to become a very full-featured, powerful desktop in its own right, so much so that there’s an official Ubuntu flavor based on MATE. In fact I think Ubuntu MATE is at least as good, perhaps better than, Linux Mint MATE.

+[image=“linuxmint191-mate.jpg” caption=“The stock MATE desktop in Linux Mint 19.1”] +

The difference really comes down to whether you want all the Mint-based extras like the Update Manager and Software Sources tools mentioned above (which are part of MATE as well).

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One nice new feature in this release that applies to both the Cinnamon and MATE releases, is a new Firewall configuration option in the “First Steps” section of Mint’s welcome screen. Security concious users can quickly and easily set up a firewall using Gufw.

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While Gufw is not a Mint app, an increasing number of the apps you get with Mint are homegrown (at least to some degree, some are forked from upstream projects). This release sees some improvements to Xreader, to my mind one of the nicest PDF readers around, I regularly use it outside of Linux Mint even though it has quite a few Linux Mint dependencies. It’s that good.

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The other standout Xapp to my mind is Timeshift, which is Linux Mint’s built-in backup tool. It’s prominently featured at the top of the “First Steps” section when you first boot Linux Mint, but if you missed it then you can always find it in the apps menu. It’s dead simple to set up, just open it and check the option to use Rsync. That will enable incremental snapshot updates where new files live in the latest snapshot, but older files are hard-linked to previous snapshot, saving considerable disk space. Select next and the little wizard will scan your disks, figure out how much space you need to make a backup and ask where you want to put that backup. This would be the time to insert your external drive. Once you’ve got your backup location set, just click okay and you’re done.

+[image=“linuxmint191-backups.jpg” caption=“Linux Mint’s helpful Rsync wrapper, known as Timeshift.”] +

If you want to you can go into the settings tab and change how frequently snapshots are made and how many are kept on hand. By default Mint will make daily backups and keep five of them. I suggest adding a weekly backup, keeping three of those and a monthly backup and keeping 2 of those. This strategy, which I implemented years ago using a bash script, has more than once saved my bacon (for completeness sake I should also add that I keep multiple off-site copies of the weekly and monthly backups as well). It’s been my experience that most people lack a good backup strategy and don’t discover how important it is to have one until they learn it the very painful way. I like that Mint has put the idea front and center from the moment you install the system.

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Linux Mint Xfce Edition

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I’ll confess I had never, until this release, paid much attention to the Xfce edition of Linux Mint. Part of the reason was that it always felt like an afterthought. The main development energy clearly goes into Cinnamon and MATE, but all the tools mentioned above that are system level – for example the Update Manager, Software Sources and the Mint-Y theme changes – are part of the Xfce release as well.

+[image=“linuxmint191-xfce.jpg” caption=“The stock Xfce desktop in Linux Mint 19.1”] +

Outside of Mint’s tools though there’s not much new in Linux Mint Xfce 19.1. It ships with Xfce 4.12, which is nearly four years old now, but in Xfce terms that’s still pretty new. Like MATE, and to a lesser degree, Cinnamon, Xfce is essentially done. Every release tends to bring some incremental improvements, but this is not the place to look for massive changes. This is the place for those looking to avoid massive changes.

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Conclusion

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As mentioned above, for the duration of the Mint Linux 19 line the project will use the Ubuntu 18.04 package base. With 19.1 you’ll get Linux kernel 4.15.0-20. You can of course easily browse and install any supported kernel available in the Mint repos via the aforementioned Update Manager tool.

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Linux Mint 19.1 is a long term support release (LTS) with critical updates and fixes coming until 2023. Because 19.1 is, like 19.0, based on an Ubuntu 18.04 base it’s relatively easy to upgrade from Linux Mint 19 to 19.1. That said, there are a couple no-longer-needed packages you might want to get rid of and a couple new ones that might not be installed in the upgrade. See the Linux Mint blog for full upgrade details and be sure to make a backup of your system before you do (with the great Timeshift tool there’s really no excuse not to always have a good backup of your system).

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Linux Mint is funded primarily through donations and the project recently added a Patreon page to the list of ways you can support it. If you prefer not to use Paypal to donate money you can now do so through Patreon. Much of that Patreon money is going toward Mint’s Timeshift project.

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It’s also worth mentioning that Linux Mint Debian Edition still exists as well, though it runs on an entirely different update cycle and is not part of the Ubuntu-based system reviewed here. In fact it’s really an entirely different distro and I find it somewhat remarkable that Linux Mint is able to maintain and support two distros, I’m not aware of another project that does that. With Debian hard at work on version 10, which will reportedly be released later this year, expect Linux Mint Debian Edition to have a major update on the horizon as well.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/linuxmintreview.txt b/ars-technica/published/linuxmintreview.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8412400 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/linuxmintreview.txt @@ -0,0 +1,109 @@ +The Linux Mint project has released Mint 17.2, a significant upgrade for the Ubuntu-based distro that has become one of Linux's most popular. It's also among the last holdouts of the traditional desktop computing paradigm. + +Mint is Ubuntu for people who don't like the Unity desktop. + +If you want Ubuntu and all the good that comes with it, like an extensive up-to-date set of packages, great documentation and a web full of tutorials and helpful users, but not Unity and its baggage -- like query-logging search "features" some have [called spyware](http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/ubuntu-spyware-what-to-do) -- Linux Mint just might be the distro for you. + +Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu and in my experience most things that work in Ubuntu will also work in Mint. All those tutorials and .deb files in most cases (not all though) will do just fine with Mint. + +Linux Mint comes in a variety of desktop flavors, most notable though are the dual homegrown desktops, Cinnamon and MATE. Both desktops represent something increasingly rare regardless of your computing platform of choice -- they stick with the tried and true paradigms of earlier desktop software. That is, they both offer task bars, system trays, docks and other familiar metaphors for interacting with and managing your applications and files. + +[image="mint172-cinn-start-menu.png" caption="The default Cinnamon desktop in Linux Mint 17.2"] + +These days the desktops grabbing headlines have, for the most part, left the traditional desktop behind in favor of what's often referred to as a "shell", which offers a search-based interface. The GNOME project and Ubuntu's Unity desktop interfaces both use this approach. + +This is not a sea change that's limited to Linux. The upheaval of the desktop is happening in Windows land as well. Windows 8 also departed from the traditional desktop UI and Windows 10 looks like it will continue that rethinking of the desktop, albeit with a few familiar elements retained. + +Whether it's driven by, in Ubuntu's case, a vision of "convergence" between desktop and mobile or perhaps just the need for something new (which seems to be the case for GNOME 3.x), the developers would have you believe that these mobile-friendly, search based desktops are the future of, well, everything. + +There are however, still some holdouts that still stick with the task bar and start menu style interface. Apple's OS X has thus far been surprisingly conservative about changing its basic metaphors, but then the company has iOS to tantalize developers. + +In the Linux world there are a few holdouts as well. Both KDE and Xfce continue to be more or less what they have always been. The word stolid comes to mind with both. They're both solid options, but the word fun doesn't spring to mind with either. + +Linux Mint on the other hand has managed to do something a bit different, particularly with its Cinnamon desktop which manages to feel both familiar and modern at the same time. + +Linux Mint 17.2 is more than just the Cinnamon desktop -- we'll get to that in a minute -- but for those looking for alternatives to Unity and GNOME 3, Linux Mint 17.2 offers everything you love about Ubuntu without the Unity Desktop. + +## Cinnamon 2.6 + +If you head over to the Linux Mint website you'll find two different downloads available, one for the Cinnamon desktop and one for the MATE desktop. Opt for the former and you'll get Linux Mint 17.2 with Cinnamon 2.6. + +[image="mint172-cinn.png" caption="Cinnamon 2.6 in Linux Mint 17.2"] + +Out of the box Cinnamon rather closely resembles Windows XP, albeit with a mintier green gray theme. You'll find all the familiar elements of traditional desktops though, a start menu, task bar and so on. If Windows XP isn't your idea of a good looking desktop, fear not, Cinnamon is highly customizable and there are a ton of themes and useful applets available for download. + +Among the more obvious new features in this release are better dual monitor support, some new tricks for the panel and a much faster overall desktop experience. + +The latter point -- speed improvements -- is particularly true on older hardware. Cinnamon 2.6 is still not by any means a lightweight desktop, nor would it be my first choice for less powerful hardware, but with this release it is a bit less taxing on older systems. Among the improvements are some code optimizations that have reduced the amount of background refreshes that happen. The menu, for instance, is refreshed about 6 times less and the window manager has been overhauled to reduce idle CPU use. + +For more details on all the under the hood speed improvements in Cinnamon 2.6, check out Linux Mint lead Clément Laforge's [blog post on the subject](http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2015/06/cinnamon-2-6/). Since brevity is the essence of Linux reviews, suffice to say that Linux Mint 17.2 is noticeably snappier than its predecessor on the same hardware, something disappointingly few desktops can claim these days. + +The new and improved dual monitor support primarily addresses a long-time complaint from Cinnamon users with more than one screen -- there was no way to set up your panels independently. That's been fixed, which means you can now have a completely different panel on each of your monitors. In fact, you don't have to have multiple screens to take advantage of this one, the updates to the panel mean you can now set up your single monitor with multiple instances, for example, one at the top and bottom of your screen, though I'm not sure why you'd want to. + +But wait, did you catch that in the last paragraph? Cinnamon 2.6 has a new feature that *addresses a long time complaint from users*. In fact there are quite a few new features that can be traced right back to user submitted bugs and feature requests, which is another thing that feels increasingly rare in Linux desktops. + +This release sees the Cinnamon developers focusing on some of what are sometimes call "paper cut" fixes, which just means there's been a lot of attention to the details, particularly the small, but annoying problems. For example, this release adds a new panel applet called "inhibit" which temporarily bans all notifications. It also turns off screen locking and stops any auto dimming you have set up, making a great tool for when you want to watch a video or play a game. + +[image="mint172-cinn-inhibit.png" caption="The Inhibit applet in action."] + +Sure, you could accomplish all those before using a couple different panes in the system settings app, but with applet you can just drop it in the menu bar and click to easily toggle things on and off. It's not a huge new feature, but it's great to have and it solves the kind of real-world problem ordinary users encounter. + +Along similar lines Cinnamon has an improved sound applet, which supports PulseAudio and has the ability to "detect output devices with greater accuracy". In practical terms that means more outputs "just work". There's also a new feature to set the volume level independently for each running application. + +If you've used Cinnamon for a long time you may well remember some bad old days of desktop freezes and other crashes. This used to happen so much I had a Bash shortcut just to restart Cinnamon. As I noted in my review of Mint 17.1, I haven't had this problem for some time on any of my hardware, but if you do you'll be glad to know there's now a keyboard shortcut to restart Cinnamon. By default it's Ctrl+Alt+Escape, which will restart both the Nemo file manager and the cinnamon-settings-daemon and launch a brand new instance of Cinnamon. + +That's a bit cleaner than good old Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, which kills your session and can potentially lose your work. With Ctrl+Alt+Escape your session stays as it was, including any open apps with unsaved work. I've been using Cinnamon 2.6 for a while now though and haven't needed to restart it yet. + +Linux Mint 17.2 with Cinnamon is well worth the upgrade. In fact, even if you're using Cinnamon elsewhere, which has become increasingly common, with Debian and Fedora now including Cinnamon as an option in their installers, I'd suggest updating. The speed improvements alone are worth it. + + +## MATE 1.10 + +The other primary option for Linux Mint 17.2 is the MATE desktop, which has been updated to version 1.10. + + +[image="mint172-mate.png" caption="The MATE desktop in Linux Mint 17.2"] + +Just like its cohort Cinnamon, the MATE update has seen quite a bit of work go into speeding up the desktop experience and bringing down the memory requirements. Unlike Cinnamon though, MATE is what passes for a "lightweight" desktop these days, which is to say that particularly the memory use improvements will be a huge win for anyone using MATE on older, less capable hardware. MATE is not LXDE or bare Openbox by any means, but neither is it anywhere near as big and memory hungry as GNOME 3 or Unity. + +That said, I didn't really notice the speed improvements. Depending on your hardware and use habits you may find that MATE 1.10 is faster, but MATE has always been pretty speedy so sometimes it's hard to tell. It does definitely use less RAM though. + +Beyond the speed and RAM improvements you won't likely notice a lot of changes in this version of MATE. The default file manager in MATE can now enable and disable extensions without a restart and the MATE documentation is now available within the desktop interface. + +The developers of MATE have initiated a similar "paper cut" project for MATE to fix some of the small issues and also to port some of the new Cinnamon features into MATE, but so far it doesn't look like much has happened on this project. The MATE 1.10 release announcement says that these should come as updates to MATE 1.10.x, so expect to see a few things updated and optimized as the 1.10.x release cycle continues. + +Like Cinnamon, MATE has also grown beyond Linux Mint. In fact, there's now an official Ubuntu flavor based on MATE. Given that Linux Mint is derived from Ubuntu, it's worth asking -- why not just use Ubuntu MATE? If you want the latest version of Ubuntu, need an up-to-date kernel to support new hardware or prefer pure Ubuntu then Ubuntu MATE is probably a better choice. + +There's more to Linux Mint than just the desktop though. And while this release retains the base system of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, there are plenty of improvements to the tools and applications that make Mint, well, Mint. + +## Linux Mint 17.2 + +Linux Mint 17.2 ships with a slew of updates that apply regardless of the desktop you choose. + +Among the places Mint trumps Ubuntu is the Update Manager, which goes well beyond the usual package manager, offering up what amounts to a user-friendly tour of the system via package updates. If you really want to know what's going on with your system and how various package updates relate to one another the Mint Update Manager is one of the best ways I've seen to wrap your head around it. + +The latest feature is support package aliases, which sounds obscure, but is actually very simple. It just means that a package with an otherwise obscure name like "cjs" can be displayed as "cinnamon-cjs" so that it appears along side other Cinnamon updates and perhaps more importantly so that you can tell it's connected in some way to Cinnamon. This makes it easier to debug things after an update if something on your system breaks. Even if you have no idea what "cjs" does (for the record, its a JavaScript/C bridge), at least you know it's part of Cinnamon. + +[image="mint172-mate-update-manager.png" caption="Viewing updates in Linux Mint 17.2"] + +The paper cuts theme mentioned earlier extends beyond the desktops as well. Among the small things in the Update Manager is a option to hide the system tray icon when no updates are available, which keeps your panel a little less cluttered. + +Part of the appeal of using Ubuntu is the wealth of .deb packages out there. In general those same third party packages will also work in Mint, which is great, until it isn't. The problem with .deb files is that you never really know what's in them unless you check and let's face it, you don't. Mint makes it a little easier to check out exactly what you're getting with an update to the Software Sources configuration tool. + +With Mint 17.2 you can now open PPA archives and browse their packages. You can also then install them right from Software Sources, you don't have to switch to another tool. But more importantly you can easily purge .deb packages you installed manually. Just remove the repository/PPA and update. Sure you can do that from the command line too, but doing it through Software Source will be much easier for most users. + +[image="mint172-cinn-ppas.png" caption="Inspecting PPA contents in Linux Mint 17.2"] + +If you do prefer the command line there are a couple updates there as well, including support for an interesting command, "apt recommends", which will list missing recommended packages for a particular package. It's sort of like a post installation way to inspect what happens if you use "--no-install-recommends". + +## Ubuntu 14.04 Core + +As mentioned earlier Linux Mint 17.2 sticks with Ubuntu 14.04 under the hood. That means the kernel remains at 3.16, which might be bad news for newer hardware. Naturally you can update the kernel yourself, though unless you really know what you're doing I don't suggest it. + +There is one big upside to sticking with Ubuntu 14.04 as the base for Mint 17.2 -- there's still now systemd. Mint users won't have to deal with systemd for another year when Mint will make the leap to Ubuntu 16.04 as the new base system. That makes Mint 17.2 a good option for those who want to have an updated desktop in the Ubuntu ecosystem, but postpone the move to systemd for a little while. + +## Conclusion + +Mint 17.2 is well worth the upgrade though much of what you want from it might be easier to get by just upgrading Cinnamon or MATE on their own. The Mint Linux upgrade guide tends to emphasize the wisdom on the old saying, "if it ain't broke..." Those are good words to live by, but, that said, I had no trouble at all upgrading from Mint 17.1. All you need to do is open Update Manager and head to the Edit menu, where you should see an option to "Upgrade to Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela." + +Linux Mint 17.2 is an LTS release and will receive security updates until 2019, and until 2016, all Mint releases will continue to use the same base package system (Ubuntu 14.04). diff --git a/ars-technica/published/markdown-notes.txt b/ars-technica/published/markdown-notes.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f2862a3 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/markdown-notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1,208 @@ +We need HTML, but we don't ensuring that our sentences fall into paragraphs, our emphatic points are emphasized and our references are linked. because writing + + +The markup language that surrounds most of our words isn't part of those words. HTML has thankfully been relegated to the background. + + + +dG + +Who should control Markdown? + + +Who should control all the other tools? + +Much of the the strength of + + + + +John Gruber created it, and as Winer writes in arguing why he supports Gruber, "e owe a debt of gratitude to Gruber, for creating Markdown and doing such a great job of getting it established." + + + + + + +If the tools of our culture are controlled solely by those who make them, we always use them at the mercy of the tool makers. + + + + + +> that Gruber felt threatened. I understand this. He wants to be the +> only one who gets to say what "Markdown" is. Unfortunately, he has spent the + + + + + +In the course of writing this I went from generally agreeing with Gruber to agreeing with + +Everything ends there + +That's more or less where the story of Standard Markdown ends + + +> In retrospect, maybe it wasn't well chosen. But I don't think the name was +> ever the real issue. I posted the spec on markdown-discuss on August 14, with +> the name "Standard Markdown" right at the top, and sent it to John Gruber for +> comment, hoping he might get behind some (possibly modified) version of it. +> Nobody said anything about the name then. I think + +> last eight years not saying anything about what it is, even when implementers +> on markdown-discuss were begging for clarification about various issues. That +> is one of the reasons we have so much fragmentation now. + + + + +## What's in a Name + + + +This would be conjecture in many cases, but in this case Atwood has made no secret that he would like to be in charge of Markdown, in fact he's gone so far as to call Gruber a "bad father", of Markdown, which is, frankly, a little creepy even for a good old fashion developer fight. + +Atwood created Stack Overflow so he's not just a little developer who's never had any legal advice before (if such a thing is even still possible in these copyright laced times), so Atwood knows that even when code is open source, project names are not. + +If you don't think Atwood wants to control markdown, consider the other names he wanted to use: + +* Compatible Markdown +* Regular Markdown +* Community Markdown +* Common Markdown +* Uniform Markdown +* Vanilla Markdown + +These are names designed to give your project a ring of authority that supersedes the origin. These are names designed to extinguish. + +Community Markdown is especially infuriating to everyone who has ever used Markdown and is not Jeff Atwood. As developer Dave Winer aptly [writes](http://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/standard-flavored-markdown/2382/19), "we all use Markdown, not just you and your pals. It isn't yours to do with as you please." + +Sometimes it's useful to step back and reframe a question a bit, especially if you sympathize with the ostensible goals of Markdown. + +Suppose you were a group of developers concerned about the future of the MySQL project under Oracle's leadership. You would probably start by forking the MySQL code base and then you would need to name your new project. Given that MySQL is a trademarked name of Oracle, you probably would not call your new project Standard MySQL. If you did you could expect to hear from Oracle's lawyers. A better choice would be to pick a name that has nothing to do with the source -- to forge your own identity. In the case of MySQL the fork is known as Maria DB and its well on its way to being more widely used than MySQL. + +We live where big tech companies are not shy about taking the things they want and destroying the things they don't like. This is what big companies do on the web. No one was better at this than Microsoft back in its heyday. The company even had a [catchy little phrase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend_and_extinguish) for it -- embrace, extend, and extinguish. + +There are many reasons this happens but the two main ones familiar to developers are the not invented here syndrome and the desire of big companies to squash, buy or just bully out of existence smaller, similar projects. + +Not invented here and embrace, extend and extinguish are why we have RDFa and Atom when RSS was working just fine. It's why there's Schema.org when Microformats was already there. Google has even demonstrated that you can do this internally, witness the new Activity Stream API when there's not only an external Activity Stream def, but an internal one. + + + + +This is precisely what a group of companies recently tried to do to Markdown. + +The embrace step happened organically. As already noted, text fields the web over offer support for Markdown. Most of these text fields are controlled by large companies. Notably in this case, Stack Overflow, GitHub and Reddit. + +The next step is extend. This also happened organically. Markdown is imperfect. There are edge cases where it fails. Then there are things it doesn't do. When people ported it to other languages they ran into these problems and often solved them in different ways. Gruber has only updated Markdown once, though there are some beta scripts floating around the web. + +So different version of Markdown sometimes do things in different way. This can be confusing sometimes. But that's the nature of forks, they build on, change and improve what came before. Yet, despite that, none of the forks has ever managed to gain the kind of popularity the original enjoys. Much of this is because the name belongs to the original. + +There are only two conditions you need to adhere to when you make your own version of Markdown (which is licensed under a "BSD-style" license). Retain the copyright notice and refrain from calling your version Markdown or otherwise using the name Markdown in your project. + +The problem is that last bit makes it really hard to complete the third step: extinguish. + +Your project is never going to superceed the original because the original is only one called Markdown. + +Remember too that Markdown has been around for 10 years at this point. It's in hundreds, possibly thousands of pieces of software, often behind the scenes, but often identified by name. In order to take over Markdown you need the name. + +So, if you're Jeff Atwood, founder of Stack Overflow, and cohorts (which include developers from GitHub, Reddit and Meteor.com, you name your fork Standard Markdown. + +This the developer equivalent of [spitting in someone's face](https://twitter.com/justin/status/507304506007515136). + + +In the case of Markdown, if you bothered to read the license you would know that using the word Markdown as part of your project requires explicit permission from the author. The web is waiting to see what happens when Standard Stack Overflow launches. + +## Why This Matters + +Eventually Atwood did back down. He half apologized to Gruber and changed the name to CommonMark, which will take its place alongside all the other Markdown forks. The big names failed to take over Markdown. + +There's an XKCD cartoon that nicely summarizes the future of CommonMark. + +Most likely CommonMark will last about as long as the companies involved remain interested, which is to say, as long as it is useful to them. Most of the time what happens is that the specific developers involved will move on to new companies and the company loses interest. The project dies. + +Community driven projects don't necessarily last longer, but they're not prone to the whims of individual companies. The web is littered with examples of this, from Microformats which flourishes even as Schema.org (backed by the big search engines) languishes. RSS is still here and has become, without any input from big companies, a key part of the web's unseen plumping. + +Markdown now gets to join that list. + +That doesn't mean the gripes against Markdown are without merit though. It seems pretty obvious that Atwood and company want control of Markdown, but at least some of the problems they would like to solve are real problems. + +They want to improve Markdown, solve some of the edge cases and make it easier for other developer to integrate it into their projects. They want to standardize it and, despite what I wrote earlier, standardization is often not a bad thing, which is why a lot of developers support Atwood and CommonMark. + +There's another problem. Markdown has already shipped. Markdown is not a new thing. It's ten years old and used in countless pieces of software, most of which are never going to update just to make a spec that one group of programmers think is better. + +Even if Standard Markdown solved all of Markdown's problems and all the problems it will ever have it's too late. Markdown is not Jeff Atwood's toy. It's not Github's, it's not Reddit's, it's not Stack Overflow's. It's not even Gruber's. + +Markdown is ours. At this point Markdown belongs to everyone who uses it. We are the web writers for whom it was intended and yes we have to deal with some inconsistencies, some vague blurriness around the edges you might say. The good news is it's just plain text, so even if markdown disappears entirely you'll still have something perfectly readable. + +If we're going to spend 2 years fixing bugs and improving something, let's make it something more worthwhile, like OpenSSL. Markdown is doing just fine. + + +Markdown bills itself as "a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers". Notice the last two words, "web writers". That's you and me. Assuming you're getting ready to type a comment at the bottom of this article, and you probably are. We are web writers. Those two words will be important in a minute. + + + + + + + + + + + +The hoopla over + + + + + + + + +Because Atwood and the other big companies behind CommonMark have, as far as I can tell, neglected to put any sort of copyright protection on their name, I have forked the code on GitHub and started a project called Standard CommonMark. If you would like to join me, head on over to GitHub. Or don't, I won't be updating it. + + + + + + +That's not to say that standards are not a good thing. They can be a very good thing, but only when they're built from and for a community of end users. + +There's a reason the W3C, which oversees the standardization of HTML, CSS and other web technologies, requires stakeholders to give up copyright. Without that crucial thing, "standardization" is little more than a land grab, just another weapon in a big company's arsenal of tools to crush the competition. + +Fortunately for smaller developers, and the web at large, tactics like this rarely end up working, because the + + +What happens though when a little Perl script written by one person becomes the focus of the ebrace extend extinguish attack? This is the story of a 1450 line Perl script named Markdown and it's adventures on the web. + + + +## Embrace + + + + + + + + + +The programmer’s tendency to indulge their hyper-specced fantasies often produces inaccessibly myopic software that excludes the uninitiated - Sam Stephenson @sstephenson https://twitter.com/sstephenson/status/507931444182667264 + + + + + + +You can write in HTML. It's not that hard, + +There is a better way to do this. Many, many better ways in fact. One of those ways, perhaps the most popular of those ways is using something called Markdown. + + + + +. To do that you would need to use it in your projects, use it on large sites so that the majority of users of the technology are your own. This way you will have a huge number of supporters when it comes time to sway public opinion. + +You will also have a clever, if meaningless, little counter argument to throw out when people protest that Markdown is doing just fine as is -- you'll be able to say that most of the users are only using it because *you* gave it to them. Man you sure are swell. + diff --git a/ars-technica/published/markdown.html b/ars-technica/published/markdown.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..67c54f8 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/markdown.html @@ -0,0 +1,76 @@ +

Markdown is a Perl script that converts plain text into web-ready HTML. Markdown is also a shorthand syntax for writing HTML tags without needing to write the actual HTML. It has been around for a decade now, but hasn't seen an update in all that time -- nearly unheard of for a piece of software. That Markdown continues to work at all is somewhat amazing.

+

Regrettably, works and works well are not the same thing. Markdown, despite its longevity, has bugs. Luckily Markdown is free software, licensed under a BSD-style license, so anyone can fork it and fix those bugs.

+

Recently a group of developers who rely on Markdown set out to fix some of those bugs and created what they call a "standard" version. From a pure code standpoint the results are great, but instead of the developer gratitude you might expect, the group found themselves at the center of a much larger and very contentious debate that's ultimately about who we want in control of the tools we use.

+

HTML is for Browsers

+

The web turned the whole world into writers. Never in the history of the human race have so many people produced so much text. The web has not, however, turned the whole world into writers of HTML. If writing HTML were a requirement to writing on the web, very few people would be writing on the web.

+

Not that it's particularly hard to write HTML. Only a small subset of the hundreds of HTML tags actually end up in the average bit of text. Most of the time you can get by with paragraph tags, em, strong, and anchor tags for links. And of course list tags, where would the modern web be without list tags?

+

In other words, it's not that hard to write HTML. But it is a pain.

+

Typing out all those tags creates an extra wall between you and your thoughts. No one wants to put <p> at the start of every paragraph. And then </p> at the end, we just want to hit return and keep typing, which is what I did at the end of the previous paragraph. In fact, despite the fact that you're reading this article as a rendering bit of HTML in a webpage, I have not typed a single HTML tag while writing it.

+

Chances are you posted something on Twitter today, chatted with your friends on Facebook, wrote something on your WordPress blog, posted something to Tumblr, committed a bit of code to GitHub, answered a question on Stack Overflow or did a hundred other things that ended up rendered in HTML. You most likely did all that without ever actually typing any HTML tags.

+

Most of the time HTML is hidden by a "rich" text editor, which takes care of creating all the necessary HTML tags for you. WordPress, Tumblr and other sites not aimed at developers tend to use rich text editors.

+

Developers and the sites they interact with on the other hand often use Markdown.

+

Markdown, a Tool for Web Writers

+

Markdown began life as a little Perl script written by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz back in 2004. Gruber had just started writing daringfireball.net and quickly realized that the article-as-a-fragment-of-HTML model that most publishing systems used at the time was lacking. Like most of us, Gruber wanted to edit and preview his writing in the text editor of his choice before pasting that text into the publishing system.

+

HTML is great at many things, but reading raw HTML is terrible. HTML is a markup language, it's a second stage presentation format. That is, you want to get words on the web. So the first stage is to type those words. The second is to add HTML so they look the way you intended in a web browser.

+

No one wants to read, let alone try to edit, text when it's littered with HTML tags.

+

Gruber and Swartz wanted to write first and convert to HTML later, which is what Markdown allows you to do. Gruber and Swartz came up with a shorthand syntax for common HTML elements and Markdown then parses through your text, finds those shorthand markers and replaces them with HTML tags. It also automatically wraps your paragraphs in <p> tags (you just need to leave a blank line between them).

+

Markdown is not an all or nothing syntax. You can pick and choose what you want to use. For example, in ten years of writing in Markdown I have never used its image syntax. For me Markdown's image syntax is no easier to read or simpler to type than an HTML <img> tag, so I just use the HTML tag.

+

Markdown is something you can make your own, which is one of its great strengths. Don't like the inline link syntax? Use the reference syntax, or, just write your links in HTML. Markdown is very flexible. Perhaps too flexible as it turns out.

+

Markdown was not the first text-to-HTML converter, but it was simple and took most of its shorthand syntax from the real world. It mimicked informal styles that emerged when people tried to overcome the limitations of plain text -- writing styles that grew into conventions in email, IRC and Usenet.

+

For example, in Markdown if you surround a word with asterisks it is rendered in HTML as <em> tags, which means it's (usually) italicized. Surround a word with double asterisks and it gets wrapped in <strong> tags and displayed in a bold font.

+

Dig through old mailing lists, IRC logs or Usenet postings and you'll find this style of writing everywhere. Markdown might have been formalized and the parser written by Gruber and Swartz, but much of its language evolved collectively and informally over many years of countless people figuring out how to convey meaning effectively in plain text.

+

Markdown turned out to be wildly successful, particularly among writers who used text editors rather than word processors and were devoted to the idea that your documents, no matter where they end up, should begin life as a text file. In other words, programmers.

+

In the last ten years Markdown has been forked many times, ported to more than a dozen programming languages and rolled out on some big, often developer oriented websites, for example, Github and Stack Overflow. Markdown isn't just popular with developers though, there are also plugins for every major blogging platform, including Wordpress.com.

+

All that is nice for those of us who grew to depend on Markdown since it means that we can use the familiar syntax all over the web.

+

What is the What

+

The problem with Markdown is that it isn't entirely clear all the time. There are bugs, but worse there are ambiguities and edge cases where it's unclear what should happen. Consider Markdown's list syntax. To create an unordered HTML list in Markdown you write something like this:

+
* item one
+* item two
+* item three
+

Markdown then turns that into this HTML:

+
<ul>
+    <li>item one</li>
+    <li>item one</li>
+    <li>item one</li>
+</ul>
+

So far so good. But remember when I said Markdown automatically wraps paragraphs in HTML <p> tags? Okay so what happens if we do this:

+
Here's a list of stuff:
+* item one
+* item two
+* item three
+

There's no line break before it, but any human reader familiar with Markdown would look at this and know there's supposed to be a list there. That means the parser should close the paragraph tag and start creating a list. Or at least that's one way to look at it. The parser might also think, well, there's no line break so it's still part of the paragraph, but there is an asterisk around "item one" and "item two" so those should be wrapped in <em> tags.

+

In fact, depending on which fork of Markdown you use there are 15 possible ways this snippet of Markdown might be rendered.

+

This is not an isolated example either, there are quite a few cases where Markdown is ambiguous. To be clear, there is no real "right" answer, someone just needs to make a decision about which of those 15 possibilities is "right".

+

There are also plain old bugs in Markdown as well. That's why when authors port Markdown to other language they end up creating something slightly different and you end up with something that can be rendered 15 different ways.

+

That's not just annoying for programmers trying to roll Markdown into their projects, it's a huge problem for web writers like you and me who never really know what's going to happen when we put some Markdown in a text field.

+

In a perfect world Gruber would release an update for Markdown. Perhaps even Markdown 2.0. He might, as Dave Winer has suggested, also move Markdown to some sort of version control system and publicly host the code in such a way that other developers can contribute and improve the code. That is, after all, the point of a FOSS software license -- allowing others to freely use and modify the code. The easier you make it to contribute the more people that will do so.

+

Regrettably, we don't live in that perfect world. Markdown, while widely adopted and widely used, hasn't seen so much as a bug fix since 2004. There's nothing wrong with that, it's certainly Gruber's right to let Markdown stand as is, but it's not surprising that other people want to fix the problems and make Markdown better.

+

Recently a group of developers made an effort to do just that. They created a fork of Markdown that solves the inconsistencies and edge cases, fixes the bugs. They also offered up two reference implementations, plenty of documentation and hosted the project on GitHub, which, although not ideal, at least makes it easier for other developers to contribute.

+

This fork might even be able to solve the ambiguities discussed earlier -- by consensus even. For example, it solves the earlier is-it-a-list or not dilemma by requiring blank lines before lists, a decision made in large part because that's what the majority of existing parsers do and therefore will be what most users will expect.

+

That all sounds really nice, so why did the project rankle so many developers? Two reasons. First there was the name -- Standard Markdown.

+

Were the project not using the Markdown name and simply positioning itself as an entirely new thing it would quite possibly have been welcomed by the entire Markdown community. But names have power, names give control. When you use a name you're telling the world you don't want to just improve a thing, you want to control it. Standard Markdown very much wants to be the future of Markdown.

+

Gruber, understandably, did not like the name. He asked the developers to change it and they did. Standard Markdown became CommonMark. That was pretty much the end of the name controversy (though CommonMark could really use a new logo to further distance itself from Markdown).

+

The far more interesting reason Standard Markdown, now CommonMark, created such a fuss is because of who was behind it. Not the individuals, but the companies they represent.

+

The Once and Future Web of People

+

Exploitation of the user is the dominant business model on today's web. Whether that's in the form of data being gathered about you, onerous terms of service you need to abide by or privacy policies that treat you like a commodity, it's hard not to feel like everything is designed to turn you into a device for making someone else massive amounts of money.

+

Today's web is short on humanity and that's something we need to fix. The problem is deep and systemic. Fixing it will not happen overnight, and may well not happen at all.

+

In the mean time there seems to be a deep sense among developers that what we don't need is more big companies trying to take over small projects like Markdown.

+

Despite the disappointing state of the web these days there remain pockets of the internet that still feel untainted. We jealously guard these spaces, our personal little Fugazis of the web that we can point to and say, see, Pinboard.in isn't taking venture capital, Metafilter isn't manipulating me for an exit, and Markdown is still a little script some guy wrote.

+

CommonMark on the other hand was announced by Jeff Atwood, creator of Stack Overflow. Its contributors include developers from Github and Reddit. It's unclear to what extent the companies these people represent are involved, but it certainly appears that CommonMark is a project coming out of the very big companies many have learned to distrust.

+

One of the common arguments leveled at Gruber when he objected to the name Standard Markdown was that there are dozens of other projects using the name Markdown that he did not, publicly anyway, object to, why this one. That is to say, why the apparent hypocrisy?

+

Gruber initially agreed to talk to me about this story, but then never responded to my questions so I can't answer that with his words. But John MacFarlane, creator of the tool Pandoc, and the only CommonMark contributor not associated with a Big Internet Corp., told me that he first posted the spec to the Markdown mailing list in August, several weeks before making it more widely known. He used the name Standard Markdown and Gruber did not raise any objections at the time.

+

It was only later, when Atwood announced the project and presented it as an effort backed by some of the biggest industry users of Markdown that Gruber protested the use of the name.

+

Gruber was not alone. Plenty of developers balked, ostensibly at the name, but more likely at the name combined with the backers. Developer Dave Winer captured the sentiment nicely when he wrote, "we all use Markdown, not just you and your pals. It isn't yours to do with as you please."

+

It Is Yours to Do With As You Please

+

Winer is right in one sense, Markdown belongs to everyone who uses it. In a way this true precisely because Markdown's license says that anyone may do with it as they please. So long as they don't use the name Markdown.

+

And doing as you please includes forking the project to move in a different direction. In fact, forking is open source. Names are something else though.

+

When Oracle purchased Sun a group of developers concerned about the future of the MySQL project under Oracle's leadership forked the code and started a new project. They did not call it Standard MySQL though. If they had the Maria DB project most likely would have disappeared under an avalanche of trademark infringement lawsuits. Luckily the MariaDB developers did the right thing from the start, they made a fresh start, renaming the project.

+

The open source world abounds with successful forks. LibreOffice supplanted OpenOffice, Blink is on its way to being used by more projects than WebKit, and WebKit itself completely overshadows the KHTML project. While not all forks are successful, only about 12 percent of them devolve into trademark fights.

+

Markdown and CommonMark are slightly different since technically CommonMark did not fork the Markdown code, but the Markdown syntax, which is much murkier legal territory. Whether or not Markdown's copyright notice (which applies to derivative works) legally applies to CommonMark is something a judge would have to decided. But legal or no, the name "Standard Markdown" certainly violates the spirit and historical precedence of forking a project.

+

Changing the name to CommonMark solves the technical problem then, but it allows the bigger problem to go unanswered -- who should be allowed to control our tools? In other words, should you go with Markdown or CommonMark?

+

The free software movement -- from which the license governing Markdown is derived -- says the answer is any one, or rather anyone who can write code. The license allows anyone to fork and build their own, it's all decentralized and open. Except that as Markdown illustrates, the result of that is not always ideal.

+

MacFarlane likens the current state of Markdown to an untended garden, adding that "it is a predictable result that a garden so tended will become untidy, that people will begin to trip on the weeds, and that there will be a call for a cleanup." In other words, people want to know that their list will be a list.

+

The answer to the question of who controls our tools will come in part from us and in part from the services we choose to use. There may be some benefits to CommonMark for developers and for web writers, but it still has to gain acceptance in the wider world if it has any hope of success.

+

As Winer writes, "Programmers always underestimate deployment, and think they can wave a magic wand and get everyone to upgrade. It's actually nothing like that. Once the investment is made, and years have gone by, no one wants to go back and dig out old infrastructure and replace it with something else."

+

Stack Overflow, Reddit and GitHub will presumably be moving to CommonMark, which will make it the more familiar version for many users, but unless the CommonMark developers can bring others over to their cause, CommonMark will remain Yet Another Standard.

+

In the mean time, CommonMark is very much a work in progress. If you have ideas or want to contribute to the project, head on over to GitHub. It might not be Markdown, but it could end up becoming something better.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/markdown.txt b/ars-technica/published/markdown.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ffc4111 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/markdown.txt @@ -0,0 +1,157 @@ +Markdown is a Perl script that converts plain text into web-ready HTML. Markdown is also a shorthand syntax for writing HTML tags without needing to write the actual HTML. It has been around for a decade now, but hasn't seen an update in all that time -- nearly unheard of for a piece of software. That Markdown continues to work at all is somewhat amazing. + +Regrettably, works and works well are not the same thing. Markdown, despite its longevity, has bugs. Luckily Markdown is free software, licensed under a BSD-style license, so anyone can fork it and fix those bugs. + +Recently a group of developers who rely on Markdown set out to fix some of those bugs and created what they call a "standard" version. From a pure code standpoint the results are great, but instead of the developer gratitude you might expect, the group found themselves at the center of a much larger and very contentious debate that's ultimately about who we want in control of the tools we use. + +## HTML is for Browsers + +The web turned the whole world into writers. Never in the history of the human race have so many people produced so much text. The web has not, however, turned the whole world into writers of HTML. If writing HTML were a requirement to writing on the web, very few people would be writing on the web. + +Not that it's particularly *hard* to write HTML. Only a small subset of the hundreds of HTML tags actually end up in the average bit of text. Most of the time you can get by with paragraph tags, em, strong, and anchor tags for links. And of course list tags, where would the modern web be without list tags? + +In other words, it's not that hard to write HTML. But it is a pain. + +Typing out all those tags creates an extra wall between you and your thoughts. No one wants to put `

` at the start of every paragraph. And then `

` at the end, we just want to hit return and keep typing, which is what I did at the end of the previous paragraph. In fact, despite the fact that you're reading this article as a rendering bit of HTML in a webpage, I have not typed a single HTML tag while writing it. + +Chances are you posted something on Twitter today, chatted with your friends on Facebook, wrote something on your WordPress blog, posted something to Tumblr, committed a bit of code to GitHub, answered a question on Stack Overflow or did a hundred other things that ended up rendered in HTML. You most likely did all that without ever actually typing any HTML tags. + +Most of the time HTML is hidden by a "rich" text editor, which takes care of creating all the necessary HTML tags for you. WordPress, Tumblr and other sites not aimed at developers tend to use rich text editors. + +Developers and the sites they interact with on the other hand often use Markdown. + +## Markdown, a Tool for Web Writers + +Markdown began life as a little Perl script written by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz back in 2004. Gruber had just started writing daringfireball.net and quickly realized that the article-as-a-fragment-of-HTML model that most publishing systems used at the time was lacking. Like most of us, Gruber wanted to edit and preview his writing in the text editor of his choice before pasting that text into the publishing system. + +HTML is great at many things, but reading raw HTML is terrible. HTML is a markup language, it's a second stage presentation format. That is, you want to get words on the web. So the first stage is to type those words. The second is to add HTML so they look the way you intended in a web browser. + +No one wants to read, let alone try to edit, text when it's littered with HTML tags. + +Gruber and Swartz wanted to write first and convert to HTML later, which is what Markdown allows you to do. Gruber and Swartz came up with a shorthand syntax for common HTML elements and Markdown then parses through your text, finds those shorthand markers and replaces them with HTML tags. It also automatically wraps your paragraphs in `

` tags (you just need to leave a blank line between them). + +Markdown is not an all or nothing syntax. You can pick and choose what you want to use. For example, in ten years of writing in Markdown I have never used its image syntax. For me Markdown's image syntax is no easier to read or simpler to type than an HTML `` tag, so I just use the HTML tag. + +Markdown is something you can make your own, which is one of its great strengths. Don't like the inline link syntax? Use the reference syntax, or, just write your links in HTML. Markdown is very flexible. Perhaps too flexible as it turns out. + +Markdown was not the first text-to-HTML converter, but it was simple and took most of its shorthand syntax from the real world. It mimicked informal styles that emerged when people tried to overcome the limitations of plain text -- writing styles that grew into conventions in email, IRC and Usenet. + +For example, in Markdown if you surround a word with asterisks it is rendered in HTML as `` tags, which means it's (usually) italicized. Surround a word with double asterisks and it gets wrapped in `` tags and displayed in a bold font. + +Dig through old mailing lists, IRC logs or Usenet postings and you'll find this style of writing everywhere. Markdown might have been formalized and the parser written by Gruber and Swartz, but much of its language evolved collectively and informally over many years of countless people figuring out how to convey meaning effectively in plain text. + +Markdown turned out to be wildly successful, particularly among writers who used text editors rather than word processors and were devoted to the idea that your documents, no matter where they end up, should begin life as a text file. In other words, programmers. + +In the last ten years Markdown has been forked many times, ported to more than a dozen programming languages and rolled out on some big, often developer oriented websites, for example, Github and Stack Overflow. Markdown isn't just popular with developers though, there are also plugins for every major blogging platform, including Wordpress.com. + +All that is nice for those of us who grew to depend on Markdown since it means that we can use the familiar syntax all over the web. + +## What is the What + +The problem with Markdown is that it isn't entirely clear all the time. There are bugs, but worse there are ambiguities and edge cases where it's unclear what should happen. Consider Markdown's list syntax. To create an unordered HTML list in Markdown you write something like this: + +~~~ +* item one +* item two +* item three +~~~ + +Markdown then turns that into this HTML: + +~~~ +

    +
  • item one
    • +
  • item one
    • +
  • item one
    • +
+~~~ + +So far so good. But remember when I said Markdown automatically wraps paragraphs in HTML `

` tags? Okay so what happens if we do this: + +~~~ +Here's a list of stuff: +* item one +* item two +* item three +~~~ + +There's no line break before it, but any human reader familiar with Markdown would look at this and know there's supposed to be a list there. That means the parser should close the paragraph tag and start creating a list. Or at least that's one way to look at it. The parser might also think, well, there's no line break so it's still part of the paragraph, but there is an asterisk around "item one" and "item two" so those should be wrapped in `` tags. + +In fact, depending on which fork of Markdown you use there are [15 possible ways][1] this snippet of Markdown might be rendered. + +This is not an isolated example either, there are quite a few cases where Markdown is ambiguous. To be clear, there is no real "right" answer, someone just needs to make a decision about which of those 15 possibilities is "right". + +There are also plain old bugs in Markdown as well. That's why when authors port Markdown to other language they end up creating something slightly different and you end up with something that can be rendered 15 different ways. + +That's not just annoying for programmers trying to roll Markdown into their projects, it's a huge problem for web writers like you and me who never really know what's going to happen when we put some Markdown in a text field. + +In a perfect world Gruber would release an update for Markdown. Perhaps even Markdown 2.0. He might, as Dave Winer has suggested, also move Markdown to some sort of version control system and publicly host the code in such a way that other developers can contribute and improve the code. That is, after all, the point of a FOSS software license -- allowing others to freely use and modify the code. The easier you make it to contribute the more people that will do so. + +Regrettably, we don't live in that perfect world. Markdown, while widely adopted and widely used, hasn't seen so much as a bug fix since 2004. There's nothing wrong with that, it's certainly Gruber's right to let Markdown stand as is, but it's not surprising that other people want to fix the problems and make Markdown better. + +Recently a group of developers made an effort to do just that. They created a fork of Markdown that solves the inconsistencies and edge cases, fixes the bugs. They also offered up two reference implementations, plenty of documentation and hosted the project on GitHub, which, although not ideal, at least makes it easier for other developers to contribute. + +This fork might even be able to solve the ambiguities discussed earlier -- by consensus even. For example, it solves the earlier is-it-a-list or not dilemma by requiring blank lines before lists, a decision made in large part because that's what the majority of existing parsers do and therefore will be what most users will expect. + +That all sounds really nice, so why did the project rankle so many developers? Two reasons. First there was the name -- Standard Markdown. + +Were the project not using the Markdown name and simply positioning itself as an entirely new thing it would quite possibly have been welcomed by the entire Markdown community. But names have power, names give control. When you use a name you're telling the world you don't want to just improve a thing, you want to control it. Standard Markdown very much wants to be the future of Markdown. + +Gruber, understandably, did not like the name. He asked the developers to change it and they did. Standard Markdown became [CommonMark][6]. That was pretty much the end of the name controversy (though CommonMark could really use a new logo to further distance itself from Markdown). + +The far more interesting reason Standard Markdown, now CommonMark, created such a fuss is because of who was behind it. Not the individuals, but the companies they represent. + +## The Once and Future Web of People + +Exploitation of the user is the dominant business model on today's web. Whether that's in the form of data being gathered about you, onerous terms of service you need to abide by or privacy policies that treat you like a commodity, it's hard not to feel like everything is designed to turn you into a device for making someone else massive amounts of money. + +Today's web is short on humanity and that's something we need to fix. The problem is deep and systemic. Fixing it will not happen overnight, and may well not happen at all. + +In the mean time there seems to be a deep sense among developers that what we don't need is more big companies trying to take over small projects like Markdown. + +Despite the disappointing state of the web these days there remain pockets of the internet that still feel untainted. We jealously guard these spaces, our personal little Fugazis of the web that we can point to and say, see, Pinboard.in isn't taking venture capital, Metafilter isn't manipulating me for an exit, and Markdown is still a little script some guy wrote. + +CommonMark on the other hand was announced by Jeff Atwood, creator of Stack Overflow. Its contributors include developers from Github and Reddit. It's unclear to what extent the companies these people represent are involved, but it certainly appears that CommonMark is a project coming out of the very big companies many have learned to distrust. + +One of the common arguments leveled at Gruber when he objected to the name Standard Markdown was that there are dozens of other projects using the name Markdown that he did not, publicly anyway, object to, why this one. That is to say, why the apparent hypocrisy? + +Gruber initially agreed to talk to me about this story, but then never responded to my questions so I can't answer that with his words. But John MacFarlane, creator of the tool Pandoc, and the only CommonMark contributor not associated with a Big Internet Corp., told me that he first posted the spec to the Markdown mailing list in August, several weeks before making it more widely known. He used the name Standard Markdown and Gruber did not raise any objections at the time. + +It was only later, when Atwood announced the project and presented it as an effort backed by some of the biggest industry users of Markdown that Gruber protested the use of the name. + +Gruber was not alone. Plenty of developers balked, ostensibly at the name, but more likely at the name combined with the backers. Developer Dave Winer captured the sentiment nicely when he [wrote][2], "we all use Markdown, not just you and your pals. It isn't yours to do with as you please." + +## It Is Yours to Do With As You Please + +Winer is right in one sense, Markdown belongs to everyone who uses it. In a way this true precisely because Markdown's license says that anyone may do with it as they please. *So long as they don't use the name Markdown*. + +And doing as you please includes forking the project to move in a different direction. In fact, forking is open source. Names are something else though. + +When Oracle purchased Sun a group of developers concerned about the future of the MySQL project under Oracle's leadership forked the code and started a new project. They did not call it Standard MySQL though. If they had the Maria DB project most likely would have disappeared under an avalanche of trademark infringement lawsuits. Luckily the MariaDB developers did the right thing from the start, they made a fresh start, renaming the project. + +The open source world abounds with successful forks. LibreOffice supplanted OpenOffice, Blink is on its way to being used by more projects than WebKit, and WebKit itself completely overshadows the KHTML project. While not all forks are successful, only about 12 percent of them devolve into trademark fights. + +Markdown and CommonMark are slightly different since technically CommonMark did not fork the Markdown code, but the Markdown syntax, which is much murkier legal territory. Whether or not Markdown's copyright notice (which applies to derivative works) legally applies to CommonMark is something a judge would have to decided. But legal or no, the name "Standard Markdown" certainly violates the spirit and historical precedence of forking a project. + +Changing the name to CommonMark solves the technical problem then, but it allows the bigger problem to go unanswered -- who should be allowed to control our tools? In other words, should you go with Markdown or CommonMark? + +The free software movement -- from which the license governing Markdown is derived -- says the answer is any one, or rather anyone who can write code. The license allows anyone to fork and build their own, it's all decentralized and open. Except that as Markdown illustrates, the result of that is not always ideal. + +MacFarlane [likens][3] the current state of Markdown to an untended garden, adding that "it is a predictable result that a garden so tended will become untidy, that people will begin to trip on the weeds, and that there will be a call for a cleanup." In other words, people want to know that their list will be a list. + +The answer to the question of who controls our tools will come in part from us and in part from the services we choose to use. There may be some benefits to CommonMark for developers and for web writers, but it still has to gain acceptance in the wider world if it has any hope of success. + +As Winer [writes][5], "Programmers always underestimate deployment, and think they can wave a magic wand and get everyone to upgrade. It's actually nothing like that. Once the investment is made, and years have gone by, no one wants to go back and dig out old infrastructure and replace it with something else." + +Stack Overflow, Reddit and GitHub will presumably be moving to CommonMark, which will make it the more familiar version for many users, but unless the CommonMark developers can bring others over to their cause, CommonMark will remain [Yet Another Standard][4]. + +In the mean time, CommonMark is very much a work in progress. If you have ideas or want to contribute to the project, head on over to [GitHub][7]. It might not be Markdown, but it could end up becoming something better. + + +[1]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/?text=Here%27s+a+list+of+stuff%3A%0A*+item+one%0A*+item+two%0A*+item+three%0A +[2]: http://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/standard-flavored-markdown/2382/19 +[3]: http://talk.commonmark.org/t/please-lets-tone-down-the-rhetoric/707/2 +[4]: https://xkcd.com/927/ +[5]: http://scripting.com/2014/09/08/soImSidingWithGruber.html +[6]: http://commonmark.org/ +[7]: https://github.com/jgm/stmd diff --git a/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot01.png b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot01.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b3fc2dd Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot01.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot02.png b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot02.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6b51920 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot02.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot03.png b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot03.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..19d3b61 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot03.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot04.png b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot04.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..53a2eb4 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot04.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot05.png b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot05.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6cd3e0e Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot05.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot06.png b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot06.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5faf9e3 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot06.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot07.png b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot07.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..feb4c63 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot07.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot08.png b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot08.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2c9c842 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot08.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot09.png b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot09.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3ce86f5 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot09.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot10.png b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot10.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..46eaa63 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/mint17/screenshot10.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/mint171review.html b/ars-technica/published/mint171review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9b339fe --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/mint171review.html @@ -0,0 +1,74 @@ +

The Linux Mint team recently released Linux Mint 17.1, a somewhat minor, but still welcome upgrade to the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint ecosystem.

+

While Linux Mint 17.1 arrives as it usually does, a few weeks after the release of a new version of Ubuntu, version 17.1 is not based on Ubuntu's latest effort, 14.10, but remains tied to the last Long Term Support release, Ubuntu 14.04.

+

This is the first time Linux Mint has not used the latest version of Ubuntu for a new release, but that's been the plan all along. Indeed, Mint will not be changing its Ubuntu base again until the next Long Term Support release -- Ubuntu 16.04 -- arrives in 2016.

+

At first glance this might seem like a bad thing -- Mint is after all missing out on whatever new stuff is in Ubuntu 14.10 (in the case of 14.10 there's not much, but 15.04 will have plenty of new things) -- but it is in fact a very good thing for fans of Mint's own tools, like the homegrown Cinnamon desktop.

+

Instead of spending all their time and effort making sure whatever Ubuntu has changed in Ubuntu 14.10 works with Mint, Mint developers can more or less ignore the base system and focus on what makes Mint such a great distro, namely, its two primary desktops -- MATE and Cinnamon.

+

Linux Mint 17.1

+

While most of what's new in Mint 17.1 will be seen in the updated desktops, there are some components common to both Cinnamon and MATE. While accessing some of these new tools varies slightly by desktop, the results are the same in both.

+

Among those new and improved elements is one you'll notice right off the bat -- the new login screen.

+

If you start the Mint installation process and walk away, as I did, you'll likely come back to an image slideshow that's slowly flipping through all the various wallpapers Mint 17.1 offers -- which is a lot, since it contains not only those that are new with this release, but all the wallpapers that came with every previous Mint release. Suffice to say, if you need some new desktop wallpaper, Mint 17.1 has you covered.

+ +[image="mint171__login-screen.jpg" caption="The new Mint 17.1 login screen, complete with slideshow controls."] + +

The slideshow is a nice touch and you can control how it behaves with the Login Window Preferences menu, which now has Theme, Auto Login, and Options menu items to access different settings. There's also a theme preview button to test out the other themes available (or any you install yourself).

+

The newly polished login screen is nice, but far more useful is the revamped Update Manager that ships with Mint 17.1.

+

Mint has been refining its Update Manager for some time now. The last release saw the introduction of some new icons and a numbered rating system that help let you know which updates are essential and which can be safely ignored. Mint 17.1 builds on those improvements with a new feature that groups package updates together based on source package.

+

That is, rather than just a list of every new package that's going to be updated, Mint 17.1 will group everything you need to update a single package, say, LibreOffice, into one line in the Update Manager. Select the update and you can see the individual packages listed in the bottom pane. If you want more information on what's new, there's a Changelog tab which will download details on what's new in that package.

+ +[image="mint171__update-manager.jpg" caption="Mint 17.1's Update Manager."] + +

The new grouping system will help users avoid selectively updating packages and potentially breaking the whole because not every necessary part has been updated.

+

As Mint's lead developer, Clement Lefebvre puts it, "when a developer fixes a bug or writes new features, the source code is modified and all packages which are related to it become available under a new version... it is therefore futile and sometimes dangerous to apply some package updates and not others within the same source package."

+

Because Mint 17.1 groups updates, you'll never apply incomplete updates and it's considerably easier to review exactly what's being updated in each source package because everything is shown together in one place.

+

The Update Manager in Linux Mint 17.1 also features a redesigned kernels menu that makes it easier to see security updates and any regressions in each kernel update.

+ + +[image="mint171__kernels.jpg" caption="Viewing various installed kernels in Mint 17.1's Update Manager."] + +

The trademark minty green is still the default, but Mint's theme gets quite an overhaul in this release. And those that don't like the default green can banish it in favor of quite a few new colors. There are also a number of dark-on-light theme options available if the default light-on-dark interface isn't what you want.

+ +[image="mint171__theme-options.jpg" caption="Mint, now with less minty green"] + +

Linux Mint 17.1 ships with a new font, Google's Noto font, which is Google's attempt to create a font family that supports all the world's languages.

+

As noted at the start, this release sticks with the Ubuntu 14.04 base, which means the kernel is v3.13. That's a little behind what most distros released in last couple of months are using. If you're already running Mint 17 without issues then you'll likely be fine with 3.13. The main issue you're likely to run into is if you have any brand new hardware that requires a newer kernel for full support.

+

One bit of hardware does get some love in this release -- single button trackpads, for example, those used in Apple laptops. If you're planning to run Mint on a Macbook of some kind this release is a must-have. Be sure to check out the new Mouse and Touchpad panel in the System Settings, which now allows you to configure which actions apply to 2-finger and 3-finger clicks (by default it's right and middle click respectively).

+

Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon Desktop

+

Cinnamon is Mint's homegrown flagship desktop. If you're not interested in new approaches to the desktop like those being pioneered by Ubuntu's Unity or GNOME 3's Shell interface, Cinnamon offers a more traditional interface based around familiar ideas like a task bar and main menu. Cinnamon is not breaking any new ground on the UI front, but it's polished, fast and reliable.

+

I've been using Cinnamon nearly full time for quite a few releases now. When it first arrived it was the desktop you knew had potential, but it was buggy enough that I actually created a bash alias to restart it after a crash. Thankfully those days are long gone. Cinnamon has been rock solid in my use ever since Mint 15.

+

For Mint 17.1 Cinnamon has been updated to version 2.4. This release focuses on reducing memory use and speeding things up. While Cinnamon will never be as lightweight as something like LXDE or Openbox, Cinnamon 2.4 is considerably snappier than its predecessor, even on underpowered hardware like my aging Asus EeePC 1005.

+

When you install the Cinnamon version of Mint 17.1, once you get past the new slideshow login screen you'll be greeted with yet another new animation -- a GNOME-inspired desktop zoom that gives the Cinnamon boot experience a more polished feel. It's a small thing, but it sets the tone quite nicely for Cinnamon 2.4. The Cinnamon interface remains light-on-dark by default, but as noted earlier there are numerous new theme options and colors to customize things to your liking (most GTK 2 and 3 themes should work as well).

+

Among the more visual changes in this release are slew of new features in Nemo, Cinnamon's file manager. The latest version of Nemo adds support for what Mint calls "emblems", colored folders and new ways to customize the sidebar.

+ +[image="mint171__cinn-emblems.jpg" caption="Adding color and emblems to the Documents folder."] + +

The emblems are little sub-icons which are displayed on top of the base icon, for example the musical note emblem overlays the Music folder by default. You can now apply any emblem to any folder or file. The emblems make it a little easier to find the folder or file you're looking for in the sidebar or list views (as do the new colored folder options). The emblems and colors would be even better if they showed up in open/save dialogs in other apps, but unfortunately they do not.

+

Nemo's toolbar has been redesigned and its buttons are now configurable. For example, there's an especially handy button that will open a terminal window in the current directory. It's not there by default, but you can enable it under Edit >> Preferences.

+ +[image="mint171__cinn-nemo2.jpg" caption="Customizing Nemo's toolbar."] + +

The Cinnamon settings panel has been revamped for this release, with panes now displayed in alphabetical order within each section. There are also a couple of new panes, including one dubbed Privacy, which is based on the same tool in GNOME 3 and allows you to control how long recent items are stored. There's also a new a pane for controlling notifications.

+

Other improvements in Cinnamon 2.4 include support multiple panel launchers, improvements in the sound applet and the usual slew of bug fixes that come with any major update.

+

The new features, themes, added polish and speed improvements in Cinnamon 2.4 make it quite simply the best desktop I've used on any OS, including Windows and OS X.

+

Linux Mint 17.1 MATE Desktop

+

The MATE desktop began life as a fork of GNOME 2, a response to GNOME 3's radical departure from GNOME 2. Since then MATE has gone on to become very much its own thing

+

That's not to say though that the latest, MATE 1.8, has strayed too far from its GNOME 2 roots, it's still aimed at GNOME 2 fans and those looking for a lightweight, but full-featured desktop. In fact, those GNOME roots are strengthened in this release with the addition of Compiz support. Yes, it's true, MATE and Compiz can be joined for a return to the halcyon days of rotating cubes and wobbly windows.

+ +[image="mint171__mate-compiz.jpg" caption="Compiz and MATE, together at last."] + +

To keep MATE true to its lightweight past, Compiz is not enabled out of the box, but turning it on is just a matter of opening Desktop Settings >> Windows and switching from the default Marco window manager to Compiz. MATE will warn you that Compiz's Settings Manager is a powerful tool capable for rendering your desktop unusable, but once you ignore that warning you'll be able to tweak and break Compiz just like you did when Ubuntu 8.10 was the best thing in Linux.

+ +[image="mint171__mate-compiz2.jpg" caption="Compiz and MATE... you've been warned."] + +

That said, I would not recommend using Compiz with MATE. I found the Compiz support to be little buggy and of course Compiz requires more powerful hardware which negates part of the appeal of MATE. If you want more bang for your desktop buck, I'd go with Cinnamon. Unless you really love rotating cubes and wobbly windows, in which case, perhaps you'll have better luck than I did.

+

The new Mint-X theme options mentioned earlier give you a few new ways to customize MATE and the new font provides better support for some languages (CJK in particular). Under the hood there are some bug fixes and stability improvements as well.

+

If you pine for the days of GNOME 2 complete with Compiz wobbly windows and the rest of the desktop effects that once said "this is a Linux desktop" then MATE 2 fits the bill. If you prefer a lightweight desktop that just stays simple and out of the way, MATE is still a great choice, just stick with the default Marco window manager.

+

Mint 17.1 Software Stack

+

When Mint first announced its intention to stick with an Ubuntu 14.04 base for a few years, many users were concerned about what that would mean for application updates. As noted at the start the kernel is not as up-to-date as what you'll find in the latest version of Ubuntu, openSUSE or the coming Fedora 21.

+

On the application front though things are looking much better. Mint continues to ship with just about everything you need for all-around desktop use and even includes some useful apps often left out of other distros by default (like GIMP and VLC), though this does make the Mint DVD a little on the large size (1.4GB for the Cinnamon DVD).

+

Both the Cinnamon and MATE versions Mint 17.1 ship with the latest stable versions of all its included apps -- Firefox, LibreOffice, Banshee, VLC and other common applications. So apparently Mint can keep its base system and eat its application updates too.

+

Upgrade For a Reason

+

Mint 17.1 is well worth the upgrade, though as Lefebvre writes in a post on how to upgrade from Mint 17, "upgrade for a reason."

+

Lefebvre goes on to add, "as excited as we are about 17.1, upgrading blindly for the sake of running the latest version does not make much sense, especially if you're already happy with 17 and everything is working perfectly."

+

That refreshing bit of pragmatism is worth keeping in mind regardless of which distro or desktop you use, but in fact I had no trouble at all upgrading from Mint 17 and everything is once again working perfectly. All you need to do is open Update Manager and head to the Edit menu where you should see an option to "Upgrade to Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca".

+

The only problem I've encountered is the known bug involving problems with Skype on 64-bit versions of Mint 17.1. Fortunately there's an easy fix.

+

Linux Mint 17.1 will receive security updates until 2019 and until 2016 all Mint releases will continue to use the same base package system, AKA Ubuntu 14.04. That means upgrading to 17.2 and beyond should continue to be as painless as the move from 17 to 17.1.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/mint171review.txt b/ars-technica/published/mint171review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..26bb7b5 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/mint171review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,97 @@ +The Linux Mint team recently released Linux Mint 17.1, a somewhat minor, but still welcome upgrade to the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint ecosystem. + +While Linux Mint 17.1 arrives as it usually does, a few weeks after the release of a new version of Ubuntu, version 17.1 is *not* based on Ubuntu's latest effort, 14.10, but remains tied to the last Long Term Support release, [Ubuntu 14.04](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/ubuntu-14-04-review-missing-the-boat-on-big-changes/). + +This is the first time Linux Mint has not used the latest version of Ubuntu for a new release, but that's been the plan all along. Indeed, Mint will not be changing its Ubuntu base again until the next Long Term Support release -- Ubuntu 16.04 -- arrives in 2016. + +At first glance this might seem like a bad thing -- Mint is after all missing out on whatever new stuff is in Ubuntu 14.10 (in the case of 14.10 there's not much, but 15.04 will have plenty of new things) -- but it is in fact a very good thing for fans of Mint's own tools, like the homegrown Cinnamon desktop. + +Instead of spending all their time and effort making sure whatever Ubuntu has changed in Ubuntu 14.10 works with Mint, Mint developers can more or less ignore the base system and focus on what makes Mint such a great distro, namely, its two primary desktops -- MATE and Cinnamon. + +# Linux Mint 17.1 + +While most of what's new in Mint 17.1 will be seen in the updated desktops, there are some components common to both Cinnamon and MATE. While accessing some of these new tools varies slightly by desktop, the results are the same in both. + +Among those new and improved elements is one you'll notice right off the bat -- the new login screen. + +If you start the Mint installation process and walk away, as I did, you'll likely come back to an image slideshow that's slowly flipping through all the various wallpapers Mint 17.1 offers -- which is a lot, since it contains not only those that are new with this release, but all the wallpapers that came with every previous Mint release. Suffice to say, if you need some new desktop wallpaper, Mint 17.1 has you covered. + +The slideshow is a nice touch and you can control how it behaves with the Login Window Preferences menu, which now has Theme, Auto Login, and Options menu items to access different settings. There's also a theme preview button to test out the other themes available (or any you install yourself). + +The newly polished login screen is nice, but far more useful is the revamped Update Manager that ships with Mint 17.1. + +Mint has been refining its Update Manager for some time now. The [last release](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/06/mint-17-the-perfect-place-for-linux-ers-to-wait-out-ubuntu-uncertainty/) saw the introduction of some new icons and a numbered rating system that help let you know which updates are essential and which can be safely ignored. Mint 17.1 builds on those improvements with a new feature that groups package updates together based on source package. + +That is, rather than just a list of every new package that's going to be updated, Mint 17.1 will group everything you need to update a single package, say, LibreOffice, into one line in the Update Manager. Select the update and you can see the individual packages listed in the bottom pane. If you want more information on what's new, there's a Changelog tab which will download details on what's new in that package. + +The new grouping system will help users avoid selectively updating packages and potentially breaking the whole because not every necessary part has been updated. + +As Mint's lead developer, Clement Lefebvre [puts it](http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_rebecca_mate_whatsnew.php#mintupdate), "when a developer fixes a bug or writes new features, the source code is modified and all packages which are related to it become available under a new version... it is therefore futile and sometimes dangerous to apply some package updates and not others within the same source package." + +Because Mint 17.1 groups updates, you'll never apply incomplete updates and it's considerably easier to review exactly what's being updated in each source package because everything is shown together in one place. + +The Update Manager in Linux Mint 17.1 also features a redesigned kernels menu that makes it easier to see security updates and any regressions in each kernel update. + +The trademark minty green is still the default, but Mint's theme gets quite an overhaul in this release. And those that don't like the default green can banish it in favor of quite a few new colors. There are also a number of dark-on-light theme options available if the default light-on-dark interface isn't what you want. + +Linux Mint 17.1 ships with a new font, Google's Noto font, which is Google's attempt to create a font family that supports all the world's languages. + +As noted at the start, this release sticks with the Ubuntu 14.04 base, which means the kernel is v3.13. That's a little behind what most distros released in last couple of months are using. If you're already running Mint 17 without issues then you'll likely be fine with 3.13. The main issue you're likely to run into is if you have any brand new hardware that requires a newer kernel for full support. + +One bit of hardware does get some love in this release -- single button trackpads, for example, those used in Apple laptops. If you're planning to run Mint on a Macbook of some kind this release is a must-have. Be sure to check out the new Mouse and Touchpad panel in the System Settings, which now allows you to configure which actions apply to 2-finger and 3-finger clicks (by default it's right and middle click respectively). + +## Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon Desktop + +Cinnamon is Mint's homegrown flagship desktop. If you're not interested in new approaches to the desktop like those being pioneered by Ubuntu's Unity or GNOME 3's Shell interface, Cinnamon offers a more traditional interface based around familiar ideas like a task bar and main menu. Cinnamon is not breaking any new ground on the UI front, but it's polished, fast and reliable. + +I've been using Cinnamon nearly full time for quite a few releases now. When it first arrived it was the desktop you knew had potential, but it was buggy enough that I actually created a bash alias to restart it after a crash. Thankfully those days are long gone. Cinnamon has been rock solid in my use ever since Mint 15. + +For Mint 17.1 Cinnamon has been updated to version 2.4. This release focuses on reducing memory use and speeding things up. While Cinnamon will never be as lightweight as something like LXDE or Openbox, Cinnamon 2.4 is considerably snappier than its predecessor, even on underpowered hardware like my aging Asus EeePC 1005. + +When you install the Cinnamon version of Mint 17.1, once you get past the new slideshow login screen you'll be greeted with yet another new animation -- a GNOME-inspired desktop zoom that gives the Cinnamon boot experience a more polished feel. It's a small thing, but it sets the tone quite nicely for Cinnamon 2.4. The Cinnamon interface remains light-on-dark by default, but as noted earlier there are numerous new theme options and colors to customize things to your liking (most GTK 2 and 3 themes should work as well). + +Among the more visual changes in this release are slew of new features in Nemo, Cinnamon's file manager. The latest version of Nemo adds support for what Mint calls "emblems", colored folders and new ways to customize the sidebar. + +The emblems are little sub-icons which are displayed on top of the base icon, for example the musical note emblem overlays the Music folder by default. You can now apply any emblem to any folder or file. The emblems make it a little easier to find the folder or file you're looking for in the sidebar or list views (as do the new colored folder options). The emblems and colors would be even better if they showed up in open/save dialogs in other apps, but unfortunately they do not. + +Nemo's toolbar has been redesigned and its buttons are now configurable. For example, there's an especially handy button that will open a terminal window in the current directory. It's not there by default, but you can enable it under Edit >> Preferences. + +The Cinnamon settings panel has been revamped for this release, with panes now displayed in alphabetical order within each section. There are also a couple of new panes, including one dubbed Privacy, which is based on the same tool in GNOME 3 and allows you to control how long recent items are stored. There's also a new a pane for controlling notifications. + +Other improvements in Cinnamon 2.4 include support multiple panel launchers, improvements in the sound applet and the usual slew of bug fixes that come with any major update. + +The new features, themes, added polish and speed improvements in Cinnamon 2.4 make it quite simply the best desktop I've used on any OS, including Windows and OS X. + +## Linux Mint 17.1 MATE Desktop + +The MATE desktop began life as a fork of GNOME 2, a response to GNOME 3's radical departure from GNOME 2. Since then MATE has gone on to become very much its own thing + +That's not to say though that the latest, MATE 1.8, has strayed too far from its GNOME 2 roots, it's still aimed at GNOME 2 fans and those looking for a lightweight, but full-featured desktop. In fact, those GNOME roots are strengthened in this release with the addition of Compiz support. Yes, it's true, MATE and Compiz can be joined for a return to the halcyon days of rotating cubes and wobbly windows. + +To keep MATE true to its lightweight past, Compiz is not enabled out of the box, but turning it on is just a matter of opening Desktop Settings >> Windows and switching from the default Marco window manager to Compiz. MATE will warn you that Compiz's Settings Manager is a powerful tool capable for rendering your desktop unusable, but once you ignore that warning you'll be able to tweak and break Compiz just like you did when Ubuntu 8.10 was the best thing in Linux. + +That said, I would not recommend using Compiz with MATE. I found the Compiz support to be little buggy and of course Compiz requires more powerful hardware which negates part of the appeal of MATE. If you want more bang for your desktop buck, I'd go with Cinnamon. Unless you really love rotating cubes and wobbly windows, in which case, perhaps you'll have better luck than I did. + +The new Mint-X theme options mentioned earlier give you a few new ways to customize MATE and the new font provides better support for some languages (CJK in particular). Under the hood there are some bug fixes and stability improvements as well. + +If you pine for the days of GNOME 2 complete with Compiz wobbly windows and the rest of the desktop effects that once said "this is a Linux desktop" then MATE 2 fits the bill. If you prefer a lightweight desktop that just stays simple and out of the way, MATE is still a great choice, just stick with the default Marco window manager. + +## Mint 17.1 Software Stack + +When Mint first announced its intention to stick with an Ubuntu 14.04 base for a few years, many users were concerned about what that would mean for application updates. As noted at the start the kernel is not as up-to-date as what you'll find in the latest version of Ubuntu, openSUSE or the coming Fedora 21. + +On the application front though things are looking much better. Mint continues to ship with just about everything you need for all-around desktop use and even includes some useful apps often left out of other distros by default (like GIMP and VLC), though this does make the Mint DVD a little on the large size (1.4GB for the Cinnamon DVD). + +Both the Cinnamon and MATE versions Mint 17.1 ship with the latest stable versions of all its included apps -- Firefox, LibreOffice, Banshee, VLC and other common applications. So apparently Mint can keep its base system and eat its application updates too. + +## Upgrade For a Reason + +Mint 17.1 is well worth the upgrade, though as Lefebvre writes in a post on [how to upgrade from Mint 17](http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2725), "upgrade for a reason." + +Lefebvre goes on to add, "as excited as we are about 17.1, upgrading blindly for the sake of running the latest version does not make much sense, especially if you're already happy with 17 and everything is working perfectly." + +That refreshing bit of pragmatism is worth keeping in mind regardless of which distro or desktop you use, but in fact I had no trouble at all upgrading from Mint 17 and everything is once again working perfectly. All you need to do is open Update Manager and head to the Edit menu where you should see an option to "Upgrade to Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca". + +The only problem I've encountered is the known bug involving problems with Skype on 64-bit versions of Mint 17.1. Fortunately there's [an easy fix](http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_rebecca_cinnamon.php#upstream). + +Linux Mint 17.1 will receive security updates until 2019 and until 2016 all Mint releases will continue to use the same base package system, AKA Ubuntu 14.04. 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I knew when I crowned Fedora 25 the best distro of 2016 I was going to hear about it from Linux Mint fans.

+

How could I proclaim the best distro of the year before the latest version of Mint arrived? And indeed I did hear about it. There's nothing like some guy on the internet overlooking your favorite distro to make the hairs in your neckbeard start twitching angrily. I understand, it happens to me every time someone fails to recognize that Arch is the best distro of every year. But I digress.

+

There is a very simple reason I didn't pick Mint as the best distro of 2016 and I didn't even have to wait to test it. The reason is Wayland.

+

Wayland is, for better or worse, the future of Linux and will undoubtedly be the big story of 2017 (unless Mir actually ships, in which case it might share the spotlight). What's more once you're used Wayland, at least in my experience, you'll want it everywhere. And only one of the major distros has Wayland today: Fedora.

+

That doesn't mean that Mint 18.1, which happened to arrive the same day the Fedora article was published, isn't a great release. But it doesn't have Wayland. Nor will it have Wayland until Linux Mint's upstream source, Ubuntu, ships Wayland as part of an LTS release, which won't happen until at least 2018 when the next Ubuntu LTS release comes out. By that time, theoretically, Ubuntu itself will be using Mir and Ubuntu GNOME (and possibly other flavors) will move to Wayland. Then and only then will Mint be in a position to move to Wayland (and even then it may not happen right away).

+

That means there's no Wayland in Mint's near future and it also means Mint will be a little out of the loop going forward, which is an interesting transition for the project given that it started out with a more aggressive development pace, adopting new features and iterating quickly.

+

All that changed a couple of years ago when Mint opted to stop chasing Ubuntu and build off the LTS cycle. Mint is no longer quite as cutting edge as it once was, which shows itself in some important areas, like the kernel which is only at 4.4 even now. It's also still plagued by the some of the poorly implemented update and security issues that have dogged it for years. You can keep Mint up-to-date and secure, but Mint actively encourages users, especially inexperienced users to avoid updates. That more than anything else would prevent me from picking Mint 18.1 over, well, any other distro.

+

Although Mint 18.1 builds on the same set of base packages found in the previous release (Linux Mint 18.0), which are based on Ubuntu 16.04, there's still plenty of new stuff in this release to make Mint fans happy. Most of what's new is higher level stuff, the stuff that makes Mint, well, Mint rather than any underlying system changes.

+

As always Mint comes in two main flavors, one with the Cinnamon desktop and one with the MATE desktop. There will be releases with other desktops as well, the Xfce version is quite nice, but at the time of writing none of those are out yet.

+

Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition

+ +[image="mint181-cinn-desktop.jpg" caption="The stock Mint 18.1 desktop with Cinnamon 3.2"] + +

Cinnamon has long felt like the flagship desktop for Linux Mint and this release is no exception. Though MATE gets roughly equal billing and, from what I can tell as an outsider, equal development attention, Cinnamon is definitely the flashier, more polished of the two.

+

Linux Mint 18.1 features Cinnamon 3.2, which is notable for two things that sound rather minor at first glance, but open up quite a few possibilities for third-party developers. The first is that all the various menus and panels no longer have what Mint calls "box pointers", in other words, the shape of the menus used to "point" to their parent object. In Cinnamon 3.2 that's no longer true. Cinnamon 3.2 also features the ability to dock panels vertically on either (or both) sides of your screen rather than just the top and bottom.

+

The latter change is immediately useful for anyone working a cramped laptop screen since there's more horizontal space than vertical, provided the panels on the side works with your habits. Eliminating the box pointers is more something that will be interesting down the road since it opens up quite a few more options for theme designers.

+ +[image="mint181-vert-panel.jpg" caption="With Cinnamon 3.2 you can now have vertical panels."] + +

Thanks to some underlying upgrades, Cinnamon 3.2 brings back some of its flash by re-enabling cross-fade animations and fade effects for lists. These features had both been disabled in the past couple of releases for stability reasons. You can also now have Cinnamon play a custom sound when a notification pops up. There's a new setting in the Sound panel of the System Settings app, head to Sound and then Sound Effects to find it.

+

There's also quite a few really nice features to Cinnamon that have been there quite a while, but rarely get mentioned. For example I've always been impressed with the way the main menu search tool gets you what you want even when you type something that doesn't exist. For example I wanted to test Xed, the Mint text editor, but of course within Mint there's no Xed app, it's called "Text Editor". Still, open the main menu and search for Xed and the top hit will be Text Editor. Similarly I can never remember if the app to change desktop backgrounds is called "Desktop" or Appearance or something else. What's nice is I don't have to remember that, type "Desktop" and the top hit is "Background", which, as it happens, is the name of the app that changes backgrounds. It's a small thing, but this kind of attention to detail and solving small, but common problems is a big part of why users love Mint.

+ +[image="mint181-search.jpg" caption="Search by one name, find by another."] + +

Another very nice feature that's new in Cinnamon 3.2, but doesn't seem to get much press, is that Bumblebee users can right-click any app in the application menu and launch it with optirun by selecting 'Run with NVIDIA GPU'. That might be the easiest way I've seen to take advantage of the more powerful, but more battery draining graphics only when you really want it, e.g. with your favorite graphics editor or game. Again, a very small feature, but one that's extremely useful.

+

Another bit of hardware support worth noting is that, in addition to synaptics, Cinnamon 3.2 now supports the newer libinput touchpad driver. I've had much better luck with libinput on newer hardware, particularly getting "reverse" scrolling working globally as opposed to globally-except-Chromium, which is what happens if you use a higher level method (Xmodmap for instance) or synaptics. You mileage may vary, but either way it's nice to have the option to use libinput with Cinnamon.

+

Mint continues to polish its set of default application with this release. The Xed text editor gets a Firefox-style search bar at the bottom of the windows that features find-as-you-type searching. Xed also now has full support for dark themes, notably the optional Mint-Y theme that shipped with Mint 18.0. Mint's video and image viewer apps, Xplayer and Xviewer respectively, also see some improvements like the ability to blank a second monitor when you're watching a video in Xplayer.

+

The Mint Update Manager remains largely unchanged aside from a couple of tweaks to how kernel update options are displayed (they're now sorted by version and there are recommendations for both the most stable and the most secure). There's also a new column showing the source of updates, whether its Mint, upstream Ubuntu or any third-party repos you've installed.

+ +[image="mint181-update.jpg" caption="Mint's updated Update Manager now shows (and can sort by) the source of your updates."] + +

While 99 percent of my experience with Linux Mint has been positive, I find that the Update Manager is one place it falls on its face. Mint users tend to get defensive about this point because Mint has gone to all the trouble to build its own Update Manager (which is very nice, I've praised it in the past, particularly for linking to the changelogs for every available kernel) but, nice as it is, an update manager becomes counter productive if it doesn't keep users up-to-date, particularly kernel level security updates.

+

In Mint 18, Mint began including an intro screen that comes up when you first launch Update Manager. Mint will ask you which settings you want to use for updates. The options are "don't break my computer", "optimize stability and security" and "always update everything". By default the middle option is selected. Each of those options has some additional information, including a recommendation which is, in the same order, "for novice users", "for most users", and "for advanced users".

+ +[image="mint181-update-warning.jpg" caption="Labeling something 'don't break my computer' implies that other options will break my computer and almost guarantees new users will opt for the top choice."] + +

I didn't call this out in the last review, but it deserves it because frankly, this is a load of crap.

+

Labeling a setting "don't break my computer" implies that the other options will break your computer which is almost guaranteed to scare a new users into choosing that option. That's a huge disservice to novice users and out of place with the rest of Mint. If Mint really can't provide a stable up-to-date system without blocking upstream updates I would suggest everyone stop using it forthwith. The thing is Mint can provide that, it has just made some poor UI decisions in its Update Manager which may mislead novice users, causing them to end up with a less secure system.

+

Mint can be just as secure as any other distro. The problem is that it actively encourages users not to value security via poorly chosen defaults and user interface messages.

+

If the "always update everything" option, including the kernel, really does break Mint, I'd suggest maybe Mint needs to step back and give some thought to what that says about it. In my experience though, using this setting has never caused me any problems with Mint and it should be the default setting just as it is in every other distro I'm aware of.

+

It's worth noting here that when I say update the kernel I mean the current point release of the kernel, not major point updates. For Mint 18.1 that means kernel 4.4.x, which frankly, feels terribly out of date. It could be that I've spent too much time with Arch and have been using brand new hardware a lot, but I'd hesitate to use anything less than 4.8 at this point, particularly if you have a Skylake chip. Fortunately 4.8 is available for Mint, though here you may well want to heed Mint's various scary sounding warnings since updating between kernel point releases can cause problems with your system -- especially if your distro hasn't explicitly confirmed that everything works, which, as far as I can tell Mint has not.

+ +[image="mint181-kernel-update.jpg" caption="What happens when you press this red button?"] + +

While Mint's Update Manager offers quite a bit of detail about all the various kernels available it's frustratingly vague about whether or not a given kernel has been tested, especially in light of all the scare-tactic warnings your get when from the UI. Is kernel 4.8 there because it works just fine with Mint 18.1 and I can upgrade to it? Or is 4.8 there simply because upstream Ubuntu has pushed it out for Ubuntu users and Mint is picking it up? So far as I can tell there's no information provided to answer that question. Unlike the Update Manager, the window listing available kernel updates doesn't used the colored, 1-5 stability ranking system and beyond linking to the changelogs (a nice features to be sure) there's no indication of what's been tested and what hasn't. The only information provided is that 4.4.0-53 is recommended for stability and the more recent 4.4.0-57 is recommended if you care about security. Again, security and stability are apparently at odds in Linux Mint.

+

Since at least part of the point of reviewing a distro is to be the canary in a coal mine so you don't have to, I went ahead and updated the kernel to 4.8 and... nothing bad happened. For the record I do the majority of my testing on a Lenovo x240 i5. I always start with a virtual machine install and then also install it on actual hardware using a separate partition from my main OS installation. In other words I don't have any hardware that's likely to affected by jumping a few kernel point releases, your experience may be very different and I strongly suggest doing your research and testing in virtual machine before you update your kernel in Mint. Honestly, if you have to do all that on your own, you may as well run Arch.

+

MATE

+

Linux Mint MATE edition started live as a kind of GNOME 2.x clone, but has since morphed and evolved into a desktop that sits somewhere between the old GNOME and Xfce. It's relatively lightweight, but it's not militant about its minimalism. If you've got older hardware it makes a great option.

+ +[image="mint181-mate-desktop.jpg" caption="The default Mint MATE desktop with MATE 1.16"] + +

This release sees MATE updated to version 1.16, which is chiefly notable for bringing quite a few more GTK+ 3 components. The session manager, terminal, notifications and policykit library are all now GTK+ 3. That means MATE now relies on the cairo drawing library throughout and themes can take advantage of the simpler CSS-based theming tools without worrying as much about the non-GTK+ 3 elements in MATE.

+

MATE 1.6 sees a couple of other changes in the main Menu, notably some improvements to the search features. The Google custom search engine option has been replaced with DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia searches are now localized and will send you to the Wikipedia domain for your language. Online search options can of course be disabled in the preference.

+

MATE also gets the same set of X-apps updates mentioned in the Cinnamon section and one other change I did not mention up there -- Rhythmbox replaces Banshee as the default music player. That means no more relying on the half-broken, tangled mess of code that is mono just to play some music. The Update Manager in Linux Mint MATE is the same as well, so everything that applies to the Cinnamon release applies here as well.

+

If that sounds like nothing much is new in MATE 1.16, well you're sort of right. I consider that a good thing. MATE has been a stable, lightweight desktop that does what a desktop needs to do and gets out of the way the rest of the time for quite a few releases now. There are of course lighter weight options, but MATE does a nice job of finding the midpoint between bare bones and bloat. The move to GTK+ 3 won't be noticed by most, but it cleans up some of the last rough edges I've found in MATE. If you're looking for a desktop that just works, is easy on your processor, graphics and RAM, MATE makes an excellent choice.

+

Conclusion

+

Does Mint 18.1 deserve to wrestle the best distro of the year title from Fedora? For me, in a word, no.

+

Mint 18.1 Cinnamon continues to refine the traditional desktop UI model and makes an easy transition path for Windows refugees than Unity or GNOME Shell. But I'd still probably suggest running Cinnamon atop another distro. The Update Manager mars the experience of Mint and is too critical a part of the what makes a good distro to gloss over. If you're comfortable taking charge of updates yourself or just don't care about security all that much then it probably won't bother you.

+

Likewise MATE continues to be an impressive effort, but I enjoy it atop other distros much more than Mint, particularly both Ubuntu MATE and the Fedora MATE spin.

+

In the end Mint 18.1 lacks any compelling, must-have updates and the disappointing defaults for the Update Manager would stop me from installing Mint for anyone but experienced users who are comfortable updating their software from the command line.

+

One of the things I have always liked about Mint is creator Clément Lefebvre's take up upgrading. Too many Linux users seem to be a hurry to update to the latest and greatest, Lefebvre's take is refreshing: if your system is working the way you want, are sure you want to upgrade?

+

That might seem at oods with my gripes about the Update Manager, but it's not. Security updates and bug fix updates are always welcome, but an entire distro update can be a huge undertaking and is not without risk. If it ain't broke... With that in mind, I would say that moving from Mint 18.0 to 18.1 is probably not worth it if 18.0 is working well. Both are long term support releases and will be supported until 2021.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/mint181review.txt b/ars-technica/published/mint181review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a709bfa --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/mint181review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,95 @@ +I knew when I crowned Fedora 25 the best distro of 2016 I was going to hear about it from Linux Mint fans. + +How could I proclaim the best distro of the year before the latest version of Mint arrived? And indeed I did hear about it. There's nothing like some guy on the internet overlooking your favorite distro to make the hairs in your neckbeard start twitching angrily. I understand, it happens to me every time someone fails to recognize that Arch is the best distro of every year. But I digress. + +There is a very simple reason I didn't pick Mint as the best distro of 2016 and I didn't even have to wait to test it. The reason is Wayland. + +Wayland is, for better or worse, the future of Linux and will undoubtedly be the big story of 2017 (unless Mir actually ships, in which case it might share the spotlight). What's more once you're used Wayland, at least in my experience, you'll want it everywhere. And only one of the major distros has Wayland today: Fedora. + +That doesn't mean that Mint 18.1, which happened to arrive the same day the Fedora article was published, isn't a great release. But it doesn't have Wayland. Nor will it have Wayland until Linux Mint's upstream source, Ubuntu, ships Wayland as part of an LTS release, which won't happen until at least 2018 when the next Ubuntu LTS release comes out. By that time, theoretically, Ubuntu itself will be using Mir and Ubuntu GNOME (and possibly other flavors) will move to Wayland. Then and only then will Mint be in a position to move to Wayland (and even then it may not happen right away). + +That means there's no Wayland in Mint's near future and it also means Mint will be a little out of the loop going forward, which is an interesting transition for the project given that it started out with a more aggressive development pace, adopting new features and iterating quickly. + +All that changed a couple of years ago when Mint opted to stop chasing Ubuntu and build off the LTS cycle. Mint is no longer quite as cutting edge as it once was, which shows itself in some important areas, like the kernel which is only at 4.4 even now. It's also still plagued by the some of the poorly implemented update and security issues that have dogged it for years. You can keep Mint up-to-date and secure, but Mint actively encourages users, especially inexperienced users to avoid updates. That more than anything else would prevent me from picking Mint 18.1 over, well, any other distro. + +Although Mint 18.1 builds on the same set of base packages found in the previous release (Linux Mint 18.0), which are based on Ubuntu 16.04, there's still plenty of new stuff in this release to make Mint fans happy. Most of what's new is higher level stuff, the stuff that makes Mint, well, Mint rather than any underlying system changes. + +As always Mint comes in two main flavors, one with the Cinnamon desktop and one with the MATE desktop. There will be releases with other desktops as well, the Xfce version is quite nice, but at the time of writing none of those are out yet. + +## Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition + +[image="mint181-cinn-desktop.jpg" caption="The stock Mint 18.1 desktop with Cinnamon 3.2"] + +Cinnamon has long felt like the flagship desktop for Linux Mint and this release is no exception. Though MATE gets roughly equal billing and, from what I can tell as an outsider, equal development attention, Cinnamon is definitely the flashier, more polished of the two. + +Linux Mint 18.1 features Cinnamon 3.2, which is notable for two things that sound rather minor at first glance, but open up quite a few possibilities for third-party developers. The first is that all the various menus and panels no longer have what Mint [calls](https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_serena_cinnamon_whatsnew.php) "box pointers", in other words, the shape of the menus used to "point" to their parent object. In Cinnamon 3.2 that's no longer true. Cinnamon 3.2 also features the ability to dock panels vertically on either (or both) sides of your screen rather than just the top and bottom. + +The latter change is immediately useful for anyone working a cramped laptop screen since there's more horizontal space than vertical, provided the panels on the side works with your habits. Eliminating the box pointers is more something that will be interesting down the road since it opens up quite a few more options for theme designers. + +[image="mint181-vert-panel.jpg" caption="With Cinnamon 3.2 you can now have vertical panels."] + +Thanks to some underlying upgrades, Cinnamon 3.2 brings back some of its flash by re-enabling cross-fade animations and fade effects for lists. These features had both been disabled in the past couple of releases for stability reasons. You can also now have Cinnamon play a custom sound when a notification pops up. There's a new setting in the Sound panel of the System Settings app, head to Sound and then Sound Effects to find it. + +There's also quite a few really nice features to Cinnamon that have been there quite a while, but rarely get mentioned. For example I've always been impressed with the way the main menu search tool gets you what you want even when you type something that doesn't exist. For example I wanted to test Xed, the Mint text editor, but of course within Mint there's no Xed app, it's called "Text Editor". Still, open the main menu and search for Xed and the top hit will be Text Editor. Similarly I can never remember if the app to change desktop backgrounds is called "Desktop" or Appearance or something else. What's nice is I don't have to remember that, type "Desktop" and the top hit is "Background", which, as it happens, is the name of the app that changes backgrounds. It's a small thing, but this kind of attention to detail and solving small, but common problems is a big part of why users love Mint. + +[image="mint181-search.jpg" caption="Search by one name, find by another."] + +Another very nice feature that's new in Cinnamon 3.2, but doesn't seem to get much press, is that Bumblebee users can right-click any app in the application menu and launch it with optirun by selecting 'Run with NVIDIA GPU'. That might be the easiest way I've seen to take advantage of the more powerful, but more battery draining graphics only when you really want it, e.g. with your favorite graphics editor or game. Again, a very small feature, but one that's extremely useful. + +Another bit of hardware support worth noting is that, in addition to synaptics, Cinnamon 3.2 now supports the newer libinput touchpad driver. I've had much better luck with libinput on newer hardware, particularly getting "reverse" scrolling working globally as opposed to globally-except-Chromium, which is what happens if you use a higher level method (Xmodmap for instance) or synaptics. You mileage may vary, but either way it's nice to have the option to use libinput with Cinnamon. + +Mint continues to polish its set of default application with this release. The Xed text editor gets a Firefox-style search bar at the bottom of the windows that features find-as-you-type searching. Xed also now has full support for dark themes, notably the optional Mint-Y theme that shipped with Mint 18.0. Mint's video and image viewer apps, Xplayer and Xviewer respectively, also see some improvements like the ability to blank a second monitor when you're watching a video in Xplayer. + +The Mint Update Manager remains largely unchanged aside from a couple of tweaks to how kernel update options are displayed (they're not sorted by version and there are recommendations for both the most stable and the most secure). There's also a new column showing the source of updates, whether its Mint, upstream Ubuntu or any third-party repos you've installed. + +[image="mint181-update.jpg" caption="Mint's updated Update Manager now shows (and can sort by) the source of your updates."] + +While 99 percent of my experience with Linux Mint has been positive, I find that the Update Manager is one place it falls on its face. Mint users tend to get defensive about this point because Mint has gone to all the trouble to build its own Update Manager (which is very nice, I've praised it in the past, particularly for linking to the changelogs for every available kernel) but, nice as it is, an update manager becomes counter productive if it doesn't keep users up-to-date, particularly kernel level security updates. + +In Mint 18, Mint began including an intro screen that comes up when you first launch Update Manager. Mint will ask you which settings you want to use for updates. The options are "don't break my computer", "optimize stability and security" and "always update everything". By default the middle option is selected. Each of those options has some additional information, including a recommendation which is, in the same order, "for novice users", "for most users", and "for advanced users". + +[image="mint181-update-warning.jpg" caption="Labeling something 'don't break my computer' implies that other options will break my computer and almost guarantees new users will opt for the top choice."] + +I didn't call this out in the last review, but it deserves it because frankly, this is a load of crap. + +Labeling a setting "don't break my computer" implies that the other options will break your computer which is almost guaranteed to scare a new users into choosing that option. That's a huge disservice to novice users and out of place with the rest of Mint. If Mint really can't provide a stable up-to-date system without blocking upstream updates I would suggest everyone stop using it forthwith. The thing is Mint *can* provide that, it has just made some poor UI decisions in its Update Manager which may mislead novice users, causing them to end up with a less secure system. + +Mint can be just as secure as any other distro. The problem is that it actively encourages users not to value security via poorly chosen defaults and user interface messages. + +If the "always update everything" option, including the kernel, really does break Mint, I'd suggest maybe Mint needs to step back and give some thought to what that says about it. In my experience though, using this setting has never caused me any problems with Mint and it should be the default setting just as it is in every other distro I'm aware of. + +It's worth noting here that when I say update the kernel I mean the current point release of the kernel, not major point updates. For Mint 18.1 that means kernel 4.4.x, which frankly, feels terribly out of date. It could be that I've spent too much time with Arch and have been using brand new hardware a lot, but I'd hesitate to use anything less than 4.8 at this point, particularly if you have a Skylake chip. Fortunately 4.8 is available for Mint, though here you may well want to heed Mint's various scary sounding warnings since updating between kernel point releases can cause problems with your system -- especially if your distro hasn't expressibly confirmed that everything works, which, as far as I can tell Mint has not. + +[image="mint181-kernel-update.jpg" caption="What happens when you press this red button?"] + +While Mint's Update Manager offers quite a bit of detail about all the various kernels available it's frustratingly vague about whether or not a given kernel has been tested, especially in light of all the scare-tactic warnings your get when from the UI. Is kernel 4.8 there because it works just fine with Mint 18.1 and I can upgrade to it? Or is 4.8 there simply because upstream Ubuntu has pushed it out for Ubuntu users and Mint is picking it up? So far as I can tell there's no information provided to answer that question. Unlike the Update Manager, the window listing available kernel updates doesn't used the colored, 1-5 stability ranking system and beyond linking to the changelogs (a nice features to be sure) there's no indication of what's been tested and what hasn't. The only information provided is that 4.4.0-53 is recommended for stability and the more recent 4.4.0-57 is recommended if you care about security. Again, security and stability are apparently at odds in Linux Mint. + +Since at least part of the point of reviewing a distro is to be the canary in a coal mine so you don't have to, I went ahead and updated the kernel to 4.8 and... nothing bad happened. For the record I do the majority of my testing on a Lenovo x240 i5. I always start with a virtual machine install and then also install it on actual hardware using a separate partition from my main OS installation. In other words I don't have any hardware that's likely to affected by jumping a few kernel point releases, your experience may be very different and I strongly suggest doing your research and testing in virtual machine before you update your kernel in Mint. Honestly, if you have to do all that on your own, you may as well run Arch. + +## MATE + +Linux Mint MATE edition started live as a kind of GNOME 2.x clone, but has since morphed and evolved into a desktop that sits somewhere between the old GNOME and Xfce. It's relatively lightweight, but it's not militant about its minimalism. If you've got older hardware it makes a great option. + +[image="mint181-mate-desktop.jpg" caption="The default Mint MATE desktop with MATE 1.16"] + +This release sees MATE updated to version 1.16, which is chiefly notable for bringing quite a few more GTK+ 3 components. The session manager, terminal, notifications and policykit library are all now GTK+ 3. That means MATE now relies on the cairo drawing library throughout and themes can take advantage of the simpler CSS-based theming tools without worrying as much about the non-GTK+ 3 elements in MATE. + +MATE 1.6 sees a couple of other changes in the main Menu, notably some improvements to the search features. The Google custom search engine option has been replaced with DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia searches are now localized and will send you to the Wikipedia domain for your language. Online search options can of course be disabled in the preference. + +MATE also gets the same set of X-apps updates mentioned in the Cinnamon section and one other change I did not mention up there -- Rhythmbox replaces Banshee as the default music player. That means no more relying on the half-broken, tangled mess of code that is mono just to play some music. The Update Manager in Linux Mint MATE is the same as well, so everything that applies to the Cinnamon release applies here as well. + +If that sounds like nothing much is new in MATE 1.16, well you're sort of right. I consider that a good thing. MATE has been a stable, lightweight desktop that does what a desktop needs to do and gets out of the way the rest of the time for quite a few releases now. There are of course lighter weight options, but MATE does a nice job of finding the midpoint between bare bones and bloat. The move to GTK+ 3 won't be noticed by most, but it cleans up some of the last rough edges I've found in MATE. If you're looking for a desktop that just works, is easy on your processor, graphics and RAM, MATE makes an excellent choice. + +## Conclusion + +Does Mint 18.1 deserve to wrestle the best distro of the year title from Fedora? For me, in a word, no. + +Mint 18.1 Cinnamon continues to refine the traditional desktop UI model and makes an easy transition path for Windows refugees than Unity or GNOME Shell. But I'd still probably suggest running Cinnamon atop another distro. The Update Manager mars the experience of Mint and is too critical a part of the what makes a good distro to gloss over. If you're comfortable taking charge of updates yourself or just don't care about security all that much then it probably won't bother you. + +Likewise MATE continues to be an impressive effort, but I enjoy it atop other distros much more than Mint, particularly both Ubuntu MATE and the Fedora MATE spin. + +In the end Mint 18.1 lacks any compelling, must-have updates and the disappointing defaults for the Update Manager would stop me from installing Mint for anyone but experienced users who are comfortable updating their software from the command line. + +One of the things I have always liked about Mint is creator Clément Lefebvre's take up upgrading. Too many Linux users seem to be a hurry to update to the latest and greatest, Lefebvre's take is refreshing: if your system is working the way you want, are sure you want to upgrade? + +That might seem at oods with my gripes about the Update Manager, but it's not. Security updates and bug fix updates are always welcome, but an entire distro update can be a huge undertaking and is not without risk. If it ain't broke... With that in mind, I would say that moving from Mint 18.0 to 18.1 is probably not worth it if 18.0 is working well. Both are long term support releases and will be supported until 2021. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/mint18review.html b/ars-technica/published/mint18review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4acb099 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/mint18review.html @@ -0,0 +1,73 @@ +

The Linux Mint project has released Mint 18, a major upgrade not only for Mint's dueling desktops -- Cinnamon and MATE -- but for all the underlying systems. With Mint 18, Linux Mint has moved its base software system from Ubuntu 14.04 to the recently released Ubuntu 16.04.

+

The move to the latest long term support release of Ubuntu means that, as with the Mint 17.x release series, the Mint 18.x release cycle is now locked to its base for the next two years. Rather than tracking Ubuntu, Mint 18.1 and all subsequent release will stick with Ubuntu 16.04. That doesn't necessarily mean Mint will get as out of date as Ubuntu LTS releases tend to by the end of their two year cycle, but it does mean that nothing major is going to change at the low level for quite a while.

+

If the Mint 17.x release series is anything to judge by, that's a good thing and allows Mint to focus on its own projects rather than spending development time creating patches for every Ubuntu update. That should be especially good news for the 18.x series since Ubuntu plans to make some major changes in the next two years, including moving to a new display server (Mir) and updating its own Unity desktop to Unity 8, which will also mean updating many components that will affect downstream users like Mint.

+

If you're looking for an Ubuntu-like system, but don't want to be Canonical's lab rat for the transition to Mir and Unity 8, Mint 18.x make a familiar, but stable Linux environment.

+

In some ways Mint has become what Ubuntu once was -- a stable, new-user-friendly gateway to Linux. Installation is simpler than upgrading to Windows 10 -- though there is one additional headache with this release, more on that below -- and once it's installed both the Cinnamon and MATE desktops will be familiar to anyone switching from Windows.

+

While Ubuntu's Unity and GNOME's 3.x series opt for sometimes radical changes, Cinnamon and MATE have taken a slower, more progressive path. Mint has elected to evolve rather than "revolutionize", making it a far more comfortable choice for newcomers who aren't likely to enjoy have the rug pulled out from under them every time they upgrade.

+

Mint's slower, more evolutionary path seems to be serving it well, enabling it to play tortoise to Ubuntu's revolutionary hare. These days Mint is possibly the most popular desktop Linux distro around, at least according to Distrowatch (which should be taken more as a rough guess rather than rock solid stats).

+

What's New in Mint 18

+ +[image="mint18-cinnamon-desktop.jpg" caption="The default Cinnamon desktop in Linux Mint 18"] + +

Mint 18.x is well poised to continue to drive Mint's popularity. It's a solid release with some big changes (most of which won't cause the average user any problems), but both Cinnamon and MATE look and behave more or less as they always have, with a number of incremental improvements.

+

Mint 18 has a lot of updates under the hood, most of which the average desktop user can safely ignore, though there is one change that will mean an extra installation step for many users. Mint 18 is the first Mint release to ship without patent-encumbered codecs and plugins. The change is a result of legal and copyright issues in some countries, particularly the United States.

+

To help out with the install there's a new GUI app dedicated to installing multimedia codecs. It's prominently listed in the installer and if you don't opt for it then, there's a item in the start menu on both Cinnamon and MATE, making it fairly obvious for new users, though nowhere near as simple as having it just work from the start.

+

There is a new command line tool that will allow you to package up the codecs from the install disk (without having to have an internet connection). It's nice to see Mint is aware that not everyone who uses it necessarily has constant high speed internet connections. Too many Linux distros seem blissfully unaware that many of their users don't have always-on, high speed access (or worse, they just don't care). It's an especially nice touch since not shipping with codecs in the first place is really to appease the legal restrictions of U.S. users, while potentially dumping the bandwidth problem on those who could have had the codecs bundled legally.

+ +[image="mint18-codecs.jpg" caption="There's no codecs installed in this release, but there is a new GUI app that will install them for you."] + +

Interestingly, if you happen to use the Chrome web browser (not installed by default) and VLC for videos (also not installed by default) you might not even need most of the codecs since both apps bundle the necessary codecs and plugins themselves. That really just leaves the MP3 codecs to install.

+

Straight out of the box Linux Mint 18.1's flagship Cinnamon desktop looks just like its predecessor. The theme is still the "Mint X" theme that's been the default for Cinnamon for years now. There is, however, change on its way. You can preview what will likely be the new default Mint theme at some point by heading to Settings >> Appearance and switching to the new theme, Mint Y.

+ +[image="mint18-mint-y.jpg" caption="The new Mint Y theme."] + +

As you would expect from Mint, it's not radically different. It's a bit flatter, buttons are less 3D, gradients have been toned down, and window bars blend into toolbars like they did in older versions of GNOME 3, back when toolbars and windows bars were still separate things.

+

When the new look was first previewed back in January of this year there was a bit of an outcry from Mint users, which Mint's lead developer Clément Lefebvre addressed in a blog post that could well serve as a kind of Mint mission statement:

+
+

We've all witnessed the rise of the iPad and the iPhone. This was attributed to iOS somehow and it started a new trend with various projects trying to replicate Apple’s success, inventing new formulas and radically changing their own goals, focus or identity in the process. We've seen a new artistic trend called "flat", with bright colors, no gradients and minimalistic widgets, taking these projects by storm. You don’t see us at the forefront of all that. We do keep a close eye on it, without any intention to jump into it, but rather to learn from it and to see if it can help us improve what we’re already doing.

+
+
+

People who enjoyed Linux Mint years ago still enjoy it nowadays. If you enjoy it now, chances are you’ll enjoy it still for a long time. You’re here because you enjoy it right now, we know that, we enjoy it too, and we've no intention of being anything else. So, in the context of that “new look and feel”, we’re not trying to reinvent ourselves. We’re talking about icons and GTK themes here. We’re also committed to supporting Mint-X, so with a click of a mouse you’ll be able to make Mint 18 look just like the way Mint 17 did.

+
+

Mint Y is, in other words, a nice evolution of Mint X with a nod to the current trend of "flat" user interface design. And yes, It looks similar to what GNOME, KDE, OS X 10.11 and Windows 10 are doing. Mint X looks similar to what GNOME, KDE, OS X and Windows were doing six years ago -- it had a decidedly "metallic" look to it which a certain fruit themed OS also used around that time. Mint Y simply evolves to fit with the modern OS world. That's part of what "evolutionary" means -- changing to better fit the current environment.

+

Somewhere between then and now Lefebvre and team must have changed their minds about making Mint Y the default though. As of Mint 18.1 if you want to evolve the look and feel of Mint you'll have to do it yourself. If you'd like a slightly different feel there's also a very nice dark theme, Mint Y dark, and a hybrid of the two that uses dark toolbars and buttons with and light panels.

+ +[image="mint18-mint-y-dark.jpg" caption="The new dark Mint Y theme."] +[image="mint18-mint-y-hybrid.jpg" caption="The new Mint Y hybrid dark/light theme."] + +

The move to a flatter theme may be motivated by a good bit more than keeping pace with contemporaries in the style department, it may well be related to another change in Mint 18 -- something called X Apps.

+

Mint 18 updates its base system to Ubuntu 16.04, which means under the hood Mint 18 has moved from GNOME/GTK 3.10 to 3.18. Since GNOME does not adhere to Mint's evolutionary philosophy, but likes to make radical changes from point release to point release, there are some huge changes involved in moving from 3.10 to 3.18.

+

Sometimes this is a good thing. Mint 18 benefits from much improved HiDPI support, which is now just as good as GNOME's. It also means that Mint has been able to add popular apps like Spotify, Dropbox and Steam to its repos, making them much easier to install.

+

The move to GNOME 3.18 is not, however, without its downsides for Mint. As Lefebvre writes in the same blog post mentioned above, "GNOME applications now integrate better with GNOME Shell and look more native in that environment. The bad news, is that they now look completely out of place everywhere else." For Mint the issue is further complicated by being downstream from Ubuntu, which heavily patches GTK, GNOME applications and the GNOME environment itself.

+

In the past Mint has dealt with this problem the same way Ubuntu has -- by downgrading apps and patching where necessary, occasionally patching on top of Ubuntu's patches. The changes in GNOME 3.16 and onward however make this extremely time consuming and impractical.

+

Instead Mint has decided to create X Apps. No, the distro isn't building out clones of GNOME apps. Lefebvre rejects this idea writing, "it was decided early that Cinnamon would not get its own applications, because it represented too much work and there were too few differences in application needs between Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce."

+

Instead Mint has kicked off the X Apps project. Essentially what it does is take GTK apps and re-theme them in a way that they'll look at home on all of Mint's desktop releases, Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. For Mint 18 there are five X apps, Xedit (a text editor), Xviewer (an image viewer), Xreader (a PDF/document viewer), Pix (a simple photo organizer) and Xplayer (a video player).

+ +[image="mint18-Xviewer.jpg" caption="Mint 18's new default image viewer, XViewer"] + +

In the end X Apps become a seamless part of the Mint 18 experience. Users don't really need to know the Xplayer is a heavily themed and patched version of Totem or that Xviewer is Eye of GNOME. What's even nicer is that the X Apps get all the underlying features that make modern GNOME apps nice, namely HiDPI support and support for customization via gsettings.

+

Another change to be aware of in Mint 18 is that Mint's homegrown "apt" command now supports Debian's command of the same name. Mint's apt was originally a shortcut for a handful of package related commands, including apt-get, aptitude, and apt-cache. Since Mint's apt debuted, Debian has created a similar shortcut with the same name. Since tutorials typically refer to the Debian version Mint has updated its tool to mirror Debian's version. Mint's apt, however, still supports all its own commands, many of which Debian's does not.

+

As has been the case for just about every Mint release in recent memory, Mint 18 ships with a number of improvements to the Update Manager. The biggest change is a new overall setting for updates. Users can choose from three options, the very safe choice, which is to update the system with stable versions of software, or the default, which is to do the same as the safe option, but also show additional updates which could cause instability, allowing you to choose what you want to update beyond the stable available.

+

The last option is the make-it-like-Arch-but-without-the-testing option to always update everything. The latter is not recommended unless you know how to boot to a shell and roll back updates when you break something. Again, even though most users don't need anything beyond the default it's nice to see Mint adding options (and if you find yourself using the third option, you might want to consider trying Arch).

+ +[image="mint18-update.jpg" caption="Mint 18 offers a variety of update possibilities."] + +

The Update Manager also greatly simplifies its kernel update options and now just links to changelogs instead of trying to pull them in.

+

The kernel update feature in Mint is probably the simplest GUI means of updating a kernel I'm aware of in any distro. That's something of a mixed blessing of course since this is also probably the tool by which it is easiest to really screw up your system.

+

That might be part of why with Mint 18 when you first launch the kernel update panel you'll also get a very nice explanation of what a kernel is and how badly you can screw up your system if you try to use the wrong kernel. Linux Mint 18 ships with Linux Kernel 4.4.0.21, though when I tested several newer kernels were available up to and including 4.4.0.28.

+

What's New in Cinnamon

+

Mint 18.1 ships with Cinnamon 3.0. In keeping with the evolutionary nature of Mint-related projects, Cinnamon 3.0 is not a radical departure from the past, but a careful refinement of existing features and some new customization options.

+

Cinnamon is not a tiling window manager by any means, but it does have an interesting window-snapping form of tiling that has been improved in this release. It's a long way from Xmonad or Awesome, but if you're a casual tiler it will allow you to tile your windows when you want to.

+

A more useful change in this release is the ability to eliminate potentially unused cruft from the start menu. Right-clicking the Mint button will bring up the customization screen with new options to hide favorites, bookmarks, system settings and other infrequently used items. The result is a cleaner start menu if you want such a thing. It's not a feature that everyone will use. In fact, I didn't use it, but I like that it's there because I like that Mint is still developing features useful to only a small segment of users and hasn't caved to the tyranny of the majority like certain other desktops.

+

Similarly Cinnamon 3.0 offers some new accessibility settings, which have been re-written as native Cinnamon-settings modules. It's now easy to toggle larger text, high contrast themes and turn on (or install) GNOME's Orca screen reader.

+

Panel launchers get some new features in this release, namely support for application actions. This means, for example, that you can launch a new Firefox window from the launcher icon. Which actions are supported varies by application, but at a minimum it consists of opening and closing new windows.

+

What's New in MATE

+

The MATE specific changes for this release are relatively minor. The MATE version contains all the Mint updates like the new theme options, the revamped Update Manager and new X apps, but beyond that MATE's changes are small.

+

There's new GTK support under the hood, which means better HiDPI support, though MATE is still a long way from the best choice for HiDPI laptops. The MATE touchpad preferences get some new options to configure edge and two-finger scrolling independent of each other (this is available in Cinnamon 3.0 as well).

+

Performance

+

I tested Mint 18 on the Dell XPS 13 that I reviewed last month on Ars and found it to be a snappy desktop, considerably less resource hungry than the default Unity that shipped with the Dell. Cinnamon is the flashier of Mint's desktop options and uses a bit more memory (about 450MB with nothing running but the default startup apps), but still quite a bit less than Ubuntu 16.04 (about 650 MB with nothing running but the default startup app). In fact, of what I would call the four heavy weight Linux desktops -- GNOME 3, Unity, KDE and Cinnamon -- Cinnamon is the least resource intensive.

+

If you're looking for something a bit lighter, Linux Mint MATE is the way to go. It lacks the level of HiDPI support that Cinnamon offers (which makes it difficult to use on the Dell XPS 13's HiDPI screen), but for older hardware it's the obvious choice. There's also an Xfce version of Mint, but as of the time of writing it has not yet been updated to Mint 18.

+

Both Mint desktops feel snappy on modern hardware. Even Cinnamon's on-by-default animations don't introduce the kind of millisecond interface lag that I was, frankly, expecting. Of course testing on less modern hardware like an old EeePC, reveals a starker contrast and clearly, of the two, MATE is the better choice in situations where RAM is limited.

+

Conclusion

+

Linux Mint 18 is a solid update and continues the slow but steady evolution of what may be the most popular Linux desktop out there. If you're an existing Mint user it's definitely worth upgrading, though do bear in mind that this upgrade may be a bit more difficult that the very simple upgrade process for 17.x updates. As of the time of writing Linux Mint has not published it's usual upgrade guide and I installed a clean copy so I can't comment on the upgrade process.

+

Mint 18 remains my recommendation for anyone whose new to Linux, as well as seasoned Linux users who want a desktop that just works and gets out of the way. Thanks to it's incremental development approach, its dedication to evolving features slowly, and its development of power user features and configuration options, Mint manages to serve both newcomers and Linux power users well.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/mint18review.txt b/ars-technica/published/mint18review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a6dde19 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/mint18review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,113 @@ +The Linux Mint project has released Mint 18, a major upgrade not only for Mint's dueling desktops -- Cinnamon and MATE -- but for all the underlying systems. With Mint 18, Linux Mint has moved its base software system from Ubuntu 14.04 to the recently released Ubuntu 16.04. + +The move to the latest long term support release of Ubuntu means that, as with the Mint 17.x release series, the Mint 18.x release cycle is now locked to its base for the next two years. +Rather than tracking Ubuntu, Mint 18.1 and all subsequent release will stick with Ubuntu 16.04. That doesn't necessarily mean Mint will get as out of date as Ubuntu LTS releases tend to by the end of their two year cycle, but it does mean that nothing major is going to change at the low level for quite a while. + +If the Mint 17.x release series is anything to judge by, that's a good thing and allows Mint to focus on its own projects rather than spending development time creating patches for every Ubuntu update. That should be especially good news for the 18.x series since Ubuntu plans to make some major changes in the next two years, including moving to a new display server (Mir) and updating its own Unity desktop to Unity 8, which will also mean updating many components that will affect downstream users like Mint. + +If you're looking for an Ubuntu-like system, but don't want to be Canonical's lab rat for the transition to Mir and Unity 8, Mint 18.x make a familiar, but stable Linux environment. + +In some ways Mint has become what Ubuntu once was -- a stable, new-user-friendly gateway to Linux. Installation is simpler than upgrading to Windows 10 -- though there is one additional headache with this release, more on that below -- and once it's installed both the Cinnamon and MATE desktops will be familiar to anyone switching from Windows. + +While Ubuntu's Unity and GNOME's 3.x series opt for sometimes radical changes, Cinnamon and MATE have taken a slower, more progressive path. Mint has elected to evolve rather than "revolutionize", making it a far more comfortable choice for newcomers who aren't likely to enjoy have the rug pulled out from under them every time they upgrade. + +Mint's slower, more evolutionary path seems to be serving it well, enabling it to play tortoise to Ubuntu's revolutionary hare. These days Mint is possibly the most popular desktop Linux distro around, at least according to [Distrowatch](http://distrowatch.com/) (which should be taken more as a rough guess rather than rock solid stats). + +# What's New in Mint 18 + +[image="mint18-cinnamon-desktop.jpg" caption="The default Cinnamon desktop in Linux Mint 18"] + +Mint 18.x is well poised to continue to drive Mint's popularity. It's a solid release with some big changes (most of which won't cause the average user any problems), but both Cinnamon and MATE look and behave more or less as they always have, with a number of incremental improvements. + +Mint 18 has a lot of updates under the hood, most of which the average desktop user can safely ignore, though there is one change that will mean an extra installation step for many users. Mint 18 is the first Mint release to ship without patent-encumbered codecs and plugins. The change is a result of legal and copyright issues in some countries, particularly the United States. + +To help out with the install there's a new GUI app dedicated to installing multimedia codecs. It's prominently listed in the installer and if you don't opt for it then, there's a item in the start menu on both Cinnamon and MATE, making it fairly obvious for new users, though nowhere near as simple as having it just work from the start. + +There is a new command line tool that will allow you to package up the codecs from the install disk (without having to have an internet connection). It's nice to see Mint is aware that not everyone who uses it necessarily has constant high speed internet connections. Too many Linux distros seem blissfully unaware that many of their users don't have always-on, high speed access (or worse, they just don't care). It's an especially nice touch since not shipping with codecs in the first place is really to appease the legal restrictions of U.S. users, while potentially dumping the bandwidth problem on those who could have had the codecs bundled legally. + +[image="mint18-codecs.jpg" caption="There's no codecs installed in this release, but there is a new GUI app that will install them for you."] + +Interestingly, if you happen to use the Chrome web browser (not installed by default) and VLC for videos (also not installed by default) you might not even need most of the codecs since both apps bundle the necessary codecs and plugins themselves. That really just leaves the MP3 codecs to install. + +Straight out of the box Linux Mint 18.1's flagship Cinnamon desktop looks just like its predecessor. The theme is still the "Mint X" theme that's been the default for Cinnamon for years now. There is, however, change on its way. You can preview what will likely be the new default Mint theme at some point by heading to Settings >> Appearance and switching to the new theme, Mint Y. + +[image="mint18-mint-y.jpg" caption="The new Mint Y theme."] + +As you would expect from Mint, it's not radically different. It's a bit flatter, buttons are less 3D, gradients have been toned down, and window bars blend into toolbars like they did in older versions of GNOME 3, back when toolbars and windows bars were still separate things. + +When the new look was first previewed back in January of this year there was a bit of an outcry from Mint users, which Mint's lead developer Clément Lefebvre addressed in a [blog post](http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2985) that could well serve as a kind of Mint mission statement: + +> We've all witnessed the rise of the iPad and the iPhone. This was attributed to iOS somehow and it started a new trend with various projects trying to replicate Apple’s success, inventing new formulas and radically changing their own goals, focus or identity in the process. We've seen a new artistic trend called "flat", with bright colors, no gradients and minimalistic widgets, taking these projects by storm. You don’t see us at the forefront of all that. We do keep a close eye on it, without any intention to jump into it, but rather to learn from it and to see if it can help us improve what we’re already doing. + +> People who enjoyed Linux Mint years ago still enjoy it nowadays. If you enjoy it now, chances are you’ll enjoy it still for a long time. You’re here because you enjoy it right now, we know that, we enjoy it too, and we've no intention of being anything else. So, in the context of that “new look and feel”, we’re not trying to reinvent ourselves. We’re talking about icons and GTK themes here. We’re also committed to supporting Mint-X, so with a click of a mouse you’ll be able to make Mint 18 look just like the way Mint 17 did. + +Mint Y is, in other words, a nice evolution of Mint X with a nod to the current trend of "flat" user interface design. And yes, It looks similar to what GNOME, KDE, OS X 10.11 and Windows 10 are doing. Mint X looks similar to what GNOME, KDE, OS X and Windows were doing six years ago -- it had a decidedly "metallic" look to it which a certain fruit themed OS also used around that time. Mint Y simply evolves to fit with the modern OS world. That's part of what "evolutionary" means -- changing to better fit the current environment. + +Somewhere between then and now Lefebvre and team must have changed their minds about making Mint Y the default though. As of Mint 18.1 if you want to evolve the look and feel of Mint you'll have to do it yourself. If you'd like a slightly different feel there's also a very nice dark theme, Mint Y dark, and a hybrid of the two that uses dark toolbars and buttons with and light panels. + +[image="mint18-mint-y-dark.jpg" caption="The new dark Mint Y theme."] +[image="mint18-mint-y-hybrid.jpg" caption="The new Mint Y hybrid dark/light theme."] + +The move to a flatter theme may be motivated by a good bit more than keeping pace with contemporaries in the style department, it may well be related to another change in Mint 18 -- something called X Apps. + +Mint 18 updates its base system to Ubuntu 16.04, which means under the hood Mint 18 has moved from GNOME/GTK 3.10 to 3.18. Since GNOME does not adhere to Mint's evolutionary philosophy, but likes to make radical changes from point release to point release, there are some huge changes involved in moving from 3.10 to 3.18. + +Sometimes this is a good thing. Mint 18 benefits from much improved HiDPI support, which is now just as good as GNOME's. It also means that Mint has been able to add popular apps like Spotify, Dropbox and Steam to its repos, making them much easier to install. + +The move to GNOME 3.18 is not, however, without its downsides for Mint. As Lefebvre writes in the same blog post mentioned above, "GNOME applications now integrate better with GNOME Shell and look more native in that environment. The bad news, is that they now look completely out of place everywhere else." For Mint the issue is further complicated by being downstream from Ubuntu, which heavily patches GTK, GNOME applications and the GNOME environment itself. + +In the past Mint has dealt with this problem the same way Ubuntu has -- by downgrading apps and patching where necessary, occasionally patching on top of Ubuntu's patches. The changes in GNOME 3.16 and onward however make this extremely time consuming and impractical. + +Instead Mint has decided to create X Apps. No, the distro isn't building out clones of GNOME apps. Lefebvre rejects this idea writing, "it was decided early that Cinnamon would not get its own applications, because it represented too much work and there were too few differences in application needs between Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce." + +Instead Mint has kicked off the X Apps project. Essentially what it does is take GTK apps and re-theme them in a way that they'll look at home on all of Mint's desktop releases, Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. For Mint 18 there are five X apps, Xedit (a text editor), Xviewer (an image viewer), Xreader (a PDF/document viewer), Pix (a simple photo organizer) and Xplayer (a video player). + +[image="mint18-Xviewer.jpg" caption="Mint 18's new default image viewer, XViewer"] + +In the end X Apps become a seamless part of the Mint 18 experience. Users don't really need to know the Xplayer is a heavily themed and patched version of Totem or that Xviewer is Eye of GNOME. What's even nicer is that the X Apps get all the underlying features that make modern GNOME apps nice, namely HiDPI support and support for customization via gsettings. + +Another change to be aware of in Mint 18 is that Mint's homegrown "apt" command now supports Debian's command of the same name. Mint's apt was originally a shortcut for a handful of package related commands, including apt-get, aptitude, and apt-cache. Since Mint's apt debuted, Debian has created a similar shortcut with the same name. Since tutorials typically refer to the Debian version Mint has updated its tool to mirror Debian's version. Mint's apt, however, still supports all its own commands, many of which Debian's does not. + +As has been the case for just about every Mint release in recent memory, Mint 18 ships with a number of improvements to the Update Manager. The biggest change is a new overall setting for updates. Users can choose from three options, the very safe choice, which is to update the system with stable versions of software, or the default, which is to do the same as the safe option, but also show additional updates which could cause instability, allowing you to choose what you want to update beyond the stable available. + +The last option is the make-it-like-Arch-but-without-the-testing option to always update everything. The latter is not recommended unless you know how to boot to a shell and roll back updates when you break something. Again, even though most users don't need anything beyond the default it's nice to see Mint adding options (and if you find yourself using the third option, you might want to consider trying Arch). + +[image="mint18-update.jpg" caption="Mint 18 offers a variety of update possibilities."] + +The Update Manager also greatly simplifies its kernel update options and now just links to changelogs instead of trying to pull them in. + +The kernel update feature in Mint is probably the simplest GUI means of updating a kernel I'm aware of in any distro. That's something of a mixed blessing of course since this is also probably the tool by which it is easiest to really screw up your system. + +That might be part of why with Mint 18 when you first launch the kernel update panel you'll also get a very nice explanation of what a kernel is and how badly you can screw up your system if you try to use the wrong kernel. Linux Mint 18 ships with Linux Kernel 4.4.0.21, though when I tested several newer kernels were available up to and including 4.4.0.28. + +## What's New in Cinnamon + +Mint 18.1 ships with Cinnamon 3.0. In keeping with the evolutionary nature of Mint-related projects, Cinnamon 3.0 is not a radical departure from the past, but a careful refinement of existing features and some new customization options. + +Cinnamon is not a tiling window manager by any means, but it does have an interesting window-snapping form of tiling that has been improved in this release. It's a long way from Xmonad or Awesome, but if you're a casual tiler it will allow you to tile your windows when you want to. + +A more useful change in this release is the ability to eliminate potentially unused cruft from the start menu. Right-clicking the Mint button will bring up the customization screen with new options to hide favorites, bookmarks, system settings and other infrequently used items. The result is a cleaner start menu if you want such a thing. It's not a feature that everyone will use. In fact, I didn't use it, but I like that it's there because I like that Mint is still developing features useful to only a small segment of users and hasn't caved to the tyranny of the majority like certain other desktops. + +Similarly Cinnamon 3.0 offers some new accessibility settings, which have been re-written as native Cinnamon-settings modules. It's now easy to toggle larger text, high contrast themes and turn on (or install) GNOME's Orca screen reader. + +Panel launchers get some new features in this release, namely support for application actions. This means, for example, that you can launch a new Firefox window from the launcher icon. Which actions are supported varies by application, but at a minimum it consists of opening and closing new windows. + +## What's New in MATE + +The MATE specific changes for this release are relatively minor. The MATE version contains all the Mint updates like the new theme options, the revamped Update Manager and new X apps, but beyond that MATE's changes are small. + +There's new GTK support under the hood, which means better HiDPI support, though MATE is still a long way from the best choice for HiDPI laptops. The MATE touchpad preferences get some new options to configure edge and two-finger scrolling independent of each other (this is available in Cinnamon 3.0 as well). + +## Performance + +I tested Mint 18 on the Dell XPS 13 that I reviewed last month on Ars and found it to be a snappy desktop, considerably less resource hungry than the default Unity that shipped with the Dell. Cinnamon is the flashier of Mint's desktop options and uses a bit more memory (about 450MB with nothing running but the default startup apps), but still quite a bit less than Ubuntu 16.04 (about 650 MB with nothing running but the default startup app). In fact, of what I would call the four heavy weight Linux desktops -- GNOME 3, Unity, KDE and Cinnamon -- Cinnamon is the least resource intensive. + +If you're looking for something a bit lighter, Linux Mint MATE is the way to go. It lacks the level of HiDPI support that Cinnamon offers (which makes it difficult to use on the Dell XPS 13's HiDPI screen), but for older hardware it's the obvious choice. There's also an Xfce version of Mint, but as of the time of writing it has not yet been updated to Mint 18. + +Both Mint desktops feel snappy on modern hardware. Even Cinnamon's on-by-default animations don't introduce the kind of millisecond interface lag that I was, frankly, expecting. Of course testing on less modern hardware like an old EeePC, reveals a starker contrast and clearly, of the two, MATE is the better choice in situations where RAM is limited. + +## Conclusion + +Linux Mint 18 is a solid update and continues the slow but steady evolution of what may be the most popular Linux desktop out there. If you're an existing Mint user it's definitely worth upgrading, though do bear in mind that this upgrade may be a bit more difficult that the very simple upgrade process for 17.x updates. As of the time of writing Linux Mint has not published it's usual upgrade guide and I installed a clean copy so I can't comment on the upgrade process. + +Mint 18 remains my recommendation for anyone whose new to Linux, as well as seasoned Linux users who want a desktop that just works and gets out of the way. Thanks to it's incremental development approach, its dedication to evolving features slowly, and its development of power user features and configuration options, Mint manages to serve both newcomers and Linux power users well. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/mintlinuxreview.html b/ars-technica/published/mintlinuxreview.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a158638 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/mintlinuxreview.html @@ -0,0 +1,66 @@ +

The Linux Mint project has released Mint 17.2, a significant upgrade for the Ubuntu-based distro that has become one of Linux's most popular. It's also among the last holdouts of the traditional desktop computing paradigm.

+

Mint is Ubuntu for people who don't like the Unity desktop.

+

If you want Ubuntu and all the good that comes with it, like an extensive up-to-date set of packages, great documentation and a web full of tutorials and helpful users, but not Unity and its baggage -- like query-logging search "features" some have called spyware -- Linux Mint just might be the distro for you.

+

Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu and in my experience most things that work in Ubuntu will also work in Mint. All those tutorials and .deb files in most cases (not all though) will do just fine with Mint.

+

Linux Mint comes in a variety of desktop flavors, most notable though are the dual homegrown desktops, Cinnamon and MATE. Both desktops represent something increasingly rare regardless of your computing platform of choice -- they stick with the tried and true paradigms of earlier desktop software. That is, they both offer task bars, system trays, docks and other familiar metaphors for interacting with and managing your applications and files.

+ +[image="mint172-cinn-start-menu.png" caption="The default Cinnamon desktop in Linux Mint 17.2"] + +

These days the desktops grabbing headlines have, for the most part, left the traditional desktop behind in favor of what's often referred to as a "shell", which offers a search-based interface. The GNOME project and Ubuntu's Unity desktop interfaces both use this approach.

+

This is not a sea change that's limited to Linux. The upheaval of the desktop is happening in Windows land as well. Windows 8 also departed from the traditional desktop UI and Windows 10 looks like it will continue that rethinking of the desktop, albeit with a few familiar elements retained.

+

Whether it's driven by, in Ubuntu's case, a vision of "convergence" between desktop and mobile or perhaps just the need for something new (which seems to be the case for GNOME 3.x), the developers would have you believe that these mobile-friendly, search based desktops are the future of, well, everything.

+

There are however, still some holdouts that still stick with the task bar and start menu style interface. Apple's OS X has thus far been surprisingly conservative about changing its basic metaphors, but then the company has iOS to tantalize developers.

+

In the Linux world there are a few holdouts as well. Both KDE and Xfce continue to be more or less what they have always been. The word stolid comes to mind with both. They're both solid options, but the word fun doesn't spring to mind with either.

+

Linux Mint on the other hand has managed to do something a bit different, particularly with its Cinnamon desktop which manages to feel both familiar and modern at the same time.

+

Linux Mint 17.2 is more than just the Cinnamon desktop -- we'll get to that in a minute -- but for those looking for alternatives to Unity and GNOME 3, Linux Mint 17.2 offers everything you love about Ubuntu without the Unity Desktop.

+

Cinnamon 2.6

+

If you head over to the Linux Mint website you'll find two different downloads available, one for the Cinnamon desktop and one for the MATE desktop. Opt for the former and you'll get Linux Mint 17.2 with Cinnamon 2.6.

+ +[image="mint172-cinn.png" caption="Cinnamon 2.6 in Linux Mint 17.2"] + +

Out of the box Cinnamon rather closely resembles Windows XP, albeit with a mintier green gray theme. You'll find all the familiar elements of traditional desktops though, a start menu, task bar and so on. If Windows XP isn't your idea of a good looking desktop, fear not, Cinnamon is highly customizable and there are a ton of themes and useful applets available for download.

+

Among the more obvious new features in this release are better dual monitor support, some new tricks for the panel and a much faster overall desktop experience.

+

The latter point -- speed improvements -- is particularly true on older hardware. Cinnamon 2.6 is still not by any means a lightweight desktop, nor would it be my first choice for less powerful hardware, but with this release it is a bit less taxing on older systems. Among the improvements are some code optimizations that have reduced the amount of background refreshes that happen. The menu, for instance, is refreshed about 6 times less and the window manager has been overhauled to reduce idle CPU use.

+

For more details on all the under the hood speed improvements in Cinnamon 2.6, check out Linux Mint lead Clément Laforge's blog post on the subject. Since brevity is the essence of Linux reviews, suffice to say that Linux Mint 17.2 is noticeably snappier than its predecessor on the same hardware, something disappointingly few desktops can claim these days.

+

The new and improved dual monitor support primarily addresses a long-time complaint from Cinnamon users with more than one screen -- there was no way to set up your panels independently. That's been fixed, which means you can now have a completely different panel on each of your monitors. In fact, you don't have to have multiple screens to take advantage of this one, the updates to the panel mean you can now set up your single monitor with multiple instances, for example, one at the top and bottom of your screen, though I'm not sure why you'd want to.

+

But wait, did you catch that in the last paragraph? Cinnamon 2.6 has a new feature that addresses a long time complaint from users. In fact there are quite a few new features that can be traced right back to user submitted bugs and feature requests, which is another thing that feels increasingly rare in Linux desktops.

+

This release sees the Cinnamon developers focusing on some of what are sometimes call "paper cut" fixes, which just means there's been a lot of attention to the details, particularly the small, but annoying problems. For example, this release adds a new panel applet called "inhibit" which temporarily bans all notifications. It also turns off screen locking and stops any auto dimming you have set up, making a great tool for when you want to watch a video or play a game.

+ +[image="mint172-cinn-inhibit.png" caption="The Inhibit applet in action."] + +

Sure, you could accomplish all those before using a couple different panes in the system settings app, but with applet you can just drop it in the menu bar and click to easily toggle things on and off. It's not a huge new feature, but it's great to have and it solves the kind of real-world problem ordinary users encounter.

+

Along similar lines Cinnamon has an improved sound applet, which supports PulseAudio and has the ability to "detect output devices with greater accuracy". In practical terms that means more outputs "just work". There's also a new feature to set the volume level independently for each running application.

+

If you've used Cinnamon for a long time you may well remember some bad old days of desktop freezes and other crashes. This used to happen so much I had a Bash shortcut just to restart Cinnamon. As I noted in my review of Mint 17.1, I haven't had this problem for some time on any of my hardware, but if you do you'll be glad to know there's now a keyboard shortcut to restart Cinnamon. By default it's Ctrl+Alt+Escape, which will restart both the Nemo file manager and the cinnamon-settings-daemon and launch a brand new instance of Cinnamon.

+

That's a bit cleaner than good old Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, which kills your session and can potentially lose your work. With Ctrl+Alt+Escape your session stays as it was, including any open apps with unsaved work. I've been using Cinnamon 2.6 for a while now though and haven't needed to restart it yet.

+

Linux Mint 17.2 with Cinnamon is well worth the upgrade. In fact, even if you're using Cinnamon elsewhere, which has become increasingly common, with Debian and Fedora now including Cinnamon as an option in their installers, I'd suggest updating. The speed improvements alone are worth it.

+

MATE 1.10

+

The other primary option for Linux Mint 17.2 is the MATE desktop, which has been updated to version 1.10.

+ +[image="mint172-mate.png" caption="The MATE desktop in Linux Mint 17.2"] + +

Just like its cohort Cinnamon, the MATE update has seen quite a bit of work go into speeding up the desktop experience and bringing down the memory requirements. Unlike Cinnamon though, MATE is what passes for a "lightweight" desktop these days, which is to say that particularly the memory use improvements will be a huge win for anyone using MATE on older, less capable hardware. MATE is not LXDE or bare Openbox by any means, but neither is it anywhere near as big and memory hungry as GNOME 3 or Unity.

+

That said, I didn't really notice the speed improvements. Depending on your hardware and use habits you may find that MATE 1.10 is faster, but MATE has always been pretty speedy so sometimes it's hard to tell. It does definitely use less RAM though.

+

Beyond the speed and RAM improvements you won't likely notice a lot of changes in this version of MATE. The default file manager in MATE can now enable and disable extensions without a restart and the MATE documentation is now available within the desktop interface.

+

The developers of MATE have initiated a similar "paper cut" project for MATE to fix some of the small issues and also to port some of the new Cinnamon features into MATE, but so far it doesn't look like much has happened on this project. The MATE 1.10 release announcement says that these should come as updates to MATE 1.10.x, so expect to see a few things updated and optimized as the 1.10.x release cycle continues.

+

Like Cinnamon, MATE has also grown beyond Linux Mint. In fact, there's now an official Ubuntu flavor based on MATE. Given that Linux Mint is derived from Ubuntu, it's worth asking -- why not just use Ubuntu MATE? If you want the latest version of Ubuntu, need an up-to-date kernel to support new hardware or prefer pure Ubuntu then Ubuntu MATE is probably a better choice.

+

There's more to Linux Mint than just the desktop though. And while this release retains the base system of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, there are plenty of improvements to the tools and applications that make Mint, well, Mint.

+

Linux Mint 17.2

+

Linux Mint 17.2 ships with a slew of updates that apply regardless of the desktop you choose.

+

Among the places Mint trumps Ubuntu is the Update Manager, which goes well beyond the usual package manager, offering up what amounts to a user-friendly tour of the system via package updates. If you really want to know what's going on with your system and how various package updates relate to one another the Mint Update Manager is one of the best ways I've seen to wrap your head around it.

+

The latest feature is support package aliases, which sounds obscure, but is actually very simple. It just means that a package with an otherwise obscure name like "cjs" can be displayed as "cinnamon-cjs" so that it appears along side other Cinnamon updates and perhaps more importantly so that you can tell it's connected in some way to Cinnamon. This makes it easier to debug things after an update if something on your system breaks. Even if you have no idea what "cjs" does (for the record, its a JavaScript/C bridge), at least you know it's part of Cinnamon.

+ +[image="mint172-mate-update-manager.png" caption="Viewing updates in Linux Mint 17.2"] + +

The paper cuts theme mentioned earlier extends beyond the desktops as well. Among the small things in the Update Manager is a option to hide the system tray icon when no updates are available, which keeps your panel a little less cluttered.

+

Part of the appeal of using Ubuntu is the wealth of .deb packages out there. In general those same third party packages will also work in Mint, which is great, until it isn't. The problem with .deb files is that you never really know what's in them unless you check and let's face it, you don't. Mint makes it a little easier to check out exactly what you're getting with an update to the Software Sources configuration tool.

+

With Mint 17.2 you can now open PPA archives and browse their packages. You can also then install them right from Software Sources, you don't have to switch to another tool. But more importantly you can easily purge .deb packages you installed manually. Just remove the repository/PPA and update. Sure you can do that from the command line too, but doing it through Software Source will be much easier for most users.

+ +[image="mint172-cinn-ppas.png" caption="Inspecting PPA contents in Linux Mint 17.2"] + +

If you do prefer the command line there are a couple updates there as well, including support for an interesting command, "apt recommends", which will list missing recommended packages for a particular package. It's sort of like a post installation way to inspect what happens if you use "--no-install-recommends".

+

Ubuntu 14.04 Core

+

As mentioned earlier Linux Mint 17.2 sticks with Ubuntu 14.04 under the hood. That means the kernel remains at 3.16, which might be bad news for newer hardware. Naturally you can update the kernel yourself, though unless you really know what you're doing I don't suggest it.

+

There is one big upside to sticking with Ubuntu 14.04 as the base for Mint 17.2 -- there's still now systemd. Mint users won't have to deal with systemd for another year when Mint will make the leap to Ubuntu 16.04 as the new base system. That makes Mint 17.2 a good option for those who want to have an updated desktop in the Ubuntu ecosystem, but postpone the move to systemd for a little while.

+

Conclusion

+

Mint 17.2 is well worth the upgrade though much of what you want from it might be easier to get by just upgrading Cinnamon or MATE on their own. The Mint Linux upgrade guide tends to emphasize the wisdom on the old saying, "if it ain't broke..." Those are good words to live by, but, that said, I had no trouble at all upgrading from Mint 17.1. All you need to do is open Update Manager and head to the Edit menu, where you should see an option to "Upgrade to Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela."

+

Linux Mint 17.2 is an LTS release and will receive security updates until 2019, and until 2016, all Mint releases will continue to use the same base package system (Ubuntu 14.04).

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/notes-moz-richard-barnes.txt b/ars-technica/published/notes-moz-richard-barnes.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..889e8ac --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/notes-moz-richard-barnes.txt @@ -0,0 +1,90 @@ + +> Which is still open so I would qualify that if I mention it. +> +> Okay, here are a few specific questions I have about this effort, though +> again, I'd much prefer to have something more like a discussion because +> my take on all this is somewhat open ended right now. +> +> 1) First and foremost what is the big win for users visiting a flat HTML +> site (that is, no login, no data exchange)? Which is to say, how does +> HTTPS help users outside of situations where they already have it (e.g. +> their bank, Facebook, et al)? + + +HTTPS give you auth and *integrity*. They know they're connecting to you and they know that the content is what you intended to provide. + +- subresource integrity spec: https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-subresource-integrity/#use-casesexamples let's the benefit propogate. If my 1st connection is https, and I download a link to some other site, SRI specifies a constraint of the image, SRI protects against dependencies (jquery, etc). + +Systemic benefit -- more things are HTTPS, great cannon can be prevented. widely used site + +little sites are more likely to get caught up in tracking or advertising. + + +> 2) The best answer I have come up with to the above question is that +> HTTPS stops unsophisticated MitM attacks. Do you have any numbers or +> research of any kind on how common such attack are? + +No one knows. Mozilla is trying to get such stats, but so far, says Barnes, "we don't have it. + +> 3) HTTPS consists of several layers, will Firefox be grading these +> layers on a per-site basis and letting the user know the overall level +> of security? That is, I might have implemented HTTPS, but done so in +> such a way that my server is vulnerable to Heartbleed, BOOST, POODLE, +> etc or supports a weak, possibly compromised cipher suite, will Firefox +> warn users about the potential vulnerability? If so how? If not, why +> not? + + +is there a date? + +It's already happening. New features are https, fido hardware auth, etc + +- Gradually phasing out access to browser features for non-secure websites + +For every features that goes away, the question becomes, "how much are you going to break the web for it's own good?" + +To be completely frank, I don't care about URLs I care about secure connections. So if you can get a secure connections via HSTS et al + +geo location api, get user media (mic camera), + + +HSTS and the upgrade-insecure-requests CSP + +Still treated as mixed content, HSTS you discover as you browse, + +"HSTS priming spec" + + +> 4) LetEncrypt is great, but it's still way beyond the capabilities of +> non-technical users. Yet part of what makes the web amazing is how +> simple it is to just create a few text files, put them in the folder, +> upload it to a server and you have a site (this is I believe one of the +> central parts of Mozilla's Maker efforts, that anyone can create things +> on the web). + +Fix the transport level. + +Big site concerns: + +- not too complex +- dependecies -- media sites can't go HTTPS without their ads being HTTPS as the ecosystem moves in that direction the big sites don't have to worry as much. + + +Little site concerns + +- complexity (config, etc) +- same level of automation as DNS - caddy server +- dependencies + + +> 5) Tim Berners Lee has called the move from http to https, "arguably a +> greater threat to the integrity for the web than anything else in its +> history." Given that URLs breaking, changing and disappearing is already +> a massive problem, and that this move will absolutely mean more broken +> sites, how is that a win for the web? Is a secure web that's only 10% of +> the web better than an insecure web? +> + +Tim has been a really useful contraian voice. His views have driven the browser and web community to address concerns he has raised. HTST priming is designed to address. + + diff --git a/ars-technica/published/open-source-article.html b/ars-technica/published/open-source-article.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fb26216 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/open-source-article.html @@ -0,0 +1,69 @@ +

Free and open source software enables the world as we know it. From web servers to kiosks to the big data algorithms mining your Facebook feed, nearly every computer system you interact with runs, at least in part, on free software. Free software has given rise to a galaxy of startups and enabled the largest software acquisition in the history of the world.

+

Free software is a gift. It’s the gift that made the world as we know it possible. It’s an astounding gift to give. So astounding in fact that it made businesses unaccustomed to this kind of generosity uncomfortable. They weren’t unwilling to use free software, it was too radical and by extension, too political. It had to be renamed “open source.”

+

Once that happened open source software took over the world.

+

Recently though there’s been a disturbance in the open source force.

+

Redis Labs, MongoDB, and Confluent all changed their software licenses in recent months, moving away from open source licenses to more restrictive terms that limit what can be done with the software, making it no longer open source software.

+

The problem, argue Redis Labs, MongoDB and others, is hosted software services. Also known as, “the cloud.” Also known as Amazon AWS.

+

Amazon, for it’s part, recently came out swinging, releasing its own version of the code behind Elastic Search in response to licensing changes at Elastic. Interestingly, Elastic, the company behind Elastic Search, has a very different response from that of MongoDB and Redis – it hasn’t said a word in protest.

+

Cloud Burst

+

MongoDB the company is built around the open source “NoSQL” database of the same name. MongoDB’s database is useful for storing unstructured data, for example images, which it can handle just as well as it handles more traditional data types. Data is stored in JSON-like documents rather than the columns and rows of a relational database. Since there’s no structured tables there’s no “structured query language” for working with the data, hence the term “NoSQL.”

+

MongoDB is not the only NoSQL database out there, but it’s one of the most widely used. According to industry aggregator, DB Engines, MongoDB is the fifth most popular database, with everyone from Google to Code Academy to Foursquare using MongoDB.

+

MongoDB is also leading the charge to create a new kind of open source license, which CTO Eliot Horowitz believes is necessary to protect open source software businesses as computing moves into the new world of the cloud.

+

The cloud, argue Horowitz and others, requires the open source community to re-think and possibly update open source licenses to “deal with new challenges in a new environment.” The challenges are, essentially, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, which are all capable of taking open source software, wrapping it up as a service and reselling it. The problem with AWS or Azure wrapping up MongoDB and offering it as part of a software as a service (SaaS), is that it then competes with MongoDB’s own cloud-based SaaS – MongoDB Atlas. What’s threatened then is not MongoDB’s source code, but MongoDB’s own SaaS derived from that source code, and which is the company’s chief source of revenue.

+

To combat the potential threat to its bottom line, MongoDB has moved from the Gnu Public License (GPL) to what it calls the Server Side Public License, or SSPL. The SSPL says, in essence, you can do anything you want with this software, except use it to build something that competes with MongoDB Atlas.

+

Originally MongoDB submitted the SSPL to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the organization that oversees and approves new open source licenses, but after seeing the writing on the wall – discussion on the OSI mailing lists, combined with the wording of the license made it unlikely the SSPL would ever be approved by the OSI – MongoDB has withdrawn the SSPL from consideration.

+

The SSPL is not an open source license and it never will be.

+

To understand why it helps to realize that MongoDB is not the first open source business to run into this situation. In fact, part of this problem – companies taking software, using it as they please and contributing nothing back – is the reason open source software exists at all.

+

Open source licenses vary, but the gist is generally, you can take this code and do what you want with it, but you can’t make the code proprietary, and if you use it in another project, then that project can’t be proprietary either. These licenses were written this way to prevent companies from taking open source code, using it in their own code and not sharing any of it back to the original project.

+

Horowitz argues that wrapping a piece of code in a SaaS offering is the modern equivalent of using it in an application.

+

It is a novel argument, but it’s in defense of a very old problem that goes well beyond licensing. It’s a problem that goes all the back to the beginning of free software – how do you make money off software if you give it away for free?

+

One traditional answer has been that you sell services around your open source software. But for Horowitz that’s not good enough. “Monetizing open source with support contracts has never been a great business model,” he tells Ars. Red Hat would likely disagree, but Horowitz believes that more protective licenses would bring more venture capital investment and spawn more software businesses based on the open model MongoDB has used. “We’re unique,” he says, “I want us to be less unique.”

+

He may be correct. A more protective license could induce more venture capital investment because there’s (arguably) a greater likelihood of return on their investment. But if that capital did come, it wouldn’t be investing in open source because that kind of restriction on the software means it no longer fits the definition of open source.

+

Quite a few open source advocates have already made the counter argument that the current set of licenses are fine, it’s the business models that need work.

+

Bruce Perens, co-author of the original open source definition, says the SSPL is incompatible with the OSI’s open source definition number nine, which says that the “license must not restrict other software.” Since the SSPL forces any SaaS software that is aggregated with the covered software, but not a derivative of it, to nevertheless be open source, it fails this test. “I wrote number nine into the OSD to prohibit exactly this sort of conduct,” says Perens, “the text is really clear.”

+

But MongoDB is not the only one complaining that the cloud is raining on its profits.

+

Redis Labs, another data storage company, was the first to sound the alarm about cloud providers threatening its business and Redis Labs may have the better solution. Redis Labs initially changed its license to include something called the Common Clause sub-license, which forbids anyone from selling any software it covers. Software licensed with the Common Clause is not, by anyone’s definition, open source, which Redis Labs acknowledged. It has never described those portions of its software as open source.

+

As this article was wrapping up Redis Labs made yet another licensing change, in essence dropping all pretense of being open source software and adopting a homegrown proprietary license for some of its modules. To be clear, most of Redis is governed by the Apache 2.0 License, but some modules are not, namely RedisJSON, RedisSearch, RedisGraph, RedisML and RedisBloom.

+

The license Redis Labs applies to these modules says that while users can view and modify the code, use it in their applications, it restricts which types of applications they can build. With Redis Labs’ new license you are not free to build anything you want. You cannot build database products, a caching engine, a processing engine, a search engine, an indexing engine or any kinds of ML or AI derived serving engine. You cannot in other words use Redis Labs’ code to compete with Redis Labs. This violates one of the core tenants of open source licensing – that there be no restrictions on derivative software.

+

Unfortunately for both companies it doesn’t make sense to simultaneously say that you are open source, and that only you should profit from your open source software. There is a business model where than does make sense: proprietary software.

+

That’s a path that Elastic.co has hewed for some time. While part of the problem here is that there is no playbook set in stone yet, some companies has managed to prosper with both open source and proprietary code. Elastic, makers of Elasticsearch and other open source tools, has faced the exact competition from AWS and soldiered on.

+

Not only has Amazon for years offered Elasticsearch on AWS (ostensibly competing with Elastic’s own offerings), Amazon recently packaged up its own version of the Elasticsearch codebase, extending it to offer for free several of the services Elastic hasn’t released as open source. Elastic’s response has been little more than the corporate equivalent of a shrug.

+

Lessons from history

+

Why does MongoDB want to be open source at all? After all there is no shortage of very successful proprietary software, so why not embrace that path and move on?

+

Horowitz tells me he believes “that open source results in better systems software, especially databases,” going on to cite security and community as advantages of remaining open source. He’s right about both of those things, those are often cited as reasons to use open source software – more eyes on the software means fewer bugs, better security.

+

But looking at the open source definition, it’s clear that Horowitz is missing one key component that’s built into to every open source license – generosity.

+

Open source does not limit what you can do with the software, ever. Full stop. This may well be the chief reason for its success, it’s certainly what made it palpable to large businesses in the first place.

+

Generosity of this kind is how you get community, the cornerstone on which any successful open source project is built. By allowing the widest possible range of users to use your software you get the biggest possible community. More eyes on bugs, more people fixing them. That community is what turns into momentum. That momentum becomes market share. Sometimes market share becomes profit, but that’s not a promise of open source.

+

As Bruce Perens puts it, “we have to draw a line between open source… and the right to make money with open source. The open source definition allows, but does not support, your right to make money. We’re not going to change the rules because you can make money better that way.”

+

To its credit, Horowitz and MongoDB seem to have come around to this point for view, or at least accepted the inevitability of it when they withdrew the SSPL from consideration as an OSI-approved license.

+

Just because you build it and they come, does not mean massive profit.

+

In fact, if you build it and they come and then you take it away, it might be worse than if you’d never built it.

+

Redis Labs’ move away from open source comes after it reaped all the benefits of open source – community support, wide adoption and code contributions from a widespread sources. To put it bluntly, Redis Labs angered the community.

+

When free software developers get mad, they get forking, and there is indeed a fork of Redis, GoodFORM. GoodFORM takes the re-licensed Redis modules as they were prior to the license change, and will maintain them for Debian, Fedora and other Linux distros that cannot ship proprietary software.

+

The unintended consequence of Redis Labs’ new license is that anyone wanting to use a full and open source version of Redis will have to use GoodFORM, not Redis.

+

Individual developers might not much care, but large companies looking to use open source software aren’t so cavalier. For them it usually comes down to a choice, either use clearly open source software with an OSI approved license, or call the lawyers. And no one ever wants to call the lawyers just to install a piece of software.

+

Perens tells Ars that this was one of the key motivations behind the intimal open source definition (originally written for the Debian project). “The open source definition means that you shouldn’t need a lawyer just to be a user,” says Perns. “And one of the ways we do that is minimizing the legal load.”

+

Redis Labs’ new license puts companies in the position of needing a lawyer, and GoodFORM becomes the more logical choice. This also may hint at why MongoDB wanted to remain open source.

+

Other open source projects which have changed to closed source licenses have not fared well. The Xfree86 project was the defacto standard for running X Windows for most of the 1990s, up through the early 2000s. In 2004 Xfree86 began shipping code that the Free Software Foundation felt was counter to the GPL. The downstream operating systems using Xfree86 decided that was unacceptable and a fork, X.org, was born. Today X.org occupies the place Xfree86 once did and Xfree86 is abandoned.

+

Other examples are easy to find, LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice, MariaDB came out of license changes in MySQL, Wireshark came out of Ethereal, the list goes on, but the key thing to note is not just that the forks happened, but that they took with them the developers, the community, the momentum that sustains open source software over the long haul. Lose the goodwill of the open source community and it can be vicious in exacting its revenge. It’s also efficient in doing so, Xfree86 was effectively dead six months after X.org began, OpenOffice disappeared into irrelevancy similarly quickly.

+

The overwhelming lesson of open source history is that once you are open source, it’s very unlikely you will change that and survive.

+

What makes open source work: generosity

+

If open source history teaches that there is no going back, it’s worth considering why.

+

Beanbooks, a little project spun out of Linux computer manufacturer System76 is a perfect example of what Perens sees as an ideal open source software scenario. In The emerging economic paradigm of Open Source Perens argues that a company’s non-differentiating software is its best scenario for open source software. That is, open source the infrastructure of the business, not the core.

+

To put it another way, Beanbooks was not System76’s profit center, but it is an enabling technology for System76’s profit center – building Linux-based computers.

+

However, despite being a perfect candidate for an open source license, Beanbooks is not open source. Why?

+

System76 sells a hosted version of Beanbooks, a SaaS, and at the time the company was worried that a larger company would come along, take the GPL code, essentially clone Beanbooks and get all the profit from System76’s investment.

+

System76 founder Carl Richell says he can empathize with MongoDB and Redis Labs, but he has already been down the worry-about-someone-stealing-your-code-for-competing-SaaS road and regrets it. “Our concern was that someone would wrap up the software and we would lose all our investment.” He says System76 wanted something like patent protection for a few years, but that “ended up hurting us, hurting the platform, and we shouldn’t have had those concerns.”

+

While the SaaS version of Beanbooks looks to be fine, the available code does not get updates and is, from a free software perspective, fairly useless. The Github page is a ghost town. There’s no development, no community.

+

Beanbooks the service carries on, but it does so without a community contributing ideas, code and everything else vibrant open source projects have. Richell thinks Beanbooks might have avoided its fate if it had a GPL or similar license from the beginning.

+

“If it was good enough that someone wanted it that’s great,” says Richell. The key to success for Ritchell isn’t the open source software, it’s the innovation. “Differentiation is not what you’ve done today, but how rapidly you can advance,” he says. As the software developer you have a head start, and, hopefully, a vision of where you are going, those are your differentiators, to use Perens’ terms.

+

“The only way to be successful is to stay ahead,” says Richell, “I don’t think the license has anything to do with it.”

+

The Chef project, makers of various software automation and deployment tools, seems to agree and offers an alternative course to that of MongoDB and Redis. Chef recently announced it would change its license to be completely open source (under the Apache 2.0 license). “We welcome anyone to use and extend our software for any purpose in alignment with the four essential freedoms of Free Software,” writes Chef CEO Barry Crist. While Crist doesn’t mention any other companies, it’s hard to see the specific language of “the four essential freedoms” as anything but a response to Redis and MongoDB.

+

What the future looks like

+

Everyone loves an underdog, and Redis Labs and MongoDB want to portray themselves as the open source underdogs waging a heroic battle against the forces of evil in the form of AWS. But are they?

+

Redis Labs and MongoDB both look like very healthy companies. Redis Labs recently raised $60 million dollars in funding and, based on the companies doing the funding, looks poised for a successful IPO. MongoDB’s IPO last year was, by all accounts, a huge success. It’s stock IPOed at $24 and has steadily climbed ever since then. Today it trades at at around $100 a share. Just before this article went to press one of MongoDB’s biggest users, Lyft, did defect to Amazon, but after a slight stock drop, MongoDB’s stock was right back up where it was before Lyft defected.

+

Neither company is hurting. At least not yet. The fallout from their license changes remains to be seen, but given that much of the development of MongoDB comes from employees, it will likely be fine regardless of whether it’s open source or not. The fate of either is unimportant to the fate of the larger open source paradigm.

+

The open source paradigm doesn’t work for everyone. As Perens put it in a conversation we had as I was wrapping this up, “you can use any license you want as long as you don’t call it open source, that’s your freedom. But we have certain rights that come with open source it doesn’t make sense to give these up to protect a business model.”

+

Through all the conversations I had with developers and founders, one line kept coming back to me. System76 founder Carl Richell told me: “if generosity isn’t built into open source, it isn’t going to work.”

+

Generosity in this case is the right to use the software for any purpose.

+

This has always been the basic litmus test for new open licenses – is the license limiting the generosity of the software? What got open source where it is today is that it could be used anywhere, with anything. Need to combine open source and proprietary software? No problem. Need to re-write that open source library so it can interface with your proprietary code? No problem. Want to take that open source library, wrap it up as a service and sell it? No problem. Because in the end, that’s what open source is: freedom through generosity. And as Perens points out, that’s what it is even when that model doesn’t work for a particular business.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/open-source-article.txt b/ars-technica/published/open-source-article.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..07e3d83 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/open-source-article.txt @@ -0,0 +1,139 @@ +Free and open source software enables the world as we know it. From web servers to kiosks to the big data algorithms mining your Facebook feed, nearly every computer system you interact with runs, at least in part, on free software. Free software has given rise to a galaxy of startups and enabled the [largest software acquisition](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/10/ibm-buys-red-hat-with-eye-on-cloud-dominance/) in the history of the world. + +Free software is a gift. It's the gift that made the world as we know it possible. It's an astounding gift to give. So astounding in fact that it made businesses unaccustomed to this kind of generosity uncomfortable. They weren't unwilling to use free software, it was too radical and by extension, too political. It had to be renamed "open source." + +Once that happened open source software took over the world. + +Recently though there's been a disturbance in the open source force. + +Redis Labs, MongoDB, and Confluent all changed their software licenses in recent months, moving away from open source licenses to more restrictive terms that limit what can be done with the software, making it no longer open source software. + +The problem, argue Redis Labs, MongoDB and others, is hosted software services. Also known as, "the cloud." Also known as Amazon AWS. + +Amazon, for it's part, recently came out swinging, releasing its own version of the code behind Elastic Search in response to licensing changes at Elastic. Interestingly, Elastic, the company behind Elastic Search, has a very different response from that of MongoDB and Redis -- it hasn't said a word in protest. + +## Cloud Burst + +MongoDB the company is built around the open source "NoSQL" database of the same name. MongoDB's database is useful for storing unstructured data, for example images, which it can handle just as well as it handles more traditional data types. Data is stored in JSON-like documents rather than the columns and rows of a relational database. Since there's no structured tables there's no "structured query language" for working with the data, hence the term "NoSQL." + +MongoDB is not the only NoSQL database out there, but it's one of the most widely used. According to industry aggregator, DB Engines, MongoDB is the [fifth most popular database](https://db-engines.com/en/ranking), with everyone from Google to Code Academy to Foursquare using MongoDB. + +MongoDB is also leading the charge to create a new kind of open source license, which CTO Eliot Horowitz believes is necessary to protect open source software businesses as computing moves into the new world of the cloud. + +The cloud, argue Horowitz and others, requires the open source community to re-think and possibly update open source licenses to "deal with new challenges in a new environment." The challenges are, essentially, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, which are all capable of taking open source software, wrapping it up as a service and reselling it. The problem with AWS or Azure wrapping up MongoDB and offering it as part of a software as a service (SaaS), is that it then competes with MongoDB's own cloud-based SaaS -- MongoDB Atlas. What's threatened then is not MongoDB's source code, but MongoDB's own SaaS derived from that source code, and which is the company's chief source of revenue. + +To combat the potential threat to its bottom line, MongoDB has moved from the Gnu Public License (GPL) to what it calls the Server Side Public License, or SSPL. The SSPL says, in essence, you can do anything you want with this software, except use it to build something that competes with MongoDB Atlas. + +Originally MongoDB submitted the SSPL to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the organization that oversees and approves new open source licenses, but after seeing the writing on the wall -- discussion on the OSI mailing lists, combined with the wording of the license made it unlikely the SSPL would ever be approved by the OSI -- MongoDB has withdrawn the SSPL from consideration. + +The SSPL is not an open source license and it never will be. + +To understand why it helps to realize that MongoDB is not the first open source business to run into this situation. In fact, part of this problem -- companies taking software, using it as they please and contributing nothing back -- is the reason open source software exists at all. + +Open source licenses vary, but the gist is generally, you can take this code and do what you want with it, but you can't make the code proprietary, and if you use it in another project, then that project can't be proprietary either. These licenses were written this way to prevent companies from taking open source code, using it in their own code and not sharing any of it back to the original project. + +Horowitz argues that wrapping a piece of code in a SaaS offering is the modern equivalent of using it in an application. + +It is a novel argument, but it's in defense of a very old problem that goes well beyond licensing. It's a problem that goes all the back to the beginning of free software -- how do you make money off software if you give it away for free? + +One traditional answer has been that you sell services around your open source software. But for Horowitz that's not good enough. "Monetizing open source with support contracts has never been a great business model," he tells Ars. Red Hat would likely disagree, but Horowitz believes that more protective licenses would bring more venture capital investment and spawn more software businesses based on the open model MongoDB has used. "We're unique," he says, "I want us to be less unique." + +He may be correct. A more protective license could induce more venture capital investment because there's (arguably) a greater likelihood of return on their investment. But if that capital did come, it wouldn't be investing in open source because that kind of restriction on the software means it no longer fits the definition of open source. + +Quite a few open source advocates have already made the counter argument that the current set of licenses are fine, it's the business models that need work. + +Bruce Perens, co-author of the original [open source definition](https://opensource.org/docs/osd), says the SSPL is incompatible with the OSI's open source definition number nine, which says that the "license must not restrict other software." Since the SSPL forces any SaaS software that is aggregated with the covered software, but not a derivative of it, to nevertheless be open source, it fails this test. "I wrote number nine into the OSD to prohibit exactly this sort of conduct," says Perens, "the text is really clear." + +But MongoDB is not the only one complaining that the cloud is raining on its profits. + +Redis Labs, another data storage company, was the first to sound the alarm about cloud providers threatening its business and Redis Labs may have the better solution. Redis Labs initially changed its license to include something called the Common Clause sub-license, which forbids anyone from selling any software it covers. Software licensed with the Common Clause is not, by anyone's definition, open source, which Redis Labs acknowledged. It has never described those portions of its software as open source. + +As this article was wrapping up Redis Labs made yet another licensing change, in essence dropping all pretense of being open source software and adopting a homegrown proprietary license for some of its modules. To be clear, most of Redis is governed by the Apache 2.0 License, but some modules are not, namely RedisJSON, RedisSearch, RedisGraph, RedisML and RedisBloom. + +The license Redis Labs applies to these modules says that while users can view and modify the code, use it in their applications, it restricts which types of applications they can build. With Redis Labs' new license you are not free to build anything you want. You cannot build database products, a caching engine, a processing engine, a search engine, an indexing engine or any kinds of ML or AI derived serving engine. You cannot in other words use Redis Labs' code to compete with Redis Labs. This violates one of the core tenants of open source licensing -- that there be no restrictions on derivative software. + +Unfortunately for both companies it doesn't make sense to simultaneously say that you are open source, and that only you should profit from your open source software. There *is* a business model where than does make sense: proprietary software. + +That's a path that Elastic.co has hewed for some time. While part of the problem here is that there is no playbook set in stone yet, some companies has managed to prosper with both open source and proprietary code. Elastic, makers of Elasticsearch and other open source tools, has faced the exact competition from AWS and soldiered on. + +Not only has Amazon for years offered Elasticsearch on AWS (ostensibly competing with Elastic's own offerings), Amazon recently packaged up its own version of the Elasticsearch codebase, extending it to offer for free several of the services Elastic hasn't released as open source. Elastic's response has been little more than the corporate equivalent of a shrug. + +## Lessons from history + +Why does MongoDB want to be open source at all? After all there is no shortage of very successful proprietary software, so why not embrace that path and move on? + +Horowitz tells me he believes "that open source results in better systems software, especially databases," going on to cite security and community as advantages of remaining open source. He's right about both of those things, those are often cited as reasons to use open source software -- more eyes on the software means fewer bugs, better security. + +But looking at the open source definition, it's clear that Horowitz is missing one key component that's built into to every open source license -- generosity. + +Open source does not limit what you can do with the software, ever. Full stop. This may well be the chief reason for its success, it's certainly what made it palpable to large businesses in the first place. + +Generosity of this kind is how you get community, the cornerstone on which any successful open source project is built. By allowing the widest possible range of users to use your software you get the biggest possible community. More eyes on bugs, more people fixing them. That community is what turns into momentum. That momentum becomes market share. Sometimes market share becomes profit, but that's not a promise of open source. + +As Bruce Perens puts it, "we have to draw a line between open source... and the right to make money with open source. The open source definition allows, but does not support, your right to make money. We're not going to change the rules because you can make money better that way." + +To its credit, Horowitz and MongoDB seem to have come around to this point for view, or at least accepted the inevitability of it when they withdrew the SSPL from consideration as an OSI-approved license. + +Just because you build it and they come, does not mean massive profit. + +In fact, if you build it and they come and then you take it away, it might be worse than if you'd never built it. + +Redis Labs' move away from open source comes after it reaped all the benefits of open source -- community support, wide adoption and code contributions from a widespread sources. To put it bluntly, Redis Labs angered the community. + +When free software developers get mad, they get forking, and there is indeed a fork of Redis, [GoodFORM](https://goodformcode.com/). GoodFORM takes the re-licensed Redis modules as they were prior to the license change, and will maintain them for Debian, Fedora and other Linux distros that cannot ship proprietary software. + +The unintended consequence of Redis Labs' new license is that anyone wanting to use a full and open source version of Redis will have to use GoodFORM, not Redis. + +Individual developers might not much care, but large companies looking to use open source software aren't so cavalier. For them it usually comes down to a choice, either use clearly open source software with an OSI approved license, or call the lawyers. And no one ever wants to call the lawyers just to install a piece of software. + +Perens tells Ars that this was one of the key motivations behind the intimal open source definition (originally written for the Debian project). "The open source definition means that you shouldn't need a lawyer just to be a user," says Perns. "And one of the ways we do that is minimizing the legal load." + +Redis Labs' new license puts companies in the position of needing a lawyer, and GoodFORM becomes the more logical choice. This also may hint at why MongoDB wanted to remain open source. + +Other open source projects which have changed to closed source licenses have not fared well. The Xfree86 project was the defacto standard for running X Windows for most of the 1990s, up through the early 2000s. In 2004 Xfree86 began shipping code that the Free Software Foundation felt was counter to the GPL. The downstream operating systems using Xfree86 decided that was unacceptable and a fork, X.org, was born. Today X.org occupies the place Xfree86 once did and Xfree86 is abandoned. + +Other examples are easy to find, LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice, MariaDB came out of license changes in MySQL, Wireshark came out of Ethereal, the list goes on, but the key thing to note is not just that the forks happened, but that they took with them the developers, the community, the momentum that sustains open source software over the long haul. Lose the goodwill of the open source community and it can be vicious in exacting its revenge. It's also efficient in doing so, Xfree86 was effectively dead six months after X.org began, OpenOffice disappeared into irrelevancy similarly quickly. + +The overwhelming lesson of open source history is that once you are open source, it's very unlikely you will change that and survive. + +## What makes open source work: generosity + +If open source history teaches that there is no going back, it's worth considering why. + +[Beanbooks](https://beansbooks.com/opencode), a little project spun out of Linux computer manufacturer System76 is a perfect example of what Perens sees as an ideal open source software scenario. In [The emerging economic paradigm of Open Source](https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1470/1385) Perens argues that a company's non-differentiating software is its best scenario for open source software. That is, open source the infrastructure of the business, not the core. + +To put it another way, Beanbooks was not System76's profit center, but it is an enabling technology for System76's profit center -- building Linux-based computers. + +However, despite being a perfect candidate for an open source license, Beanbooks is not open source. Why? + +System76 sells a hosted version of Beanbooks, a SaaS, and at the time the company was worried that a larger company would come along, take the GPL code, essentially clone Beanbooks and get all the profit from System76's investment. + +System76 founder Carl Richell says he can empathize with MongoDB and Redis Labs, but he has already been down the worry-about-someone-stealing-your-code-for-competing-SaaS road and regrets it. "Our concern was that someone would wrap up the software and we would lose all our investment." He says System76 wanted something like patent protection for a few years, but that "ended up hurting us, hurting the platform, and we shouldn't have had those concerns." + +While the SaaS version of Beanbooks looks to be fine, the available code does not get updates and is, from a free software perspective, fairly useless. The Github page is a ghost town. There's no development, no community. + +Beanbooks the service carries on, but it does so without a community contributing ideas, code and everything else vibrant open source projects have. Richell thinks Beanbooks might have avoided its fate if it had a GPL or similar license from the beginning. + +"If it was good enough that someone wanted it that's great," says Richell. The key to success for Ritchell isn't the open source software, it's the innovation. "Differentiation is not what you've done today, but how rapidly you can advance," he says. As the software developer you have a head start, and, hopefully, a vision of where you are going, those are your differentiators, to use Perens' terms. + +"The only way to be successful is to stay ahead," says Richell, "I don't think the license has anything to do with it." + +The Chef project, makers of various software automation and deployment tools, seems to agree and offers an alternative course to that of MongoDB and Redis. Chef recently announced it would change its license to be completely open source (under the Apache 2.0 license). "We welcome anyone to use and extend our software for any purpose in alignment with the four essential freedoms of Free Software," writes Chef CEO Barry Crist. While Crist doesn't mention any other companies, it's hard to see the specific language of "the four essential freedoms" as anything but a response to Redis and MongoDB. + +## What the future looks like + +Everyone loves an underdog, and Redis Labs and MongoDB want to portray themselves as the open source underdogs waging a heroic battle against the forces of evil in the form of AWS. But are they? + +Redis Labs and MongoDB both look like very healthy companies. Redis Labs recently raised $60 million dollars in funding and, based on the companies doing the funding, looks poised for a successful IPO. MongoDB's IPO last year was, by all accounts, a huge success. It's stock IPOed at $24 and has steadily climbed ever since then. Today it trades at at around $100 a share. Just before this article went to press one of MongoDB's biggest users, Lyft, did defect to Amazon, but after a slight stock drop, MongoDB's stock was right back up where it was before Lyft defected. + +Neither company is hurting. At least not yet. The fallout from their license changes remains to be seen, but given that much of the development of MongoDB comes from employees, it will likely be fine regardless of whether it's open source or not. The fate of either is unimportant to the fate of the larger open source paradigm. + +The open source paradigm doesn't work for everyone. As Perens put it in a conversation we had as I was wrapping this up, "you can use any license you want as long as you don't call it open source, that's your freedom. But we have certain rights that come with open source it doesn't make sense to give these up to protect a business model." + + +Through all the conversations I had with developers and founders, one line kept coming back to me. System76 founder Carl Richell told me: "if generosity isn't built into open source, it isn't going to work." + +Generosity in this case is the right to use the software for any purpose. + +This has always been the basic litmus test for new open licenses -- is the license limiting the generosity of the software? What got open source where it is today is that it could be used anywhere, with anything. Need to combine open source and proprietary software? No problem. Need to re-write that open source library so it can interface with your proprietary code? No problem. Want to take that open source library, wrap it up as a service and sell it? No problem. Because in the end, that's what open source is: freedom through generosity. And as Perens points out, that's what it is even when that model doesn't work for a particular business. + diff --git a/ars-technica/published/opera-reborn3.txt b/ars-technica/published/opera-reborn3.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ec0ad9f --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/opera-reborn3.txt @@ -0,0 +1,101 @@ +Opera Software recently released what the company refers to as Reborn 3, the latest version of its flagship desktop browser. + +At first glance it's tempting to dismiss the name "Reborn 3" as little more than marketing hype, but given the relentless and utterly unspectacular updates that the Chromium project releases every six weeks, it can be hard to denote actual big releases of browsers based on Chromium, hence the "Reborn" moniker. And, for Opera, this is a significant update that goes far beyond what arrived with the move to Chromium 60. + +Opera Reborn 3 -- or Opera 60 if you want to stick with version numbers -- brings a slew of features that recently debuted in Opera's mobile browsers to the desktop. The big three in this release are support for blockchain-secured transactions, a crypto wallet to go with the mobile version and a new look with light and dark themes available. + +If you haven't checked out Opera lately, it's worth revisiting, especially for those older Opera fans still smarting about the switch from Opera's Presto rendering engine to Google's Blink rendering engine. + +Opera once [filed a complaint](https://www.wired.com/2007/12/opera-to-the-edotudot-internet-explorer-is-ruining-the-web/) with the EU saying that Internet Explorer was holding back the web "by not following accepted Web standards." The founders of Opera (who have since moved on to other things) probably never imagined their browser would one day share a rendering engine with Internet Explorer, but it does now. + +And it's true, this is not the Opera of old -- there's no mail client, no IRC support to name a few things -- but it does offer features that make it much more useful than Chrome or Chromium. + +Opera's user base, like that of every other web browser, pales next to Google Chrome. But Opera was the originator of many things we all take for granted will be part of any web browser these days. Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, and the "speed dial" of page thumbnails on new tabs are just a few of the things that started life in Opera. + +Firefox, Chrome and the rest have long since copied all those features, but for quite some time if you wanted to know what the future of the web browser looked like, you checked in with what Opera was doing. That's part of what makes this latest release of desktop Opera interesting, it has quite a few new things that feel well afield of what the rest of the market is doing. + +Opera's innovation track record is impressive and it bears paying attention to what Opera is doing. + +## Reborn 3 + +The first thing that jumps out about Opera 60 is that most of the new features arrived in the mobile version first and were brought to the desktop afterward. This makes sense given that much of Opera's user base is on mobile. Indeed, mobile is where Opera still leads with considerable innovation, especially Opera Touch which manages to do something no other mobile browser has yet pulled off -- making it easy to browse with one hand even on larger devices. + +Opera Touch also has some thoughtful features like a built-in cookie dialog blocker that's actually pretty effective at hiding those annoying legal-compliance cookie notices. + +I've also long been a fan of Opera Mini, which is perfect for bandwidth constrained situations. Opera Mini pipes all traffic through Opera's servers to first compress pages after which they are sent on to your phone in much smaller form, saving considerable bandwidth. I wouldn't use it for mobile banking, but it's great for casual web surfing on sketchy 2G/3G connections. + +Opera's Desktop offering is considerably less innovative, though it still offers plenty you won't find in Chrome or Firefox, including the new blockchain support and crypto wallet. What will be most obvious to Opera users in this update though is the new look. + +Any visual redesign is likely to anger at least some existing users and Opera 60 is no exception, judging by the Opera forums. That said, to my eye the new look is really nice. It's clean, well-thought-out in terms of feature placement, and does a good job of staying out of the way of the actual webpage. + +The new look follows the general trend that's enchanted browser makers for some years now -- reducing the user interface to better display the webpage. Opera doesn't carry this trend as far as some competitors though. Opera, for example, still retains its very useful sidebar. + +You can hide the sidebar if you don't use it, but personally I don't worry about the browser using horizontal screen real estate. Even my tiny 12 inch 1080p screen is wider than most websites. What I do dislike is losing vertical real estate to the UI and here Opera has gone full minimalist, taking up fewer vertical pixels than even my other favorite for this reason, Vivaldi. + +In fact, the Opera 60 redesign bears more than a passing resemblance to Vivaldi, which has a similar looking sidebar, square tabs and generally minimalist feel. Perhaps Opera has been studying the more recent efforts of its co-founder, Jon von Tetzchner, now CEO of Vivaldi. + +While I like Opera's new look, it's not without some shortcomings. Like Firefox, if you open more tabs than will fit on screen, it scrolls them off screen. While I realize many people like this (judging by Opera's user forums), it drives me crazy -- just keep making the tabs smaller. + +On the plus side, Opera's tab menu in the toolbar, complete with large preview images of the currently hovered tab is amazing for quickly finding that tab needle in a haystack. What would be even better is if it could be activated and navigated with the keyboard. + +The other two standout improvements in the Opera 60 redesign are two new buttons in the menubar, one for the "easy setup" menu and another for the snapshot tool. The easy setup menu previously lived on the startup page. Moving it to the toolbar means that most things you'd regularly want to change -- theme, clearing browser data, enabling/disabling the sidebar, and more -- are just a click away. This is helpful because Opera's settings page, while not as labyrinthine as Vivaldi's, is still extensive and finding what you want can take a minute. + +The snapshot tool is a another nice one to have easy access too, though for those who don't do massive amounts of web-based research it might be somewhat less useful. + +## Web 3.0 + +Once you get past the changes to the user interface, most of what's new in Opera 60 feels, well, ahead of its time. Most users probably aren't going to immediately rush out and start buying everything in cryptocurrencies or switch to storing files on [IPFS](https://ipfs.io/). Still, Opera's blockchain support is interesting, as is the built in Crypto Wallet, which was already part of Opera Mobile. + +Crypto anything, let alone wallets, is nearer to the bleeding edge of the internet than most browsers are willing to go. Opera has, wisely I think, left this disabled by default. To turn it on head to the aforementioned easy setup menu and turn on the Crypto Wallet. + +Opera has been heavily touting what it calls Web 3 as part of this release, but just what that means varies considerably by who's using the phrase. What Opera (and others) call Web 3, refers to sites and apps built using blockchain-based distributed tools rather than the traditional client-server model that has powered the internet since the beginning. + +But once you get past that initial definition there's often a lot of white papers, hand waving and muttering of the phrase blockchain. The hope is that distributed tools will eventually create a more decentralized web with fewer single points of failure, but that's still a long way off. + +The most mainstream part of the decentralized web stack is payment processing. Instead of payments through credit cards or Paypal, there's Bitcoin, Ethereum and others. This is what Opera is supporting with its new Crypto Wallet. Unfortunately for now Opera is only supporting Ethereum. Opera plans to add support for more blockchain currencies down the road. + +There's much more to the so-called Web 3 than that though. For every bit of the traditional website stack there is a blockchain-based equivalent. For example instead of Amazon S3 for file storage, there's IPFS or Filecoin. Similarly instead of Amazon EC2 for computational needs, a decentralized app built on Ethereum might use Truebit. + +How well these distributed tools work is still an open question, but they are starting to be used in the wild and you can expect to hear much more about them in the near future. Examples of sites that use (some) of this new tech stack include would-be Ebay replacement [Openbazaar](https://openbazaar.org/) and YouTube alternative [Flixxo](https://flixxo.com/#/). + +What makes all this interesting, and more than just hype in my mind, is Opera's track record. The question is, now that its founders are long gone, its rendering engine is shared with dozens of other browsers, and its parent company is a Chinese consortium, does Opera still have the sense of vision that has historically made it a good bellwether for the future of web browsers? That's a question we won't know the answer to for several years. + +## Getting More out of Chromium + +When Microsoft recently announced that it would, like Opera before it, abandon its own rendering engine and build a new version of its Edge web browser around Blink, which also powers Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi, and dozens of others, many people worried that the lack of competition would harm the web. There are after all effectively only two browsers on the web now -- Firefox and everything else. + +That may be bad for the web in some ways, but it has an interesting and positive side effect for users -- with everything under the hood the same, browsers have to differentiate themselves on their UI and extra features. + +This is where Opera is miles ahead of most of its competitors. Opera ships with a built-in ad blocker, the ability to easily send pages between desktop and phone using Opera Flow, a built-in RSS reader (called Personal News), and a free HTTP proxy that Opera calls a VPN. + +That last distinction is an important point because while connecting to an HTTP proxy over HTTPS gets you some of the benefits of a true VPN, it lacks others like packet level redirection over the tunnel, which means some add-ons and plugins may not use it. In other words, while better than nothing, Opera's "VPN" does not offer the same level of protection you get connecting to an actual VPN and running all your traffic through it. + +It's worth noting that a number of older reviews of Opera's VPN service claim Opera will log your traffic, but the company has a very specific note in its privacy policy that "When you use our built-in VPN service, we do not log any information related to your browsing activity and originating network address." + +Of these above-and-beyond-Chrome features, the killer one, to my mind, is Opera Flow. Nearly every browser with mobile and desktop versions offers some way to sync or share tabs between them. Firefox has built in syncing, as does, for that matter, Opera. But Flow is a little different than sync. + +Flow is more immediate, doesn't require setting up an account and doesn't run through anyone else's servers. Instead you "pair" your desktop and mobile browsers using a QR code. Once that's done you can send links, notes, photos and movies between your desktop and mobile device. The connection is private and secure, and your data is encrypted before sending. + +The only downside to Flow is that you can only send things back and forth from Opera Touch, not Opera Mini. + +Once you get beyond headlining features Opera has some very nice little tools that make everyday browsing better. I'm a fan of the power-saving mode known as Battery Saver. By default it's disabled, but you can head to settings and enable the toolbar button so you can easily toggle Battery Saver on and off. Battery Saver causes Opera to make some background optimizations like limiting animations and limiting tab and plugin activity. Opera claims laptop batteries last 35 percent longer with its battery saver on. + +Opera's chat sidebar is another nice feature for those who like to keep their various instant messaging accounts easily at hand, but not taking up a tab in the browser. Opera's chat sidebar works with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and VK. + +As someone living abroad, Opera has one last killer feature I wanted to use all the time -- a currency converter menu. Sadly, it doesn't work for my use case. + +While I'm browsing, for example, Ebay from Mexico, I usually want prices in US dollars, not the default pesos. In theory, Opera should be able to do this. If you highlight a number a toolbar will appear and automatically convert the number to your preferred currency. Unfortunately, because prices in pesos use a dollar sign, Opera thinks they're already in dollars and doesn't convert them. This feature did work well with all the other currencies I tested. + +## Conclusion + +Before rendering a verdict on Opera I should say that I am a perpetual browser switcher. No browser I'm currently aware of is good enough to keep me using it consistently. + +[Vivaldi](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/vivaldi-2-0-review-meet-your-ideal-browser-if-youre-willing-to-invest-time/) is very close to my ideal browser, but seems to have some memory leaks. Firefox does better with memory, but lacks many features I rely on to get work done. Firefox is also planning to change how it handles DNS in ways that [could seriously compromise](https://ungleich.ch/en-us/cms/blog/2018/08/04/mozillas-new-dns-resolution-is-dangerous/) the browser, which makes me uncertain about its future. + +[Qutebrowser](https://qutebrowser.org/) has Vim-inspired, keyboard-driven user interface that's damn near perfect, but it doesn't, and likely never will, support Chrome extentions, which makes fine-grained JavaScript blocking impractical. If I could combine Qutebrowser's Vim-like UI with Vivaldi's features I'd be getting close to my ideal browser. In the mean time I tend to switch things up frequently. + +For the last month I've been exclusively using Opera on the desktop. The experience has been a very good one, if not perfect. Using Opera has added a new must-have feature to my list of things I want in a web browser -- Opera Flow. There are lots of sync tools out there to move content between desktop and phone, but I have not found another that's as simple and easy to use as Opera's Flow. I also used the battery saver feature and while I didn't notice anything dramatic in terms of actual battery use, my laptop's fan came on noticeably less often. + +In the end though I always end up back at Vivaldi. Two things always draw me back to Vivaldi, the ability to stack and tile multiple pages in a single "tab" view and the ability to manually manage tab memory via the "hibernate background tabs" option, which, if you've got limited RAM and open tons of tabs, can quickly and easily reclaim a considerable amount of memory. While Opera's battery saver mode is capable of something similar, it lacks the level of control Vivaldi offers. Vivaldi lets me pick and choose which tabs to keep active and which to background. + +Right now in my perpetual browser switching world Opera pulls a close second to Vivaldi. In fact I'm currently using both. And on my phone, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile remain my browsers of choice until, perhaps, a mobile version of Vivaldi becomes available. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/opera-review.html b/ars-technica/published/opera-review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6b9a645 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/opera-review.html @@ -0,0 +1,73 @@ +

Opera Software recently released what the company refers to as Reborn 3, the latest version of its flagship desktop browser.

+

At first glance it’s tempting to dismiss the name “Reborn 3” as little more than marketing hype, but given the relentless and utterly unspectacular updates that the Chromium project releases every six weeks, it can be hard to denote actual big releases of browsers based on Chromium, hence the “Reborn” moniker. And, for Opera, this is a significant update that goes far beyond what arrived with the move to Chromium 60.

+

Opera Reborn 3 – or Opera 60 if you want to stick with version numbers – brings a slew of features that recently debuted in Opera’s mobile browsers to the desktop. The big three in this release are support for blockchain-secured transactions, a crypto wallet to go with the mobile version and a new look with light and dark themes available.

+

If you haven’t checked out Opera lately, it’s worth revisiting, especially for those older Opera fans still smarting about the switch from Opera’s Presto rendering engine to Google’s Blink rendering engine.

+

Opera once filed a complaint with the EU saying that Internet Explorer was holding back the web “by not following accepted Web standards.” The founders of Opera (who have since moved on to other things) probably never imagined their browser would one day share a rendering engine with Internet Explorer, but it does now.

+

And it’s true, this is not the Opera of old – there’s no mail client, no IRC support to name a few things – but it does offer features that make it much more useful than Chrome or Chromium.

+

Opera’s user base, like that of every other web browser, pales next to Google Chrome. But Opera was the originator of many things we all take for granted will be part of any web browser these days. Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, and the “speed dial” of page thumbnails on new tabs are just a few of the things that started life in Opera.

+

Firefox, Chrome and the rest have long since copied all those features, but for quite some time if you wanted to know what the future of the web browser looked like, you checked in with what Opera was doing. That’s part of what makes this latest release of desktop Opera interesting, it has quite a few new things that feel well afield of what the rest of the market is doing.

+

Opera’s innovation track record is impressive and it bears paying attention to what Opera is doing.

+

Reborn 3

+

The first thing that jumps out about Opera 60 is that most of the new features arrived in the mobile version first and were brought to the desktop afterward. This makes sense given that much of Opera’s user base is on mobile. Indeed, mobile is where Opera still leads with considerable innovation, especially Opera Touch which manages to do something no other mobile browser has yet pulled off – making it easy to browse with one hand even on larger devices.

+

Opera Touch also has some thoughtful features like a built-in cookie dialog blocker that’s actually pretty effective at hiding those annoying legal-compliance cookie notices.

+

I’ve also long been a fan of Opera Mini, which is perfect for bandwidth constrained situations. Opera Mini pipes all traffic through Opera’s servers to first compress pages after which they are sent on to your phone in much smaller form, saving considerable bandwidth. I wouldn’t use it for mobile banking, but it’s great for casual web surfing on sketchy 2G/3G connections.

+

Opera’s Desktop offering is considerably less innovative, though it still offers plenty you won’t find in Chrome or Firefox, including the new blockchain support and crypto wallet. What will be most obvious to Opera users in this update though is the new look.

+ + +[image="opera-60-default.jpg" caption='The Default look for Opera 60+.'] + +[image="desktop" caption='Opera 60 also has a dark theme.'] + + +

Any visual redesign is likely to anger at least some existing users and Opera 60 is no exception, judging by the Opera forums. That said, to my eye the new look is really nice. It’s clean, well-thought-out in terms of feature placement, and does a good job of staying out of the way of the actual webpage.

+

The new look follows the general trend that’s enchanted browser makers for some years now – reducing the user interface to better display the webpage. Opera doesn’t carry this trend as far as some competitors though. Opera, for example, still retains its very useful sidebar.

+

You can hide the sidebar if you don’t use it, but personally I don’t worry about the browser using horizontal screen real estate. Even my tiny 12 inch 1080p screen is wider than most websites. What I do dislike is losing vertical real estate to the UI and here Opera has gone full minimalist, taking up fewer vertical pixels than even my other favorite for this reason, Vivaldi.

+

In fact, the Opera 60 redesign bears more than a passing resemblance to Vivaldi, which has a similar looking sidebar, square tabs and generally minimalist feel. Perhaps Opera has been studying the more recent efforts of its co-founder, Jon von Tetzchner, now CEO of Vivaldi.

+

While I like Opera’s new look, it’s not without some shortcomings. Like Firefox, if you open more tabs than will fit on screen, it scrolls them off screen. While I realize many people like this (judging by Opera’s user forums), it drives me crazy – just keep making the tabs smaller.

+

On the plus side, Opera’s tab menu in the toolbar, complete with large preview images of the currently hovered tab is amazing for quickly finding that tab needle in a haystack. What would be even better is if it could be activated and navigated with the keyboard.

+ +[image="opera-60-tab-switcher.jpg" caption="Quickly find the tab you're after with Opera's toolbar tab switcher."] + +

The other two standout improvements in the Opera 60 redesign are two new buttons in the menubar, one for the “easy setup” menu and another for the snapshot tool. The easy setup menu previously lived on the startup page. Moving it to the toolbar means that most things you’d regularly want to change – theme, clearing browser data, enabling/disabling the sidebar, and more – are just a click away. This is helpful because Opera’s settings page, while not as labyrinthine as Vivaldi’s, is still extensive and finding what you want can take a minute.

+ +[image="opera-60-easy.jpg" caption='Easily switch themes and toggle frequently used settings with Opera's "easy menu."'] + +

The snapshot tool is a another nice one to have easy access too, though for those who don’t do massive amounts of web-based research it might be somewhat less useful.

+

Web 3.0

+

Once you get past the changes to the user interface, most of what’s new in Opera 60 feels, well, ahead of its time. Most users probably aren’t going to immediately rush out and start buying everything in cryptocurrencies or switch to storing files on IPFS. Still, Opera’s blockchain support is interesting, as is the built in Crypto Wallet, which was already part of Opera Mobile.

+

Crypto anything, let alone wallets, is nearer to the bleeding edge of the internet than most browsers are willing to go. Opera has, wisely I think, left this disabled by default. To turn it on head to the aforementioned easy setup menu and turn on the Crypto Wallet.

+

Opera has been heavily touting what it calls Web 3 as part of this release, but just what that means varies considerably by who’s using the phrase. What Opera (and others) call Web 3, refers to sites and apps built using blockchain-based distributed tools rather than the traditional client-server model that has powered the internet since the beginning.

+

But once you get past that initial definition there’s often a lot of white papers, hand waving and muttering of the phrase blockchain. The hope is that distributed tools will eventually create a more decentralized web with fewer single points of failure, but that’s still a long way off.

+

The most mainstream part of the decentralized web stack is payment processing. Instead of payments through credit cards or Paypal, there’s Bitcoin, Ethereum and others. This is what Opera is supporting with its new Crypto Wallet. Unfortunately for now Opera is only supporting Ethereum. Opera plans to add support for more blockchain currencies down the road.

+

There’s much more to the so-called Web 3 than that though. For every bit of the traditional website stack there is a blockchain-based equivalent. For example instead of Amazon S3 for file storage, there’s IPFS or Filecoin. Similarly instead of Amazon EC2 for computational needs, a decentralized app built on Ethereum might use Truebit.

+

How well these distributed tools work is still an open question, but they are starting to be used in the wild and you can expect to hear much more about them in the near future. Examples of sites that use (some) of this new tech stack include would-be Ebay replacement Openbazaar and YouTube alternative Flixxo.

+

What makes all this interesting, and more than just hype in my mind, is Opera’s track record. The question is, now that its founders are long gone, its rendering engine is shared with dozens of other browsers, and its parent company is a Chinese consortium, does Opera still have the sense of vision that has historically made it a good bellwether for the future of web browsers? That’s a question we won’t know the answer to for several years.

+

Getting More out of Chromium

+

When Microsoft recently announced that it would, like Opera before it, abandon its own rendering engine and build a new version of its Edge web browser around Blink, which also powers Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi, and dozens of others, many people worried that the lack of competition would harm the web. There are after all effectively only two browsers on the web now – Firefox and everything else.

+

That may be bad for the web in some ways, but it has an interesting and positive side effect for users – with everything under the hood the same, browsers have to differentiate themselves on their UI and extra features.

+

This is where Opera is miles ahead of most of its competitors. Opera ships with a built-in ad blocker, the ability to easily send pages between desktop and phone using Opera Flow, a built-in RSS reader (called Personal News), and a free HTTP proxy that Opera calls a VPN.

+ +[image="opera-60-news.jpg" caption="Opera's built-in feed reader, Personal News."] + +

That last distinction is an important point because while connecting to an HTTP proxy over HTTPS gets you some of the benefits of a true VPN, it lacks others like packet level redirection over the tunnel, which means some add-ons and plugins may not use it. In other words, while better than nothing, Opera’s “VPN” does not offer the same level of protection you get connecting to an actual VPN and running all your traffic through it.

+

It’s worth noting that a number of older reviews of Opera’s VPN service claim Opera will log your traffic, but the company has a very specific note in its privacy policy that “When you use our built-in VPN service, we do not log any information related to your browsing activity and originating network address.”

+

Of these above-and-beyond-Chrome features, the killer one, to my mind, is Opera Flow. Nearly every browser with mobile and desktop versions offers some way to sync or share tabs between them. Firefox has built in syncing, as does, for that matter, Opera. But Flow is a little different than sync.

+

Flow is more immediate, doesn’t require setting up an account and doesn’t run through anyone else’s servers. Instead you “pair” your desktop and mobile browsers using a QR code. Once that’s done you can send links, notes, photos and movies between your desktop and mobile device. The connection is private and secure, and your data is encrypted before sending.

+ +[image="opera-60-news.jpg" caption="Send pages, notes, photos and more from the desktop to Opera Touch and back again."] + +

The only downside to Flow is that you can only send things back and forth from Opera Touch, not Opera Mini.

+

Once you get beyond headlining features Opera has some very nice little tools that make everyday browsing better. I’m a fan of the power-saving mode known as Battery Saver. By default it’s disabled, but you can head to settings and enable the toolbar button so you can easily toggle Battery Saver on and off. Battery Saver causes Opera to make some background optimizations like limiting animations and limiting tab and plugin activity. Opera claims laptop batteries last 35 percent longer with its battery saver on.

+

Opera’s chat sidebar is another nice feature for those who like to keep their various instant messaging accounts easily at hand, but not taking up a tab in the browser. Opera’s chat sidebar works with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and VK.

+

As someone living abroad, Opera has one last killer feature I wanted to use all the time – a currency converter menu. Sadly, it doesn’t work for my use case.

+

While I’m browsing, for example, Ebay from Mexico, I usually want prices in US dollars, not the default pesos. In theory, Opera should be able to do this. If you highlight a number a toolbar will appear and automatically convert the number to your preferred currency. Unfortunately, because prices in pesos use a dollar sign, Opera thinks they’re already in dollars and doesn’t convert them. This feature did work well with all the other currencies I tested.

+ +[image="opera-60-currency.jpg" caption="Convert currencies on the fly by selecting text."] + +

Conclusion

+

Before rendering a verdict on Opera I should say that I am a perpetual browser switcher. No browser I’m currently aware of is good enough to keep me using it consistently.

+

Vivaldi is very close to my ideal browser, but seems to have some memory leaks. Firefox does better with memory, but lacks many features I rely on to get work done. Firefox is also planning to change how it handles DNS in ways that could seriously compromise the browser, which makes me uncertain about its future.

+

Qutebrowser has Vim-inspired, keyboard-driven user interface that’s damn near perfect, but it doesn’t, and likely never will, support Chrome extentions, which makes fine-grained JavaScript blocking impractical. If I could combine Qutebrowser’s Vim-like UI with Vivaldi’s features I’d be getting close to my ideal browser. In the mean time I tend to switch things up frequently.

+

For the last month I’ve been exclusively using Opera on the desktop. The experience has been a very good one, if not perfect. Using Opera has added a new must-have feature to my list of things I want in a web browser – Opera Flow. There are lots of sync tools out there to move content between desktop and phone, but I have not found another that’s as simple and easy to use as Opera’s Flow. I also used the battery saver feature and while I didn’t notice anything dramatic in terms of actual battery use, my laptop’s fan came on noticeably less often.

+

In the end though I always end up back at Vivaldi. Two things always draw me back to Vivaldi, the ability to stack and tile multiple pages in a single “tab” view and the ability to manually manage tab memory via the “hibernate background tabs” option, which, if you’ve got limited RAM and open tons of tabs, can quickly and easily reclaim a considerable amount of memory. While Opera’s battery saver mode is capable of something similar, it lacks the level of control Vivaldi offers. Vivaldi lets me pick and choose which tabs to keep active and which to background.

+

Right now in my perpetual browser switching world Opera pulls a close second to Vivaldi. In fact I’m currently using both. And on my phone, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile remain my browsers of choice until, perhaps, a mobile version of Vivaldi becomes available.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/oryxpro.html b/ars-technica/published/oryxpro.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..89db0e4 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/oryxpro.html @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +

Laptops preloaded with Linux aren't a rare as they used to be. In fact big name hardware companies like Dell have whole lines of laptops that ship with Ubuntu installed, and if you want to stretch things a bit you could argue that a Chromebook is a kind of Linux machine, though it takes a bit of tinkering to get actual Linux installed. Still, there's no question that the Linux user of today has a wealth of options next to the dark ages of just a few years ago when "I use Linux" was code for "I spend all my time looking for hardware drivers".

+

What remains unusual even in the midst of what looks like a growing interest in PCs shipping with Linux is companies that sell nothing else. There are a handful that do though and have for some time. From long time Linux supporters like System 76 to newer efforts from the likes of Purism, which began life with an impressive crowdfunding campaign that raised over a $1 million to create a line of sleek, Apple-inspired, but completely free software laptops.

+

If Purism is any indicator, Linux-based hardware businesses might have an actual future in a world increasingly dissatisfied with the proprietary OSes on offer. If you're a developer looking to get a laptop with more than 16GB of RAM Apple's no longer an option. The company recently updated its Macbook Pro line, but still caps RAM at 16GB. That means you can either get a PC and live with Windows 10 or you can try installing Linux and hope it works.

+

Alternately you could invest in some hardware that's been well tested and known to work with, if not every Linux distro, at least Ubuntu (and by extension, Mint and every other Ubuntu derivative). System 76 is perhaps the best known of these alternate, Linux-loving hardware vendors and for good reason -- they offer incredibly powerful Linux machines with more customization options than most manufacturers offer for any system, no matter what OS it ships with.

+

System 76 has a decent range of laptops, from the small, lightweight, battery-sipping Lemur to some mid-range options with better performance to the top end beast-like Oryx Pro.

+

After reviewing the svelte, but not necessarily top-end specced Dell XPS 13, I got curious about System 76's Oryx Pro. On paper it sounds like a desktop machine somehow packed into a laptop form factor. If money were not an object and you wanted the most of everything you could pack into an Oryx system you'd end up with a 6th Generation Intel i7-6820HK CPU, and GTX 1070 GPU, 64GB of RAM, a ridiculous 9TB worth of hard drive and either an 15.6 or 17.3 IPS. You'd end up with a desktop machine packed into a dark, brushed aluminum alloy shell that still manages to fit in your backpack. It would set you back almost $7000, but hey, with massive power comes a massive price tag.

+

If you wanted a portable video editing workstation or a gaming machine you can take with you wherever you go you'd be hard pressed to find more impressive specs from any manufacturer, let alone one that ships with Linux-compatible hardware like System 76.

+

When I mentioned to System 76 that I wanted to test the Oryx Pro and compare it to the Dell XPS as a "developer" laptop they were a little hesitant, pointing out that the two are really -- aside from both shipping with Ubuntu installed -- pretty much nothing alike. It wasn't until the Oryx Pro arrived though that I really understood just how different they are.

+

The Hardware

+

The Oryx Pro that System 76 sent for me to test was not the fully maxed out model, but it did have a GTX 1060 GPU, 32GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. It also had the 1080p matte IPS display. As configured it would set you back $1864. Even without the max hard drive space and nowhere near the max RAM the Oryx Pro was incredibly powerful, but that's not the first thing that jumps out at you when the Oryx Pro arrives. Once you get past the very clever, minimalist packaging the most striking thing about the Oryx Pro is holy crap this thing is massive.

+

Like most computer users these days I've been programmed to think a laptop should be just slightly thicker than my phone, weigh about the same as my paper notebook and be no larger than an 8x11 sheet of paper. There is of course no reason to expect this beyond the fact that that's the expectation marketing campaigns have created. If you chuck those expectations out the window, you end up with, yes, a much larger laptop, but also a much more capable laptop.

+

While the size of the Oryx Pro is shocking at first, especially when you pull out the Dell XPS 13 and put them next to each other, it's really not that big. Nor is it that heavy considering what you get. Weighing in at 5.5lbs for the 15.6" version, the Oryx Pro is heavy, but not back-breakingly so. It does do better in a backpack than a shoulder bag, but if that's the biggest compromise I have to make to get a portable video editing workstation, I'll take it.

+

So yes, the System 76 folks were right, the Oryx Pro doesn't stack up all that well next to the Dell XPS 13 when it comes to size, weight and svelteness. If those are your criteria then the Dell XPS is what you want. If you want power though, the Oryx Pro blows the Dell out of the water, especially when you start looking at RAM capacity, which tops out at 16GB for the XPS 13.

+

At just over an inch thick the Oryx Pro makes it clear that if you want to pack in some serious hardware you're going to have to forgo skinniness. This does, however, mean that the Oryx Pro has room for quite a few things becoming increasingly rare in laptops, like an ethernet port and an SD card slot. There's also 2 Mini DisplayPorts, an HDMI port, 2 USB 3.1 Type-C ports, 3 USB 3.0 Type-A ports and headphone and mic jacks. The GTX 1070 models also include a headphone amplifier.

+

The Oryx Pro also includes a very nice keyboard, with some much thicker keys than you'll find on most laptops these days. It's no Model M , but it's about as close as I've seen a laptop get to the kind of old-school, clacky keyboards some of us still remember fondly -- minus the clacking part, which your fellow coffee shop denizens will appreciate. The keys have a nice springiness to them and the backlight supports multicolor back lighting.

+

The Oryx Pro is not, despite its size and heft, ungainly. In fact its quite svelte and the brushed aluminum top gives it a nicely understated design. The bottom of the Oryx Pro is plastic, but the build quality of the laptop is good enough that I didn't notice much flex even lifting it one handed. Another bonus to having a slightly thicker body is that you can have real speakers that actually project sound out of the top rather than some muffled, tinny speakers stuck underneath. And the Oryx Pro's speakers are impressively good, they're even angled towards you and manage to deliver a surprising amount of bass for their size.

+

While the Oryx itself is, if not the sleekest laptop out there, at least not quite like the bricks Lenovo used to churn out, there is one downright ungainly thing about the Oryx Pro -- the power brick. The power brick is ridiculously huge, about double the size of any power brick I've ever seen. It's also worth noting that it adds nearly 2lbs to the total weight of the Oryx Pro. And you're going to want that power brick with you if you plan to work for more than a couple hours because of course, with great power comes great power consumption.

+

Exactly how much battery life you get out of the Oryx Pro will obviously vary according to what you're doing with it. I happened to have a video editing job that coincided with having the Oryx Pro so I loaded up both KDenlive and Lightworks and when crunching video, as you'd expect, battery life suffers. I still managed to get about 1.5 hours out of the battery, even running a video editor, though that dropped more when actually exporting the edit to the final MP4 file.

+

The other things you may notice if you push the Oryx Pro at all is that it has a good old fashioned fan in it and it uses it. It's not particularly loud as fans go -- my EeePC's fan is far louder -- but it is noticeable. If you frequently work in very quite spaces, like a school library, you'll notice the fan, as will anyone working around you.

+

I will admit upfront that I am not a gamer, but I did test Grand Theft Auto V and a couple other more graphics-intensive games and discovered just how impressive top end Nvidia hardware actually is. Suffice to say, if you're looking for a portable gaming machine, the Oryx Pro delivers.

+

I gave the Nvidia card a workout editing 4K video as well and it was similarly impressive, especially with 32GB of RAM at its disposal.

+

The graphics card in the Oryx Pro is powering a 1920×1080 matte, optionally IPS, display that has nice rich colors, renders pretty close to true black, and isn't so HiDPI that it has problems on Linux desktops. Did I mention it's matte? A good matte display, especially a good matte IPS display, is frankly the number one selling point of the Oryx Pro for me. I could comfortably stare at this screen all day with very little eye strain.

+

That said, if I have a complaint about the Oryx Pro it's the lack of a 4K option. A screen this good at 1080p is just begging to be that much better in 4K. I am apparently not the only one to think that. Just before this review was finished System 76 let me know that a 4K screen option would soon be available.

+

Software

+

The Oryx Pro ships with Ubuntu installed by default. There's an option when ordering to select the newest LTS Ubuntu release (16.04.1 as of this review) or to go ahead and go with the latest stable release (16.10 as of this review). The model I tested came with 16.04.1, but true to my ongoing experience with 16.04, I encountered a few bugs, all of which were fixed when I upgraded to 16.10.

+

None of the bugs were show stoppers, though at least one, which caused Ubuntu's HUD interface and dock to get flickering lines though it after waking from sleep sometimes, is likely the result of the graphics card and Ubuntu 16.04's somewhat older kernel. Again, upgrading to 16.10 got rid of the problem and I strongly suggest opting for the latest stable release when ordering an Oryx Pro.

+

Unlike the Dell XPS, which, with a higher pixel density display, has some problems running certain applications -- notably GIMP -- at such high DPI, every application I tested worked just fine on the Oryx Pro.

+

If, like me, Ubuntu is not your favorite distro, fear not, chances are good that the Oryx Pro will run your favorite distro without a hitch. I tested a pre-release version of Fedora 25, Ubuntu MATE, Arch with Openbox and Debian Testing with GNOME all without encountering any hardware-related problems. Officially System 76 only supports Ubuntu, but unofficially I've found their support to be helpful no matter what distro you happen to be running.

+

User Experience

+

The Oryx Pro is a pleasure to use, the keyboard is nice, and, as mentioned above, the matte screen is wonderful. Adding a USB mouse to the package gave me a portable system -- albeit a heavy one -- fully capable of editing video at the coffee shop. I did get some looks from the generally Mac-centric crowd when I pulled out such a massive -- next to a Mac laptop anyway -- machine, but it was the power brick that elicited a "woah" comment.

+

I carried the Oryx Pro in a backpack of the old school variety when designers recognized that two straps distributes weight better than one and indeed, you'll want a backpack if you plan on toting this thing around. I would not call it heavy exactly, but suffice to say that if you carry it around all day you'll know it's there.

+

There's another thing that sometimes comes up in reviews of System 76 machines, namely that the same machine can be had for less money from another manufacturer like Clevo. It's true that System 76 purchases parts from other manufacturers, but that's really a small part of what makes the Oryx Pro a pleasant Linux experience. If saving money is your top criteria you might indeed want to check out the Clevo version that specs out roughly the same on paper. However, that will not get you a machine with the firmware, drivers and hardware components that System 76 uses to build fully Ubuntu-compatible machines (and by extension Linux more generally).

+

If you want hotkeys, touchpad, audio jacks, keyboard backlighting, suspend and all the other functions you take for granted to work out of the box with no fiddling on your part then you want to pay for the work System 76's engineers have put in.

+

In the end all hardware is a compromise, the question is, which end of the spectrum do you want to compromise on?

+

If what you value is portability and extended battery life, and you only need enough RAM to run a web browser (so, about 16GB), then the Oryx Pro might disappoint. At 7lbs (with power brick) the Oryx Pro is relatively large and heavy next to something like the Dell XPS 13, but you won't get 64GB of RAM in an XPS 13. You won't get up to 9TBs of data storage space in an XPS 13.

+

The real question is then, do you need 64GB of RAM? Do you need all the power of the Oryx Pro? If you're serious about editing video, gaming, or are compiling software on a regular basis then you'll appreciate the additional RAM and power of the Oryx Pro.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/oryxpro.txt b/ars-technica/published/oryxpro.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2adcd92 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/oryxpro.txt @@ -0,0 +1,72 @@ +Laptops preloaded with Linux aren't a rare as they used to be. In fact big name hardware companies like Dell have whole lines of laptops that ship with Ubuntu installed, and if you want to stretch things a bit you could argue that a Chromebook is a kind of Linux machine, though it takes a bit of tinkering to get actual Linux installed. Still, there's no question that the Linux user of today has a wealth of options next to the dark ages of just a few years ago when "I use Linux" was code for "I spend all my time looking for hardware drivers". + +What remains unusual even in the midst of what looks like a growing interest in PCs shipping with Linux is companies that sell nothing else. There are a handful that do though and have for some time. From long time Linux supporters like System 76 to newer efforts from the likes of Purism, which began life with an impressive crowdfunding campaign that raised over a $1 million to create a line of sleek, Apple-inspired, but completely free software laptops. + +If Purism is any indicator, Linux-based hardware businesses might have an actual future in a world increasingly dissatisfied with the proprietary OSes on offer. If you're a developer looking to get a laptop with more than 16GB of RAM Apple's no longer an option. The company recently updated its Macbook Pro line, but still caps RAM at 16GB. That means you can either get a PC and live with Windows 10 or you can try installing Linux and hope it works. + +Alternately you could invest in some hardware that's been well tested and known to work with, if not every Linux distro, at least Ubuntu (and by extension, Mint and every other Ubuntu derivative). System 76 is perhaps the best known of these alternate, Linux-loving hardware vendors and for good reason -- they offer incredibly powerful Linux machines with more customization options than most manufacturers offer for any system, no matter what OS it ships with. + +System 76 has a decent range of laptops, from the small, lightweight, battery-sipping Lemur to some mid-range options with better performance to the top end beast-like Oryx Pro. + +After reviewing the svelte, but not necessarily top-end specced Dell XPS 13, I got curious about System 76's Oryx Pro. On paper it sounds like a desktop machine somehow packed into a laptop form factor. If money were not an object and you wanted the most of everything you could pack into an Oryx system you'd end up with a 6th Generation Intel i7-6820HK CPU, and GTX 1070 GPU, 64GB of RAM, a ridiculous 9TB worth of hard drive and either an 15.6 or 17.3 IPS. You'd end up with a desktop machine packed into a dark, brushed aluminum alloy shell that still manages to fit in your backpack. It would set you back almost $7000, but hey, with massive power comes a massive price tag. + +If you wanted a portable video editing workstation or a gaming machine you can take with you wherever you go you'd be hard pressed to find more impressive specs from any manufacturer, let alone one that ships with Linux-compatible hardware like System 76. + +When I mentioned to System 76 that I wanted to test the Oryx Pro and compare it to the Dell XPS as a "developer" laptop they were a little hesitant, pointing out that the two are really -- aside from both shipping with Ubuntu installed -- pretty much nothing alike. It wasn't until the Oryx Pro arrived though that I really understood just how different they are. + +## The Hardware + + +The Oryx Pro that System 76 sent for me to test was not the fully maxed out model, but it did have a GTX 1060 GPU, 32GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. It also had the 1080p matte IPS display. As configured it would set you back $1864. Even without the max hard drive space and nowhere near the max RAM the Oryx Pro was incredibly powerful, but that's not the first thing that jumps out at you when the Oryx Pro arrives. Once you get past the very clever, minimalist packaging the most striking thing about the Oryx Pro is holy crap this thing is massive. + +Like most computer users these days I've been programmed to think a laptop should be just slightly thicker than my phone, weigh about the same as my paper notebook and be no larger than an 8x11 sheet of paper. There is of course no reason to expect this beyond the fact that that's the expectation marketing campaigns have created. If you chuck those expectations out the window, you end up with, yes, a much larger laptop, but also a much more capable laptop. + +While the size of the Oryx Pro is shocking at first, especially when you pull out the Dell XPS 13 and put them next to each other, it's really not that big. Nor is it that heavy considering what you get. Weighing in at 5.5lbs for the 15.6" version, the Oryx Pro is heavy, but not back-breakingly so. It does do better in a backpack than a shoulder bag, but if that's the biggest compromise I have to make to get a portable video editing workstation, I'll take it. + +So yes, the System 76 folks were right, the Oryx Pro doesn't stack up all that well next to the Dell XPS 13 when it comes to size, weight and svelteness. If those are your criteria then the Dell XPS is what you want. If you want power though, the Oryx Pro blows the Dell out of the water, especially when you start looking at RAM capacity, which tops out at 16GB for the XPS 13. + +At just over an inch thick the Oryx Pro makes it clear that if you want to pack in some serious hardware you're going to have to forgo skinniness. This does, however, mean that the Oryx Pro has room for quite a few things becoming increasingly rare in laptops, like an ethernet port and an SD card slot. There's also 2 Mini DisplayPorts, an HDMI port, 2 USB 3.1 Type-C ports, 3 USB 3.0 Type-A ports and headphone and mic jacks. The GTX 1070 models also include a headphone amplifier. + +The Oryx Pro also includes a very nice keyboard, with some much thicker keys than you'll find on most laptops these days. It's no Model M , but it's about as close as I've seen a laptop get to the kind of old-school, clacky keyboards some of us still remember fondly -- minus the clacking part, which your fellow coffee shop denizens will appreciate. The keys have a nice springiness to them and the backlight supports multicolor back lighting. + +The Oryx Pro is not, despite its size and heft, ungainly. In fact its quite svelte and the brushed aluminum top gives it a nicely understated design. The bottom of the Oryx Pro is plastic, but the build quality of the laptop is good enough that I didn't notice much flex even lifting it one handed. Another bonus to having a slightly thicker body is that you can have real speakers that actually project sound out of the top rather than some muffled, tinny speakers stuck underneath. And the Oryx Pro's speakers are impressively good, they're even angled towards you and manage to deliver a surprising amount of bass for their size. + +While the Oryx itself is, if not the sleekest laptop out there, at least not quite like the bricks Lenovo used to churn out, there is one downright ungainly thing about the Oryx Pro -- the power brick. The power brick is ridiculously huge, about double the size of any power brick I've ever seen. It's also worth noting that it adds nearly 2lbs to the total weight of the Oryx Pro. And you're going to want that power brick with you if you plan to work for more than a couple hours because of course, with great power comes great power consumption. + +Exactly how much battery life you get out of the Oryx Pro will obviously vary according to what you're doing with it. I happened to have a video editing job that coincided with having the Oryx Pro so I loaded up both KDenlive and Lightworks and when crunching video, as you'd expect, battery life suffers. I still managed to get about 1.5 hours out of the battery, even running a video editor, though that dropped more when actually exporting the edit to the final MP4 file. + +The other things you may notice if you push the Oryx Pro at all is that it has a good old fashioned fan in it and it uses it. It's not particularly loud as fans go -- my EeePC's fan is far louder -- but it is noticeable. If you frequently work in very quite spaces, like a school library, you'll notice the fan, as will anyone working around you. + +I will admit upfront that I am not a gamer, but I did test Grand Theft Auto V and a couple other more graphics-intensive games and discovered just how impressive top end Nvidia hardware actually is. Suffice to say, if you're looking for a portable gaming machine, the Oryx Pro delivers. + +I gave the Nvidia card a workout editing 4K video as well and it was similarly impressive, especially with 32GB of RAM at its disposal. + +The graphics card in the Oryx Pro is powering a 1920×1080 matte, optionally IPS, display that has nice rich colors, renders pretty close to true black, and isn't so HiDPI that it has problems on Linux desktops. Did I mention it's matte? A good matte display, especially a good matte IPS display, is frankly the number one selling point of the Oryx Pro for me. I could comfortably stare at this screen all day with very little eye strain. + +That said, if I have a complaint about the Oryx Pro it's the lack of a 4K option. A screen this good at 1080p is just begging to be that much better in 4K. I am apparently not the only one to think that. Just before this review was finished System 76 let me know that a 4K screen option would soon be available. + +## Software + +The Oryx Pro ships with Ubuntu installed by default. There's an option when ordering to select the newest LTS Ubuntu release (16.04.1 as of this review) or to go ahead and go with the latest stable release (16.10 as of this review). The model I tested came with 16.04.1, but true to my ongoing experience with 16.04, I encountered a few bugs, all of which were fixed when I upgraded to 16.10. + +None of the bugs were show stoppers, though at least one, which caused Ubuntu's HUD interface and dock to get flickering lines though it after waking from sleep sometimes, is likely the result of the graphics card and Ubuntu 16.04's somewhat older kernel. Again, upgrading to 16.10 got rid of the problem and I strongly suggest opting for the latest stable release when ordering an Oryx Pro. + +Unlike the Dell XPS, which, with a higher pixel density display, has some problems running certain applications -- notably GIMP -- at such high DPI, every application I tested worked just fine on the Oryx Pro. + +If, like me, Ubuntu is not your favorite distro, fear not, chances are good that the Oryx Pro will run your favorite distro without a hitch. I tested a pre-release version of Fedora 25, Ubuntu MATE, Arch with Openbox and Debian Testing with GNOME all without encountering any hardware-related problems. Officially System 76 only supports Ubuntu, but unofficially I've found their support to be helpful no matter what distro you happen to be running. + +## User Experience + +The Oryx Pro is a pleasure to use, the keyboard is nice, and, as mentioned above, the matte screen is wonderful. Adding a USB mouse to the package gave me a portable system -- albeit a heavy one -- fully capable of editing video at the coffee shop. I did get some looks from the generally Mac-centric crowd when I pulled out such a massive -- next to a Mac laptop anyway -- machine, but it was the power brick that elicited a "woah" comment. + +I carried the Oryx Pro in a backpack of the old school variety when designers recognized that two straps distributes weight better than one and indeed, you'll want a backpack if you plan on toting this thing around. I would not call it heavy exactly, but suffice to say that if you carry it around all day you'll know it's there. + +There's another thing that sometimes comes up in reviews of System 76 machines, namely that the same machine can be had for less money from another manufacturer like Clevo. It's true that System 76 purchases parts from other manufacturers, but that's really a small part of what makes the Oryx Pro a pleasant Linux experience. If saving money is your top criteria you might indeed want to check out the Clevo version that specs out roughly the same on paper. However, that will not get you a machine with the firmware, drivers and hardware components that System 76 uses to build fully Ubuntu-compatible machines (and by extension Linux more generally). + +If you want hotkeys, touchpad, audio jacks, keyboard backlighting, suspend and all the other functions you take for granted to work out of the box with no fiddling on your part then you want to pay for the work System 76's engineers have put in. + +In the end all hardware is a compromise, the question is, which end of the spectrum do you want to compromise on? + +If what you value is portability and extended battery life, and you only need enough RAM to run a web browser (so, about 16GB), then the Oryx Pro might disappoint. At 7lbs (with power brick) the Oryx Pro is relatively large and heavy next to something like the Dell XPS 13, but you won't get 64GB of RAM in an XPS 13. You won't get up to 9TBs of data storage space in an XPS 13. + +The real question is then, do you need 64GB of RAM? Do you need all the power of the Oryx Pro? If you're serious about editing video, gaming, or are compiling software on a regular basis then you'll appreciate the additional RAM and power of the Oryx Pro. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/pic-notes.txt b/ars-technica/published/pic-notes.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3b6a22a --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/pic-notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1,75 @@ + + + + +[8/4/14, 1:29:59 PM] Mathew Marquis: https://responsiveimagescg.github.io/eq-usecases +[8/4/14, 1:33:41 PM] Mathew Marquis: http://discourse.specifiction.org/ +[8/4/14, 1:36:24 PM] Mathew Marquis: https://twitter.com/zcorpan +[8/4/14, 1:37:01 PM] Mathew Marquis: https://twitter.com/marcosc + +https://github.com/ResponsiveImagesCG/newsletters + +So the genisus of this article was another article I did on the 25th anniversary of the web and how much web development has changed over the eyars. We moved from sort of the web developer as someone who knew how to make IE behave to a world where developers are proposing, developing and even crowdfunding a new html element into existence. + +I think if we went back even just ten years and told that story about the future of web development, no one would believe you. + +So I wanted to tell the story of picture and the people who made it happen. So maybe we could start with how you came to be involved in the development of the picture element. + +Boston globe site + +Bruce Lawson. 2007 independently eloved name + +Who set up the community group? + +simon peters at opera proposed that, instead of a new element to handle images, picture wrap around img community effort from irc. + +timeline: + +* first picture element proposal without srcset +* very rough proposal on the mailing list +* Shot down on the mailing list when... +* community group starts +* that got shot down with the suggestion that developers create a community group, which they do. +* Apple introduces srcset for img (Mozilla rejects that idea, Chrome says sure, but doesn't do anything) +* tab atkins hybrid src-n proposal is independent of everything source ordering of attributes "grotesque" commment. + +* major re-write for picture (Webkit has killed src-n, Firefox killed srcset) + * 3rd version makes it easier to implement + * adds the variant of src-n choosing syntax. + * becomes a wrapper for img + +* Weiss raises money to implement pic element in Chrome + +* Dust settles a bit and the picture proposal becomes an official draft at W3C + +biggest community group 350 + +we're kind of pirate radio HTML WG. + +Client hints, can't get viewport information or respond to any changes client side. + +Yoav Wiess is one of 30 only non-chrome committer. + +tab atkins, Simon peters opera. came up with picture element as a controller. imarcos caceros + +Ian's comments: + +> Some likely elements to success: +> +> - Strong sentiment in the community of the value of such feature, and effective +> communication by the proponents about the value. +> - Effective community building by Mat and others. This would include +> bringing people into the Responsive Images CG, as well as engaging +> with the HTML Working Group and getting interest from a lot of organizations. +> - Tenacity, including engaging with browser vendors and working for a consensus +> solution. +> +> The topic sort of went viral. I don't know the formula for that, but my guess is that the above elements were necessary. + + +But it has indeed been solved and it happened because a small group of people, none of whom had ever written a web standard before, made it happen. + +They went from frustrated developers trying to solve a problem, to standards authors to browser makers. Along the way they created what's now know as the picture element, convinced the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to add it to the HTML5 specification and then helped raise the money to get it implemented in Google Chrome. + +By the end of the year Picture will work in both Chrome and Firefox. + diff --git a/ars-technica/published/picture.html b/ars-technica/published/picture.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fe9bc30 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/picture.html @@ -0,0 +1,95 @@ +

The web is going to get faster in the very near future. Sadly, this is rare enough to be news.

+

The speed bump won't be because our devices are getting faster, though they are. Nor will it be because some giant company created something great, though they probably have.

+

The web will be getting faster very soon because a small group of web developers saw a problem and decided to solve it for all of us.

+

The problem is images.

+

As of August 2014 the size of the average page in the top 1,000 sites on the web is 1.7MB. Images account for almost 1MB of that 1.7MB.

+

If you've got a nice fast fiber connection that image payload isn't such a big deal. But, if you're on a mobile network, that huge image payload is not just slowing you down, it's using up your limited bandwidth and, depending on your mobile data plan, might well be costing you money.

+

What makes that image payload doubly annoying when you're using a mobile device is that you're getting images intended for giant monitors and they're being loaded on a screen little bigger than your palm. It's a waste of bandwidth delivering pixels you don't need.

+

Web developers recognized this problem very early on in the growth of what was called the "mobile" web back then.

+

More recently a few of them banded together to do something that web developers have never done before -- create a new HTML element.

+

In the Beginning Was the "Mobile Web"

+

Browsing the web on your phone hasn't always been what it is today. Even browsing the web on the first iPhone, one of the first phones with a real web browser, was still pretty terrible.

+

Browsing the web on a small screen back then required constant tapping to zoom in on content that had been optimized for much larger screens. Images took forever to load over the iPhone's slow EDGE network connection and then there was all that Flash content, which didn't load at all. And that was the iPhone. Browsing the web using Blackberry and other OSes crippled mobile browsers was even worse.

+

It wasn't necessarily the devices' fault, though mobile browsers did, and in many cases still do, lag well behind their desktop brethren. Most of the problem though was the fault of web developers. The web is inherently flexible, but web developers had made it fixed by optimizing sites for large desktop monitors.

+

To fix this a lot of sites started building a second site. It sounds crazy now, but just a few years ago the going solution for handling new devices like the Blackberry, the then-new iPhone and some of the first Android phones was to use server-side device detection scripts and redirect users to a dedicated site for mobile devices, typically a URL like m.domain.com.

+

These dedicated mobile URLs -- often referred to as M-dot sites -- typically lacked many features found on their "real" desktop counterparts and often didn't even redirect properly, leaving you on the homepage when you wanted a specific article.

+

M-dot websites are a fine example of developers encountering a problem and figuring out a way to make it even worse.

+

Luckily for us, most web developers did not jump on the m-dot bandwagon because something much better came along.

+

Responsive Design Killed the M-Dot Star

+

In 2010 web developer Ethan Marcotte wrote a little article about something he called Responsive Web Design.

+

Marcotte suggested that with the proliferation of mobile devices and the pain of building these dedicated m-dot sites, it might make more sense to embrace the inherently fluid nature of the web and build websites that were flexible. Sites that used relative widths to fit any screen and worked well no matter what device was accessing it.

+ +[image="pic-marcotte-example.png" caption="Ethan Marcotte's original responsive demo site at roughly phone, tablet and desktop screen sizes"] + +

Marcotte's vision gave web developers a way to build sites that flex and rearrange their content based on the size and characteristics of the device in your hand.

+

Responsive web design isn't perhaps a panacea, but it's pretty close.

+

Responsive design started with a few more prominent developers making their personal sites responsive, but it quickly took off when Marcotte and the developers at the Filament Group redesigned the Boston Globe website to make it responsive. The Globe redesign showed that responsive design worked for more than developer portfolios and blogs. The Globe redesign showed that responsive design was the way of the future.

+

While the Globe redesign was successful from a user standpoint, Marcotte and the Filament Group did run into some problems behind the scenes, particularly with images.

+

Marcotte's original article dealt with images by scaling them down using CSS. That made them fit smaller screens and preserve the layout of content, but it also means mobile devices were loading huge images that would never be displayed at full resolution.

+

For the most part this is still what happens on nearly every site you visit on a small screen. Web developers know, as the developers building the Globe site knew, that this is a problem, but solving it is not as easy as it seems at first glance.

+

In fact solving this problem would require adding a brand new element to HTML.

+

Introducing the Picture Element

+

The Picture element story begins with the developers working on the Boston Globe, including Mat Marquis, who would eventually co-author the HTML specification.

+

In the beginning though, no one working on the Globe site was thinking about creating new HTML elements. Marquis and the other developers just wanted to build a site that loaded faster on mobile devices.

+

As Marquis explains, they thought they had a solution. "We started with an image for mobile and then selectively enhanced it up from there. It was a hack using cookies and JavaScript. It worked up until about a week before the site launched."

+

Around this time both Firefox and Chrome were updating their prefetching capabilities and the new image prefetching tools broke the method used on the Globe prototypes.

+

Browser prefetching was more than just a problem for the solution originally planed for the Globe site. It's actually the crux of what's so difficult about responsive images.

+

When a server sends a page to your browser the browser first downloads all the HTML on the page and then parses it. Or at least that's what used to happen. Modern web browsers attempt to speed up page load times by downloading images before parsing the page's body. The browser starts downloading the image long before it knows where that image will be in the page layout or how big it will need to be.

+

This is simultaneously a very good thing -- it means images load faster -- and a very tricky thing -- it means using JavaScript to manipulate images can actually slow down your page even when your JavaScript is trying to load smaller images (because you end up fighting the prefetcher and downloading two images).

+

Marquis and the rest of the developers working on the site had to scrap their original plan and go back to the drawing board. "We started trying to hash out some solution that we could use going forward... but nothing really materialized." However, they started writing about the problem and other developers joined the conversation. The quickly learned they were not alone in struggling with responsive images.

+

"By this time," Marquis says, "we have 10 or 15 developers and nobody has come up with anything."

+

The Globe site ended up launched with no solution -- mobile devices were stuck downloading huge images.

+ +[image="pic-globe-responsive.png" caption="The Boston Globe website at phone, tablet and desktop sizes"] + +

Soon other prominent developers outside the Globe project started to weigh in with possible solutions, including Google's Paul Irish and Opera's Bruce Lawson. Still, no one was able to craft a solution that covered all the possible use cases developers had identified.

+

"We soon realized," says Marquis, "that, even if we were able to solve this with a clever bit of JavaScript we would be working around browser-level optimizations rather than working with them." In other words, using JavaScript meant fighting the browser's built-in image prefetching.

+

Talk then moved to lower-level solutions, including a new HTML element that might somehow get around the image prefetching problems in a way that JavaScript never would. It was Bruce Lawson of Opera who first suggested that a new <picture> element might be in order. Though they did not know it at the time, a picture element had been proposed once before, but it never went anywhere.

+

Welcome to Standards Jungle

+

It is one thing to decide a new HTML element is needed. It's quite another thing to actually navigate the stratified, labyrinthine world of web standards. Especially if no one on your team has ever done such a thing.

+

Perhaps the best thing about being naive though is that you tend to plow forward without the hesitation that attends someone who knows how difficult the road ahead it will be.

+

And so the developers working on the picture element took their ideas to the WHATWG, one of two groups that oversee the development of HTML. The WHATWG is made up primarily of browser vendors, which makes it a good place to gauge how likely it is that browsers will actually ship your ideas.

+

To paraphrase Tolstoy, every standards body is unhappy in its own way, but, as Marquis was about to learn, the WHATWG is perhaps most unhappy when people outside it make suggestions about what it ought to do. Suffice to say that Marquis and the rest of the developers involved did not get the WHATWG interested in a new HTML element.

+

Right around this time the W3C, which is where the second group that oversees HTML, the HTML WG, is based, launched a new idea -- community groups. Community groups are the W3C's attempt to get outsiders involved in the standards process, a place to propose problems and work on solutions.

+

After being shot down by the WHATWG, someone suggested that the developers start a community group and the Responsive Images Community Group (RICG) was born.

+ +[image="pic-ricg-site.png" caption="The Responsive Images Community Group website."] + +

The only problem with community groups is that no one in the actual working groups pays any attention to community groups. Or at least they didn't in 2011.

+

Blissfully unaware of this, Marquis and hundreds of other developers hashed out a responsive image solution in the community group.

+

Much of that effort was thanks to Marcos Caceres, now at Mozilla, who, unlike the rest of the group members, had some experience with writing web standards. That experience allowed Caceres to span the divide between two worlds -- web development and standards development. Caceres organized the RICG's efforts and helped the group produce the kind of use cases and tests that standards bodies are looking for. As Marquis puts it, "Marcos saw us flailing around in IRC and helped get everything organized."

+

"I tried to herd all the cats," Caceres jokes. And herd he did. He set up the Github repos to get everything in one place, set up a space for the responsive images site and helped bring everything together into the first use cases document. "This played a really critical role for me and for the community," says Caceres, "because it forced us to articulate what the actual problem was... and to set priorities."

+

After months of effort, the RICG brought their ideas to the WHATWG IRC. This also did not go well. As Caceres puts it, "standards bodies like to say 'oh we want a lot of input for developers', but then when developers come it ends in tears. Or it used to."

+

If you read the WHATWG IRC logs from that time you'll see that the WHATWG members fall into a classic "not invented here" trap. Not only did they reject the input from developers, they turned around and, without considering the RICG's work at all, proposed their own solution, something called set, an attribute that solved only one of the many use cases Marquis and company had already identified.

+

Developers were, understandably, miffed.

+

With developers pushing Picture and browser makers and standards bodies favoring the far more limited and very confusing (albeit still useful) set proposal, it looked like nothing would ever actually come of the RICG's work.

+

As Paul Irish put it in the WHATWG IRC channel, "[Marquis] corralled and led a group of the best mobile web developers, created a CG, isolated a solution (from many), fought for and won consensus within the group, wrote a draft spec and proposed it. Basically he's done the thing standards folks really want "authors" to do. Which is why this this feels so defeating."

+

Irish was not alone. The developer outcry surrounding the WHATWG's counter proposal was quite vocal, vocal enough that some entirely new proposals surfaced, but browser makers failed to agree on anything. Mozilla killed the WHATWG's idea of set on img. And Chrome refused to implement Picture as it was defined at the time.

+

If this all sounds like a bad soap opera, well, it was. This process is, believe it or not, how the web you're using right now gets made.

+

Invented Here.

+

To the credit of the WHATWG, the group did eventually overcome their not-invented-here syndrome. Or at least partially overcame it.

+

Compromises started to happen. The RICG rolled support for many of the ideas inset into their proposal. That wasn't enough to convince the WHATWG, but it got some members working together with the Marquis and the RICG. The WHATWG still didn't like Picture, but they didn't outright reject it anymore either.

+

To an outsider the revision process looks a bit like a game of Ping Pong, except that every time someone hits the ball it changes shape.

+

The big breakthrough for Picture came from Opera's Simon Pieters and Apple's Tab Atkins. They made a simple, but powerful, suggestion -- make picture a wrapper for img. That way there would not be two separate elements for images on the web (which was rightly considered confusing), but there would still be a new way to control which image the browser displays.

+

This is exactly the approach used in the final version of the Picture spec.

+

When the browser encounters a Picture element, it first evaluates any rules that the web developer might specify. Opera's developer site has a good article on all the possibilities Picture offers. Then, after evaluating the various rules, the browser picks the best image based on its own criteria. This is another nice feature since the browser's criteria can include your settings. For example, future browsers might offer an option to stop high-res images from loading over 3G, regardless of what any Picture element on the page might say. Once the browser knows which image is the best choice it actually loads and displays that image in a good old img element.

+

This solves two big problems -- the browser prefetching problem -- prefetching still works and there's no performance penalty -- and the problem of what to do when the browser doesn't understand picture -- it falls back to whatever is in the img tag.

+

So, in the final proposal, what happens is Picture wraps an img tag and if the browser is too old to know what to make of a <picture> element then it loads the fallback img tag. All the accessibility benefits remain since the alt attribute is still on the img element.

+

Everyone is happy and the web wins.

+

Nice Theory, but Show Me the Browser

+

The web only wins if browsers actually support a proposed standard. And at this time last year no browser on the web actually supported Picture.

+

While Firefox and Chrome had both committed to supporting it, it might be years before it became a priority for either, making Picture little more than a nice theory.

+

Enter Yoav Weiss, a rare developer who spans the worlds of web development and C++ development. Weiss was a independent contractor who wanted Picture to become a part of the web. Weiss knew C++, the language most browsers are written in, but had never worked on a web browser before.

+

Still, like Caceres, Weiss was able to bridge a gap, in this case the world of web developers and C++ developers, putting him in a unique position to be able to know what Picture needed to do and how to make it happen. So, after talking it over with other Chromium developers, Weiss started hacking on Blink, the rendering engine that powers Google's Chrome browser.

+

Implementing Picture was no small task. "Getting Picture into Blink required some infrastructure that wasn't there," says Weiss. "I had two options: either wait for the infrastructure to happen naturally over the course of the next two years, or make it happen myself."

+

Weiss, who, incidentally, has three young children and, presumably, not much in the way of free time, quickly realized that working night and weekends wasn't going to cut it. Weiss need to turn his work on Picture into a contract job. So he, Marquis and others involved in the community group, set up a crowd funding campaign on Indiegogo.

+

On the face of it it sounds like a doomed proposition -- why would developers fund a feature that will ultimately end up in a web browser they otherwise have no control over?

+

Then something amazing happened. The campaign didn't just meet its goal, it went way over it. Web developers wanted Picture bad enough to spend their money on the cause.

+

It could have been the t-shirts. It could have been the novelty of it. Or it could have been that web developers saw how important a solution to the image problem was in a way that the browser makers and standards bodies didn't. Most likely it was some combination of all these and more.

+

In the end enough money was raised to not only implement Picture in Blink, but to also port Weiss' work back to WebKit so WebKit browsers (including Apple's iOS version of Safari) can use it as well. At the same time Marcos Caceres started work at Mozilla and has helped drive Firefox's support for Picture.

+

As of today the Picture element will be available in Chrome and Firefox by the end of the year. It's available now in Chrome's dev channel and Firefox 34+ (in Firefox you'll need enable it in about:config). Here's a test page showing the new Picture element in action.

+

Apple appears to be adding support to Safari though the backport to WebKit wasn't finished in time for the upcoming Safari 8. Microsoft has likewise been supportive and is considering Picture for the next release of IE.

+

The Future of the Web

+

The story of the Picture element isn't just an interesting tale of web developers working together to make the web a better place. It's also a glimpse at the future of the web. The separation between between those who build the web and those who create web standards is disappearing. The W3C's community groups are growing and sites like Move the Web Forward aim to help bridge the gap between developer ideas and standards bodies.

+

There's even a site devoted to what it calls "specifiction" -- giving web developers a place to suggest tools they need, discuss possible solutions and then find the relevant W3C working group to make it happen.

+

Picture may be almost finished, but the RICG isn't going away. In fact it's renaming itself and taking on a new project -- Element Queries. Coming soon to a browser near you.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/picture.txt b/ars-technica/published/picture.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0e5f634 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/picture.txt @@ -0,0 +1,185 @@ +The web is going to get faster in the very near future. Sadly, this is rare enough to be news. + +The speed bump won't be because our devices are getting faster, though they are. Nor will it be because some giant company created something great, though they probably have. + +The web will be getting faster very soon because a small group of web developers saw a problem and decided to solve it for all of us. + +The problem is images. + +As of August 2014 the [size of the average page in the top 1,000 sites on the web][1] is 1.7MB. Images account for almost 1MB of that 1.7MB. + +If you've got a nice fast fiber connection that image payload isn't such a big deal. But, if you're on a mobile network, that huge image payload is not just slowing you down, it's using up your limited bandwidth and, depending on your mobile data plan, might well be costing you money. + +What makes that image payload doubly annoying when you're using a mobile device is that you're getting images intended for giant monitors and they're being loaded on a screen little bigger than your palm. It's a waste of bandwidth delivering pixels you don't need. + +Web developers recognized this problem very early on in the growth of what was called the "mobile" web back then. + +More recently a few of them banded together to do something that web developers have never done before -- create a new HTML element. + +## In the Beginning Was the "Mobile Web" + +Browsing the web on your phone hasn't always been what it is today. Even browsing the web on the first iPhone, one of the first phones with a real web browser, was still pretty terrible. + +Browsing the web on a small screen back then required constant tapping to zoom in on content that had been optimized for much larger screens. Images took forever to load over the iPhone's slow EDGE network connection and then there was all that Flash content, which didn't load at all. And that was the iPhone. Browsing the web using Blackberry and other OSes crippled mobile browsers was even worse. + +It wasn't necessarily the devices' fault, though mobile browsers did, and in many cases still do, lag well behind their desktop brethren. Most of the problem though was the fault of web developers. The web is inherently flexible, but web developers had made it fixed by optimizing sites for large desktop monitors. + +To fix this a lot of sites started building a second site. It sounds crazy now, but just a few years ago the going solution for handling new devices like the Blackberry, the then-new iPhone and some of the first Android phones was to use server-side device detection scripts and redirect users to a dedicated site for mobile devices, typically a URL like m.domain.com. + +These dedicated mobile URLs -- often referred to as M-dot sites -- typically lacked many features found on their "real" desktop counterparts and often didn't even redirect properly, leaving you on the homepage when you wanted a specific article. + +M-dot websites are a fine example of developers encountering a problem and figuring out a way to make it even worse. + +Luckily for us, most web developers did not jump on the m-dot bandwagon because something much better came along. + +## Responsive Design Killed the M-Dot Star + +In 2010 web developer Ethan Marcotte wrote a little article about something he called [Responsive Web Design][2]. + +Marcotte suggested that with the proliferation of mobile devices and the pain of building these dedicated m-dot sites, it might make more sense to embrace the inherently fluid nature of the web and build websites that were flexible. Sites that used relative widths to fit any screen and worked well no matter what device was accessing it. + +Marcotte's vision gave web developers a way to build sites that flex and rearrange their content based on the size and characteristics of the device in your hand. + +Responsive web design isn't perhaps a panacea, but it's pretty close. + +Responsive design started with a few more prominent developers making their personal sites responsive, but it quickly took off when Marcotte and the developers at the Filament Group redesigned the [Boston Globe][3] website to make it responsive. The Globe redesign showed that responsive design worked for more than developer portfolios and blogs. The Globe redesign showed that responsive design was the way of the future. + +While the Globe redesign was successful from a user standpoint, Marcotte and the Filament Group did run into some problems behind the scenes, particularly with images. + +Marcotte's original article dealt with images by scaling them down using CSS. That made them fit smaller screens and preserve the layout of content, but it also means mobile devices were loading huge images that would never be displayed at full resolution. + +For the most part this is still what happens on nearly every site you visit on a small screen. Web developers know, as the developers building the Globe site knew, that this is a problem, but solving it is not as easy as it seems at first glance. + +In fact solving this problem would require adding a brand new element to HTML. + +## Introducing the Picture Element + +The Picture element story begins with the developers working on the Boston Globe, including Mat Marquis, who would eventually co-author the HTML specification. + +In the beginning though, no one working on the Globe site was thinking about creating new HTML elements. Marquis and the other developers just wanted to build a site that loaded faster on mobile devices. + +As Marquis explains, they thought they had a solution. "We started with an image for mobile and then selectively enhanced it up from there. It was a hack using cookies and JavaScript. It worked up until about a week before the site launched." + +Around this time both Firefox and Chrome were updating their prefetching capabilities and the new image prefetching tools broke the method used on the Globe prototypes. + +Browser prefetching was more than just a problem for the solution originally planed for the Globe site. It's actually the crux of what's so difficult about responsive images. + +When a server sends a page to your browser the browser first downloads all the HTML on the page and then parses it. Or at least that's what used to happen. Modern web browsers attempt to speed up page load times by downloading images *before* parsing the page's body. The browser starts downloading the image long before it knows where that image will be in the page layout or how big it will need to be. + +This is simultaneously a very good thing -- it means images load faster -- and a very tricky thing -- it means using JavaScript to manipulate images can actually slow down your page even when your JavaScript is trying to load smaller images (because you end up fighting the prefetcher and downloading two images). + +Marquis and the rest of the developers working on the site had to scrap their original plan and go back to the drawing board. "We started trying to hash out some solution that we could use going forward... but nothing really materialized." However, they started [writing about the problem][4] and other developers joined the conversation. The quickly learned they were not alone in struggling with responsive images. + +"By this time," Marquis says, "we have 10 or 15 developers and nobody has come up with anything." + +The Globe site ended up launched with no solution -- mobile devices were stuck downloading huge images. + +Soon other prominent developers outside the Globe project started to weigh in with possible solutions, including Google's Paul Irish and Opera's Bruce Lawson. Still, no one was able to craft a solution that covered [all the possible use cases][5] developers had identified. + +"We soon realized," says Marquis, "that, even if we were able to solve this with a clever bit of JavaScript we would be working around browser-level optimizations rather than working with them." In other words, using JavaScript meant fighting the browser's built-in image prefetching. + +Talk then moved to lower-level solutions, including a new HTML element that might somehow get around the image prefetching problems in a way that JavaScript never would. It was Bruce Lawson of Opera who first suggested that a new `` element might be in order. Though they did not know it at the time, a picture element had been proposed once before, but it never went anywhere. + +## Welcome to Standards Jungle + +It is one thing to decide a new HTML element is needed. It's quite another thing to actually navigate the stratified, labyrinthine world of web standards. Especially if no one on your team has ever done such a thing. + +Perhaps the best thing about being naive though is that you tend to plow forward without the hesitation that attends someone who *knows* how difficult the road ahead it will be. + +And so the developers working on the picture element took their ideas to the WHATWG, one of two groups that oversee the development of HTML. The WHATWG is made up primarily of browser vendors, which makes it a good place to gauge how likely it is that browsers will actually ship your ideas. + +To paraphrase Tolstoy, every standards body is unhappy in its own way, but, as Marquis was about to learn, the WHATWG is perhaps most unhappy when people outside it make suggestions about what it ought to do. Suffice to say that Marquis and the rest of the developers involved did not get the WHATWG interested in a new HTML element. + +Right around this time the W3C, which is where the second group that oversees HTML, the HTML WG, is based, launched a new idea -- community groups. Community groups are the W3C's attempt to get outsiders involved in the standards process, a place to propose problems and work on solutions. + +After being shot down by the WHATWG, someone suggested that the developers start a community group and the [Responsive Images Community Group][6] (RICG) was born. + +The only problem with community groups is that no one in the actual working groups pays any attention to community groups. Or at least they didn't in 2011. + +Blissfully unaware of this, Marquis and hundreds of other developers hashed out a responsive image solution in the community group. + +Much of that effort was thanks to Marcos Caceres, now at Mozilla, who, unlike the rest of the group members, had some experience with writing web standards. That experience allowed Caceres to span the divide between two worlds -- web development and standards development. Caceres organized the RICG's efforts and helped the group produce the kind of use cases and tests that standards bodies are looking for. As Marquis puts it, "Marcos saw us flailing around in IRC and helped get everything organized." + +"I tried to herd all the cats," Caceres jokes. And herd he did. He set up the Github repos to get everything in one place, set up a space for the responsive images site and helped bring everything together into the first use cases document. "This played a really critical role for me and for the community," says Caceres, "because it forced us to articulate what the actual problem was... and to set priorities." + +After months of effort, the RICG brought their ideas to the WHATWG IRC. This also did not go well. As Caceres puts it, "standards bodies like to say 'oh we want a lot of input for developers', but then when developers come it ends in tears. Or it used to." + +If you read the WHATWG IRC logs from that time you'll see that the WHATWG members fall into a classic "not invented here" trap. Not only did they reject the input from developers, they turned around and, without considering the RICG's work at all, [proposed their own solution][7], something called `set`, an attribute that solved only one of the many use cases Marquis and company had already identified. + +Developers were, understandably, miffed. + +With developers pushing Picture and browser makers and standards bodies favoring the far more limited and very confusing (albeit still useful) `set` proposal, it looked like nothing would ever actually come of the RICG's work. + +As Paul Irish put it in the [WHATWG IRC channel][8], "[Marquis] corralled and led a group of the best mobile web developers, created a CG, isolated a solution (from many), fought for and won consensus within the group, wrote a draft spec and proposed it. Basically he's done the thing standards folks really want "authors" to do. Which is why this this feels so defeating." + +Irish was not alone. The developer outcry surrounding the WHATWG's counter proposal was quite vocal, vocal enough that some entirely new proposals surfaced, but browser makers failed to agree on anything. Mozilla killed the WHATWG's idea of `set` on `img`. And Chrome refused to implement Picture as it was defined at the time. + +If this all sounds like a bad soap opera, well, it was. This process is, believe it or not, how the web you're using right now gets made. + +## Invented Here. + +To the credit of the WHATWG, the group did eventually overcome their not-invented-here syndrome. Or at least partially overcame it. + +Compromises started to happen. The RICG rolled support for many of the ideas in`set` into their proposal. That wasn't enough to convince the WHATWG, but it got some members working together with the Marquis and the RICG. The WHATWG still didn't like Picture, but they didn't outright reject it anymore either. + +To an outsider the revision process looks a bit like a game of Ping Pong, except that every time someone hits the ball it changes shape. + +The big breakthrough for Picture came from Opera's Simon Pieters and Apple's Tab Atkins. They made a simple, but powerful, suggestion -- make picture a wrapper for `img`. That way there would not be two separate elements for images on the web (which was rightly considered confusing), but there would still be a new way to control which image the browser displays. + +This is exactly the approach used in the final version of the Picture spec. + +When the browser encounters a Picture element, it first evaluates any rules that the web developer might specify. Opera's developer site has a good article on [all the possibilities Picture offers][9]. Then, after evaluating the various rules, the browser picks the best image based on its own criteria. This is another nice feature since the browser's criteria can include your settings. For example, future browsers might offer an option to stop high-res images from loading over 3G, regardless of what any Picture element on the page might say. Once the browser knows which image is the best choice it actually loads and displays that image in a good old `img` element. + +This solves two big problems -- the browser prefetching problem -- prefetching still works and there's no performance penalty -- and the problem of what to do when the browser doesn't understand picture -- it falls back to whatever is in the `img` tag. + +So, in the final proposal, what happens is Picture wraps an `img` tag and if the browser is too old to know what to make of a `` element then it loads the fallback `img` tag. All the accessibility benefits remain since the alt attribute is still on the `img` element. + +Everyone is happy and the web wins. + +## Nice Theory, but Show Me the Browser + +The web only wins if browsers actually support a proposed standard. And at this time last year no browser on the web actually supported Picture. + +While Firefox and Chrome had both committed to supporting it, it might be years before it became a priority for either, making Picture little more than a nice theory. + +Enter Yoav Weiss, a rare developer who spans the worlds of web development and C++ development. Weiss was a independent contractor who wanted Picture to become a part of the web. Weiss knew C++, the language most browsers are written in, but had never worked on a web browser before. + +Still, like Caceres, Weiss was able to bridge a gap, in this case the world of web developers and C++ developers, putting him in a unique position to be able to know what Picture needed to do and how to make it happen. So, after talking it over with other Chromium developers, Weiss started hacking on Blink, the rendering engine that powers Google's Chrome browser. + +Implementing Picture was no small task. "Getting Picture into Blink required some infrastructure that wasn't there," says Weiss. "I had two options: either wait for the infrastructure to happen naturally over the course of the next two years, or make it happen myself." + +Weiss, who, incidentally, has three young children and, presumably, not much in the way of free time, quickly realized that working night and weekends wasn't going to cut it. Weiss need to turn his work on Picture into a contract job. So he, Marquis and others involved in the community group, set up a crowd funding campaign on Indiegogo. + +On the face of it it sounds like a doomed proposition -- why would developers fund a feature that will ultimately end up in a web browser they otherwise have no control over? + +Then something amazing happened. The campaign didn't just meet its goal, it went way over it. Web developers wanted Picture bad enough to spend their money on the cause. + +It could have been the t-shirts. It could have been the novelty of it. Or it could have been that web developers saw how important a solution to the image problem was in a way that the browser makers and standards bodies didn't. Most likely it was some combination of all these and more. + +In the end enough money was raised to not only implement Picture in Blink, but to also port Weiss' work back to WebKit so WebKit browsers (including Apple's iOS version of Safari) can use it as well. At the same time Marcos Caceres started work at Mozilla and has helped drive Firefox's support for Picture. + +As of today the Picture element will be available in Chrome and Firefox by the end of the year. It's available now in Chrome's dev channel and Firefox 34+ (in Firefox you'll need enable it in `about:config`). Here's a test page showing the new [Picture element in action][10]. + +Apple appears to be adding support to Safari though the backport to WebKit wasn't finished in time for the upcoming Safari 8. Microsoft has likewise been supportive and is considering Picture for the next release of IE. + +## The Future of the Web + +The story of the Picture element isn't just an interesting tale of web developers working together to make the web a better place. It's also a glimpse at the future of the web. The separation between between those who build the web and those who create web standards is disappearing. The W3C's community groups are growing and sites like [Move the Web Forward][11] aim to help bridge the gap between developer ideas and standards bodies. + +There's even a site devoted to what it calls "[specifiction][12]" -- giving web developers a place to suggest tools they need, discuss possible solutions and then find the relevant W3C working group to make it happen. + +Picture may be almost finished, but the RICG isn't going away. In fact it's renaming itself and taking on a new project -- [Element Queries][13]. Coming soon to a browser near you. + +[1]: http://httparchive.org/interesting.php?a=All&l=Aug%2015%202014&s=Top1000 +[2]: http://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design +[3]: http://www.bostonglobe.com/ +[4]: http://blog.cloudfour.com/responsive-imgs/ +[5]: http://usecases.responsiveimages.org/ +[6]: http://responsiveimages.org/ +[7]: http://www.w3.org/community/respimg/2012/05/11/respimg-proposal/ +[8]: http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20120510#l-747 +[9]: http://dev.opera.com/articles/native-responsive-images/ +[10]: https://longhandpixels.net/2014/08/picture-test +[11]: http://movethewebforward.org/ +[12]: http://specifiction.org/ +[13]: http://responsiveimagescg.github.io/eq-usecases/ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/ubuntu-anniversary.html b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu-anniversary.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0faf9cd --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu-anniversary.html @@ -0,0 +1,79 @@ +

In October of 2004 a new Linux distro appeared on the scene with the curious name, Ubuntu.

+

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different Linux distros available, and a new one isn't particularly unusual. Indeed, for some time after its quiet preview announcement Ubuntu went largely unnoticed. It was yet another Debian derivative. It wasn't long, however, before that changed.

+

Today, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, estimates that there are 25 million Ubuntu users worldwide. Now Ubuntu is poised to launch a mobile version that may well send that number skyrocketing again.

+

This month marks the tenth anniversary of Ubuntu, here's a look back at the distro through the years, its major ups and downs and a finally a look at the mobile future.

+

Warty Warthog: What's an Ubuntu?

+[image="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Ubuntu-desktop-2-410-20080706.png" caption="The default desktop of Ubuntu 4.10, Warty Warthog"] +

From its launch in 2004, Ubuntu took a different approach to Linux, one that was perhaps best defined by its slogan at the time: "Linux for human beings". The word Ubuntu also recalls the same idea, coming from South African philosophy where it means, literally, "humanness", or, more broadly translated, "humanity toward others".

+

This distinction is more than simple semantics. It is what makes Ubuntu unique in the annals of Linux history.

+

The name, combined with the slogan, "Linux for human beings", set Ubuntu apart from other Linux distros of the day, which tended to focus more narrowly on what developers and enterprise users wanted, rather than what "ordinary" desktop users might need. Fedora, for example, takes a very different approach, aiming for users who are also developers and will contribute back to open source.

+

The focus on "Linux for human beings" set the tone and direction of the Ubuntu project from the beginning. Ubuntu never chased developers. It also did not seem interested in the server market. Instead it was aimed squarely at desktop users (of whom there were significantly fewer in October 2004) and Linux newcomers. The idea was to win over "ordinary" users from Windows.

+

Ubuntu was started by Mark Shuttleworth, who sold his company Thawte to VeriSign in December 1999 for $575 million. After a short vacation in space, he founded Canonical Ltd. and started work on Ubuntu. Shuttleworth's announcement of the very first Ubuntu release, defines the fledgeling project as a "new Linux distribution that brings together the extraordinary breadth of Debian with a fast and easy install, regular releases... (and) a tight selection of excellent packages."

+

Those goals -- fast and easy to install, regular releases with support, and a wide range of applications available -- are indeed the basis of what powered Ubuntu to the top of the Linux charts.

+

Perhaps the most significant of these three goals though, especially in terms of Ubuntu's focus on new, beginning Linux users is the first one -- making Linux easy to install.

+

By 2004 Debian wasn't difficult to install if you had prior experience with Linux. But for someone accustomed to the installation process offered by Windows XP or Mac OS X, it was, at the very least, intimidating.

+

Ubuntu on the other hand was just as easy to install as Windows or OS X. You inserted the CD, it booted and you double-clicked the installer.

+

When prominent Apple supporter Mark Pilgrim switched to Linux he chose Ubuntu, joking that it was the African word for "can't install Debian."

+

The focus on newcomers also meant that Ubuntu valued tools experienced Linux users did not, namely graphical installers, well-polished themes and design details like font rendering. Indeed Ubuntu's designers sweated details about anti-aliasing that had previously (seemingly) never been considered in the Linux desktop world.

+

Ubuntu also distinguished itself by something that was all too uncommon in the free software world of 2004 -- humor. While Shuttleworth's announcement of the initial release is clearly very serious about Ubuntu's goals, don't forget that the nickname for the first version of Ubuntu was "Warty Warthog", a playful reference to the rough edges that any brand new release will likely have.

+

The cheeky, silly and often awkward naming convention continues to this day (the latest release is nicknamed Utopic Unicorn).

+

The humor also extended to the famous bug number one. The first bug ever filed for Ubuntu was "Microsoft has a majority market share". The tongue in cheek reference to Windows dominance was a nod to the broader Linux community too, which was then drawn together at least as much by what it opposed as what it supported. These days that's not really a concern for Linux. Indeed when he closed it in 2013, Shuttleworth wrote that it was "better for us to focus our intent on excellence in our own right, rather than our impact on someone else's product."

+

In many ways the closing of bug number one marks Ubuntu's transition from yet another Linux distro to something else, something that the Linux world has never really seen before.

+

Dapper Drake: Rising to the top

+[image="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Dapper_with_apps.jpg" caption="The default desktop of Ubuntu 6.06, Dapper Drake, the only release to miss the April release date."] +

Ubuntu stuck to its every six months plan, churning out progressively more polished releases from 2004 on. In ten years it has only missed a release deadline once. By 2008 Ubuntu had established itself as the distro of choice for "switchers" moving away from Windows or OS X or even other distros lacking the ease of use Ubuntu offered.

+

Ubuntu put a friendly face on the otherwise cryptic world of desktop Linux. It offered a simple installation process, the promise of easy updates and great selection of applications all available at the click of a button in the Ubuntu Software Center.

+

In short Ubuntu achieved its goals.

+

Even those who don't like Ubuntu's take on the Linux desktop benefited from it over the years as many of its defining characteristics, particularly the installation process and focus on well designed desktop experience, became a priority in other projects. The result of Ubuntu's design efforts rippled out through the wider Linux world.

+

Then came the GNOME 3 fork in the road. GNOME, which had been Ubuntu's default desktop since it launched, decided to redesign its desktop interface. The new GNOME Shell interface was not what Ubuntu wanted. Instead the company decided to write its own shell and desktop interface.

+

End users wouldn't actually see the results of Ubuntu's decision for some time, but the project's decision to move away from GNOME started a trickle of criticism that would continue to build until Ubuntu's Unity desktop was revealed in 11.04.

+

Intrepid Ibex: It's lonely at the top

+[image="intrepid-ibex.png" caption="The default desktop of Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid Ibex"] +

The move away from GNOME did not hurt Ubuntu's adoption rate. It remains the most popular Linux distro by a wide margin, which makes it, among other things, the most popular target for critics. Linux, like every other tightly knit subculture on the internet, seems to hate a runaway success, especially one that violates so many of the subculture's taboos.

+

Violating unwritten Linux taboos became something of an Ubuntu sport over the years. And the critics were there at every turn, even right at the start.

+

As part of its initial launch, Canonical also unveiled the Launchpad project hosting platform, but did not release it under an open source license for another four years which angered some who saw Canonical as saying one thing and doing another.

+

Then there were gripes about Ubuntu developers not contributing to the kernel. And then there was the brown theme. Then the purple theme. Then the window buttons moved to the left of the window. The changes got smaller, the nits got pickier, but no quieter or less vehement. There's always someone very vocally unhappy about what Ubuntu is doing.

+

For many though it all culminated in Unity, which first debuted in 11.04 or Natty Narwhal (technically it debuted in the netbook remix of 10.10, but that was not widely used). Unity began life as an alternative shell for GNOME 3, but wasn't all that different than GNOME 3. Each successive release though has used fewer and fewer underlying GNOME and GTK tools. Whether you love Unity or hate it, it is very clearly Ubuntu's own thing at this point. GNOME is still there under the hood (it needs to be for all the third-party GNOME-based apps that ship with Ubuntu), but Unity relies on it less and less.

+

Unity was, at least initially, a bit rough around the edges, but what seemed to irk most angry users was simply that it was different. It was not the Ubuntu they had come to know and love.

+

But Ubuntu has rarely backed down due to criticism. And when it has reversed course it's usually been a result of feedback from its actual community of users rather than outside critics. Instead, Ubuntu just keeps on pushing ahead with its vision of Linux which, increasingly, bears little resemblance to the rest of the Linux community.

+

These days Ubuntu is less a traditional Linux distro and more somewhat like OS X is to BSD. That is, Ubuntu still runs atop a Debian GNU/Linux base and it still uses a Linux kernel, just as somewhere underneath the OS X paint job lies BSD. But much of what the desktop user experiences and interacts with on a daily basis in Ubuntu is a wholly Ubuntu creation.

+

This chasm between Ubuntu and the rest of the Linux world will be widening in the next few years as Ubuntu builds its own Mir display server and moves into the mobile space with Ubuntu Touch running on phones and tablets.

+

No matter how that ends up there's one very safe prediction: Ubuntu will continue to blaze its own path through the Linux woods.

+

It's also a safe bet to assume the critics will continue as well. Critics hate utopias. If there's nothing wrong there's nothing to scream about. This seems especially true of Linux reviewers (myself included at times). That's not, however, to say that all criticisms leveled at Ubuntu are without merit.

+

The lack of contributions to the kernel project relative to other distros is worrying for anyone interested in the overall health of the Linux ecosystem. If the most popular Linux distro in the world has nothing to contribute, well, that doesn't bode well for the future.

+

For every storm brewed in the Ubuntu teacup there is another worth talking about. Ubuntu is far from perfect, but it is one of the distros most willing to experiment and, perhaps most importantly, admit when it's wrong.

+

Utopic Unicorn: Imagining Utopia

+[image="utopic-unicorn.png" caption="The default desktop of Ubuntu 14.10, Utopic Unicorn"] +

There's almost nothing new in the latest version of Ubuntu, 14.10, which arrives alongside the ten year anniversary of the project. There's a kernel update, a few application updates, but nothing major from Ubuntu itself.

+

There is one bit of good news in the daily builds though, Ubuntu has started work on a major change that will fix the perhaps the biggest tarnishing marks in Ubuntu's history -- removing the privacy-invading online search features.

+

One of the best parts of Unity is the Dash, a single search interface that will find apps, documents, music, images and all sorts of other data on your machine. It's the cornerstone of the Unity interface. The first few releases of Unity focused on local search, but in 12.04 Ubuntu added a feature that enabled online searches as well.

+

Some users found this incredibly useful. Others, myself included, found it incredibly invasive and the fact that Ubuntu suddenly started shipping with a privacy policy sent many a privacy conscious user scurrying to less "innovative" distros.

+

What has always been most troubling about the search features in Unity Dash is that they are enabled by default. Given that very few users change default settings, especially new Linux users, which is Ubuntu's target audience, it effectively means that users may not even be aware that their data is being transmitted to Canonical's servers and then routed on to Amazon and elsewhere.

+

Free software icon Richard Stallman branded Ubuntu 12.04 "spyware". Even the more restrained Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked Canonical to turn off the Amazon Lens by default and devoted a series of how-tos on securing Ubuntu.

+

For two years Canonical has not backed down on the Amazon search lens, though it did eventually make sure that Amazon responses were served over HTTPS, making it somewhat more secure for users.

+

It wasn't simply the Amazon controversy that bothered many users though, it was Canonical and specifically Shuttleworth's response to the criticism that riled many.

+

When asked about it Shuttleworth defended the search tools writing, "We are not telling Amazon what you are searching for. Your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query on your behalf. Don't trust us? Erm, we have root." While technically correct in the sense that you have to trust someone, there's a huge difference between trusting FLOSS software updates with published source code and trusting Canonical to keep your private data secure. The former requires trust, the latter asks for blind faith.

+

Canonical further fanned the flames of the privacy fire by sending a DMCA takedown notice to an EFF staffer who created a site fixubuntu.com, which was critical of Unity's search tools. The DMCA notice protested the use of Canonical trademarks, but, as the EFF put it in a response, "your request is not supported by trademark law and interferes with protected speech." While fixubuntu ended up complying, the move felt heavy-handed. (It's worth noting that fixubuntu was recently forked to create fix-macosx.com, which addresses a similar on-by-default search tool in OS X Yosemite).

+

No matter what their intentions may have been, Canonical and Shuttleworth came across like bullies, claiming to have root access to your machine and unafraid to twist trademark law to silence critics. That's about what you'd expect from Microsoft, but this kind of bullying is less common in the free software world.

+

It's worth looking at the rest of what what Shuttleworth wrote in that post though. "You do trust us with your data already," he continues. "You trust us not to screw up on your machine with every update. You trust Debian, and you trust a large swathe of the open source community. And most importantly, you trust us to address it when, being human, we err."

+

That last bit is especially relevant in this case, and it matters for two reasons. First, Shuttleworth apologized for the DMCA takedown notice and it has never happened again.

+

More importantly, Ubuntu is reversing course on the Amazon search lens. Sally Radwan, Product Marketing Manager at Canonical, tells Ars that, "the opt-in by default is not set to land in 14.10... [but] it is in the development pipeline for 15.04." That is, Amazon and the rest of the online search features will soon be opt-in (if you update from an existing install it will still be there, but it's disabled for fresh installs of the latest daily builds). In short, Ubuntu is fixing its mistake, though it has taken a little while.

+

Still, better late than never. Because you do have to trust someone. Like it or not Ubuntu or whatever your OS of choice is does have root access to your machine. Not literally of course, but effectively given that their code is running with root privileges on your machine and chances are you haven't reviewed it lately. You trust your distro to make sure that code is secure, stable and acting in your best interests and you trust them to update it when something goes wrong.

+

You could look at Ubuntu's privacy fiasco pessimistically, as proof that Ubuntu is out to get you. Or, you could take the more optimistic view that Ubuntu is willing to fix things when it makes bad decisions.

+

Ubuntu rebranded itself on 2010 and dropped the "Linux for human beings" slogan. It's not as catchy, but Ubuntu might do well to bring back its old slogan with slight update: Linux for human beings who make mistakes, but try to fix them.

+

Vivid Vervet: The Mobile Future

+

Ubuntu recently announced that next year's 15.04 release will be named Vivid Vervet. While Shuttleworth tends to focus on the animal names in his announcement, looking back over Ubuntu's history reveals that the word accompanying the animal is often the more defining element. From "Warty", which was a warts and all release, to Lucid, when Ubuntu seems to have developed a more distinct sense of visual and UI direction, to Vivid, which envisions a bright future.

+

I mentioned earlier that there is almost nothing new from Canonical in Ubuntu 14.10. The reason for that is that the project has had all available hands working on its Unity 8 mobile interface. The Ubuntu Phone is coming and for now the desktop is taking a back seat.

+

Eventually the two will, to use Shuttleworth's word, converge. Convergence for Ubuntu isn't just a marketing term, it also seems to be the development strategy. That is, Unity 8 is taking shape on mobile devices and eventually that work will be extended to embrace the desktop as well. There's already a "flavor" known as Ubuntu Next if you'd like to preview Unity 8 today.

+

The only problem for Ubuntu is, well, what if it builds a Linux phone and no one comes?

+

The proposed Ubuntu Edge phone already has the vivid distinction of being the largest and most spectacularly failed campaign in crowdfunding history.

+

Ubuntu missed its grandiose $32 million dollar goal by nearly $19 million in last year's effort to raise money from Linux enthusiasts directly. Seen from a more optimistic angle, the $12 million it did raise makes the Edge the biggest ever fixed crowdfunding campaign.

+

Canonical is having better luck on the software front. It's not something most people would want to use yet, but Ubuntu Touch exists and will run on a variety of Nexus devices. Devices with Ubuntu Touch preloaded are rumored to be in coming any day now.

+

Warty Warthog, The Sequel

+

Any numbers surrounding the use of Linux are suspect simply because it's very hard to track by distro, but, that said, Canonical tells Ars that the company estimates there are "around 25 million Ubuntu desktop users in over 240 countries."

+

Those numbers make Ubuntu the world’s third most popular PC OS, and Canonical claims to have around 90 percent of the Linux market.

+

While this retrospective focused on the desktop, Ubuntu is no slouch in the server market these days. It now accounts for over 55% of all OpenStack deployments and around, according to the company, 70 percent of guest OSes "on major global public cloud environments."

+

Even if Ubuntu Touch tanks and Ubuntu goes crawling home with its tail between its legs it will have an impressive home to return to.

+

It's hasn't been a perfect ten years, but it's difficult to imagine where Linux would be today without Ubuntu. When it debuted in 2004 the most popular desktop was KDE 3.5, the default theme of which looked like a sad clone of Windows 95.

+

Ten years later Linux is everywhere you look and most often it's Ubuntu Linux that you see.

+

Ubuntu has become the friendly public face of Linux. But, As Shuttleworth wrote on his blog several years ago, "free software is bigger than any one project. It's bigger than the Linux kernel, it's bigger than GNU, it's bigger than GNOME and KDE, it's bigger than Ubuntu and Fedora and Debian. Each of those projects plays a role, but it is the whole which is really changing the world."

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/ubuntu-anniversary.txt b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu-anniversary.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b969074 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu-anniversary.txt @@ -0,0 +1,157 @@ +In October of 2004 a new Linux distro appeared on the scene with the curious name, Ubuntu. + +There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different Linux distros available, and a new one isn't particularly unusual. Indeed, for some time after its quiet preview announcement Ubuntu went largely unnoticed. It was yet another Debian derivative. It wasn't long, however, before that changed. + +Today, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, estimates that there are 25 million Ubuntu users worldwide. Now Ubuntu is poised to launch a mobile version that may well send that number skyrocketing again. + +This month marks the tenth anniversary of Ubuntu, here's a look back at the distro through the years, its major ups and downs and a finally a look at the mobile future. + +## Warty Warthog: What's an Ubuntu? + +[image="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Ubuntu-desktop-2-410-20080706.png" caption="The default desktop of Ubuntu 4.10, Warty Warthog"] + +From its launch in 2004, Ubuntu took a different approach to Linux, one that was perhaps best defined by its slogan at the time: "Linux for human beings". The word Ubuntu also recalls the same idea, coming from South African philosophy where it means, literally, "humanness", or, more broadly translated, "humanity toward others". + +This distinction is more than simple semantics. It is what makes Ubuntu unique in the annals of Linux history. + +The name, combined with the slogan, "Linux for human beings", set Ubuntu apart from other Linux distros of the day, which tended to focus more narrowly on what developers and enterprise users wanted, rather than what "ordinary" desktop users might need. Fedora, for example, takes a very different approach, aiming for users who are also developers and will [contribute back to open source](http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2010052601135RVRHRL). + +The focus on "Linux for human beings" set the tone and direction of the Ubuntu project from the beginning. Ubuntu never chased developers. It also did not seem interested in the server market. Instead it was aimed squarely at desktop users (of whom there were significantly fewer in October 2004) and Linux newcomers. The idea was to win over "ordinary" users from Windows. + +Ubuntu was started by Mark Shuttleworth, who sold his company Thawte to VeriSign in December 1999 for $575 million. After a short vacation in space, he founded Canonical Ltd. and started work on Ubuntu. Shuttleworth's [announcement](https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2004-October/000003.html) of the very first Ubuntu release, defines the fledgeling project as a "new Linux distribution that brings together the extraordinary breadth of Debian with a fast and easy install, regular releases... (and) a tight selection of excellent packages." + +Those goals -- fast and easy to install, regular releases with support, and a wide range of applications available -- are indeed the basis of what powered Ubuntu to the top of the Linux charts. + +Perhaps the most significant of these three goals though, especially in terms of Ubuntu's focus on new, beginning Linux users is the first one -- making Linux easy to install. + +By 2004 Debian wasn't difficult to install if you had prior experience with Linux. But for someone accustomed to the installation process offered by Windows XP or Mac OS X, it was, at the very least, intimidating. + +Ubuntu on the other hand was just as easy to install as Windows or OS X. You inserted the CD, it booted and you double-clicked the installer. + +When prominent Apple supporter Mark Pilgrim switched to Linux he chose Ubuntu, [joking](https://web.archive.org/web/20060707010812/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/27/diveintomark-show) that it was the African word for "can't install Debian." + +The focus on newcomers also meant that Ubuntu valued tools experienced Linux users did not, namely graphical installers, well-polished themes and design details like font rendering. Indeed Ubuntu's designers sweated details about anti-aliasing that had previously (seemingly) never been considered in the Linux desktop world. + +Ubuntu also distinguished itself by something that was all too uncommon in the free software world of 2004 -- humor. While Shuttleworth's announcement of the initial release is clearly very serious about Ubuntu's goals, don't forget that the nickname for the first version of Ubuntu was "Warty Warthog", a playful reference to the rough edges that any brand new release will likely have. + +The cheeky, silly and often awkward naming convention continues to this day (the latest release is nicknamed Utopic Unicorn). + +The humor also extended to the famous bug number one. The first bug ever filed for Ubuntu was "[Microsoft has a majority market share](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1)". The tongue in cheek reference to Windows dominance was a nod to the broader Linux community too, which was then drawn together at least as much by what it opposed as what it supported. These days that's not really a concern for Linux. Indeed when he closed it in 2013, Shuttleworth wrote that it was "better for us to focus our intent on excellence in our own right, rather than our impact on someone else's product." + +In many ways the closing of bug number one marks Ubuntu's transition from yet another Linux distro to something else, something that the Linux world has never really seen before. Something which [no longer uses the word Linux](https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=linux%20site%3Aubuntu.com) anywhere on its main website. + +## Dapper Drake: Rising to the top + +[image="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Dapper_with_apps.jpg" caption="The default desktop of Ubuntu 6.06, Dapper Drake, the only release to miss the April release date."] + +Ubuntu stuck to its every six months plan, churning out progressively more polished releases from 2004 on. In ten years it has only missed a release deadline once. By 2008 Ubuntu had established itself as the distro of choice for "switchers" moving away from Windows or OS X or even other distros lacking the ease of use Ubuntu offered. + +Ubuntu put a friendly face on the otherwise cryptic world of desktop Linux. It offered a simple installation process, the promise of easy updates and great selection of applications all available at the click of a button in the Ubuntu Software Center. + +In short Ubuntu achieved its goals. + +Even those who don't like Ubuntu's take on the Linux desktop benefited from it over the years as many of its defining characteristics, particularly the installation process and focus on well designed desktop experience, became a priority in other projects. The result of Ubuntu's design efforts rippled out through the wider Linux world. + +Then came the GNOME 3 fork in the road. GNOME, which had been Ubuntu's default desktop since it launched, decided to redesign its desktop interface. The new GNOME Shell interface was not what Ubuntu wanted. Instead the company decided to write its own shell and desktop interface. + +End users wouldn't actually see the results of Ubuntu's decision for some time, but the project's decision to move away from GNOME started a trickle of criticism that would continue to build until Ubuntu's Unity desktop was revealed in 11.04. + +## Intrepid Ibex: It's lonely at the top + +[image="intrepid-ibex.png" caption="The default desktop of Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid Ibex"] + +The move away from GNOME did not hurt Ubuntu's adoption rate. It remains the most popular Linux distro by a wide margin, which makes it, among other things, the most popular target for critics. Linux, like every other tightly knit subculture on the internet, seems to hate a runaway success, especially one that violates so many of the subculture's taboos. + +Violating unwritten Linux taboos became something of an Ubuntu sport over the years. And the critics were there at every turn, even right at the start. + +As part of its initial launch, Canonical also unveiled the Launchpad project hosting platform, but did not release it under an open source license for another four years which angered some who saw Canonical as saying one thing and doing another. + +Then there were gripes about Ubuntu developers not contributing to the kernel. And then there was the brown theme. Then the purple theme. Then the window buttons moved to the left of the window. The changes got smaller, the nits got pickier, but no quieter or less vehement. There's always someone very vocally unhappy about what Ubuntu is doing. + +For many though it all culminated in Unity, which first debuted in 11.04 or Natty Narwhal (technically it debuted in the netbook remix of 10.10, but that was not widely used). Unity began life as an alternative shell for GNOME 3, but wasn't all that different than GNOME 3. Each successive release though has used fewer and fewer underlying GNOME and GTK tools. Whether you love Unity or hate it, it is very clearly Ubuntu's own thing at this point. GNOME is still there under the hood (it needs to be for all the third-party GNOME-based apps that ship with Ubuntu), but Unity relies on it less and less. + +Unity was, at least initially, a bit rough around the edges, but what seemed to irk most angry users was simply that it was different. It was not the Ubuntu they had come to know and love. + +But Ubuntu has rarely backed down due to criticism. And when it has reversed course it's usually been a result of feedback from its actual community of users rather than outside critics. Instead, Ubuntu just keeps on pushing ahead with its vision of Linux which, increasingly, bears little resemblance to the rest of the Linux community. + +These days Ubuntu is less a traditional Linux distro and more somewhat like OS X is to BSD. That is, Ubuntu still runs atop a Debian GNU/Linux base and it still uses a Linux kernel, just as somewhere underneath the OS X paint job lies BSD. But much of what the desktop user experiences and interacts with on a daily basis in Ubuntu is a wholly Ubuntu creation. + +This chasm between Ubuntu and the rest of the Linux world will be widening in the next few years as Ubuntu builds its own Mir display server and moves into the mobile space with Ubuntu Touch running on phones and tablets. + +No matter how that ends up there's one very safe prediction: Ubuntu will continue to blaze its own path through the Linux woods. + +It's also a safe bet to assume the critics will continue as well. Critics hate utopias. If there's nothing wrong there's nothing to scream about. This seems especially true of Linux reviewers (myself included at times). That's not, however, to say that all criticisms leveled at Ubuntu are without merit. + +The lack of contributions to the kernel project relative to other distros is worrying for anyone interested in the overall health of the Linux ecosystem. If the most popular Linux distro in the world has nothing to contribute, well, that doesn't bode well for the future. + +For every storm brewed in the Ubuntu teacup there is another worth talking about. Ubuntu is far from perfect, but it is one of the distros most willing to experiment and, perhaps most importantly, admit when it's wrong. + +## Utopic Unicorn: Imagining Utopia + +[image="utopic-unicorn.png" caption="The default desktop of Ubuntu 14.10, Utopic Unicorn"] + +There's almost nothing new in the latest version of Ubuntu, 14.10, which arrives alongside the ten year anniversary of the project. There's a kernel update, a few application updates, but nothing major from Ubuntu itself. + +There is one bit of good news in the daily builds though, Ubuntu has started work on a major change that will fix the perhaps the biggest tarnishing marks in Ubuntu's history -- removing the privacy-invading online search features. + +One of the best parts of Unity is the Dash, a single search interface that will find apps, documents, music, images and all sorts of other data on your machine. It's the cornerstone of the Unity interface. The first few releases of Unity focused on local search, but in 12.04 Ubuntu added a feature that enabled online searches as well. + +Some users found this incredibly useful. Others, myself included, found it incredibly invasive and the fact that Ubuntu suddenly started shipping with a [privacy policy](http://www.ubuntu.com/privacy-policy/third-parties) sent many a privacy conscious user scurrying to less "innovative" distros. + +What has always been most troubling about the search features in Unity Dash is that they are enabled by default. Given that very few users change default settings, especially new Linux users, which is Ubuntu's target audience, it effectively means that users may not even be aware that their data is being transmitted to Canonical's servers and then routed on to Amazon and elsewhere. + +Free software icon Richard Stallman branded Ubuntu 12.04 "[spyware](https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/ubuntu-spyware-what-to-do)". Even the more restrained Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) [asked](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-amazon-ads-and-data-leaks) Canonical to turn off the Amazon Lens by default and devoted a series of how-tos on securing Ubuntu. + +For two years Canonical has not backed down on the Amazon search lens, though it did eventually make sure that Amazon responses were served over HTTPS, making it somewhat more secure for users. + +It wasn't simply the Amazon controversy that bothered many users though, it was Canonical and specifically Shuttleworth's response to the criticism that riled many. + +When asked about it Shuttleworth defended the search tools [writing](http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1182), "We are not telling Amazon what you are searching for. Your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query on your behalf. Don't trust us? Erm, we have root." While technically correct in the sense that you have to trust someone, there's a huge difference between trusting FLOSS software updates with published source code and trusting Canonical to keep your private data secure. The former requires trust, the latter asks for blind faith. + +Canonical further fanned the flames of the privacy fire by [sending a DMCA takedown notice](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/canonical-abused-trademark-law-to-target-a-site-critical-of-ubuntu-privacy/) to an EFF staffer who created a site fixubuntu.com, which was critical of Unity's search tools. The DMCA notice protested the use of Canonical trademarks, but, as the EFF put it in a response, "your request is not supported by trademark law and interferes with protected speech." While fixubuntu ended up complying, the move felt heavy-handed. (It's worth noting that fixubuntu was recently forked to create [fix-macosx.com](https://fix-macosx.com/), which addresses a similar on-by-default search tool in OS X Yosemite). + +No matter what their intentions may have been, Canonical and Shuttleworth came across like bullies, claiming to have root access to your machine and unafraid to twist trademark law to silence critics. That's about what you'd expect from Microsoft, but this kind of bullying is less common in the free software world. + +It's worth looking at the rest of what what Shuttleworth wrote in that post though. "You do trust us with your data already," he continues. "You trust us not to screw up on your machine with every update. You trust Debian, and you trust a large swathe of the open source community. And most importantly, you trust us to address it when, being human, we err." + +That last bit is especially relevant in this case, and it matters for two reasons. First, Shuttleworth [apologized for the DMCA takedown notice](http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1299) and it has never happened again. + +More importantly, Ubuntu is reversing course on the Amazon search lens. Sally Radwan, Product Marketing Manager at Canonical, tells Ars that, "the opt-in by default is not set to land in 14.10... [but] it is in the development pipeline for 15.04." That is, Amazon and the rest of the online search features will soon be opt-in (if you update from an existing install it will still be there, but it's disabled for fresh installs of the latest daily builds). In short, Ubuntu is fixing its mistake, though it has taken a little while. + +Still, better late than never. Because you do have to trust someone. Like it or not Ubuntu or whatever your OS of choice is does have root access to your machine. Not literally of course, but effectively given that their code is running with root privileges on your machine and chances are you haven't reviewed it lately. You trust your distro to make sure that code is secure, stable and acting in your best interests and you trust them to update it when something goes wrong. + +You could look at Ubuntu's privacy fiasco pessimistically, as proof that Ubuntu is out to get you. Or, you could take the more optimistic view that Ubuntu is willing to fix things when it makes bad decisions. + +Ubuntu rebranded itself on 2010 and dropped the "Linux for human beings" slogan. It's not as catchy, but Ubuntu might do well to bring back its old slogan with slight update: Linux for human beings who make mistakes, but try to fix them. + +## Vivid Vervet: The Mobile Future + +Ubuntu recently announced that next year's 15.04 release will be named Vivid Vervet. While Shuttleworth tends to focus on the animal names in his announcement, looking back over Ubuntu's history reveals that the word accompanying the animal is often the more defining element. From "Warty", which was a warts and all release, to Lucid, when Ubuntu seems to have developed a more distinct sense of visual and UI direction, to Vivid, which envisions a bright future. + +I mentioned earlier that there is almost nothing new from Canonical in Ubuntu 14.10. The reason for that is that the project has had all available hands working on its Unity 8 mobile interface. The Ubuntu Phone is coming and for now the desktop is taking a back seat. + +Eventually the two will, to use Shuttleworth's word, converge. Convergence for Ubuntu isn't just a marketing term, it also seems to be the development strategy. That is, Unity 8 is taking shape on mobile devices and eventually that work will be extended to embrace the desktop as well. There's already a "flavor" known as Ubuntu Next if you'd like to preview Unity 8 today. + +The only problem for Ubuntu is, well, what if it builds a Linux phone and no one comes? + +The proposed Ubuntu Edge phone already has the vivid distinction of being the largest and most [spectacularly failed campaign](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/ubuntu-edge-is-dead-long-live-ubuntu-phones/) in crowdfunding history. + +Ubuntu missed its grandiose $32 million dollar goal by $19 million in last year's effort to raise money from Linux enthusiasts directly. Seen from a more optimistic angle, the $12 million it did raise makes the Edge the biggest ever fixed crowdfunding campaign. + +Canonical is having better luck on the software front. It's not something most people would want to use yet, but Ubuntu Touch exists and will [run on a variety of Nexus devices](http://developer.ubuntu.com/start/ubuntu-for-devices/devices/). Devices with Ubuntu Touch preloaded are rumored to be in coming any day now. + +## Warty Warthog, The Sequel + +Any numbers surrounding the use of Linux are suspect simply because it's very hard to track by distro, but, that said, Canonical tells Ars that the company estimates there are "around 25 million Ubuntu desktop users in over 240 countries." + +Those numbers make Ubuntu the world’s third most popular PC OS, and Canonical claims to have around 90 percent of the Linux market. + +While this retrospective focused on the desktop, Ubuntu is no slouch in the server market these days. It now accounts for over [55% of all OpenStack deployments](http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1373) and around, according to the company, 70 percent of guest OSes "on major global public cloud environments." + +Even if Ubuntu Touch tanks and Ubuntu goes crawling home with its tail between its legs it will have an impressive home to return to. + +It's hasn't been a perfect ten years, but it's difficult to imagine where Linux would be today without Ubuntu. When it debuted in 2004 the most popular desktop was KDE 3.5, the default theme of which looked like a sad clone of Windows 95. + +Ten years later Linux is everywhere you look and most often it's Ubuntu Linux that you see. + +Ubuntu has become the friendly public face of Linux. But, As Shuttleworth [wrote on his blog](http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/517) several years ago, "free software is bigger than any one project. It's bigger than the Linux kernel, it's bigger than GNU, it's bigger than GNOME and KDE, it's bigger than Ubuntu and Fedora and Debian. Each of those projects plays a role, but it is the whole which is really changing the world." diff --git a/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1504review.html b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1504review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..45896f4 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1504review.html @@ -0,0 +1,69 @@ +

The snow has melted and the trees are leafing out, but nothing really says spring like the arrival of a new version of Ubuntu Linux. And right on schedule Canonical has released Ubuntu 15.04, or Vivid Vervet as this release is known.

+

Ubuntu 15.04 arrived in late April and has, judging by other reviews, largely underwhelmed the tech press. The problem, goes the storyline, is there's not much new in 15.04. Of course, if there were a bunch of changes and new features in 15.04 you can bet there would be a negative reaction to them, probably from the same people calling this release boring. The top of the Linux mountain is a lonely, criticism strewn place.

+

That said, the truth is there isn't much new in 15.04, at least not in terms of visible changes to the Unity desktop, but for most users that's a good thing.

+

Change doesn't mean better and frankly, Ubuntu 15.04's Unity desktop is mature, stable and not really in need of many improvements. There are still some design inconsistencies (mostly GTK3 problems) and small problems here and there, but for the most part 15.04 delivers a great desktop experience.

+

Those clamoring for big changes will have to wait. And more than likely, when the big changes coming in Unity 8 arrive around this time next year, the same people will be reminiscing fondly about 15.04, forgetting they once found it "boring".

+

Unity Desktop

+ +[image="ubuntu1504-unity-desktop.png" caption="Ubuntu 15.04 looking a lot like Ubuntu 14.10."] + +

The biggest reason you might find 15.04 a bit boring is that there aren't many visual changes in the flagship Unity desktop. Unity has been bumped to version 7.3, which includes a number of bug fixes and two notable new features: Locally Integrated Menus and the ability to always show those menus rather than having them hidden and revealed when your mouse hovers them.

+

The Locally Integrated Menus feature just means that menus are back in the application window, rather than up in the main menu bar. Their position within the application windows has changed though. Menu items no longer get their own bar, but are rolled into the window title bar.

+

The ability to move menus into app windows has actually been around since last autumn's 14.10 release, but this release adds the ability to turn off the hidden-until-needed "feature". To switch the position of menus from the top bar to the application window just head to System Settings >> Appearance >> Behavior where you'll see both options.

+ +[image="ubuntu1504-menus-top.png" caption="Application menus always visible in the top bar."] + +

To make the menus always visible is a little more complex. First you'll need to install dconf Editor and then head to com >> canonical >> unity where you'll see a checkbox to "always-show-menus". Check that and your disappearing menus are gone. This option is really nice if you put your menus in the application window since the application menu bar is a pretty small target to get your mouse over just to see the menus. With the menus always on you have a visual target to aim for, making for much better usability.

+ +[image="ubuntu1504-menus-win.png" caption="Application menus always visible in the application window."] + +

These two small tweaks to the interface are the only visible changes that I've noticed in this release.

+

As someone who prefers boring, incremental updates that improve rather than completely rearrange my experience, I like Unity 7.3. It's not perfect by any means. There are still some outstanding design issues and inconsistencies in this release.

+

If you want proof that all the development effort is in Unity 8 rather than Unity 7, look no further than scrollbars and right click menus. Scrollbar position and appearance varies depending on which app you're in, but the most obvious problems are in Firefox, which still hasn't been themed to use the Unity style thin scrollbars with handles. Likewise the default theme will sometimes give a dark right-click menu, sometimes light. Plenty of third-party themes handle Firefox fine, but the default still doesn't.

+ +[image="ubuntu1504-menus-inconsistent.png" caption="Unity 7 still harbors some inconsistencies and UI glitches that will likely never be fixed since Unity 8 will replace it soon anyway. On the left is the right click menu in Firefox, on the right, Nautilus"] + +

Most users probably won't even notice these little issues, but the fact that they remain does lend some credence to the charge that Canonical has all but abandoned Unity 7.

+

What's New in the Server

+

Ubuntu 15.04 certainly isn't boring for those using it in server deployments. In fact, 15.04 has a big change in store for sysadmins -- the move to systemd instead of Upstart for the init system.

+

Changing the init system is somewhat akin to replacing your heart. It's a major change. The init system is the first process started when you boot and the last to shutdown. In the time between startup and shutdown the init system is essentially in charge of everything. It's traditionally assigned the process ID 1.

+

Canonical has been using its own homegrown init system known as Upstart for some time now. Upstart was in the running to become the default init system for Debian as well. But, after much debate, the Debian team elected to go with systemd instead.

+

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth was at one point quite critical of systemd, but in the end, once Debian made its decision, Ubuntu and other Debian-derivatives had little choice but to adopt systemd. Ubuntu 15.04 is the first release to actually use it by default.

+

For desktop users that will mean almost nothing. Those running Ubuntu on the server though will be in for a potentially big change. I covered systemd in some detail in my Debian 8 review, and the same things apply here, though migrating from Upstart is a little different than migrating from SysV, which was Debian's old init system.

+

Canonical has a short wiki page that's designed to help you migrate from Upstart to systemd. Aside from binary log files, the biggest change from Upstart is simply syntax, your init scripts and service files will need to be migrated to systemd's syntax.

+

It's worth noting that while systemd is the default in Ubuntu 15.04, all of the Upstart packages are still there and you can in fact keep using it if you wish. If you want to switch back and forth you can use Grub and select "Advanced options for Ubuntu", where you will find an "Ubuntu, with Linux ... (upstart)" entry. If you want to permanently switch install the upstart-sysv package.

+

Other new features on the server side include the latest version of OpenStack and support for Canonical's LXD (Linux Container Daemon) hypervisor. The not-quite-a-competitor-but-sort-of competitor to Docker is a bit more bare bones than Docker at this stage, but for many use cases that's actually a plus. Suffice to say that if you're using Docker containers with Ubuntu anyway you might want to check out LXD.

+

Kernel

+

Ubuntu 15.04 ships with kernel version 3.19. The timing of feature freezes in the kernel and Ubuntu 15.04 meant that this release just missed the move to version 4.x, which features rebootless kernel upgrades among other updates. The 4.x kernel line should be part of Ubuntu 15.10 later this year.

+

For now you'll have to get by with quite a bit more hardware support, including preliminary support for Intel's "Skylake" chips, the successor to Broadwell which should start arriving by end of 2015. There's also some notable improvements for Radeon and Nvidia drivers, Btrfs support for live device replacement with RAID 5 and 6 and other hardware related improvements.

+

Flavors

+

Unity is not the only desktop available for Ubuntu. It might be the most popular and the one Canonical would have you use, but Ubuntu comes in quite a few flavors and, with this release, there's a brand new one -- Ubuntu MATE. Ubuntu MATE has been around in unofficial form for a couple of release cycles but this is its first time as an official, Canonical-blessed "flavor".

+

Ubuntu MATE is notable because the MATE desktop comes awfully close to the user experience of Ubuntu around the time of 9.10, a release that many long time Ubuntu users will recall with some fondness. If you'd like to return to the pre-Unity days -- AKA the good old days of GNOME 2.x -- Ubuntu MATE 15.04 might be your best bet.

+

The newest kid on the Ubuntu block features MATE Desktop 1.8.2, which is notable for its Compiz graphics support. With Ubuntu MATE you can have your classic, GNOME-style desktop complete with wobbly windows and all the rest of your Compiz enhancements.

+ +[image="ubuntu1504-mate-desktop.png" caption="Ubuntu MATE, the new kid on the Ubuntu block."] + +

Other new features include updates for the full compliment of MATE apps, including Mate terminal, the Caja file manager and the rest. There's a nice new theme by the name of Yuyo that gives Ubuntu MATE a nice visual difference from more familiar MATE-based distros like Linux Mint. Indeed the Ubuntu MATE developers deserve credit for building out what might be the slickest MATE-based distro I've tested.

+

If Ubuntu MATE isn't for you the rest of the Ubuntu flavors have also seen some significant updates, including Ubuntu GNOME, Lubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu. The latter two see particularly big updates with Kubuntu shipping the new KDE Plasma 5.2 "Breeze" desktop and Xubuntu shipping with the equally fresh Xfce 4.12.

+ +[image="ubuntu1504-kubuntu.png" caption="Kubuntu 15.04, featuring KDE Plasma 5."] + +

Kubuntu makes a great base to see what KDE is up to since the Kubuntu devs don't do much to customize the distro. In Kubuntu 15.04 you'll find KDE Plasma 5.2, though it's pretty easy to update to the latest and greatest 5.3, which, while numerically small, is in fact a huge update.

+

The new Breeze desktop with its flat, colorful, high contrast look is what KDE refers to as a modernized interface, with "reduced visual clutter throughout the workspace." For more details on what's new in Plasma 5, see our earlier review.

+

Xubuntu 15.04 also has a huge update in the form of Xfce 4.12, the first major Xfce update in almost two years. Xfce 4.12 has far to much to cover here, but the highlights include HiDPI support in themes -- no more jagged edges on rounded corners -- and much improved multiple monitor support.

+ +[image="ubuntu1504-xubuntu.png" caption="Xubuntu 15.04 with the brand new Xfce 4.12."] + +

Xfce 4.12 also sees a huge set of theme and user interface related components that go along way to make Xfce feel less like the desktop time forgot. There's now full support for GTK3 themes and a new themable Alt+Tab dialog among other things. The Thunar file manager now supports tabs (a much requested feature) and panels are much smarter about getting out of your way when you're dragging windows around.

+

Thanks to the timing of the Xfce release and Xubuntu 15.04, Xubuntu is one of the few distros to currently ship with 4.12. If you want to see what's new, Xubuntu makes a great way to test Xfce 4.12.

+

Ubuntu MATE isn't the only new version of the Ubuntu family launching with 15.04, there's also Snappy Ubuntu Core. Snappy is Canonical's stripped-down version of Ubuntu designed for container hosts and small connected devices. Shuttleworth calls it "the smallest, safest platform for Docker deployment ever."

+

Phones

+

This is also the first release of Ubuntu in which there are actual shipping phones that run Ubuntu. The Aquaris E4.5 is available and the Meizu M4 will be here later this year.

+

The mobile version of Ubuntu is significant because the reason that this release isn't as exciting as some would hope has to do with these mobile devices. Most of Canonical's efforts are currently being poured into Unity 8 and Mir, which power the interface on these phones, but most likely won't make it to the desktop until next year at the earliest.

+

Unity 8 will see Canonical's vision of "convergence" -- that is desktop and mobile OSes coming together in a single, unified code base -- coming to fruition. Or that's the plan anyway. As Ars reported last month, neither of the Ubuntu Phones we currently know about will support the very cool feature that's been demoed many times that lets you plug your phone into a monitor and have it become the desktop Unity interface.

+

Convergence it seems takes a little while longer than planned.

+

Should You Upgrade?

+

The question for this release then is -- should you bother?

+

While there are plenty of bug fixes and small refinements that are worth having that doesn't mean you need to update. If you're on the desktop I can't think of the reason not to, though it's worth noting that the features listed here will be backported.

+

If you want systemd on the server then you should upgrade since is not likely to be backported to earlier releases.

+

Most of the new features in Unity and other associated apps will be backported to at least the last Long Term Support release, currently last year's 14.04. That means that, provided you don't mind waiting a few weeks while the new features are tested, you'll get all the new stuff without lifting a finger.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1504review.txt b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1504review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..79496d4 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1504review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,110 @@ +The snow has melted and the trees are leafing out, but nothing really says spring like the arrival of a new version of Ubuntu Linux. And right on schedule Canonical has released Ubuntu 15.04, or Vivid Vervet as this release is known. + +Ubuntu 15.04 arrived in late April and has, judging by other reviews, largely underwhelmed the tech press. The problem, goes the storyline, is there's not much new in 15.04. Of course, if there were a bunch of changes and new features in 15.04 you can bet there would be a negative reaction to them, probably from the same people calling this release boring. The top of the Linux mountain is a lonely, criticism strewn place. + +That said, the truth is there isn't much new in 15.04, at least not in terms of visible changes to the Unity desktop, but for most users that's a good thing. + +Change doesn't mean better and frankly, Ubuntu 15.04's Unity desktop is mature, stable and not really in need of many improvements. There are still some design inconsistencies (mostly GTK3 problems) and small problems here and there, but for the most part 15.04 delivers a great desktop experience. + +Those clamoring for big changes will have to wait. And more than likely, when the big changes coming in Unity 8 arrive around this time next year, the same people will be reminiscing fondly about 15.04, forgetting they once found it "boring". + +## Unity Desktop + + +[image="ubuntu1504-unity-desktop.png" caption="Ubuntu 15.04 looking a lot like Ubuntu 14.10."] + +The biggest reason you might find 15.04 a bit boring is that there aren't many visual changes in the flagship Unity desktop. Unity has been bumped to version 7.3, which includes a number of bug fixes and two notable new features: Locally Integrated Menus and the ability to always show those menus rather than having them hidden and revealed when your mouse hovers them. + +The Locally Integrated Menus feature just means that menus are back in the application window, rather than up in the main menu bar. Their position within the application windows has changed though. Menu items no longer get their own bar, but are rolled into the window title bar. + +The ability to move menus into app windows has actually been around since last autumn's 14.10 release, but this release adds the ability to turn off the hidden-until-needed "feature". To switch the position of menus from the top bar to the application window just head to System Settings >> Appearance >> Behavior where you'll see both options. + +[image="ubuntu1504-menus-top.png" caption="Application menus always visible in the top bar."] + +To make the menus always visible is a little more complex. First you'll need to install dconf Editor and then head to com >> canonical >> unity where you'll see a checkbox to "always-show-menus". Check that and your disappearing menus are gone. This option is really nice if you put your menus in the application window since the application menu bar is a pretty small target to get your mouse over just to see the menus. With the menus always on you have a visual target to aim for, making for much better usability. + +[image="ubuntu1504-menus-win.png" caption="Application menus always visible in the application window."] + +These two small tweaks to the interface are the only visible changes that I've noticed in this release. + +As someone who prefers boring, incremental updates that improve rather than completely rearrange my experience, I like Unity 7.3. It's not perfect by any means. There are still some outstanding design issues and inconsistencies in this release. + +If you want proof that all the development effort is in Unity 8 rather than Unity 7, look no further than scrollbars and right click menus. Scrollbar position and appearance varies depending on which app you're in, but the most obvious problems are in Firefox, which still hasn't been themed to use the Unity style thin scrollbars with handles. Likewise the default theme will sometimes give a dark right-click menu, sometimes light. Plenty of third-party themes handle Firefox fine, but the default still doesn't. + +[image="ubuntu1504-menus-inconsistent.png" caption="Unity 7 still harbors some inconsistencies and UI glitches that will likely never be fixed since Unity 8 will replace it soon anyway. On the left is the right click menu in Firefox, on the right, Nautilus"] + +Most users probably won't even notice these little issues, but the fact that they remain does lend some credence to the charge that Canonical has all but abandoned Unity 7. + +## What's New in the Server + +Ubuntu 15.04 certainly isn't boring for those using it in server deployments. In fact, 15.04 has a big change in store for sysadmins -- the move to systemd instead of Upstart for the init system. + +Changing the init system is somewhat akin to replacing your heart. It's a major change. The init system is the first process started when you boot and the last to shutdown. In the time between startup and shutdown the init system is essentially in charge of everything. It's traditionally assigned the process ID 1. + +Canonical has been using its own homegrown init system known as Upstart for some time now. Upstart was in the running to become the default init system for Debian as well. But, after much debate, the Debian team elected to go with systemd instead. + +Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth was at one point quite critical of systemd, but in the end, once Debian made its decision, Ubuntu and other Debian-derivatives had little choice but to adopt systemd. Ubuntu 15.04 is the first release to actually use it by default. + +For desktop users that will mean almost nothing. Those running Ubuntu on the server though will be in for a potentially big change. I covered systemd in some detail in my [Debian 8 review](tk), and the same things apply here, though migrating from Upstart is a little different than migrating from SysV, which was Debian's old init system. + +Canonical has a short [wiki page](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SystemdForUpstartUsers) that's designed to help you migrate from Upstart to systemd. Aside from binary log files, the biggest change from Upstart is simply syntax, your init scripts and service files will need to be migrated to systemd's syntax. + +It's worth noting that while systemd is the default in Ubuntu 15.04, all of the Upstart packages are still there and you can in fact keep using it if you wish. If you want to switch back and forth you can use Grub and select "Advanced options for Ubuntu", where you will find an "Ubuntu, with Linux ... (upstart)" entry. If you want to permanently switch install the upstart-sysv package. + +Other new features on the server side include the latest version of OpenStack and support for Canonical's LXD (Linux Container Daemon) hypervisor. The not-quite-a-competitor-but-sort-of competitor to Docker is a bit more bare bones than Docker at this stage, but for many use cases that's actually a plus. Suffice to say that if you're using Docker containers with Ubuntu anyway you might want to check out LXD. + +## Kernel + +Ubuntu 15.04 ships with kernel version 3.19. The timing of feature freezes in the kernel and Ubuntu 15.04 meant that this release just missed the move to version 4.x, which features rebootless kernel upgrades among other updates. The 4.x kernel line should be part of Ubuntu 15.10 later this year. + +For now you'll have to get by with quite a bit more hardware support, including preliminary support for Intel's "Skylake" chips, the successor to Broadwell which should start arriving by end of 2015. There's also some notable improvements for Radeon and Nvidia drivers, Btrfs support for live device replacement with RAID 5 and 6 and other hardware related improvements. + +## Flavors + +Unity is not the only desktop available for Ubuntu. It might be the most popular and the one Canonical would have you use, but Ubuntu comes in quite a few flavors and, with this release, there's a brand new one -- Ubuntu MATE. Ubuntu MATE has been around in unofficial form for a couple of release cycles but this is its first time as an official, Canonical-blessed "flavor". + +Ubuntu MATE is notable because the MATE desktop comes awfully close to the user experience of Ubuntu around the time of 9.10, a release that many long time Ubuntu users will recall with some fondness. If you'd like to return to the pre-Unity days -- AKA the good old days of GNOME 2.x -- Ubuntu MATE 15.04 might be your best bet. + +The newest kid on the Ubuntu block features MATE Desktop 1.8.2, which is notable for its Compiz graphics support. With Ubuntu MATE you can have your classic, GNOME-style desktop complete with wobbly windows and all the rest of your Compiz enhancements. + +[image="ubuntu1504-mate-desktop.png" caption="Ubuntu MATE, the new kid on the Ubuntu block."] + +Other new features include updates for the full compliment of MATE apps, including Mate terminal, the Caja file manager and the rest. There's a nice new theme by the name of Yuyo that gives Ubuntu MATE a nice visual difference from more familiar MATE-based distros like Linux Mint. Indeed the Ubuntu MATE developers deserve credit for building out what might be the slickest MATE-based distro I've tested. + +If Ubuntu MATE isn't for you the rest of the Ubuntu flavors have also seen some significant updates, including Ubuntu GNOME, Lubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu. The latter two see particularly big updates with Kubuntu shipping the new KDE Plasma 5.2 "Breeze" desktop and Xubuntu shipping with the equally fresh Xfce 4.12. + +[image="ubuntu1504-kubuntu.png" caption="Kubuntu 15.04, featuring KDE Plasma 5."] + +Kubuntu makes a great base to see what KDE is up to since the Kubuntu devs don't do much to customize the distro. In Kubuntu 15.04 you'll find KDE Plasma 5.2, though it's pretty easy to update to the latest and greatest 5.3, which, while numerically small, is in fact a huge update. + +The new Breeze desktop with its flat, colorful, high contrast look is what KDE refers to as a modernized interface, with "reduced visual clutter throughout the workspace." For more details on what's new in Plasma 5, see our [earlier review](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/17/kde-plasma-5-for-those-linux-users-undecided-on-the-kernels-future/). + +Xubuntu 15.04 also has a huge update in the form of Xfce 4.12, the first major Xfce update in almost two years. Xfce 4.12 has far to much to cover here, but the highlights include HiDPI support in themes -- no more jagged edges on rounded corners -- and much improved multiple monitor support. + +[image="ubuntu1504-xubuntu.png" caption="Xubuntu 15.04 with the brand new Xfce 4.12."] + +Xfce 4.12 also sees a huge set of theme and user interface related components that go along way to make Xfce feel less like the desktop time forgot. There's now full support for GTK3 themes and a new themable Alt+Tab dialog among other things. The Thunar file manager now supports tabs (a much requested feature) and panels are much smarter about getting out of your way when you're dragging windows around. + +Thanks to the timing of the Xfce release and Xubuntu 15.04, Xubuntu is one of the few distros to currently ship with 4.12. If you want to see what's new, Xubuntu makes a great way to test Xfce 4.12. + +Ubuntu MATE isn't the only new version of the Ubuntu family launching with 15.04, there's also Snappy Ubuntu Core. Snappy is Canonical's stripped-down version of Ubuntu designed for container hosts and small connected devices. Shuttleworth calls it "the smallest, safest platform for Docker deployment ever." + +## Phones + +This is also the first release of Ubuntu in which there are actual shipping phones that run Ubuntu. The Aquaris E4.5 is available and the Meizu M4 will be here later this year. + +The mobile version of Ubuntu is significant because the reason that this release isn't as exciting as some would hope has to do with these mobile devices. Most of Canonical's efforts are currently being poured into Unity 8 and Mir, which power the interface on these phones, but most likely won't make it to the desktop until next year at the earliest. + +Unity 8 will see Canonical's vision of "convergence" -- that is desktop and mobile OSes coming together in a single, unified code base -- coming to fruition. Or that's the plan anyway. As Ars reported last month, neither of the Ubuntu Phones we currently know about will support the very cool feature that's been demoed many times that lets you plug your phone into a monitor and have it become the desktop Unity interface. + +Convergence it seems takes a little while longer than planned. + +## Should You Upgrade? + +The question for this release then is -- should you bother? + +While there are plenty of bug fixes and small refinements that are worth having that doesn't mean you need to update. If you're on the desktop I can't think of the reason not to, though it's worth noting that the features listed here will be backported. + +If you want systemd on the server then you should upgrade since is not likely to be backported to earlier releases. + +Most of the new features in Unity and other associated apps will be backported to at least the last Long Term Support release, currently last year's 14.04. That means that, provided you don't mind waiting a few weeks while the new features are tested, you'll get all the new stuff without lifting a finger. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1510.html b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1510.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bd6311d --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1510.html @@ -0,0 +1,56 @@ +

Canonical recently released Ubuntu 15.10, nicknamed Wily Werewolf.

+

In the past the Autumn releases of Ubuntu Linux have often been more experimental affairs and warranted some caution when updating. They weren't quite update-at-your-own risk rough, but they were often packed full of new features that were not fully baked.

+

Whereas Spring .04 releases tended to be stable (and every two years packaged as Long Term Support releases), Autumn was a time to experiment.

+

For example, the now shuttered Ubuntu One first debuted in 9.10. The Unity desktop became a default in 11.10 and the controversial Amazon search results in the Unity Dash made their debut in 12.10.

+

Unfortunately -- or fortunately, depending on how you feel about desktop experiments -- that's not a case with Wily Werewolf.

+

There are new features worth updating for in this release, but on the whole this is Canonical refining what it has already created, getting ready for the next LTS release (Ubuntu 16.04, due toward the end of April 2016), which will also likely be the last LTS release based on Unity 7.

+

By this time next year 16.10 will be back to the experimental new features with an entirely different beast on the desktop -- Unity 8, Mir and other big changes will return next year's .10 release to the kind of playground status of the past.

+

More on Unity 8 and what it means for Ubuntu in a minute. But first, Ubuntu 15.10, which might be the very last of its kind for a little while -- a stable, welcome update that doesn't require you to radically change your workflow or habits.

+

Ubuntu 15.10

+ +[image="ubuntu1510-desktop.png" caption="Visually Ubuntu 15.10 looks a lot like previous releases."] + +

While Ubuntu 15.10 is unlikely to win any awards for innovation there are some very useful new features in the kernel update, a couple of UI changes for Unity and plenty of application updates, all of which make it well worth the update.

+

The most notable UI changes in this release are the scrollbars, which are now pulled straight from GNOME 3. Canonical has abandoned its little disappearing "handle"-style scrollbars in favor of GNOME's defaults (which have improved considerably since Ubuntu started work on its own version). The change appears to based more on code maintenance and development effort than any strong aesthetic feelings from Canonical. It would seem that writing and maintaining your own scrollbar code is more work than it's worth. The visual change is minor and solves quite a few bugs in Canonical's home-grown scrollbars, making it a win for users as well as the programmers once tasked with maintaining the old code base.

+ +[image="ubuntu1510-scrollbars.png" caption="The old Ubuntu-created scrollbar is on the left, the new upstream version from GNOME on the right."] + +

Abandoning the homegrown scrollbars might also mean that Unity is able to integrate upstream GNOME updates faster than it has been lately. With this release most of the GNOME suite of tools that powers much of Unity have finally been updated to 3.16, though a few holdouts like GEdit remain at much older versions.

+

Aside from the scrollbars, there's not a lot of visual changes to this release. Unity itself gets a slight version bump with some bug fixes and a couple new features, including a new option to drag icons out of the Dash launcher and onto your desktop. If you were really missing the ability to clutter your desktop with something other than files, well, now you can throw some application launchers in there for good measure.

+

Other notable bug fixes in Unity include an annoying problem with fullscreen menu bars and the ability to access locally integrated menus -- that is, menus within the window rather than in the top bar -- on unfocussed windows.

+

While those are welcome fixes, most of what's interesting in this release is not directly from Canonical. The most exiting thing in Ubuntu 15.10 is probably the updated kernel, which is now based on the upstream Linux Kernel 4.2.

+

The 4.2 line brings support for for recent Radeon GPUs, as well as some new encryption options for ext4 disks. There's also support for Intel's new Broxton chips, which just might be finding their way into an Ubuntu Mobile device at some point. 15.10 also marks the first time that the new live kernel patching has been available in Ubuntu. This release also adds a new kernel for the Raspberry Pi 2.

+

Linux game aficionados will be happy hear that this release ships with support for the new Steam controller.

+

Developers get some love in this release too, with updates for Python and Ubuntu Make, Ubuntu's impressive suite of developer tools. If you're looking for a quick way to get, for example, a basic Android development environment set up, you'd be hard pressed to beat Ubuntu Make's simple umake android command.

+

Anyone doing tech support from an Ubuntu machine will be happy to hear that Virtualbox has been updated with the latest version, which offers guest additions for Windows 10. The rest of Ubuntu's standard application suite has been updated as well, including the latest version of Firefox, Thunderbird, Chromium and more. Of particular note is LibreOffice, which has been upgraded to version 5, a major update for LibreOffice users.

+

Ubuntu 15.10 has been rock solid in my testing. That said, I have had some trouble installing 15.10 via Chrubuntu on a new Dell 13 Chromebook, primarily related to trackpad drivers. Chrubuntu is a bit of a hack though, it's probably not fair to hold it against Ubuntu. Otherwise 15.10 has been very stable and wonderful to use on all the devices I've tested it on -- especially my old Eeepc where Ubuntu offers something that gets very little press -- UI scaling. Typically HiDPI screens get all the attention, and indeed Unity looks great in high res, but Ubuntu also has some great scaling in the opposite direction. Using the slider under Settings >> displays it's possible to downsize the entire UI, which gains you some precious real estate on smaller screens. It doesn't work everywhere -- Firefox is my most-used exception -- but it does make it easy to reclaim a few pixels on small screens.

+

Ubuntu 15.10 Flavors

+

When most people refer to Ubuntu they mean the Unity desktop version, but there are half a dozen other official Ubuntu "flavors" using just about every popular desktop available for Linux.

+

The release of Wily Werewolf brings updates for all of them, but perhaps none as big or impressive as Kubuntu 15.10. Kubuntu has always been one of the nicer KDE-based distros, but this release is particularly impressive. With Kubuntu 15.04 earlier this year, Kubuntu made the leap to Plasma 5, the next generation of KDE, but things were rough around the edges in my experience. Kubuntu 15.10 adds an impressive list of bug fixes and some added UI polish that make it one of the best KDE desktops available right now (the other standout being openSUSE Leap). This update features Plasma 5.4 and KDE Applications 15.08, which means the latest set of stock KDE apps and underlying tools you can get in a KDE distro.

+ +[image="kubuntu1510-desktop.png" caption="Kubuntu 15.10 with the new Breeze KDE theme."] + +

The new Breeze desktop with its flat, colorful, high-contrast look is what KDE refers to as a modernized interface, with "reduced visual clutter throughout the workspace." For more details on what's new in Plasma 5, see Ars' earlier review.

+

Unfortunately Kubuntu 15.10 comes along with news that the lead developer of Kubuntu is leaving the project. The good news is that he'll still be actively involved in KDE, but the bad news is he made some troubling accusations about Canonical's misuse of donations as the reason for his departure. Canonical has reportedly launched an internal audit to figure out what, if anything, went wrong.

+

The other notable update among the various Ubuntu flavors is an Ubuntu MATE release intended for the Raspberry Pi 2. The lightweight MATE desktop is a natural fit for the Pi and the new tailored release makes it much easier to get it installed and up and running on your Raspberry Pi 2.

+

Unity 8

+

Despite a healthy list of new features in Unity and quite a bit of change in some of the other flavors, many, including me, feel a certain sense of disappointment with 15.10.

+

While there's something to be said for solid updates that don't rock the boat and let you keep getting work done, that's really what LTS releases were designed for. If you prize stability, stick with 14.04 (or use Debian stable). It would be nice to see Ubuntu's x.10 releases return to something a bit edgier and more experimental.

+

That said, you actually can get something very experimental in this release, something so experimental in fact that it isn't quite ready for even a .10 release, you'll need to install it yourself -- Ubuntu running Unity 8.

+

Yes, the very thing that has made Ubuntu a tad boring lately -- as all development effort has been focused on Ubuntu Mobile and the new Unity 8 desktop -- is actually relatively easy to install. It's still very buggy though, which is why it's available as an LXC container, which helps keep it fully isolated from your production machine.

+ +[image="ubuntu1510-unity-8.png" caption="Unity 8 as a log in option. This is likely the approach Canonical will take at least for the first few releases -- Unity 8 as a separate log in option."] + +

I took it for a spin and, well, here's the thing about Unity 8: it's buggy and unstable, but it's getting really close. It's possible to experience what Canonical has in mind and it actually looks pretty great.

+

The real exciting part of Unity 8 though isn't on the desktop, but on Ubuntu Mobile and Canonical's vision of "convergence". Convergence, for Canonical, means the mobile device becomes, which the addition of a larger screen monitor, a full desktop PC. To make this possible Canonical has developed Unity 8, which will bring the same underlying code base to both the desktop and mobile versions of the OS.

+

The most impressive Unity 8 demo I've seen comes from Canonical engineers, who have posted a couple of video demos of GIMP running on an Ubuntu Mobile device.

+ +[Note to eds, I can't figure out how to embed that video...] + +

The point isn't that GIMP is on your phone, that's more a novelty since the interface would be unusably small and, in the end, pointless beyond the "hey look at that" factor. The point is that you plug your phone into a monitor and all the sudden you have the full power of GIMP running on a device that fits in your pocket (and reverts to a mobile OS when you unplug it from the monitor). It sounds good and now, for the first time, it actually looks believably good.

+

What you can see in the desktop version is the opposite portion of Canonical's convergence, mobile applications scaling up to run on the desktop device, along with some new visual splashes like the 3D app switcher and flatter visual look showcased in the video below.

+

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiw1XDVopjc

+

It won't be for everyone, but if you're underwhelmed by iOS and Android's attempts to provide a desktop-quality experience with the applications you already use, Ubuntu Mobile is looking like it might finally deliver the goods.

+

Ubuntu Mobile is also the reason you have boring .10 releases like Wily Werewolf. Canonical is getting its ducks in a row for Unity 8. There will be a day soon when the minor, perhaps unremarkable releases like 15.10 are a thing of long lost memories. There will no doubt be growing pains involved with the transition to Unity 8.

+

If you want a desktop that's reliable, solid, but also pushing things forward, which is to say if you want the experience Unity has been providing for the last three, perhaps even four releases, then you will likely want to get the 16.04 LTS release coming next April. It will likely be the last Unity 7 release.

+

If you want to live on the edge, Unity 8 will likely be, if not the default, at least only a login screen away come this time next year. In the mean time enjoy your quiet days of Ubuntu 15.10.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1510.txt b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1510.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f95cd82 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1510.txt @@ -0,0 +1,91 @@ +Canonical recently released Ubuntu 15.10, nicknamed Wily Werewolf. + +In the past the Autumn releases of Ubuntu Linux have often been more experimental affairs and warranted some caution when updating. They weren't quite update-at-your-own risk rough, but they were often packed full of new features that were not fully baked. + +Whereas Spring .04 releases tended to be stable (and every two years packaged as Long Term Support releases), Autumn was a time to experiment. + +For example, the now shuttered Ubuntu One first debuted in 9.10. The Unity desktop became a default in 11.10 and the controversial Amazon search results in the Unity Dash made their debut in 12.10. + +Unfortunately -- or fortunately, depending on how you feel about desktop experiments -- that's not a case with Wily Werewolf. + +There are new features worth updating for in this release, but on the whole this is Canonical refining what it has already created, getting ready for the next LTS release (Ubuntu 16.04, due toward the end of April 2016), which will also likely be the last LTS release based on Unity 7. + +By this time next year 16.10 will be back to the experimental new features with an entirely different beast on the desktop -- Unity 8, Mir and other big changes will return next year's .10 release to the kind of playground status of the past. + +More on Unity 8 and what it means for Ubuntu in a minute. But first, Ubuntu 15.10, which might be the very last of its kind for a little while -- a stable, welcome update that doesn't require you to radically change your workflow or habits. + +## Ubuntu 15.10 + +[image="ubuntu1510-desktop.png" caption="Visually Ubuntu 15.10 looks a lot like previous releases."] + +While Ubuntu 15.10 is unlikely to win any awards for innovation there are some very useful new features in the kernel update, a couple of UI changes for Unity and plenty of application updates, all of which make it well worth the update. + +The most notable UI changes in this release are the scrollbars, which are now pulled straight from GNOME 3. Canonical has abandoned its little disappearing "handle"-style scrollbars in favor of GNOME's defaults (which have improved considerably since Ubuntu started work on its own version). The change appears to based more on [code maintenance](https://plus.google.com/+WillCooke/posts/4WnzUY2PHix) and development effort than any strong aesthetic feelings from Canonical. It would seem that writing and maintaining your own scrollbar code is more work than it's worth. The visual change is minor and solves quite a few bugs in Canonical's home-grown scrollbars, making it a win for users as well as the programmers once tasked with maintaining the old code base. + +[image="ubuntu1510-scrollbars.png" caption="The old Ubuntu-created scrollbar is on the left, the new upstream version from GNOME on the right."] + +Abandoning the homegrown scrollbars might also mean that Unity is able to integrate upstream GNOME updates faster than it has been lately. With this release most of the GNOME suite of tools that powers much of Unity have finally been updated to 3.16, though a few holdouts like GEdit remain at much older versions. + +Aside from the scrollbars, there's not a lot of visual changes to this release. Unity itself gets a slight version bump with some bug fixes and a couple new features, including a new option to drag icons out of the Dash launcher and onto your desktop. If you were really missing the ability to clutter your desktop with something other than files, well, now you can throw some application launchers in there for good measure. + +Other notable bug fixes in Unity include an annoying problem with fullscreen menu bars and the ability to access locally integrated menus -- that is, menus within the window rather than in the top bar -- on unfocussed windows. + +While those are welcome fixes, most of what's interesting in this release is not directly from Canonical. The most exiting thing in Ubuntu 15.10 is probably the updated kernel, which is now based on the upstream Linux Kernel 4.2. + +The 4.2 line brings support for for recent Radeon GPUs, as well as some new encryption options for ext4 disks. There's also support for Intel's new Broxton chips, which just might be finding their way into an Ubuntu Mobile device at some point. 15.10 also marks the first time that the new live kernel patching has been available in Ubuntu. This release also adds a new kernel for the Raspberry Pi 2. + +Linux game aficionados will be happy hear that this release ships with support for the [new Steam controller](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/10/steams-living-room-hardware-blitz-gets-off-to-a-muddy-start/4/). + +Developers get some love in this release too, with updates for Python and Ubuntu Make, Ubuntu's impressive suite of developer tools. If you're looking for a quick way to get, for example, a basic Android development environment set up, you'd be hard pressed to beat Ubuntu Make's simple `umake android` command. + +Anyone doing tech support from an Ubuntu machine will be happy to hear that Virtualbox has been updated with the latest version, which offers guest additions for Windows 10. The rest of Ubuntu's standard application suite has been updated as well, including the latest version of Firefox, Thunderbird, Chromium and more. Of particular note is LibreOffice, which has been upgraded to version 5, a major update for LibreOffice users. + +Ubuntu 15.10 has been rock solid in my testing. That said, I have had some trouble installing 15.10 via Chrubuntu on a new Dell 13 Chromebook, primarily related to trackpad drivers. Chrubuntu is a bit of a hack though, it's probably not fair to hold it against Ubuntu. Otherwise 15.10 has been very stable and wonderful to use on all the devices I've tested it on -- especially my old Eeepc where Ubuntu offers something that gets very little press -- UI scaling. Typically HiDPI screens get all the attention, and indeed Unity looks great in high res, but Ubuntu also has some great scaling in the opposite direction. Using the slider under Settings >> displays it's possible to downsize the entire UI, which gains you some precious real estate on smaller screens. It doesn't work everywhere -- Firefox is my most-used exception -- but it does make it easy to reclaim a few pixels on small screens. + +## Ubuntu 15.10 Flavors + +When most people refer to Ubuntu they mean the Unity desktop version, but there are half a dozen other official Ubuntu "flavors" using just about every popular desktop available for Linux. + +The release of Wily Werewolf brings updates for all of them, but perhaps none as big or impressive as Kubuntu 15.10. Kubuntu has always been one of the nicer KDE-based distros, but this release is particularly impressive. With Kubuntu 15.04 earlier this year, Kubuntu made the leap to Plasma 5, the next generation of KDE, but things were rough around the edges in my experience. Kubuntu 15.10 adds an impressive list of bug fixes and some added UI polish that make it one of the best KDE desktops available right now (the other standout being openSUSE Leap). This update features Plasma 5.4 and KDE Applications 15.08, which means the latest set of stock KDE apps and underlying tools you can get in a KDE distro. + +[image="kubuntu1510-desktop.png" caption="Kubuntu 15.10 with the new Breeze KDE theme."] + +The new Breeze desktop with its flat, colorful, high-contrast look is what KDE refers to as a modernized interface, with "reduced visual clutter throughout the workspace." For more details on what's new in Plasma 5, see Ars' [earlier review](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/17/kde-plasma-5-for-those-linux-users-undecided-on-the-kernels-future/). + +Unfortunately Kubuntu 15.10 comes along with news that the lead developer of Kubuntu is [leaving the project](https://kubuntu.org/news/jonathan-riddell-stands-down-as-release-manager-of-kubuntu/). The good news is that he'll still be actively involved in KDE, but the bad news is he made some troubling accusations about Canonical's misuse of donations as the reason for his departure. Canonical has reportedly launched an internal audit to figure out what, if anything, went wrong. + +The other notable update among the various Ubuntu flavors is an Ubuntu MATE release intended for the Raspberry Pi 2. The lightweight MATE desktop is a natural fit for the Pi and the new tailored release makes it much easier to get it installed and up and running on your Raspberry Pi 2. + +## Unity 8 + +Despite a healthy list of new features in Unity and quite a bit of change in some of the other flavors, many, including me, feel a certain sense of disappointment with 15.10. + +While there's something to be said for solid updates that don't rock the boat and let you keep getting work done, that's really what LTS releases were designed for. If you prize stability, stick with 14.04 (or use Debian stable). It would be nice to see Ubuntu's x.10 releases return to something a bit edgier and more experimental. + +That said, you actually can get something very experimental in this release, something so experimental in fact that it isn't quite ready for even a .10 release, you'll need to install it yourself -- Ubuntu running Unity 8. + +Yes, the very thing that has made Ubuntu a tad boring lately -- as all development effort has been focused on Ubuntu Mobile and the new Unity 8 desktop -- is actually [relatively easy to install](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity8inLXC). It's still very buggy though, which is why it's available as an LXC container, which helps keep it fully isolated from your production machine. + +[image="ubuntu1510-unity-8.png" caption="Unity 8 as a log in option. This is likely the approach Canonical will take at least for the first few releases -- Unity 8 as a separate log in option."] + +I took it for a spin and, well, here's the thing about Unity 8: it's buggy and unstable, but it's getting really close. It's possible to experience what Canonical has in mind and it actually looks pretty great. + +The real exciting part of Unity 8 though isn't on the desktop, but on Ubuntu Mobile and Canonical's vision of "convergence". Convergence, for Canonical, means the mobile device becomes, which the addition of a larger screen monitor, a full desktop PC. To make this possible Canonical has developed Unity 8, which will bring the same underlying code base to both the desktop and mobile versions of the OS. + +The most impressive Unity 8 demo I've seen comes from Canonical engineers, who have posted a couple of [video demos of GIMP](https://plus.google.com/+MichaelHall119/posts/HBRyD8npeJk) running on an Ubuntu Mobile device. + +[Note to eds, I can't figure out how to embed that video...] + +The point isn't that GIMP is on your phone, that's more a novelty since the interface would be unusably small and, in the end, pointless beyond the "hey look at that" factor. The point is that you plug your phone into a monitor and all the sudden you have the full power of GIMP running on a device that fits in your pocket (and reverts to a mobile OS when you unplug it from the monitor). It sounds good and now, for the first time, it actually looks believably good. + +What you can see in the desktop version is the opposite portion of Canonical's convergence, mobile applications scaling up to run on the desktop device, along with some new visual splashes like the 3D app switcher and flatter visual look showcased in the video below. + +https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiw1XDVopjc + +It won't be for everyone, but if you're underwhelmed by iOS and Android's attempts to provide a desktop-quality experience with the applications you already use, Ubuntu Mobile is looking like it might finally deliver the goods. + +Ubuntu Mobile is also the reason you have boring .10 releases like Wily Werewolf. Canonical is getting its ducks in a row for Unity 8. There will be a day soon when the minor, perhaps unremarkable releases like 15.10 are a thing of long lost memories. There will no doubt be growing pains involved with the transition to Unity 8. + +If you want a desktop that's reliable, solid, but also pushing things forward, which is to say if you want the experience Unity has been providing for the last three, perhaps even four releases, then you will likely want to get the 16.04 LTS release coming next April. It will likely be the last Unity 7 release. + +If you want to live on the edge, Unity 8 will likely be, if not the default, at least only a login screen away come this time next year. In the mean time enjoy your quiet days of Ubuntu 15.10. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1604review.html b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1604review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d1cd0fc --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1604review.html @@ -0,0 +1,72 @@ +

Canonical has released a new version of Ubuntu Linux, Ubuntu 16.04 or Xenial Xerus, as this release is known. Ubuntu 16.04 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release, meaning that Canonical will provide support for the next 5 years.

+

Typically Ubuntu's LTS releases tend to be conservative in nature, after all no one wants to try to support a brand new, potentially buggy piece of code for half a decade. That, combined with the experience of the last few Ubuntu releases -- which offered almost nothing in the way of new features -- and you'd be forgiven for thinking that 16.04 is possibly the most boring release to date.

+

The potential is certainly there but happily for Ubuntu users, that's not actually the case. In fact Ubuntu 16.04 is the most exciting release Canonical has put out in recent memory and possibly the best release its had to date.

+

That's good news for Ubuntu fans, but it's also good news for Canonical which has largely ignored its desktop in favor of mobile dreams. Those mobile plans are still coming, Unity 8, the Mir display serve and the "convergence" those tools will enable are still a big part of Ubuntu's future, but they aren't part of 16.04 (not in stable form anyway).

+

Instead 16.04 focuses on improvement to the desktop, through perhaps the biggest change comes from Ubuntu's experience on the server-side, namely the container packaging system Canonical calls Snap packages (more on that in a minute). The result is that, for the first time in a long time, Ubuntu's desktop release feels like an actual release rather than something it's obligated to push out every six months.

+

Ubuntu 16.04: Now With 100% Less 'Spyware'

+ +[image="ubuntu-01.jpg" caption="At first glance not much has changed in 16.04. Ubuntu's major changes are under the hood."] + +

For all the new stuff in 16.04, probably the biggest headline grabbing change in this release is actually what's not there, namely the online search results. The controversial search "feature" debuted back in the autumn of 2012 with Ubuntu 12.10. What made it controversial is that it was on by default which meant that everything you searched for in the dash was sent first to Canonical's servers, and then from there on to Canonical's partners. That alone was enough for the Free software Foundation's Richard Stallman to brand Ubuntu "spyware."

+

Even if Canonical getting a record of your search terms didn't bother you, the feature could still be annoying for its habit of returning totally irrelevant search results, and worse, often potentially NSFW results. One frequently cited example being searches of "Bra" to launch the Brasero CD burning application often also returned Amazon results for bras.

+

Canonical dug themselves an even deeper hole when it went after a site critical of the search feature for trademark violations. FixUbuntu.com, which showed users how to disable the search features, was asked to "remove Ubuntu word from you domain name and Ubuntu logo from the website." Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth later called the letter a mistake in his blog, saying, "someone at Canonical made a mistake in sending the wrong response to a trademark issue." Whatever its intentions, it merely furthered the PR disaster that was the online shopping results.

+

Now the search lens is off by default, which is good for users, but the damage it did to Canonical's image and standing in the free software world is unlikely to be undone at this point. In the end, Canonical managed to generate a tremendous amount of ill will for a feature the majority of its users didn't seem to want and which in all likelihood generated a negligible amount of profit for the company.

+

If, by chance, you found the search results helpful, you can turn them back on in 16.04 by heading to the system settings app.

+

What's new in Ubuntu 16.04

+

Perhaps the biggest change for Users upgrading from Ubuntu's previous LTS release -- which is two years old now -- is that Ubuntu now uses the systemd init system rather than its homegrown init, Upstart. As with several of Ubuntu's attempts to go its own way, it has since abandoned its efforts in favor of upstream tools. In this case the work of stripping systemd out of Debian just to put in Upstart was deemed more effort than it was worth.

+

For most users systemd will be old news, but anyone who sticks with LTS release, well, one of the last ways to avoid systemd is now gone.

+

In practical terms the move from Upstart to systemd is not particularly difficult, certainly nothing like upgrading straight from an older init system like System V. Still, it is a significant change to be aware of, particularly on servers where Ubuntu's LTS release are incredibly popular.

+

A more visual change in 16.04 is ability to move the Unity launcher to the bottom of the screen. This long requested feature has actually been possible via third-party tools for some time, but there were always some inconsistencies and odd behavior. Thanks to the work of the Ubuntu Kylin developers, it's now an officially sanctioned option (in fact it's the default layout for Ubuntu Kylin, the official Chinese version of Ubuntu).

+ +[image="ubuntu-02.jpg" caption="Ubuntu with the launcher along the bottom of the screen."] + +

That said, it does still require installing the dconf editor and diving into the options a bit to turn it on. Once you've installed dconf-editor, navigate to com > canonical > unity > launcher > launcher-position to find the option to switch the launcher position (alternately, the third party Unity-tweak-tool supports it as well).

+

Systemd isn't the only example of an upstream project replacing one of Canonical's own, the Ubuntu Software Center sees a similar makeover, though in this case the replacement is a bit closer -- GNOME Software.

+ +[image="ubuntu-03.jpg" caption="Ubuntu's new Software Center comes courtesy of GNOME Software."] + + +[image="ubuntu-04.jpg" caption="The new Software Center retains the familiar feature details, along with user ratings and reviews."] + +

The Ubuntu Software Center has been largely abandoned for some time. GNOME on the other hand has been pouring considerable effort into its own software app so the move makes sense for Ubuntu. It's just upstream and it's flexible enough that Canonical can customize it, but doesn't have to maintain it directly. If you're already familiar with both apps the first thing you'll notice is that Canonical appears to have just mashed the two together. The result is not, to my eye, quite as nice as GNOME Software on its own, but it does bring in all the reviews and content of the old Ubuntu Software Center (which incidentally, is still in the repos if you want it).

+

Ubuntu's version of GNOME Software also gets some of the nice new upstream features like support for firmware updates via the Software Center. Provided your firmware is available via the Linux Vendor Firmware Service you'll be able to update your devices with a single click in the Software Center.

+

If you eschew graphical software apps for the simplicity of the command line, be aware that Ubuntu 16.04 supports the simpler apt command alongside apt-get in addition to marginally less typing, apt nicely unifies a bunch of apt- commands with better documentation and support for progress bars.

+

Snap Packages

+

Ubuntu 16.04's biggest change looks quite innocuous at first glance. There's nothing graphical to see, but the release brings Ubuntu Snappy to the desktop and with it the possibility to completely change the way you install and maintain software on Ubuntu (and Linux more broadly).

+

Ubuntu server users have likely already encountered Snappy through the distro's various container deployment options, but this is the first time Snappy has been integrated into the desktop.

+

To understand what Snap applications are, it helps to first understand how applications are installed in Ubuntu. When you select an application to install in the Software Center it doesn't just install itself, it also installs other applications (in this context, applications are generally referred to as "packages") that it needs.

+

Some applications you install might need only one or two other package to work. Others may use hundreds. Application packaging systems like APT do a reasonably good job at working out which additional packages you need along with the application you actually want so that you don't have to worry about. APT also does a reasonably good job of making sure that you get the right version of the packages in question. But what happens when one application you have installed needs package X version 1.1 and another needs package X version 1.2? With APT you've got yourself a potentially system breaking problem.

+

Snap packages solve this problem by creating self-contained packages. With Snap packages applications are installed in their own container and all the third-party applications are installed with them so that there are no version conflicts. Snap packages are also smart enough to not install a package more than once so applications installed via Snappy don't take anymore disk space than regular applications.

+

You're probably wondering why this matters and how it's going to change Ubuntu for the better. The answer is that Snap packages make it possible to install the latest and greatest software without worry about whether or not Ubuntu has updated every component package you might need for the latest and greatest version of your favorite app. For example I like to run the bleeding edge release of Darktable, which is typically at least a point version ahead of what's in the Ubuntu repos. Right now there's a deb maintained by a Darktable developer who does his best to make sure nothing breaks, but essentially one person putting in ton of effort is all that keeps Darktable from potentially breaking the rest of my system. It works, I've never had a problem, but it's hardly idea.

+

With Snap packages there would be no danger of accidentally breaking your system with an application update because the application is completely self-contained.

+

This means you could run a very conservative release, like an Ubuntu LTS and still have the latest versions of all your favorite applications. It's the best of both worlds -- a stable system running the latest userland software.

+

All of this is supported in Ubuntu 16.04, but so far there are very few Snappy versions of desktop applications available. That will likely change in the very near future. Mozilla has already announced that Firefox will be available as a Snap package very soon (web browsers are a great use case for Snap packages since they update frequently) and expect other big projects to likewise embrace Snap package now that 16.04 has launched.

+

As nice as Snap package is, it does have one problem -- once again Canonical is rolling its own solution when there are several upstream possibilities it could have elected to use instead. Both GNOME's xdg-app and the cross-distro app-image system do exactly what Snap packages do, but they're not just for Ubuntu.

+

While something like Snap packages have the potential to completely change the way distros work, it remains to be seen if Snap specifically will be what ends up reaching critical mass. It's certainly possible that Snap may prove popular enough to warrant other distros incorporating it. It's also possible that there may end up being more than one way to handle self-contained packages. However, looking at Canonical's track record one is not filled with confidence. Upstart gave way to systemd, the software center gave way to GNOME Software, even simple things like scrollbars get abandoned for upstream solutions. Suffice to say that it very much remains to be seen how Snap packages end up over the long term. Even in the worst case scenario though users shouldn't have anything to worry about, if one day Ubuntu does abandon Snap in favor of another system, all the changes will likely be behind the scenes.

+

In the shorter term Snap packages should be boon to Ubuntu, allowing users to stick with a stable base system while still leaving them free to try just-released software packages without fear of wrecking the system.

+

ZFS, Kernel and Unity Updates

+

Ubuntu 16.04 is the first release to offer native support for ZFS. That said, ZFS support appears aimed primarily at server and container users. There's no option to use ZFS in the desktop installer. In fact you'll actually have to install the userland components of ZFS yourself, but once you do ZFS should work without a hitch (note that the ZFS support is 64 bit only). For full details on ZFS and how to use it with Ubuntu, check out the Ubuntu wiki.

+

Under the hood 16.04 uses the Ubuntu Linux Kernel 4.4.0-18.34, which is based on the upstream 4.4.6 Linux Kernel. There's a ton of new hardware support if you're updating from the last LTS release, of particular note is the improved support for Intel Skylake chips, which should translate to better battery life in newer laptops.

+

There's one spot of bad news in 16.04. The support for the Catalyst/fglrx video driver was dropped because it doesn't support the version of XServer Ubuntu is using. Ubuntu suggests using open source alternatives (radeon and amdgpu), if you relied on the fglrx drivers it's something to check out before you upgrade because this isn't something you can create a backport for or even just compile yourself. It simply won't work.

+

The Unity desktop gets a slew of small but welcome updates in Ubuntu 16.04 including better theme support for GNOME's client side decorations (AKA, menus in the toolbar). This makes things look a bit nicer, especially with the new GNOME apps like GNOME Calendar, which is now the default calendar app.

+

Another interesting change in Unity is the integration between the Unity launcher and the Nautilus file manager. Each item in the launcher now manages its own window. For example, if you click on the Trash icon, the Nautilus window that opens is tied to the Trash icon rather than the Nautilus icon. That means that to, for example, bring that window to the front you would click the Trash icon rather than the Nautilus icon. This can be a bit maddening if you're used to old behavior, but eventually I adjusted (I have been unable to find a way to revert to the old behavior).

+

The usual set of GNOME applications that ships with Ubuntu have been updated, though not always to the latest version available. In order to retain some file browser functionality, Nautilus remains at version 3.14. The rest of the system remains primarily at GNOME 3.18, except for newer apps like GNOME Calendar which is the latest and greatest at 3.20.

+

Ubuntu Flavors

+

The Unity desktop isn't the only way to run Ubuntu and 16.04 sees quite a few of the various Ubuntu flavors turning out impressive releases. Of particular note are Kubuntu and Ubuntu MATE.

+

Kubuntu 16.04 will mark the first time LTS users see the new KDE Plasma 5 with its completely different, flat theme. KDE users who'd like to sneak a peek even further into the future can get the KDE Neon project installed as well.

+ +[image="kubuntu.jpg" caption="Kubuntu with the new Plasma 5 Oxygen theme."] + +

Ubuntu MATE continues, despite being a relative newcomer to the Ubuntu family, to be one of the best examples of the MATE desktop available. Ubuntu MATE is in fact so new to the Ubuntu family that this is the first LTS version it has released. As with most flavors Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS comes with three years of support (rather than five).

+ +

[image="ubuntu-mate-01.jpg" caption="Ubuntu MATE's minimalist MATE desktop."]

+ +

If you're looking for a lightweight desktop for older machines, or if you just want a simple fast machine, MATE makes an excellent choice. Ubuntu MATE 16.04 even includes a MATE theme that imitates the look of the Unity desktop -- there's even an applet to move application menus into the top menu bar.

+ +

[image="ubuntu-mate-02.jpg" caption="Ubuntu MATE using the Unity-inspired Mutiny theme."]

+ +

Also of note, considering the rough-around-the-edges nature of the Unity Software Center is Ubuntu MATE's Software Boutique, possibly the best GUI software installer on any platform. Unity users take note, you can install MATE's Software Boutique in Ubuntu as well (hat tip to the Linux Action Show for pointing this out).

+

Conclusion

+

Canonical's roadmap for Ubuntu currently calls for some massive changes in the next year. The Mir display server and the Unity 8 desktop will likely arrive later this year, bringing with them another big, potentially bumpy, transition for users (note that if you're curious about it now, you can test Unity 8 in 16.04. Canonical refers to it as a "technology preview" which means it's still rather buggy).

+

Given the coming upheaval Canonical needed Ubuntu 16.04 to provide a stable perch from which less experimental users can wait out the changes. Thankfully that's exactly what it has delivered with Ubuntu 16.04.

+

In fact this might be Ubuntu's best release since the good old days of 10.04. And not only is Ubuntu 16.04 quite well done today, the support for the new Snap packages system means that updated software should continue to be available well into the future (provided the larger FOSS community adopts it, and right now there is every reason to think it will). With five years of support and Snap packages providing the latest versions of your favorite apps it conceivable that you'll have no real cause to update Ubuntu 16.04 until 2021.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1604review.txt b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1604review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f982e4e --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1604review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,116 @@ +Canonical has released a new version of Ubuntu Linux, Ubuntu 16.04 or Xenial Xerus, as this release is known. Ubuntu 16.04 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release, meaning that Canonical will provide support for the next 5 years. + +Typically Ubuntu's LTS releases tend to be conservative in nature, after all no one wants to try to support a brand new, potentially buggy piece of code for half a decade. That, combined with the experience of the last few Ubuntu releases -- which offered almost nothing in the way of new features -- and you'd be forgiven for thinking that 16.04 is possibly the most boring release to date. + +The potential is certainly there but happily for Ubuntu users, that's not actually the case. In fact Ubuntu 16.04 is the most exciting release Canonical has put out in recent memory and possibly the best release its had to date. + +That's good news for Ubuntu fans, but it's also good news for Canonical which has largely ignored its desktop in favor of mobile dreams. Those mobile plans are still coming, Unity 8, the Mir display serve and the "convergence" those tools will enable are still a big part of Ubuntu's future, but they aren't part of 16.04 (not in stable form anyway). + +Instead 16.04 focuses on improvement to the desktop, through perhaps the biggest change comes from Ubuntu's experience on the server-side, namely the container packaging system Canonical calls Snap packages (more on that in a minute). The result is that, for the first time in a long time, Ubuntu's desktop release feels like an actual release rather than something it's obligated to push out every six months. + +## Ubuntu 16.04: Now With 100% Less 'Spyware' + +[image="ubuntu-01.jpg" caption="At first glance not much has changed in 16.04. Ubuntu's major changes are under the hood."] + +For all the new stuff in 16.04, probably the biggest headline grabbing change in this release is actually what's not there, namely the online search results. The controversial search "feature" debuted back in the autumn of 2012 with Ubuntu 12.10. What made it controversial is that it was on by default which meant that everything you searched for in the dash was sent first to Canonical's servers, and then from there on to Canonical's partners. That alone was enough for the Free software Foundation's Richard Stallman to brand Ubuntu "spyware." + +Even if Canonical getting a record of your search terms didn't bother you, the feature could still be annoying for its habit of returning totally irrelevant search results, and worse, often potentially NSFW results. One frequently cited example being searches of "Bra" to launch the Brasero CD burning application often also returned Amazon results for bras. + +Canonical dug themselves an even deeper hole when it [went after a site critical of the search feature](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/canonical-abused-trademark-law-to-target-a-site-critical-of-ubuntu-privacy/) for trademark violations. FixUbuntu.com, which showed users how to disable the search features, was asked to "remove Ubuntu word from you domain name and Ubuntu logo from the website." Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth later called the letter a mistake in his blog, saying, "someone at Canonical made a mistake in sending the wrong response to a trademark issue." Whatever its intentions, it merely furthered the PR disaster that was the online shopping results. + +Now the search lens is off by default, which is good for users, but the damage it did to Canonical's image and standing in the free software world is unlikely to be undone at this point. In the end, Canonical managed to generate a tremendous amount of ill will for a feature the majority of its users didn't seem to want and which in all likelihood generated a negligible amount of profit for the company. + +If, by chance, you found the search results helpful, you can turn them back on in 16.04 by heading to the system settings app. + +## What's new in Ubuntu 16.04 + +Perhaps the biggest change for Users upgrading from Ubuntu's previous LTS release -- which is two years old now -- is that Ubuntu now uses the systemd init system rather than its homegrown init, Upstart. As with several of Ubuntu's attempts to go its own way, it has since abandoned its efforts in favor of upstream tools. In this case the work of stripping systemd out of Debian just to put in Upstart was deemed more effort than it was worth. + +For most users systemd will be old news, but anyone who sticks with LTS release, well, one of the last ways to avoid systemd is now gone. + +In practical terms the move from Upstart to systemd is not particularly difficult, certainly nothing like upgrading straight from an older init system like System V. Still, it is a significant change to be aware of, particularly on servers where Ubuntu's LTS release are incredibly popular. + +A more visual change in 16.04 is ability to move the Unity launcher to the bottom of the screen. This long requested feature has actually been possible via third-party tools for some time, but there were always some inconsistencies and odd behavior. Thanks to the work of the Ubuntu Kylin developers, it's now an officially sanctioned option (in fact it's the default layout for Ubuntu Kylin, the official Chinese version of Ubuntu). + +[image="ubuntu-02.jpg" caption="Ubuntu with the launcher along the bottom of the screen."] + +That said, it does still require installing the dconf editor and diving into the options a bit to turn it on. Once you've installed dconf-editor, navigate to com > canonical > unity > launcher > launcher-position to find the option to switch the launcher position (alternately, the third party Unity-tweak-tool supports it as well). + +Systemd isn't the only example of an upstream project replacing one of Canonical's own, the Ubuntu Software Center sees a similar makeover, though in this case the replacement is a bit closer -- GNOME Software. + +[image="ubuntu-03.jpg" caption="Ubuntu's new Software Center comes courtesy of GNOME Software."] + +[image="ubuntu-04.jpg" caption="The new Software Center retains the familiar feature details, along with user ratings and reviews."] + +The Ubuntu Software Center has been largely abandoned for some time. GNOME on the other hand has been pouring considerable effort into its own software app so the move makes sense for Ubuntu. It's just upstream and it's flexible enough that Canonical can customize it, but doesn't have to maintain it directly. If you're already familiar with both apps the first thing you'll notice is that Canonical appears to have just mashed the two together. The result is not, to my eye, quite as nice as GNOME Software on its own, but it does bring in all the reviews and content of the old Ubuntu Software Center (which incidentally, is still in the repos if you want it). + +Ubuntu's version of GNOME Software also gets some of the nice new upstream features like support for firmware updates via the Software Center. Provided your firmware is available via the Linux Vendor Firmware Service you'll be able to update your devices with a single click in the Software Center. + +If you eschew graphical software apps for the simplicity of the command line, be aware that Ubuntu 16.04 supports the simpler `apt` command alongside `apt-get` in addition to marginally less typing, apt nicely unifies a bunch of apt- commands with better documentation and support for progress bars. + +## Snap Packages + +Ubuntu 16.04's biggest change looks quite innocuous at first glance. There's nothing graphical to see, but the release brings Ubuntu Snappy to the desktop and with it the possibility to completely change the way you install and maintain software on Ubuntu (and Linux more broadly). + +Ubuntu server users have likely already encountered Snappy through the distro's various container deployment options, but this is the first time Snappy has been integrated into the desktop. + +To understand what Snap applications are, it helps to first understand how applications are installed in Ubuntu. When you select an application to install in the Software Center it doesn't just install itself, it also installs other applications (in this context, applications are generally referred to as "packages") that it needs. + +Some applications you install might need only one or two other package to work. Others may use hundreds. Application packaging systems like APT do a reasonably good job at working out which additional packages you need along with the application you actually want so that you don't have to worry about. APT also does a reasonably good job of making sure that you get the right version of the packages in question. But what happens when one application you have installed needs package X version 1.1 and another needs package X version 1.2? With APT you've got yourself a potentially system breaking problem. + +Snap packages solve this problem by creating self-contained packages. With Snap packages applications are installed in their own container and all the third-party applications are installed with them so that there are no version conflicts. Snap packages are also smart enough to not install a package more than once so applications installed via Snappy don't take anymore disk space than regular applications. + +You're probably wondering why this matters and how it's going to change Ubuntu for the better. The answer is that Snap packages make it possible to install the latest and greatest software without worry about whether or not Ubuntu has updated every component package you might need for the latest and greatest version of your favorite app. For example I like to run the bleeding edge release of Darktable, which is typically at least a point version ahead of what's in the Ubuntu repos. Right now there's a deb maintained by a Darktable developer who does his best to make sure nothing breaks, but essentially one person putting in ton of effort is all that keeps Darktable from potentially breaking the rest of my system. It works, I've never had a problem, but it's hardly idea. + +With Snap packages there would be no danger of accidentally breaking your system with an application update because the application is completely self-contained. + +This means you could run a very conservative release, like an Ubuntu LTS and still have the latest versions of all your favorite applications. It's the best of both worlds -- a stable system running the latest userland software. + +All of this is supported in Ubuntu 16.04, but so far there are very few Snappy versions of desktop applications available. That will likely change in the very near future. Mozilla has already announced that Firefox will be available as a Snap package very soon (web browsers are a great use case for Snap packages since they update frequently) and expect other big projects to likewise embrace Snap package now that 16.04 has launched. + +As nice as Snap package is, it does have one problem -- once again Canonical is rolling its own solution when there are several upstream possibilities it could have elected to use instead. Both GNOME's xdg-app and the cross-distro [app-image](http://appimage.org/) system do exactly what Snap packages do, but they're not just for Ubuntu. + +While something like Snap packages have the potential to completely change the way distros work, it remains to be seen if Snap specifically will be what ends up reaching critical mass. It's certainly possible that Snap may prove popular enough to warrant other distros incorporating it. It's also possible that there may end up being more than one way to handle self-contained packages. However, looking at Canonical's track record one is not filled with confidence. Upstart gave way to systemd, the software center gave way to GNOME Software, even simple things like scrollbars get abandoned for upstream solutions. Suffice to say that it very much remains to be seen how Snap packages end up over the long term. Even in the worst case scenario though users shouldn't have anything to worry about, if one day Ubuntu does abandon Snap in favor of another system, all the changes will likely be behind the scenes. + +In the shorter term Snap packages should be boon to Ubuntu, allowing users to stick with a stable base system while still leaving them free to try just-released software packages without fear of wrecking the system. + +## ZFS, Kernel and Unity Updates + +Ubuntu 16.04 is the first release to offer native support for ZFS. That said, ZFS support appears aimed primarily at server and container users. There's no option to use ZFS in the desktop installer. In fact you'll actually have to install the userland components of ZFS yourself, but once you do ZFS should work without a hitch (note that the ZFS support is 64 bit only). For full details on ZFS and how to use it with Ubuntu, check out the [Ubuntu wiki](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Reference/ZFS). + +Under the hood 16.04 uses the Ubuntu Linux Kernel 4.4.0-18.34, which is based on the upstream 4.4.6 Linux Kernel. There's a ton of new hardware support if you're updating from the last LTS release, of particular note is the improved support for Intel Skylake chips, which should translate to better battery life in newer laptops. + +There's one spot of bad news in 16.04. The support for the Catalyst/fglrx video driver was dropped because it doesn't support the version of XServer Ubuntu is using. Ubuntu suggests using open source alternatives (radeon and amdgpu), if you relied on the fglrx drivers it's something to check out before you upgrade because this isn't something you can create a backport for or even just compile yourself. It simply won't work. + +The Unity desktop gets a slew of small but welcome updates in Ubuntu 16.04 including better theme support for GNOME's client side decorations (AKA, menus in the toolbar). This makes things look a bit nicer, especially with the new GNOME apps like GNOME Calendar, which is now the default calendar app. + +Another interesting change in Unity is the integration between the Unity launcher and the Nautilus file manager. Each item in the launcher now manages its own window. For example, if you click on the Trash icon, the Nautilus window that opens is tied to the Trash icon rather than the Nautilus icon. That means that to, for example, bring that window to the front you would click the Trash icon rather than the Nautilus icon. This can be a bit maddening if you're used to old behavior, but eventually I adjusted (I have been unable to find a way to revert to the old behavior). + +The usual set of GNOME applications that ships with Ubuntu have been updated, though not always to the latest version available. In order to retain some file browser functionality, Nautilus remains at version 3.14. The rest of the system remains primarily at GNOME 3.18, except for newer apps like GNOME Calendar which is the latest and greatest at 3.20. + +## Ubuntu Flavors + +The Unity desktop isn't the only way to run Ubuntu and 16.04 sees quite a few of the various Ubuntu flavors turning out impressive releases. Of particular note are [Kubuntu](https://kubuntu.com/) and [Ubuntu MATE](https://ubuntu-mate.org/xenial/). + +Kubuntu 16.04 will mark the first time LTS users see the new KDE Plasma 5 with its completely different, flat theme. KDE users who'd like to sneak a peek even further into the future can get the [KDE Neon project](http://neon.kde.org/download) installed as well. + +[image="kubuntu.jpg" caption="Kubuntu with the new Plasma 5 Oxygen theme."] + +Ubuntu MATE continues, despite being a relative newcomer to the Ubuntu family, to be one of the best examples of the MATE desktop available. Ubuntu MATE is in fact so new to the Ubuntu family that this is the first LTS version it has released. As with most flavors Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS comes with three years of support (rather than five). + +[image="ubuntu-mate-01.jpg" caption="Ubuntu MATE's minimalist MATE desktop."] + +If you're looking for a lightweight desktop for older machines, or if you just want a simple fast machine, MATE makes an excellent choice. Ubuntu MATE 16.04 even includes a MATE theme that imitates the look of the Unity desktop -- there's even an applet to move application menus into the top menu bar. + +[image="ubuntu-mate-02.jpg" caption="Ubuntu MATE using the Unity-inspired Mutiny theme."] + +Also of note, considering the rough-around-the-edges nature of the Unity Software Center is Ubuntu MATE's Software Boutique, possibly the best GUI software installer on any platform. Unity users take note, you can install MATE's Software Boutique in Ubuntu as well (hat tip to the Linux Action Show for pointing this out). + +## Conclusion + +Canonical's roadmap for Ubuntu currently calls for some massive changes in the next year. The Mir display server and the Unity 8 desktop will likely arrive later this year, bringing with them another big, potentially bumpy, transition for users (note that if you're curious about it now, you can test Unity 8 in 16.04. Canonical refers to it as a "technology preview" which means it's still rather buggy). + +Given the coming upheaval Canonical needed Ubuntu 16.04 to provide a stable perch from which less experimental users can wait out the changes. Thankfully that's exactly what it has delivered with Ubuntu 16.04. + +In fact this might be Ubuntu's best release since the good old days of 10.04. And not only is Ubuntu 16.04 quite well done today, the support for the new Snap packages system means that updated software should continue to be available well into the future (provided the larger FOSS community adopts it, and right now there is every reason to think it will). With five years of support and Snap packages providing the latest versions of your favorite apps it conceivable that you'll have no real cause to update Ubuntu 16.04 until 2021. + diff --git a/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1610.html b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1610.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3e9275c --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1610.html @@ -0,0 +1,52 @@ +

Canonical recently rolled out Ubuntu 16.10, a less experimental, but worthwhile, update to its flagship Unity-based desktop.

+

There's plenty in Ubuntu 16.10 that makes it worth the upgrade, though none of it is groundbreaking. Rather this release sees Canonical continuing to refine and bug-fix what at this point has become on the fastest, stablest, least-likely-to-completely-change-between-point-releases of the three major "modern" Linux desktops.

+

Still, while the Unity 7.5 desktop offers stability and speed today, it's not long for this world. Purportedly not long for this world anyway. Ubuntu 16.10 is the seventh release since the fabled Unity 8 and its accompanying Mir display server were announced. And there's still no Unity 8 and Mir.

+

In Canonical's defense, the competing display server project, Wayland, hasn't exactly taken the world by storm just yet. Wayland will likely be the default for the Fedora Project's next release, Fedora 25. The difference is that GNOME 3 isn't tied to Wayland and has been cranking out impressive releases for some time now while Unity 7.5 is feeling, well, a bit dated.

+

It's worth noting that Ubuntu 16.10 is the first official release of Ubuntu to ship with Unity 8 and Mir available. To try out a Unity 8 session, just click the Ubuntu symbol next to your username when you log in.

+ +[image="ubuntu1610-Unity8.jpg" caption="Selecting the Unity 8 session from the login screen is easy, actually running it depends on your hardware. To preview Unity 8 running on an NVidia card, you can simulate the crash cycle by just closing your eyes. Now open them again and look at the login screen."] + +

Good luck getting Unity 8 to run though. Older hardware isn't up to the task and most new NVidia-based hardware won't work either. For this review I used both a Dell XPS and System 76 Oryx Pro and neither one of these very modern, well-specced pieces of hardware can successfully boot to Unity 8. Most disappointing, those accounts I've seen of people who can get Unity 8 running (like this video) show a streamlined Unity interface with... a new set of icons and some UI elements reminiscent of GNOME Shell. It's banal enough -- at least the skin deep look we can get right now -- to make you wonder what the fuss is about.

+

But of course the fuss is about "convergence". The fuss is about the purported future in which you plug your phone into a monitor and it turns into a full desktop computing experience. I've started to feel like Fox Mulder waiting for Unity 8. I want to believe. I really do, but I've started to think convergence is about as likely as the zombie apocalypse and that the truth, the reality we'll end up with, will be somewhere below Canonical's fantasies of do anything phones and flesh eating updates that install Windows instead of Linux.

+

Which is to say Unity 8 isn't here yet and you should probably stop holding your breath waiting for it arrive.

+

In the mean time Canonical is shipping a very nice desktop operating system that's fast, stable and has fixed most of the issues that plagued the last release, which was supposed to be the Long Term Support release. If it were me, I'd much rather support Ubuntu 16.10 for five years than 16.04, but of course most of what's great about 16.10 will be backported to 16.04 as well at some point. So if you were bitten by 16.04, but not bitten hard enough to want to get off the LTS bandwagon then sit tight, backports are on the way.

+

Kernel 4.8

+

The biggest and best news to arrive with 16.10 is probably the move to Linux kernel 4.8. While earlier this year I called kernel 4.6 one of the best to come along in years (paraphrasing Linux Torvalds), 4.8 is a significant upgrade for the additional hardware support. There are three notable developments in 4.8, improved Skylake support, better support for NVidia Pascal and support for the raspberry pi 3.

+

Skylake has been a very hit or miss series of chips in both Linux and Windows, though it seems particularly prone to problems in Linux. Kernel 4.8 fixes a Skylake power management bug that can crash your system and seems to generally be much more stable than earlier releases. I still occasionally experienced a bug with Chromium and YouTube both on Ubuntu and Arch running 4.8, but otherwise 4.8 has solved all the problems I've noticed on Skylake machines.

+

Nvidia Pascal cards get some love in this update as well. The new support applies to the open-source Nouveau driver, and it's far from complete, but it's a start. I'd still suggest sticking with Nvidia's proprietary drivers for now, but at least Nouveau support is in the works.

+

The Raspberry Pi 3 support is good news for anyone looking to get Ubuntu installed. Previously Linux kernels had to be patched to work with the Raspberry Pi 3, which in practical terms means you needed the Debian patched Raspbian, but now RP3 support native to the Linux kernel, any distro should run just fine, provided you turn off any graphics-intensive UI.

+

There are also a couple of more universal improvements to ACPI low power mode, which might squeeze a few more minutes out of your laptop battery, and some big improvements to USB camera and HDMI device capture, which will be welcome to those of you editing video in Linux.

+

Unity 7.5

+ +[image="ubuntu1610-desktop.jpg" caption="At first glance not much has changed in 16.10. The wallpaper is slightly differnt, but most of Ubuntu's changes this time around are under the hood."] + +

The most noticeable difference in 16.10's Unity desktop is the speed improvement. Unity is just plain fast. Applications launch quickly, windows minimize quickly, suspend resumes quickly, even boot time is minimal.

+

This release also sees some significant updates to the GNOME components and applications that Unity depends on, bringing most of the GNOME stack up to version 3.20 (a couple appear to be at GNOME 3.22, which is downright cutting edge by Ubuntu's backporting standards). Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the Nautilus file browser, which gains the new search filters, progress indicator and icon size control that GNOME users have enjoyed for some time now.

+

In Ubuntu the best of these new features is the greatly improved search features, which are not only much faster, but also allow you to chain filters together. Files, as Nautilus is known these days, also comes with a much more compact preferences dialog, which offers new settings for showing the permanent delete and create symbolic link buttons.

+ +[image="ubuntu1610-files-search.jpg" caption="Searching for files using GNOME 3.20's new file search filtering tool."] + + +

Most of the rest of the standard GNOME-based Unity application stack has been updated to the latest version. LibreOffice has been updated to 5.2, Firefox is at 49. Another under the hood change that some users may be pleasantly surprised by: the move to GTK3 apps (when available). LibreOffice is one example of this and it looks much better than previous releases. On the other hand this could end up breaking some themes, so if you're very attached to some customized Unity theme I highly recommend testing it with 16.10 in a virtual machine before you commit to upgrading.

+

Speaking of virtual machines, Ubuntu 16.10 is noticeably faster in VMs than previous releases. This is primarily due to the new Unity Low Graphics Mode, which tones down the fade effects and transparency in favor of faster rendering times.

+

Unfortunately one place Unity seems to lag behind GNOME is detecting HiDPI screens. While 16.10 has excellent HiDPI support, it never detected my screens. I had to manually turn on scaling, which is a minor point to be sure, but a new user who doesn't know that they need to turn on dpi scaling might be quite lost, staring at tiny text on a 4k monitor. It's worth noting that Unity did successfully detect that my Virtualbox install was using a HiDPI screen (on the same hardware where, when installed to disk, it did not).

+

Also worth noting, systemd is now used for user sessions. Previous releases (and this one) used systemd for system sessions, but not user sessions. Upstart, Ubuntu's previous session manager, is still around for Unity and some indicators, but these too are in the process of being migrated to systemd. Soon it will be just systemd turtles all the way down.

+

While there hasn't been much done to the Ubuntu Software Center in this release, there are some better search tools available for the nascent Snap packages system. I still find the easiest way to find Snap packages is with the command line tool, e.g. "snap find appname", but a fair number of Snap packages do turn up in the Ubuntu Software Center. Despite the promise of Snap packages -- installing apps without worry about dependencies being probably the biggest win for end users -- developers do not appear to be rushing into Snaps. There's Snap versions of popular apps like LibreOffice and the graphics tool Krita, as well as other, smaller projects, but there are still plenty of issues with Snap apps and far too few Snaps to get too excited at this point.

+ + +[image="ubuntu1610-software-app.jpg" caption="Search for Snap packages in the Software app kinda works, but you're better off using the command line tool 'snap search packag-name'."] + +

It may well be that app developers are waiting a bit to see which of the container-meets-package formats will end up rising to the top as it were. Ubuntu's Snaps are more or less the same (conceptually anyway) as Flatpak packages, which grew out of a Red Hat led effort.

+

Stability and Performance

+

Despite feeling a bit faster, Ubuntu 16.10 was a bit more resource heavy than its LTS predecessor. I found that idle performance for 16.10 was nearly identical to 16.04, though 16.10 was using about 25 percent more RAM. There's better news when it comes to power use though. Using the powerstat application (developed by an Ubuntu engineer Colin King) with brightness at full, Wifi on and bluetooth off, I found 16.10 used roughly 10 percent less energy. At least some of that improvement may be due to the aforementioned kernel power management improvements though. In other words, once it's backported to 16.04 power consumption may be much closer, but in the mean time, 10 percent is a significant improvement.

+

One place I found Ubuntu 16.10 a giant leap ahead of 16.04 was stability and bugs. Generally this is the opposite of what I would expect, Ubuntu's October releases tend to more experimental, a place for developers to try reasonably stable new ideas that might still have a bug or two. Unfortunately I found 16.04 to be quite buggy -- which could have been related the Skylake issues upstream from Ubuntu itself -- as released, though things have settled down a bit now.

+

With 16.10 all my trackpad issues and X session crashes have vanished (save the aforementioned Chromium/YouTube bug). Once again the majority of the stability fixes will likely be backported to 16.04, but if any of these or other bugs have bitten you with 16.04 it might be worth making the leap to 16.10 to see if that improves your experience.

+

Flavors

+

Unity is the flagship Ubuntu release, but by no means the only way to enjoy Ubuntu. The list of improvements in 16.10 for Ubuntu's various flavors is beyond the scope of a short review like this, but there are two releases in particular that deserve mention. The first is not technically a flavor, but it's already the most used version of Ubuntu out there -- the server edition.

+

Ubuntu 16.10 includes the latest OpenStack release, dubbed Newton, as well as updated versions of OpenStack's various components. Again, this will also be available to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users as well, so there's no need to move your production server off the purportedly more stable LTS release just to get the latest version of OpenStack. You might want to give it some thought whether you want to upgrade at all give what a headache it can be. Even the Ubuntu release notes offer a warning that "upgrading an OpenStack deployment is a non-trivial process and care should be taken to plan and test upgrade procedures which will be specific to each OpenStack deployment". But really, the cloud makes everything so simple right?

+

All of Ubuntu's various flavors have updates for 16.10. Ubuntu GNOME has migrated some applications to GNOME 3.22, though the core system components like gnome-shell, gnome-control-center and nautilus are still at 3.20. Kubuntu 16.10 has a new version of Plasma 5 and updates for the stock KDE applications.

+

Ubuntu MATE has turned out another great update and is notable for being the first distro to ship MATE 1.16. The big news in MATE 1.16 is full GTK3+ support. The move to GTK3+ is a big one and smoothes out many of the graphical rough edges of past releases. The HiDPI support -- one of the big benefits of the move the GTK3+ -- is still a work in progress though. I was able to getting working pretty well in a virtual machine, but on the hardware site it didn't work. Developer Martin Wimpress says that HiDPI support will be an area of focus for Ubuntu MATE 17.04. Still, even without full HiDPI support, Ubuntu MATE feels like what Ubuntu would have become if the Unity interface had never come along. In that sense it's nice to know that if you don't like Unity for some reason, you can still use Ubuntu just like you used to, they've just added the word MATE to the name.

+

Conclusion

+

For all its improvements, Ubuntu 16.10 is not a huge update. It does have all the benefits of kernel 4.8, so if you had issues with 16.04 I would definitely suggest upgrading. However, most of the bug fixes and other speed and stability improvements will be backported to 16.04 as well, though you'll have to wait a bit longer.

+

If you want to experiment with Unity 8, then 16.10 is well worth the upgrade, just make sure you have a graphics card and drivers that Mir supports before you dive in. Also be forewarned that even if you get Unity 8 running, most applications won't install. It really is very much experimental still.

+

While it's been a welcome improvement over 16.04 for me (mostly due to hardware issues with 16.04), Ubuntu 16.10 still feels very much like Ubuntu is in a holding pattern, waiting for Unity 8 to mature, or at least become stable enough to use for more than a two minute screen capture video. While Ubuntu's planned future looks bright -- combining Snap packages, Mir and Unity 8 would make for an impressive system and if it can realize its vision of convergence, Canonical may really be on to something. Unfortunately that future feels no closer than it did this time last year.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1610.txt b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1610.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d6d1787 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1610.txt @@ -0,0 +1,75 @@ +Canonical recently rolled out Ubuntu 16.10, a less experimental, but worthwhile, update to its flagship Unity-based desktop. + +There's plenty in Ubuntu 16.10 that makes it worth the upgrade, though none of it is groundbreaking. Rather this release sees Canonical continuing to refine and bug-fix what at this point has become on the fastest, stablest, least-likely-to-completely-change-between-point-releases of the three major "modern" Linux desktops. + +Still, while the Unity 7.5 desktop offers stability and speed today, it's not long for this world. Purportedly not long for this world anyway. Ubuntu 16.10 is the seventh release since the fabled Unity 8 and its accompanying Mir display server were announced. And there's still no Unity 8 and Mir. + +In Canonical's defense, the competing display server project, Wayland, hasn't exactly taken the world by storm just yet. Wayland will likely [be the default for the Fedora Project's](https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-release-fedora-25-beta/) next release, Fedora 25. The difference is that GNOME 3 isn't tied to Wayland and has been cranking out impressive releases for some time now while Unity 7.5 is feeling, well, a bit dated. + +It's worth noting that Ubuntu 16.10 is the first official release of Ubuntu to ship with Unity 8 and Mir available. To try out a Unity 8 session, just click the Ubuntu symbol next to your username when you log in. + +Good luck getting Unity 8 to run though. Older hardware isn't up to the task and most new NVidia-based hardware won't work either. For this review I used both a Dell XPS and System 76 Oryx Pro and neither one of these very modern, well-specced pieces of hardware can successfully boot to Unity 8. Most disappointing, those accounts I've seen of people who can get Unity 8 running (like [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3_QK3soYw8)) show a streamlined Unity interface with... a new set of icons and some UI elements reminiscent of GNOME Shell. It's banal enough -- at least the skin deep look we can get right now -- to make you wonder what the fuss is about. + +But of course the fuss is about "convergence". The fuss is about the purported future in which you plug your phone into a monitor and it turns into a full desktop computing experience. I've started to feel like Fox Mulder waiting for Unity 8. I want to believe. I really do, but I've started to think convergence is about as likely as the zombie apocalypse and that the truth, the reality we'll end up with, will be somewhere below Canonical's fantasies of do anything phones and flesh eating updates that install Windows instead of Linux. + +Which is to say Unity 8 isn't here yet and you should probably stop holding your breath waiting for it arrive. + +In the mean time Canonical is shipping a very nice desktop operating system that's fast, stable and has fixed most of the issues that plagued the last release, which was supposed to be the Long Term Support release. If it were me, I'd much rather support Ubuntu 16.10 for five years than 16.04, but of course most of what's great about 16.10 will be backported to 16.04 as well at some point. So if you were bitten by 16.04, but not bitten hard enough to want to get off the LTS bandwagon then sit tight, backports are on the way. + +## Kernel 4.8 + +The biggest and best news to arrive with 16.10 is probably the move to Linux kernel 4.8. While earlier this year I called kernel 4.6 one of the best to come along in years (paraphrasing Linux Torvalds), 4.8 is a significant upgrade for the additional hardware support. There are three notable developments in 4.8, improved Skylake support, better support for NVidia Pascal and support for the raspberry pi 3. + +Skylake has been a very hit or miss series of chips in both Linux and Windows, though it seems particularly prone to problems in Linux. Kernel 4.8 fixes a Skylake power management bug that can crash your system and seems to generally be much more stable than earlier releases. I still occasionally experienced a bug with Chromium and YouTube both on Ubuntu and Arch running 4.8, but otherwise 4.8 has solved all the problems I've noticed on Skylake machines. + +Nvidia Pascal cards get some love in this update as well. The new support applies to the open-source Nouveau driver, and it's far from complete, but it's a start. I'd still suggest sticking with Nvidia's proprietary drivers for now, but at least Nouveau support is in the works. + +The Raspberry Pi 3 support is good news for anyone looking to get Ubuntu installed. Previously Linux kernels had to be patched to work with the Raspberry Pi 3, which in practical terms means you needed the Debian patched Raspbian, but now RP3 support native to the Linux kernel, any distro should run just fine, provided you turn off any graphics-intensive UI. + +There are also a couple of more universal improvements to ACPI low power mode, which might squeeze a few more minutes out of your laptop battery, and some big improvements to USB camera and HDMI device capture, which will be welcome to those of you editing video in Linux. + +## Unity 7.5 + +The most noticeable difference in 16.10's Unity desktop is the speed improvement. Unity is just plain fast. Applications launch quickly, windows minimize quickly, suspend resumes quickly, even boot time is minimal. + +This release also sees some significant updates to the GNOME components and applications that Unity depends on, bringing most of the GNOME stack up to version 3.20 (a couple appear to be at GNOME 3.22, which is downright cutting edge by Ubuntu's backporting standards). Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the Nautilus file browser, which gains the new search filters, progress indicator and icon size control that GNOME users have enjoyed for some time now. + +In Ubuntu the best of these new features is the greatly improved search features, which are not only much faster, but also allow you to chain filters together. Files, as Nautilus is known these days, also comes with a much more compact preferences dialog, which offers new settings for showing the permanent delete and create symbolic link buttons. + +Most of the rest of the standard GNOME-based Unity application stack has been updated to the latest version. LibreOffice has been updated to 5.2, Firefox is at 49. Another under the hood change that some users may be pleasantly surprised by: the move to GTK3 apps (when available). LibreOffice is one example of this and it looks much better than previous releases. On the other hand this could end up breaking some themes, so if you're very attached to some customized Unity theme I highly recommend testing it with 16.10 in a virtual machine before you commit to upgrading. + +Speaking of virtual machines, Ubuntu 16.10 is noticeably faster in VMs than previous releases. This is primarily due to the new Unity Low Graphics Mode, which tones down the fade effects and transparency in favor of faster rendering times. + +Unfortunately one place Unity seems to lag behind GNOME is detecting HiDPI screens. While 16.10 has excellent HiDPI support, it never detected my screens. I had to manually turn on scaling, which is a minor point to be sure, but a new user who doesn't know that they need to turn on dpi scaling might be quite lost, staring at tiny text on a 4k monitor. It's worth noting that Unity did successfully detect that my Virtualbox install was using a HiDPI screen (on the same hardware where, when installed to disk, it did not). + +Also worth noting, systemd is now used for user sessions. Previous releases (and this one) used systemd for system sessions, but not user sessions. Upstart, Ubuntu's previous session manager, is still around for Unity and some indicators, but these too are in the process of being migrated to systemd. Soon it will be just systemd turtles all the way down. + +While there hasn't been much done to the Ubuntu Software Center in this release, there are some better search tools available for the nascent Snap packages system. I still find the easiest way to find Snap packages is with the command line tool, e.g. "snap find appname", but a fair number of Snap packages do turn up in the Ubuntu Software Center. Despite the promise of Snap packages -- installing apps without worry about dependencies being probably the biggest win for end users -- developers do not appear to be rushing into Snaps. There's Snap versions of popular apps like LibreOffice and the graphics tool Krita, as well as other, smaller projects, but there are still plenty of issues with Snap apps and far too few Snaps to get too excited at this point. + +It may well be that app developers are waiting a bit to see which of the container-meets-package formats will end up rising to the top as it were. Ubuntu's Snaps are more or less the same (conceptually anyway) as [Flatpak](http://flatpak.org/) packages, which grew out of a Red Hat led effort. + +## Stability and Performance + +Despite feeling a bit faster, Ubuntu 16.10 was a bit more resource heavy than its LTS predecessor. I found that idle performance for 16.10 was nearly identical to 16.04, though 16.10 was using about 25 percent more RAM. There's better news when it comes to power use though. Using the powerstat application (developed by an Ubuntu engineer Colin King) with brightness at full, Wifi on and bluetooth off, I found 16.10 used roughly 10 percent less energy. At least some of that improvement may be due to the aforementioned kernel power management improvements though. In other words, once it's backported to 16.04 power consumption may be much closer, but in the mean time, 10 percent is a significant improvement. + +One place I found Ubuntu 16.10 a giant leap ahead of 16.04 was stability and bugs. Generally this is the opposite of what I would expect, Ubuntu's October releases tend to more experimental, a place for developers to try reasonably stable new ideas that might still have a bug or two. Unfortunately I found 16.04 to be quite buggy -- which could have been related the Skylake issues upstream from Ubuntu itself -- as released, though things have settled down a bit now. + +With 16.10 all my trackpad issues and X session crashes have vanished (save the aforementioned Chromium/YouTube bug). Once again the majority of the stability fixes will likely be backported to 16.04, but if any of these or other bugs have bitten you with 16.04 it might be worth making the leap to 16.10 to see if that improves your experience. + +## Flavors + +Unity is the flagship Ubuntu release, but by no means the only way to enjoy Ubuntu. The list of improvements in 16.10 for Ubuntu's various flavors is beyond the scope of a short review like this, but there are two releases in particular that deserve mention. The first is not technically a flavor, but it's already the most used version of Ubuntu out there -- the server edition. + +Ubuntu 16.10 includes the latest OpenStack release, dubbed Newton, as well as updated versions of OpenStack's various components. Again, this will also be available to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users as well, so there's no need to move your production server off the purportedly more stable LTS release just to get the latest version of OpenStack. You might want to give it some thought whether you want to upgrade at all give what a headache it can be. Even the Ubuntu release notes offer a warning that "upgrading an OpenStack deployment is a non-trivial process and care should be taken to plan and test upgrade procedures which will be specific to each OpenStack deployment". But really, the cloud makes everything so simple right? + +All of Ubuntu's various flavors have updates for 16.10. Ubuntu GNOME has migrated some applications to GNOME 3.22, though the core system components like gnome-shell, gnome-control-center and nautilus are still at 3.20. Kubuntu 16.10 has a new version of Plasma 5 and updates for the stock KDE applications. + +Ubuntu MATE has turned out another great update and is notable for being the first distro to ship MATE 1.16. The big news in MATE 1.16 is full GTK3+ support. If you've ever had problems getting MATE to look good on HiDPI screens, give Ubuntu MATE 16.10 a spin, it worked flawless out of the box for me. The move to GTK3+ is a big one and smoothes out many of the graphical rough edges of past releases. Ubuntu MATE feels like what Ubuntu would have become if the Unity interface had never come along. In that sense it's nice to know that if you don't like Unity for some reason, you can still use Ubuntu just like you used to, they've just added the word MATE to the name. + +## Conclusion + +For all its improvements, Ubuntu 16.10 is not a huge update. It does have all the benefits of kernel 4.8, so if you had issues with 16.04 I would definitely suggest upgrading. However, most of the bug fixes and other speed and stability improvements will be backported to 16.04 as well, though you'll have to wait a bit longer. + +If you want to experiment with Unity 8, then 16.10 is well worth the upgrade, just make sure you have a graphics card and drivers that Mir supports before you dive in. Also be forewarned that even if you get Unity 8 running, most applications won't install. It really is very much experimental still. + +While it's been a welcome improvement over 16.04 for me (mostly due to hardware issues with 16.04), Ubuntu 16.10 still feels very much like Ubuntu is in a holding pattern, waiting for Unity 8 to mature, or at least become stable enough to use for more than a two minute screen capture video. While Ubuntu's planned future looks bright -- combining Snap packages, Mir and Unity 8 would make for an impressive system and if it can realize its vision of convergence, Canonical may really be on to something. Unfortunately that future feels no closer than it did this time last year. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1704review.html b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1704review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b1411ab --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/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/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1704review.txt b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1704review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dcaf45e --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/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/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1710-review.txt b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1710-review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d4f5f15 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/ubuntu1710-review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,83 @@ +Canonical recently released Ubuntu 17.10, a major update with some significant changes coming to the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system. + +If you've been following the Linux world at all you know that early this year Canonical stopped work on its homegrown Unity desktop, Mir display server and its larger vision of "convergence" -- a unified interface for Ubuntu for phones, tablets, and desktops. + +Almost exactly six years after Ubuntu first switched from GNOME 2 to the Unity desktop the distro is back to GNOME, which makes this release more of a homecoming than an entirely new voyage. + +That said, Ubuntu 17.10, does very much feel like the start of a new voyage for Ubuntu. The last few Ubuntu desktop releases have been about as exciting as OpenSSH releases -- you know you need to update, but beyond that, no one really cares. Sure there'd be a few feature updates with each new numeric increment, perhaps some slightly more up-to-date GNOME and GTK components under the hood, but by and large the Ubuntu's Unity 7 desktop was in maintenance mode for several years. + +That period of stagnation turned Ubuntu from one of the more interesting operating systems around into just another Linux distro barely worthy of mention. + +That changes with 17.10. There are big changes yes -- an entirely new default desktop in fact -- but that's not what makes this release different. This release feels different, not because the desktop has changed, but because Ubuntu feels like it once again has a sense of focus and direction. + +Ubuntu feels like it's turned a corner. Even Canonical's letter-based naming scheme has arrived that the starting over point, A -- "Artful Aardvark" is 17.10's nickname. + +Desktop users paying close attention to Ubuntu may not like the renewed sense of focus and direction since much of the chatter, features and tools coming out of Canonical right now are geared toward the server, container and what the kids call the internet of things (IoT) releases. While it's true that that's where Canonical's bottom line lies, and without giving some attention to its paying customers there won't be a Canonical, that ignores the fact that Canonical put tremendous effort into transitioning away from Unity and building a replacement desktop out of GNOME. If Canonical really didn't care about the desktop it wouldn't have put in any effort at all. It would have been much easier to just get rid of the desktop entirely, but that's not what happened. + +In a [blog post](http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1518) announcing 17.10 Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth encourages users to "pick a desktop". "we're using GNOME", he writes, "but we’re the space where KDE and GNOME and MATE and many others come together to give users real and easy choice of desktops. And if you’re feeling boned by the lack of Unity in open source, you might want to hop onto the channel and join those who are updating Unity7 for the newest X and kernel graphics in 18.04". + +The last bit hints at the future of desktop Ubuntu. So does a recent call for community input on a new Ubuntu desktop theme. These hints point to a new Ubuntu desktop, one that's much more community-centric. Canonical got rid of most of its design team so in one sense it has no choice but to farm these things out to the community, but that's not the entire story here. This is pure conjecture on my part, but I think that Canonical's course reversal on "convergence" goes much deeper than just abandoning Unity. Canonical shows signs of also abandoning its sometimes rather rigid belief system as well. Gone are the days when feature requests were dismissed as "wont fix" simply because they conflicted with some designer's vision of how the desktop should work. + +Instead I believe that Ubuntu realized its mistake wasn't just pursuing convergence, but that convergence wasn't what its users wanted. I believe that the new Canonical, the new Ubuntu, is going to listen more closely to its community. I also think that the desktop release will eventually be spun off as a community-driven product only loosely affiliated with Canonical. Mark Shuttleworth has already said Canonical is prepping for an IPO, hence the focus on money-making uses of Ubuntu -- embedded, server, etc. If that happens the desktop will very likely slide to the side. There's plenty of prior art here, think Fedora and Red Hat, OpenSUSE and SUSE. That's not necessary at bad thing. In fact it can be a good thing. Keeping things separate allows the desktop to develop and grow largely independent of Canonical's bottom line. + +This is a major release for Ubuntu not just because it's a brand new desktop experience for users, but also because it's a preview of what's coming in the next Long Term Support release -- Ubuntu 18.04, coming April 2018. + +## Ubuntu 17.10 GNOME + +The Unity desktop is gone, rather it's "available in the archives," which is to say it's gone for all but the diehard fans looking for an obscure cause to get behind. Instead Ubuntu 17.10 boots in to GNOME Shell by default. + +[image="ubuntu-gnome-desktop.jpg" caption="The stock GNOME desktop in Ubuntu 17.10"] + +The first time you log in to 17.10, you'll notice that it doesn't look all that different from the last release. Ubuntu's developers have put considerable effort into making GNOME cosmetically similar to Unity. Unfortunately, in some important ways, them similarities are only skin deep. Much of Unity's appeal was in the small things that greatly improved its usability relative GNOME, for example the keyboard-driven HUD, the global menu, the nice notification system and several other innovations present in Unity are also "available in the archives", which is to say, gone. + +How much this matters to your experience with Ubuntu 17.10 depends on how much you used any of these things and how well GNOME plugins can mimic them. Let's start with the bad news: if you were a heavy user of the HUD features in Unity your transition to GNOME will be painful. There is no GNOME plugin to pick up the slack (there are some admirable efforts underway, but in my testing none of them were ready for prime time). Worse, this is the kind of feature request that will have you hounded right off the GNOME developer mailing list so don't even bother. GNOME will never have a HUD, undo your muscle memory and move on. Or stick with Ubuntu 17.04 until it reaches end of life in 2022. + +If the HUD wasn't your go-to tool in Unity then the transition to GNOME will be less painful. In fact most of what unity could do can be imitated with GNOME plugins. Want Ubuntu style notifications and indicators? There's [an extension](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-support/) for that. Want a Global Menu? There's [an extension](https://github.com/lestcape/Global-AppMenu) for that as well, but alas, it doesn't really work. Want a *working* Global Menu? Ubuntu 17.04 is for you. + +[image="ubuntu-gnome-search.jpg" caption="Searching in GNOME is a little different than Unity"] + +Still, Ubuntu 17.10 is at least visually similar to its predecessors, which helps smooth the transition to GNOME somewhat. And since Unity was built on top of the same GTK libraries, GNOME components and GNOME apps as, well, GNOME itself, most of the apps and interfaces you'll see and need to find in Ubuntu 17.10 are either identical too, or very similar to their Unity counterparts. + +In some cases though even the familiar will feel a little strange. Files, the default GNOME file manager app, is a good example of this. For Unity 7 Ubuntu used an older version of Files and heavily patched it to add some functionality that had long since been deleted by the GNOME developers. With 17.10 Files is up to date and those features are gone. One thing that Ubuntu did manage to hack in there is support for the desktop as a place to put stuff. The GNOME developers apparently consider the desktop just a wallpaper display tool, but Ubuntu with you can actually put launchers, folders and files on your desktop, which should be welcome news for many Ubuntu users. + +[image="ubuntu-gnome-files.jpg" caption="Ubuntu 17.10 features the latest version of GNOME Files"] + +The top bar in GNOME behaves a little differently than the top bar in Unity. It has app indicators, status messages, network controls and user sessions like Unity, but also adds a different app menu, a calendar applet in the center of the screen. There's also something like a global menu, minus the menu. When apps are maximized the name of app appears in the top menu, along with a one item menu -- quit is generally your only option. A couple of apps have few extra items in their menus -- Terminal and Files for example -- but it's a far cry from Unity. + +[image="ubuntu-gnome-topbar.jpg" caption="The GNOME topbar menus (composite screenshot)."] + +There's one other thing you'll notice in this release, the window management buttons are back on the right side of each title bar. Back when Unity first arrived Ubuntu moved the buttons to the left (or wrong) side of the window in the name of innovation. Actually they had a pretty good reason, when you made a window full screen in Unity the buttons became part of the top bar and you can't do that when buttons are on the right side. But with the unified top bar a thing of the past there's no reason to have the buttons on the left side. If you really liked them over there you can change the setting in the GNOME Tweak tool. + +Once you get past the differences with Unity however there's much to like about this release. GNOME Shell is different from Unity, but it's not necessarily worse. It's certainly a pretty desktop, especially if you swap out the default theme that ships with 17.10 for something a little sleeker (I happen to like the dark variant of the Arc theme), something Ubuntu itself is planning to do before 18.04 LTS arrives. The default GNOME apps are generally the same as what you had in 17.04, though, as noted above, some are quite a bit newer (Files and Terminal are the most notable of those). + +For those already well familiar with GNOME, Ubuntu 17.10 ships with GNOME 3.26, notable for its improved, streamlined search view, a new settings app (called Control Center rather than Settings) and full text search support for Files. There's also an interesting feature buried in the GNOME Web app, the GNOME browser no one uses. It now supports Firefox Sync, which means you can sync your bookmarks, history, passwords, and open tabs between Firefox and Web. So if you want to see what Web is like, now you can at least do it and keep everything you've got set up in Firefox. + +In the end what you get with GNOME in 17.10 is close enough to Unity that it doesn't take more than a couple of days to wrap your head around the differences and get on with your work. + +It's worth noting that in my testing GNOME uses slightly more RAM and CPU than Unity on the same hardware doing the same things, but it's only about 10% more on the RAM and let's face it, neither of them are lightweight desktops. If you want something light, try i3. + +## Kernel and System Updates + +Once you start digging below the GNOME surface of 17.10 you'll find quite a few reasons to upgrade, both on the desktop and, perhaps even more so, in the server edition. + +While Mir never arrived, Ubuntu has left Xorg behind, replacing it with the Wayland display server. If you've got the hardware to support it, Wayland will be the default. There are still some annoyances about Wayland, particularly with anything that needs access to your display -- apps like RedShift, screen capture tools and similar -- but aside from those issues you're unlikely to notice that you're using Wayland. + +It's worth mentioning that the 32-bit installation image is no more. Ubuntu previously offered both 32-bit and 64-bit installation images. With the 17.10 release, there's only 64-bit ISOs. Before you freak out bear in mind that all the 32-bit libraries and apps are still around so you can upgrade existing systems without issue. And if you want a fresh install there's still a 32-bit minimal ISO available. Install the base system from that and you can just install all the graphical tools you need on your own. The 32-bit road is, however, looking like it's narrowing down and probably won't be widening. Ubuntu won't be the first distro to drop support completely. + +Ubuntu 17.10 includes the Linux kernel 4.13, which has some fixes for SMB-related security vulnerabilities, initial support for Intel Cannonlake chips, some 3D support for the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA drivers, Thunderbolt improvements, along with the usual slew of odds and ends updates, patches and improvements. + +The server edition of Ubuntu 17.10 has a host of new features for sysadmins and developers, including the latest kubernetes (now at 1.8), the latest release of OpenStack, updates for most languages (Python 3.6, Python 2 is gone by default, still in the repos though), and LXD 2.18, which has a slew of bug fixes and minor improvements for container deployments. + +## Alternatives + +While I highly encourage you to take Ubuntu 17.10 for a spin -- try it in Virtualbox so you don't have to commit -- if you do and really hate there, are, as Shuttleworth mentions, "KDE and GNOME and MATE and many others." Of those I would suggest starting with Ubuntu MATE, which is some ways has more Unity-style features than the default GNOME release. + +MATE takes a more traditional approach to the desktop. Out of the box you'll find a start menu button, toolbars with, well, tools in them, and your usual desktop features like trash, folders and files. GNOME Shell this is not. But Ubuntu MATE 17.10 has two things for unhappy Unity refugees: Global Menu support, and the HUD search tool. + +These features are available in three of MATE's many panel layout options -- Mutiny, Cupertino, and Contemporary. Of these "Mutiny" is the Unity-inspired layout. You'll need to head into the MATE Tweak tool to switch to Mutiny, but once you do you can have your HUD back and works almost exactly like the Unity version -- you can search and run menu-bar commands without taking your fingers off the keyboard. Like regular Unity, it supports GTK and Qt applications. + +## Conclusion + +Ubuntu 17.10 is a huge departure for Ubuntu, but one that sees the distro seemingly getting its footing back. The transition to GNOME, while not without its pitfalls for some users, is surprisingly smooth. Unity did have some features you won't find in GNOME, but Canonical has done a good job of making things familiar, if not identical. + +More important than individual features in 17.10, this release sees Ubuntu getting starting over to some degree. The long development process of Unity 8 was threatening to turn it into Godot, but now Ubuntu is free of Unity 8 and its users no longer have to wait for anything. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/vivaldi-10-review.html b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi-10-review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3b20f76 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi-10-review.html @@ -0,0 +1,70 @@ +

The web browser is likely the most used piece of software on the average computing device and yet, despite its ubiquity, there is relatively little competition in the browser space. These days even experienced users would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the major web browsers. Internet Explorer's new Edge incarnation is slightly different, but Firefox, Chrome and Opera are indistinguishable both in appearance and features available.

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There are some small differences, but for the most part in 2016 a web browser is a web browser is a web browser.

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Especially when there's no web browser. The rise of the embedded browser in mobile apps has very nearly eliminated the need for a dedicated web browser if you spend most of your time in mobile applications.

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The disappearance of the browser is not a bad thing. The point after all is not the browser, but the web it accesses. The more the browser gets out of your way, the better it is the argument goes. The simple, reasonably cross-platform uniformity between browsers helps to get more people online. The boring, arguably crippled web browsers of today claim they improve the overall web browsing experience for the majority.

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But this argument implies that the "average" person using a web browser needs to be spoon fed as simple of an experience as possible. Google's man-on-the-street interviews demonstrated that many people have no idea what a web browser is or even that they're using one, but it did not demonstrate that they don't know how to use a browser. Most people have no idea how a car works either, but they still manage to drive one.

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Judging by the user interface design and disappearing features, Firefox, Chrome and Safari have very little regard for the intelligence of their users.

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If you work with the web the way Chrome, Firefox and Opera want you to consider yourself lucky.

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If, on the other hand, you find yourself installing a dozen or more extensions just to bend the browser to your will, you might want to check out a newcomer to the browser scene, Vivaldi, a powerful, customizable web browser that doesn't try to dictate how you browse the web.

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Vivaldi: A Browser for Everyone

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When I looked at Vivaldi's early beta release last year, I wrote that Vivaldi billed itself as "'for our friends,' which would seem to mean for power users." Since then though I've changed my mind. Vivaldi is a browser for everyone seeking an alternative to the current trend of dumbed down software.

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That said, Vivaldi clearly has a soft spot in its heart for those of us with fond memories of Opera 12. In fact Vivaldi's creator and CEO is Jon S. von Tetzchner, co-founder and former CEO of Opera. Von Tetzchner's primary goal for Vivaldi is to build the kind of browser that Opera once was -- powerful, customizable and fast.

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While Chrome and Firefox continue to infantilize the browser, removing features -- RSS buttons, toolbars, protocols in the URL bar -- Vivaldi leaves most of the decisions about what to show and not show in the browser up to you.

+ +[image="vivaldi-start.jpg" caption="Straight out of the box Vivaldi looks very familiar, albeit a bit more colorful than most browsers.] + +

Vivaldi's defaults still closely match what Chrome and Firefox use, but pretty much the entire interface and behavior of Vivaldi can be customized to your liking. For example by default, like Chrome and Firefox, Vivaldi does not show the protocol (http:// https://, ftp://, etc) in the URL bar. But head to the settings and you'll find a little box that says "show full URL". Enable it and you'll get your URL back. See Firefox and Chrome developers, that wasn't so hard was it? Vivaldi even goes a step further and shows you the number of requests a page is making and the total size of data that's downloaded, as it's downloaded.

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What's perhaps most striking about Vivaldi when you come from the relatively staid world of Chrome and Firefox is how colorful it is. By default Vivaldi adopts the color of the page in question (the color selected appears to be related to the link color the page uses). Otherwise though Vivaldi's user interface isn't all that different than other browsers. What is different is that you can completely rearrange that default interface, docking tab bars, URL bars, sidebars, where ever you want. You can even hide the entire interface to focus on just the page you're reading. More on that in a moment.

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Beneath its unique skin Vivaldi uses the same rendering engine you'll find in Chrome/Chromium and Opera, the Blink rendering engine, which is Google's fork of WebKit. In practice that means that Vivaldi will render pages just like Chrome.

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That's where the similarities end though. Vivaldi's interface does not rely on the same code you'll find in Chrome or Opera. In fact, the interface is written entirely with Web technologies, primarily Javascript and CSS. Javascript, React, Node.js, Browserify, and "a long list of NPM modules" create the Vivaldi UI. As the website puts it, "Vivaldi is the Web built with the Web."

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Early beta releases of Vivaldi occasionally felt a little slow, with some lag in the UI. With 1.0 all of that is gone. The interface is every bit as snappy as any other application. The interface code also runs in its own process with "well defined, limited access to the rest of the browser code" so there's no more security risk with Vivaldi's interface than any other, possibly less.

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Another big and welcome change from the early preview releases is support for Chrome extensions. Some extensions, particularly those that involve manipulating the UI in some way may behave a bit strangely. I could never get Google's Hangouts extension to work, and the SpeakIt extension crashed Vivaldi until I deleted it by hand. but popular extensions like Adblock and Lastpass worked just fine. That said, I've only felt the need to install two extensions (uBlock Origin and Vimium) to supplement Vivaldi's basic features. Thanks to the customization and feature-rich base there's very little Vivaldi can't do straight out of the box.

+ +[image="vivaldi-extensions.jpg" caption="Installing Chrome extensions in Vivaldi is no different than in Chrome."] + +

Customize All The Things

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When you first open it up Vivaldi looks like every other browser, albeit more colorful. The default UI layout isn't cluttered with buttons or overwhelming. In fact you'll have to dig into the preferences pane to discover the real power.

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The first place to head after you install Vivaldi and import your settings and bookmarks from your old browser is the preferences panel. Here you'll find the wealth of customization options that Vivaldi offers. You can customize keyboard shortcuts, set up multi-touch gestures, show or hide all the toolbars and sidebar, even hide the entire UI if you like. In fact you can set up a quick keyboard shortcut to toggle the UI elements when you need them and hide them when you're reading.

+ +[image="vivaldi-keyboard.jpg" caption="Customizing keyboard shortcuts in Vivaldi"] + +

You can position the tab bar wherever you like, control where new tabs appear (to the right of the current tab, always at the far right, or next to related tabs). Other tab options include whether or not to use the colorful background effect and a very useful option to automatically close tabs when you double click them.

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You can likewise control the location of the address bar and enable something called fast forward and rewind. Fast forward and rewind is a clever little feature that allows you to jump to the next page in a sequence. For example, search for something on Google, use space bar to scroll down the page and when you get to the bottom Vivaldi will, with an extra press of the space bar, automatically load the next pages of results. Rewind will take you back the first page you loaded in a given tab.

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Once you have the interface tweaked to your liking it's time to dig into some of Vivaldi's slightly hidden power user features like the ability to turn off image loading for faster browsing over slow connections (toggle the images options using the button in the status bar) or even render a page with monospace fonts if you want. If you remember the heady days back when Netscape was the dominant browser and user stylesheets were still an option, then you'll love Vivaldi.

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There's also the quick launcher, which takes its concept from the old OS X app, Quicksilver. Pull up the Quick Launcher window with a keyboard shortcut and the search for open tabs, windows, and frequently used commands. If you have a lot of tabs open the Quick Launcher is the fastest way to find exactly which tab you want without taking your hands off the keyboard.

+ +[image="vivaldi-quick-launcher.jpg" caption="Find what you want quickly with Vivaldi's quick launcher."] + +

Tabs

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Vivaldi's attention to detail is perhaps nowhere as obvious as in the variety of tab browsing configuration. There's the ability to put the tab bar where ever you like (I discovered that, against my initial instincts, I quite like the tab bar at the bottom of the screen), and pin frequently used sites, but there's much more than that.

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Vivaldi embraces and extends the Tab Stacking feature that Opera pioneered. To create tab stacks you just drag one tab and drop it on top of another. The two are now overlaid in the tab bar, which saves some screen real estate and makes it easy to keep related tabs together in nice organized clusters. In fact Vivaldi will do this for you if you right click a tab and select "Group Similar Tabs to Stack." There's also a command to save your entire current window of tabs as a "session" that you can reopen later.

+ +[image="tab-stack-hover.jpg" caption="Hovering over a Tab Stack brings up thumbnail previews of all the tabs inside that stack.] + +

The problem with Tab Stacking is that isn't all that useful if you have to hunt through the tiny tab icons to find what you're after. Don't worry though, Vivaldi has clearly thought this through, there are quite a few ways to find the particular tab you need in the stack (or stacks). If you hover your mouse cursor over the Tab Stack Vivaldi will show you a Windows-style preview thumbs, which you can then click to select the tab you want. You can also open the Quick Commands window and search for the tab you want; hit return and Vivaldi will take you to the tab in question.

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The most interesting thing to do with Tab Stacks is to use one of the predefined layout options to view all the pages at once. Select the tab stack you want to inspect and then click the rectangle icon in the status bar. Vivaldi will then attempt to fit all the tabs in that stack in a grid. This works best with four or fewer tabs, otherwise you end up with really tiny tabs. With four (or fewer) tabs though it's possible to tile them and still have them be usable. There are a variety of layout available, including left-right, top-bottom and others.

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Combine the multi-tab view with Vivaldi's notes feature and you have a one of the best tools around for online research. Vivaldi's notes feature lives in the sidebar and links your notes to a webpage, along with any images (like a screenshot) or files you want to attach. Right now there's no way to export these notes unfortunately. It's still a useful feature, but it will be even more so when you can get your notes out of the browser for use in other applications. Von Tetzchner says that will get to the export feature eventually, adding "want people to be able to import and export things for maximum flexibility."

+ +[image="vivaldi-notes-tiled.jpg" caption="A tab stack tiled in a grid with the notes pane open. It's cluttered, but sometimes it's handy."]< + +

The screenshot above shows that while Vivaldi isn't cluttered or overwhelming by default, clearly you can make it that way. Still, for me to get from that image to the one below takes only two key combos.

+ +[image="vivaldi-focus.jpg" caption="Two custom keycombo presses later the tiled stack is hidden away, and the entire interface removed to focus on reading a single page."] + +

One other thing worth mentioning about Vivaldi's vast array of tab tools is the ability to right click a tab and select "Hibernate Tab" or the more powerful "Hibernate Background Tabs". In today's web of endlessly watching JavaScript just waiting to pop up that newsletter sign up form, there's no better way to save on CPU cycles and battery life than hibernating all the tabs you're not using. Vivaldi also includes the Chrome task manager if you'd like to figure out which tab is making your fans spin up.

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The sidebar has also gained a new trick since Ars looked at the beta release last year, it's known as a Web Panel and what it does is create a long narrow window to the side of the page. Vivaldi then cleverly asks sites for the mobile version of the page and loads it in your sidebar. This works best with sites that offer a good mobile version, but it's a very simple way to keep news feeds, Twitter or other frequently updated sites at hand, while you browse other pages in the main window. And naturally you can customize the Web Panel version to be as wide or skinny as you like and you can even tell it to request the desktop version of a site instead of the mobile.

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Problems

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Vivaldi is not perfect. Few 1.0 releases are. For all its customization, the main toolbar is curiously immutable. With so many keyboard shortcut and gesture-based means of navigation having a dedicated back, forward, home and reload buttons feels decidedly quaint. It turns out the lack of customization here is simply a matter of priorities. It didn't make the list for 1.0 but von Tetzchner says it's on the short list of future improvements.

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Another shortcoming Web developers should be aware of is the Chrome developer tools panel. While capable in their own way, in my experience Chrome's tools are lacking compared to what Firefox has on offer in its Developer Edition. That's not Vivaldi's fault, though Vivaldi has an odd quirk -- it currently keeps developer tools in their own window, which, if you have a laptop that's tight on screen space, is not nearly as useful as keeping them attached to the window you're inspecting. This too is a known issue that will be addressed in future releases.

+

Also beware that it's quite possible that Chrome extensions with keyboard shortcuts will conflict with Vivaldi's built in shortcuts. For example Vimium, which adds Vim-like shortcuts to Vivaldi, can clash with Vivaldi's own single-key shortcuts (if you enable them that is, by default Vivaldi doesn't use single key shortcuts).

+

There is one other potentially huge missing feature in Vivaldi -- there's now mobile version. While a mobile version is on Vivaldi's roadmap, for now the project is focusing on the desktop.

+

The final problem worth mentioning is that Vivaldi consumes a bit more resources than Firefox, but this is true of Chrome as well, which would seem to indicate something lower-level than Vivaldi itself. Whatever the case, Firefox is still a bit less resource intensive than either Vivaldi or Chrome (when comparing all three in stock mode, no extensions installed).

+

Venture Capital Free

+

Building a new browser is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for those seeking to raise tons of venture capital in hopes of a huge IPO (or these days a massively profitable sale). While there probably are venture capitalists who'd love to invest in Vivaldi they'll never get the chance. Vivaldi isn't taking funding. Initial funding has come out of Von Tetzchner's pocket and, like other browsers, Vivaldi makes money from searches and some money from prominent placement in Vivaldi's Speed Dial features.

+

This works out to about $1/year per user of profit for Vivaldi (roughly the industry standard). So long as Vivaldi the company stays lean and can maintain a reasonable user base it will never hurt for money and it will never feel the pressure of venture-backed companies.

+

Money isn't the only thing Vivaldi seems to disdain. Vivaldi also doesn't seem particularly interested in chasing the market share of IE, Firefox, or Chrome. That's a good thing because without an OS to pre-install it or the brand recognition of Google and Firefox, it's probably never going to get anywhere near that size user base.

+

Vivaldi will likely remain where it is, in the province of the power user. Something for people who want to do more with the Web than other browsers allow out of the box.

+

The Future

+

The freedom to do what it wants without worrying about market share means that Vivaldi's roadmap looks radically different than its erstwhile competition. Top of the list for von Tetzchner is adding an email client to Vivaldi. In fact in Vivaldi's settings screen you'll find a few tools related to the coming email features (like keyboard shortcuts to open Mail and Contact panels), though none of them do anything just yet.

+

Once upon a time having a mail client in Opera felt like bloat, but with Thunderbird fading fast that's no longer true for many. If an email client is the last thing you want in browser fear not, given Vivaldi's customization track record, there's a good chance it won't take much to turn it all off and ignore it.

+

If you miss the old Opera, the Opera of Opera 12—era, then Vivaldi is for you. If the current crop of browsers leaves you wanting more, or you end up installing a dozen extensions to get things the way you like them, Vivaldi is well worth a look. But even if you never use it yourself, like Opera before it, Vivaldi has enough innovative new features that it's very likely some will end up in a browser you do use.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/vivaldi-10-review.txt b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi-10-review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a406187 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi-10-review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,111 @@ +The web browser is likely the most used piece of software on the average computing device and yet, despite its ubiquity, there is relatively little competition in the browser space. These days even experienced users would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the major web browsers. Internet Explorer's new Edge incarnation is slightly different, but Firefox, Chrome and Opera are indistinguishable both in appearance and features available. + +There are some small differences, but for the most part in 2016 a web browser is a web browser is a web browser. + +Especially when there's no web browser. The rise of the embedded browser in mobile apps has very nearly eliminated the need for a dedicated web browser if you spend most of your time in mobile applications. + +The disappearance of the browser is not a bad thing. The point after all is not the browser, but the web it accesses. The more the browser gets out of your way, the better it is the argument goes. The simple, reasonably cross-platform uniformity between browsers helps to get more people online. The boring, arguably crippled web browsers of today claim they improve the overall web browsing experience for the majority. + +But this argument implies that the "average" person using a web browser needs to be spoon fed as simple of an experience as possible. Google's man-on-the-street interviews demonstrated that many people have no idea what a web browser is or even that they're using one, but it did not demonstrate that they don't know *how to use* a browser. Most people have no idea how a car works either, but they still manage to drive one. + +Judging by the user interface design and disappearing features, Firefox, Chrome and Safari have very little regard for the intelligence of their users. + +If you work with the web the way Chrome, Firefox and Opera want you to consider yourself lucky. + +If, on the other hand, you find yourself installing a dozen or more extensions just to bend the browser to your will, you might want to check out a newcomer to the browser scene, Vivaldi, a powerful, customizable web browser that doesn't try to dictate how you browse the web. + +## Vivaldi: A Browser for Everyone + +When I looked at Vivaldi's [early beta release last year](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/hands-on-with-vivaldi-the-new-web-browser-for-power-users/), I wrote that Vivaldi billed itself as "'for our friends,' which would seem to mean for power users." Since then though I've changed my mind. Vivaldi is a browser for everyone seeking an alternative to the current trend of dumbed down software. + +That said, Vivaldi clearly has a soft spot in its heart for those of us with fond memories of Opera 12. In fact Vivaldi's creator and CEO is Jon S. von Tetzchner, co-founder and former CEO of Opera. Von Tetzchner's primary goal for Vivaldi is to build the kind of browser that Opera once was -- powerful, customizable and fast. + +While Chrome and Firefox continue to infantilize the browser, removing features -- RSS buttons, toolbars, protocols in the URL bar -- Vivaldi leaves most of the decisions about what to show and not show in the browser up to you. + +[image= caption=] + +Vivaldi's defaults still closely match what Chrome and Firefox use, but pretty much the entire interface and behavior of Vivaldi can be customized to your liking. For example by default, like Chrome and Firefox, Vivaldi does not show the protocol (http:// https://, ftp://, etc) in the URL bar. But head to the settings and you'll find a little box that says "show full URL". Enable it and you'll get your URL back. See Firefox and Chrome developers, that wasn't so hard was it? Vivaldi even goes a step further and shows you the number of requests a page is making and the total size of data that's downloaded, as it's downloaded. + +What's perhaps most striking about Vivaldi when you come from the relatively staid world of Chrome and Firefox is how colorful it is. By default Vivaldi adopts the color of the page in question (the color selected appears to be related to the link color the page uses). Otherwise though Vivaldi's user interface isn't all that different than other browsers. What is different is that you can completely rearrange that default interface, docking tab bars, URL bars, sidebars, where ever you want. You can even hide the entire interface to focus on just the page you're reading. More on that in a moment. + +Beneath its unique skin Vivaldi uses the same rendering engine you'll find in Chrome/Chromium and Opera, the Blink rendering engine, which is Google's fork of WebKit. In practice that means that Vivaldi will render pages just like Chrome. + +That's where the similarities end though. Vivaldi's interface does not rely on the same code you'll find in Chrome or Opera. In fact, the interface is written entirely with Web technologies, primarily Javascript and CSS. Javascript, React, Node.js, Browserify, and "a long list of NPM modules" create the Vivaldi UI. As the website puts it, "Vivaldi is the Web built with the Web." + +Early beta releases of Vivaldi occasionally felt a little slow, with some lag in the UI. With 1.0 all of that is gone. The interface is every bit as snappy as any other application. The interface code also runs in its own process with "well defined, limited access to the rest of the browser code" so there's no more security risk with Vivaldi's interface than any other, possibly less. + +Another big and welcome change from the early preview releases is support for Chrome extensions. Some extensions, particularly those that involve manipulating the UI in some way may behave a bit strangely. I could never get Google's Hangouts extension to work, and the SpeakIt extension crashed Vivaldi until I deleted it by hand. but popular extensions like Adblock and Lastpass worked just fine. That said, I've only felt the need to install two extensions (uBlock Origin and Vimium) to supplement Vivaldi's basic features. Thanks to the customization and feature-rich base there's very little Vivaldi can't do straight out of the box. + +[image= caption=Screenshot of add-ons] + +## Customize All The Things + +When you first open it up Vivaldi looks like every other browser, albeit more colorful. The default UI layout isn't cluttered with buttons or overwhelming. In fact you'll have to dig into the preferences pane to discover the real power. + +The first place to head after you install Vivaldi and import your settings and bookmarks from your old browser is the preferences panel. Here you'll find the wealth of customization options that Vivaldi offers. You can customize keyboard shortcuts, set up multi-touch gestures, show or hide all the toolbars and sidebar, even hide the entire UI if you like. In fact you can set up a quick keyboard shortcut to toggle the UI elements when you need them and hide them when you're reading. + +[image= caption=Screenshot of keyboard shortcuts] + +You can position the tab bar wherever you like, control where new tabs appear (to the right of the current tab, always at the far right, or next to related tabs). Other tab options include whether or not to use the colorful background effect and a very useful option to automatically close tabs when you double click them. + +You can likewise control the location of the address bar and enable something called fast forward and rewind. Fast forward and rewind is a clever little feature that allows you to jump to the next page in a sequence. For example, search for something on Google, use space bar to scroll down the page and when you get to the bottom Vivaldi will, with an extra press of the space bar, automatically load the next pages of results. Rewind will take you back the first page you loaded in a given tab. + +Once you have the interface tweaked to your liking it's time to dig into some of Vivaldi's slightly hidden power user features like the ability to turn off image loading for faster browsing over slow connections (toggle the images options using the button in the status bar) or even render a page with monospace fonts if you want. If you remember the heady days back when Netscape was the dominant browser and user stylesheets were still an option, then you'll love Vivaldi. + +There's also the quick launcher, which takes its concept from the old OS X app, Quicksilver. Pull up the Quick Launcher window with a keyboard shortcut and the search for open tabs, windows, and frequently used commands. If you have a lot of tabs open the Quick Launcher is the fastest way to find exactly which tab you want without taking your hands off the keyboard. + +[image= caption=Screenshot of quick launcher] + +## Tabs + +Vivaldi's attention to detail is perhaps nowhere as obvious as in the variety of tab browsing configuration. There's the ability to put the tab bar where ever you like (I discovered that, against my initial instincts, I quite like the tab bar at the bottom of the screen), and pin frequently used sites, but there's much more than that. + +Vivaldi embraces and extends the Tab Stacking feature that Opera pioneered. To create tab stacks you just drag one tab and drop it on top of another. The two are now overlaid in the tab bar, which saves some screen real estate and makes it easy to keep related tabs together in nice organized clusters. In fact Vivaldi will do this for you if you right click a tab and select "Group Similar Tabs to Stack." There's also a command to save your entire current window of tabs as a "session" that you can reopen later. + +[image= caption=Tab stack hover] + +The problem with Tab Stacking is that isn't all that useful if you have to hunt through the tiny tab icons to find what you're after. Don't worry though, Vivaldi has clearly thought this through, there are quite a few ways to find the particular tab you need in the stack (or stacks). If you hover your mouse cursor over the Tab Stack Vivaldi will show you a Windows-style preview thumbs, which you can then click to select the tab you want. You can also open the Quick Commands window and search for the tab you want; hit return and Vivaldi will take you to the tab in question. + +The most interesting thing to do with Tab Stacks is to use one of the predefined layout options to view all the pages at once. Select the tab stack you want to inspect and then click the rectangle icon in the status bar. Vivaldi will then attempt to fit all the tabs in that stack in a grid. This works best with four or fewer tabs, otherwise you end up with really tiny tabs. With four (or fewer) tabs though it's possible to tile them and still have them be usable. There are a variety of layout available, including left-right, top-bottom and others. + +Combine the multi-tab view with Vivaldi's notes feature and you have a one of the best tools around for online research. Vivaldi's notes feature lives in the sidebar and links your notes to a webpage, along with any images (like a screenshot) or files you want to attach. Right now there's no way to export these notes unfortunately. It's still a useful feature, but it will be even more so when you can get your notes out of the browser for use in other applications. Von Tetzchner says that will get to the export feature eventually, adding "want people to be able to import and export things for maximum flexibility." + +[image= caption=Notes and tabs in grid] + +The screenshot above shows that while Vivaldi isn't cluttered or overwhelming by default, clearly you can make it that way. Still, for me to get from that image to the one below takes only two key combos. + +[image= caption=Notes and tabs in grid] + +One other thing worth mentioning about Vivaldi's vast array of tab tools is the ability to right click a tab and select "Hibernate Tab" or the more powerful "Hibernate Background Tabs". In today's web of endlessly watching JavaScript just waiting to pop up that newsletter sign up form, there's no better way to save on CPU cycles and battery life than hibernating all the tabs you're not using. Vivaldi also includes the Chrome task manager if you'd like to figure out which tab is making your fans spin up. + +The sidebar has also gained a new trick since Ars looked at the beta release last year, it's known as a Web Panel and what it does is create a long narrow window to the side of the page. Vivaldi then cleverly asks sites for the mobile version of the page and loads it in your sidebar. This works best with sites that offer a good mobile version, but it's a very simple way to keep news feeds, Twitter or other frequently updated sites at hand, while you browse other pages in the main window. And naturally you can customize the Web Panel version to be as wide or skinny as you like and you can even tell it to request the desktop version of a site instead of the mobile. + +## Problems + +Vivaldi is not perfect. Few 1.0 releases are. For all its customization, the main toolbar is curiously immutable. With so many keyboard shortcut and gesture-based means of navigation having a dedicated back, forward, home and reload buttons feels decidedly quaint. It turns out the lack of customization here is simply a matter of priorities. It didn't make the list for 1.0 but von Tetzchner says it's on the short list of future improvements. + +Another shortcoming Web developers should be aware of is the Chrome developer tools panel. While capable in their own way, in my experience Chrome's tools are lacking compared to what Firefox has on offer in its Developer Edition. That's not Vivaldi's fault, though Vivaldi has an odd quirk -- it currently keeps developer tools in their own window, which, if you have a laptop that's tight on screen space, is not nearly as useful as keeping them attached to the window you're inspecting. This too is a known issue that will be addressed in future releases. + +Also beware that it's quite possible that Chrome extensions with keyboard shortcuts will conflict with Vivaldi's built in shortcuts. For example [Vimium](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogbaibhgnhhndojpepiihcmeb/related?hl=en), which adds Vim-like shortcuts to Vivaldi, can clash with Vivaldi's own single-key shortcuts (if you enable them that is, by default Vivaldi doesn't use single key shortcuts). + +There is one other potentially huge missing feature in Vivaldi -- there's now mobile version. While a mobile version is on Vivaldi's roadmap, for now the project is focusing on the desktop. + +The final problem worth mentioning is that Vivaldi consumes a bit more resources than Firefox, but this is true of Chrome as well, which would seem to indicate something lower-level than Vivaldi itself. Whatever the case, Firefox is still a bit less resource intensive than either Vivaldi or Chrome (when comparing all three in stock mode, no extensions installed). + +## Venture Capital Free + +Building a new browser is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for those seeking to raise tons of venture capital in hopes of a huge IPO (or these days a massively profitable sale). While there probably are venture capitalists who'd love to invest in Vivaldi they'll never get the chance. Vivaldi isn't taking funding. Initial funding has come out of Von Tetzchner's pocket and, like other browsers, Vivaldi makes money from searches and some money from prominent placement in Vivaldi's Speed Dial features. + +This works out to about $1/year per user of profit for Vivaldi (roughly the industry standard). So long as Vivaldi the company stays lean and can maintain a reasonable user base it will never hurt for money and it will never feel the pressure of venture-backed companies. + +Money isn't the only thing Vivaldi seems to disdain. Vivaldi also doesn't seem particularly interested in chasing the market share of IE, Firefox, or Chrome. That's a good thing because without an OS to pre-install it or the brand recognition of Google and Firefox, it's probably never going to get anywhere near that size user base. + +Vivaldi will likely remain where it is, in the province of the power user. Something for people who want to do more with the Web than other browsers allow out of the box. + +## The Future + +The freedom to do what it wants without worrying about market share means that Vivaldi's roadmap looks radically different than its erstwhile competition. Top of the list for von Tetzchner is adding an email client to Vivaldi. In fact in Vivaldi's settings screen you'll find a few tools related to the coming email features (like keyboard shortcuts to open Mail and Contact panels), though none of them do anything just yet. + +Once upon a time having a mail client in Opera felt like bloat, but with Thunderbird fading fast that's no longer true for many. If an email client is the last thing you want in browser fear not, given Vivaldi's customization track record, there's a good chance it won't take much to turn it all off and ignore it. + +If you miss the old Opera, the Opera of Opera 12—era, then Vivaldi is for you. If the current crop of browsers leaves you wanting more, or you end up installing a dozen extensions to get things the way you like them, Vivaldi is well worth a look. But even if you never use it yourself, like Opera before it, Vivaldi has enough innovative new features that it's very likely some will end up in a browser you do use. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/vivaldi-new.txt b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi-new.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7440c0d --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi-new.txt @@ -0,0 +1,89 @@ +It's been a long time since a brand new desktop browser landed on the web. Web newcomers might even be forgiven for thinking that there have always been just four web browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. + +After the vicious early days when the world of web browsers closely resembled the ruthless world of the railroad barons a century earlier, the browser market settled down to something pretty boring: IE and Firefox. A few years later Apple introduced Safari. Several years after that Google launched Chrome. Since Chrome arrived in 2008 the web hasn't seen another major browser launch until now. + +## The Browser is Dead, Long Live the Browser + +Part of the reason hardly anyone wants to build a new browser is no doubt that it's a massive undertaking. Another part though is likely due to the rise of mobile devices, which have spawned a thousand browsers, all quietly, invisibly embedded into other applications. + +Site-specific mobile applications like the Facebook or Twitter apps push the browser into the background. When you click a link in these apps the pages just appear. Behind the scenes an embedded browser handles everything without switching to whatever dedicated browser might be installed. In fact there's little need for a dedicated web browser at all if you spend most of your time in mobile applications. + +Desktop browsers have largely followed this overall trend of slipping into the background. Every new release sees them simplifying their interfaces and removing features that their data collection tools indicate are only used by a small handful. RSS icons disappear, toolbars get hidden away, the URL bar will likely disappear soon in many browsers. + +This ends up working out well for most people, especially since, as Google [infamously demonstrated some years ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ), most people have no idea what a web browser is or even that they're using one. The simpler the interface the less the average user needs to think about anything other than what they want to see or do on the web. + +Given that success in the browser market is measured in market share this is not surprising. The less sophisticated user will always be the most plentiful and browsers will alway chase the numbers. + +That's not a bad thing. It helps to get more people online. It improves the experience for the majority. Most people reading this have long since forgotten it, but there was a time when we too had no idea what all those inscrutable icons littered around the browser windows actually did. + +There is, however, still that 5 percent that actually did use the RSS icon, liked their status bar and will most likely abandon any browser that hides away the address bar. The power users may be the minority, but they still exist. Exactly what constitutes a power user is up for debate, but looking at the recent history of web browser "advances" one thing seems clear, the power user is not the target audience. The person who wants to be in control of their experience and customize it to their liking has been left behind by most browsers. + +## Vivaldi, a New Browser for Power Users + +The power user's current solution to the simplification, arguably the infantilization, of the web browser interface is to get all those missing features back with add-ons. This works to a degree, but it introduces a ton of extra code, some of it written by programmers far less capable than those contributing to the core of Firefox or Chromium, which means, inevitably, add-ons slow things down. The problem is bad enough that a future version of Firefox will have a feature dedicated to letting you know which of your add-ons is slowing you down. + +The list of major browsers at the start of this article was actually short one browser -- Opera. Opera has never had a huge audience, but it did cater to power users. Then Opera decided to abandon its homegrown rendering engine and adopt WebKit (along with Chrome, Opera now uses the WebKit fork, Blink). The move to WebKit meant more sites rendered properly in Opera (since supporting Opera's Presto engine was a low priority for most web developers), but it also meant Opera had to leave behind some of the features that its power users relied on the most. + +Even two years later the current version of Opera still lacks most of the features targeted at power users -- tab stacks, mouse gestures, extensive keyboard shortcuts, the ability to take notes on a web page and more are all still missing. Opera today is a shadow of its last Presto-based release (Opera 12). + +Opera threw in the towel on power users. That's at least part of why [Vivaldi](https://www.vivaldi.com/) came to exist. + +Vivaldi is a brand new web browser that wants to bring back all the old features of Opera 12 and more. The Vivaldi browser bills itself as "for our friends", which would seem to mean for power users. Vivaldi boasts many features the average user is unlikely to need or even be aware of. This is indeed a power user's browser built by power users for power users. Put another way, this is the new (old) Opera. + +The team behind Vivaldi recently release a second "technical preview". It's still experimentaland a long way from finished, but you can [try out Vivaldi](https://www.vivaldi.com/) today. Vivaldi works on Windows, OS X and Linux (there are even .deb and .rpm downloads available for easy installation on Linux). + +[image="vivaldi-ars.png" caption="Vivaldi"] + +If you're a former Opera user unhappy with the direction of desktop Opera I strongly suggest you download Vivaldi. The technical preview release may be rough around the edges but it already supports tab stacking, adding notes (complete with screenshots of any page), mouse gestures and tons of keyboard shortcuts all wrapped in a user interface that's reminiscent of Opera 12. + +It's no accident that Vivaldi offers most of what Opera 12 offered. Vivaldi's CEO is Jon S. von Tetzchner, co-founder and former CEO of Opera. Von Tetzchner's primary goal for Vivaldi is to rebuild the browser that Opera once was -- the power user's browser. + +Building a new browser is not for the faint of heart, but of course this isn't the first time von Tetzchner has done it. Why do it again? The motivations behind Vivaldi are startlingly simple. As Von Tetzchner tells me, "Opera abandoned Opera... I thought, what am I going to do now? There were all these features that I was used to, that everyone else was used to and they were gone. So we thought, well there's a lot of people that want to do more with their browser, let's make a browser for them." + +In other words Vivaldi isn't interested in chasing the market share of IE, Firefox or Chrome. It's never going to get to that size user base, but it will let you do more with the web than any of the others will out of the box. + +Vivaldi also has the potential to re-shape the browser market. Opera never had anything but a tiny slice of the browser market either, but its impact on the browser market has been enormous. Just about every major feature in today's browsers started out in Opera. Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, pioneering support for web standards and even the clustered page thumbnails when you open a new window or tab (a feature known as "speed dial") all started in Opera and were then copied by Firefox, Chrome, Safari and (sometimes) IE. + +For now Vivaldi is primarily concerned with getting its desktop offering to a stable, usable point. + +At first glance what you see when you open Vivaldi for the first time isn't all that different from any other browser you've used. Indeed it looks and behaves like any other on the surface. + +Vivaldi, like the latest versions of Opera and seemingly pretty much everything else these days, uses the WebKit rendering engine behind the scenes. That means Vivaldi renders pages just the same as Chrome or any other WebKit/Blink browser would. But Vivaldi's interface does not rely on the same code you'll find in Chrome or Opera. In fact the interface is written entirely with web technologies, primarily Javascript and CSS. JavaScript and React along with Node.js, Browserify and "a long list of NPM modules" create the Vivaldi UI. As the website puts it, "Vivaldi is the web built with the web". + +It's fitting that just under the surface Vivaldi is significantly different than its competition since the same it true of its features. Vivaldi's interface isn't cluttered, you'll have to poke around to discover the real power. Once you start to dig into the interface there's a ton of stuff you won't find elsewhere like the ability to put tabs on any side of the screen, customize keyboard shortcuts, turn off images, even render the page with monospace fonts if you want. If you remember the heady days back when Netscape was the dominant browser and user stylesheets were still an option then you'll love Vivaldi. + +[image="vivaldi-ars-no-img.png" caption="Vivaldi with images turned off."] + +Among the elements you can customize in Vivaldi are the location of the tab bar, which can be on any side of the window you like, the address bar, which can be on the top or bottom, the order in which you cycle through tabs in the tab switcher, any keyboard shortcut, the position of the sidebar panel, and the available search engines and keyboard shortcuts for each. + +There are other power user friendly tools too, like what Vivaldi calls "Quick Commands". Press F2 (that shortcut is configurable naturally) and Vivaldi will launch a small command window which allows you to search through your browsing history, open tabs, bookmarks, even settings. Between the built-in (yes, configurable) keyboard shortcuts and Quick Commands it's possible to control Vivaldi and browse the web without lifting your fingers off the keys. About the only thing that isn't easy to do is click a link (as far as I can tell you'll need to tab through every link on the page to get to the one you want). + +[image="vivaldi-ars-quick-commands.png" caption="Vivaldi's Quick Commands allow fast keyboard access to just about everything."] + +Another familiar feature for Opera refugees is the sidebar, which can show your bookmarks, contacts, downloads, notes and (not working yet) mail. The notes panel allows you to take notes on a page and even capture screenshots for later reference. Notes can be organized into folders, though currently there doesn't seem to be a way to export them. + +[image="vivaldi-notes.png" caption="Vivaldi's Notes panel with screenshots."] + +The just-released second technical preview adds a couple more welcome power user features and customization options. There's now an (optional) bookmarks menu bar. Where most browsers have a special folder for the menu bar, Vivaldi lets you make any folder in your bookmarks show up in the Bookmarks bar. + +This second release also sees some improvements to the on-demand image loading. Instead of just on or off, there's now a setting to show all, only cached images or no images at all. Although primarily aimed at those on slow or metered networks, turning off images also makes for much faster searching. I found myself turning off images (regrettably, for all the customization there is in Vivaldi, there's no keyboard shortcut for toggling images) every time I searched on Google or DuckDuckGo. That way loading those "maybe this page has what I want" results is much faster since I don't have to sit and wait while a bunch of images I don't care about load. It also makes visiting Medium.com more tolerable. + +Perhaps the most notable new feature in the second technical preview is what Vivaldi calls "spatial navigation". Instead of reaching for your mouse, spatial navigation lets you click links by pressing the shift key and the arrow keys. You'll see a blue highlight surround each link and you can quickly jump to the link you want without taking your hands off the keyboard. In practice it's just like tabbing through links, but allows you to move much faster since you don't have to go in order. + +The last item of note in the latest version is something I would not at all be surprised to see other browsers copying soon: fast-forward and rewind buttons. Fast forward and rewind take a minute to wrap your head around, but once you do they become fantastically useful, especially rewind. Rewind backs you up to the first page you visited at a particular domain. So if you come to Ars to read this review, but then clicked around, read a few other articles and then want to get back to the Vivaldi download link in this piece you would just hit rewind and you're instantly back to the first page you started on. + +Fast-forward is a little more unpredictable, but an interesting idea. It attempts to, according to the Vivaldi docs, "jump to the most natural next page". For example the second page of search results or the next page in a forum thread. + +Nice as the new features are, Vivaldi still isn't feature complete, even by its own standards. Click the mail panel in the sidebar and you'll get a "coming soon" message. + +[image="vivaldi-mail.png" caption="Vivaldi's Mail panel, coming soon."] + +The mail panel hints at Vivaldi's biggest problem right now -- it's not done. + +Vivaldi has so many great features it can be a little frustrating because it is still very much a technical preview. It's been largely stable in my testing (most of the bugs I encountered using the first release are gone in the second), but it's still missing some key features. + +Extensions still don't exist. They're in the works, but for now you'll have to get by with Vivaldi as is. That means, for example, no Ad-Block Plus or other popular extensions. It's also worth noting that thanks to extensions you could, in theory, get most of Vivaldi's features to Firefox or Chrome, something von Tetzchner acknowledges though, as he points out, too many extensions is often the reason browsers get so slow. + +Then there's syncing. In the multi-device world of today a browser without sync features is next to useless and thus far Vivaldi is missing any kind of mobile component, let alone a way to sync between desktop and mobile. Both things are already in the works according to von Tetzchner, though he declined to comment on when either might arrive. "For now," he says, "we're focused on building out the desktop version." + +At the moment Vivaldi is really too new and unfinished to use on a day to day basis, though that hasn't stopped me from doing so for the past few weeks. It hasn't always been completely smooth, but it has worked for the most part. Even if you don't jump in with both feet right now, if you miss the good old Opera -- the Opera of Opera 12 -- then Vivaldi is one to keep an eye on. Even if you never use it yourself, given their track record there's a good chance some of ideas von Tetzchner and crew come up with may well end up in your favorite browser eventually. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/vivaldi.txt b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4a7e4db --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi.txt @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ + +Indeed Firefox has a feature in the works that actually tells you which extensions are slowing your browser down. Part of the goal of Vivaldi is to give power users as higher set of built-in features so that many extensions become unnecessary. That said, everyone tends to have their pet features that are too narrow to be built in, which is where extensions come in handy. diff --git a/ars-technica/published/vivaldi/vivaldi-ars-no-img.png b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi/vivaldi-ars-no-img.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c31ebc0 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi/vivaldi-ars-no-img.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/vivaldi/vivaldi-ars.png b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi/vivaldi-ars.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bad8451 Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi/vivaldi-ars.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/vivaldi/vivaldi-mail.png b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi/vivaldi-mail.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..003235c Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi/vivaldi-mail.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/vivaldi/vivaldi-notes.png b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi/vivaldi-notes.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ec6693c Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi/vivaldi-notes.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/vivaldi/vivaldi-quick-commands.png b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi/vivaldi-quick-commands.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d9da0fe Binary files /dev/null and b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi/vivaldi-quick-commands.png differ diff --git a/ars-technica/published/vivaldi2.html b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi2.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..36181e5 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi2.html @@ -0,0 +1,62 @@ +

The Web browser is likely the most important piece of software on your hardware, whatever that hardware may be. Indeed whenever a new bit of hardware arrives, should it lack a way to browse the web, invariably one of the first things enthusiasts will do is figure out a way to run a web browser on it.

+

Despite their ubiquity though there is very little difference between web browsers. Most people it seems, get by with whatever was installed by default. And no wonder. Modern browsers, Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera are largely indistinguishable both in appearance and features -- why bother with one over the other?

+

But this uniformity is a choice. It's the result of a particular approach to software development. The prevailing wisdom of the moment is that web browsers should be like children of the Victorian age: seen and not heard. Or in the case of browsers, neither seen nor heard.

+

Fortunately for those of us who'd like something different, something we can bend to our will rather than the other way around, there is an alternative. It's called Vivaldi and it recently hit the 2.0 milestone.

+

You can download the latest version of Vivaldi from the Vivaldi site or install it through the app store or package manager of your OS.

+

Perhaps the most shocking thing about this release is that it's merely 2.0. That's a throwback to an earlier time when version numbers had meaning, and a major number increment meant that something major had happened.

+

The version number here does mean something, but it's also perhaps a tad misleading. Under the hood Vivaldi tracks Chromium updates and, like Chrome and Firefox, issues minor updates every six weeks or so. That means some of the features I'll be discussing trickled in over time, rather than all arriving in one monolithic 2.0 release. It also means that under the hood Vivaldi 2.0 uses Chromium 69.

+

But first, a confession. I'm probably a bit biased. I've been using Vivaldi daily since the pre-release versions first hit the web and at this point it's difficult to imagine going back to another browser that doesn't have a way to stack tabs, view two (or more) tabs side by side, take notes with full page screenshots, control my search suggestion privacy settings, or browse the web without ever taking my fingers off the keyboard, all standard features in Vivaldi.

+

If you'd like to go beyond the vanilla browsing experience offered by the big name browser makers, if you'd like to customize your browser in myriad ways and have more control over your browsing experience, Vivaldi 2.0 is well worth trying.

+

Vivaldi 2.0

+[image="vivaldi-stock.jpg" caption="Grab the latest version of Vivaldi and this is the first things you'll see."] +[image="vivaldi-stock-color.jpg" caption="The default Vivaldi theme matches the top bar color to the color of the site you're on. As with everything else in Vivaldi, you can change this in the settings panel."] +

Vivaldi 2.0 has several headline-grabbing new features, but the most welcome is undoubtedly be the new syncing feature.

+

Vivaldi 2.0 can synchronize your bookmarks, passwords, autofill data, typed URLs, notes, remote sessions and some, though not all, of your settings between installs.

+

Syncing data is no small undertaking since it requires a server-side component as well as the in-browser UI. Because of its focus on data privacy, Vivaldi opted to build its own sync tools and did so in such a way that your data is encrypted end-to-end (provided you set a password, which you should). Vivaldi stores, but has no way to read your data, and it isn't sending any data to third-party servers at all. Everything is in-house.

+

While I don't actually have a use for sync until there's a mobile version, I've been testing Vivaldi's syncing features for over a month now, syncing everything between my machine and my wife's machine, and have yet to experience any hiccups or problems. It just works.

+[image="vivaldi-sync.jpg" caption="Vivaldi's new Syncing feature and settings"] +

Vivaldi CEO, and co-creator of the once-great Opera, Jon von Tetzchner tells Ars that sync will be evolving quickly from here, hopefully soon including the ability to sync more settings, history, web panels, themes and more.

+

As welcome as sync is, there's something a little bittersweet about it since it makes a mobile version of Vivaldi even more desirable. Thus far that doesn't exist. Publicly anyway, von Tetzchner tells Ars that the mobile version does exist, but isn't ready for prime time yet. He did not give me any kind of time frame, but I think it's safe to say that a mobile version of Vivaldi is a very high priority.

+

In the mean time there are quite a few other improvements in Vivaldi 2.0 that make it an even more powerful tool. One that I haven't seen Vivaldi tout much is how much faster Vivaldi 2.0 is than it was back in the 1.0 days. According to von Tetzchner some of the speed boost is a result of Chromium improvements, and some of it is related to a significant Chromium change that came along last year, which forced Vivaldi's engineers to refactor a considerable amount of code, speeding up the browser in the process.

+

Whatever the case, Vivaldi 2.0 is noticeably faster than 1.0, both in terms of UI and page load speeds. In my testing, this improvement is most noticeable if you have a lot of tabs open, as well as a lot of bookmarks and notes (as an aside, if you do have a lot of tabs open, periodically right-click the active tab and select "Hibernate Background Tabs", this will stop background tabs from eating up memory. In my testing this can free up as much as 500MB of RAM. Ah, JavaScript, what would RAM makers do without you?).

+

This is the third time I've covered Vivaldi for Ars, so before I dig into some of the nice refinements in 2.0, I wanted to briefly revisit those previous reviews. In my review of Vivaldi 1.0 I criticized Vivaldi for a few missing features, notably that there was no syncing between computers, no mobile version, no way to dock the developer tools panel, and no way to customize buttons in the URL bar.

+

I'm happy to report that Vivaldi 2.0 has solved all these problem, plus a slew of smaller ones I mentioned in that piece, except of course for the lack of a mobile version.

+

After sync and the speed improvements Vivaldi 2.0's feature list becomes a browser tinkerer's wonderland. Vivaldi's MO has always been to keep refining, and fine tuning existing features, and this release is no exception. There are so many new options, added little features and tweaks that it's tough to know where to start. I highly recommend checking out the Vivaldi blog for more details, and the complete list of everything that's new in 2.0.

+

My favorite feature in this release is in Vivaldi's Tab Tiling feature. One of Vivaldi's most innovative features, tab tiling allows you to view several tabs in a single window that's split into little subwindows (nerds: think tmux in your browser). As someone who does a tremendous amount of online research, especially comparing things, this feature is what made Vivaldi my default browser years ago and I can't imagine browsing the web without it.

+

In Vivaldi 2.0 you can now resize each tiled tab's window by dragging that tile’s border. Even better, your customized layout persists through restarts and loading of saved sessions.

+[image="vivaldi-tab-tiles.jpg" caption="An example of how tab tiles can be useful. On the left is a map of bus routes, on the right is the street view of what I'll see when I get off the bus."] +

Another standout feature among the hundreds of improvements in 2.0 is support for "floating" Web Panels. Web Panels are the small windows holding various menus, or even webpages if you like, that live as buttons in Vivaldi's sidebar. Push the button and the panel expands. By default panels include bookmarks, notes, history, and downloads. In previous releases when a panel opened it resized the main window to fit both on screen. In the day and age of responsive design that sometimes meant the webpage you were viewing suddenly changed, and even if it didn't, resizing the page could be annoying.

+

Resizing the page is still the default, but with Vivaldi 2.0 there's a new setting to enable "floating" panels. Turn that on and panels will not resize the main window, they'll overlay it, floating on top of the content. That does mean they'll cover any content in your main window, but since the purpose of opening the panel is to interact with it, covering other content is rarely a problem. There's also a setting to auto-close the panel so that when you're done with the panel it will get out of your way again.

+[image="vivaldi-panel-resize.jpg" caption="This is the old behavior, the main browser window is resized to accommodate the panel."] +[image="vivaldi-panel-float.jpg" caption="Same window, same panel, but now in floating mode. Main window content is unchanged, panel float above it."] +

I said covering content is "rarely" a problem, but the truth is there are times when floating mode works better, and times when resizing the main window works better. Recognizing this, Vivaldi has a keyboard shortcut available to toggle between the two. You'll have to set the keyboard shortcut, by default it's blank, but it's there if you need it.

+

Another nice new feature is the new Quick Commands support for bookmark nicknames. If you've nicknamed your bookmarks you can now pull up the Quick Commands window (press F2), type the nickname and Vivaldi will automatically open that page -- you don't even need to hit return, as soon as you type out the nickname the page opens.

+

One feature of Vivaldi I've always ignored is the Web Panel -- I've never really seen a use for it.

+

In 2.0 there's a new feature called Web Panel Suggestions which is designed to help you explore Web Panels. Click the "+" icon to add a new Web Panel and Vivaldi will suggest websites that might be useful in a panel out of the sites you visit the most.

+

I'm still not a big user of web panels, but thanks to the suggestions I have discovered that documentation sites are a good use case. For example, I have the devdocs site as a panel and the Vivaldi help site as another. Whenever I need to look something up I open the panel, figure out what I want to know, and close it again without adding new tabs or changing the main browsing session in any way.

+[image="vivaldi-web-panel.jpg" caption="Looking up things in Django's documentation (via DevDocs.io) while reviewing code, a handy use for Web Panels."] +

This perhaps highlights something that will become very obvious the minute you start using Vivaldi: it's very customizable. Sometimes the sheer number of options can be overwhelming and if you don't spend some time digging, you can overlook very useful features.

+

For example I've been using Vivaldi for years and always been slightly irritated that releasing the Alt key opens the main menu. Because I use Alt-J and Alt-K to switch desktops, I'd always land on Vivaldi and the main menu would be open. Arguably this is an OS-level feature that I should figure out how to turn off globally since it happens in Firefox and LibreOffice as well. I happened to mention this annoyance in passing when I spoke with von Tetzchner and he emailed me a bit later to point out that Vivaldi has a setting to turn off "Alt key for Main Menu". It was there for who knows how long, I simply missed it.

+

How to get the most of Vivaldi

+

That highlights what's probably Vivaldi 2.0's biggest challenge -- convincing people to put in little bit of effort. As von Tetzchner tells Ars, "there is a little bit of a learning curve, but if you give it time and customize it, you'll find that Vivaldi feels really right. If there's something you don't like let us know, we're unique in how we listen to users."

+

To really get the most out of Vivaldi, you need to spend some time customizing it to your needs, and to do that, you need to know what's possible. I would strongly suggest you spend some time exploring Vivaldi's settings page to see what you can change. And of course Chrome extensions work just fine in Vivaldi, so if there is something it can't do out of the box, there's always extensions. That said I've only found the need for two extensions.

+

The first thing you should do when you install Vivaldi is open up the settings panel and have a look around.

+

To do that you can either click the gear icon at the lower left part of the screen, or click the main menu, go to Tools and then settings, or type F2 and then "sett" and hit return, or hit Alt-P, or you can visualize the settings page and it will appear. Just kidding, visualizing it doesn't work. Yet.

+

As you can see there are many different ways to do any one thing in Vivaldi. This is its gift to you, it will work however you'd like it to work. I happen to be a keyboard shortcuts fan, so I've set up Vivaldi so that nearly everything I want to do I can do without taking my fingers off the keys (I also use a plugin, Vimium to add some shortcuts Vivaldi doesn't offer out of the box). In Vivaldi 2.0 there are a few new shortcuts worth familiarizing yourself with, for example there are now predefined shortcuts for moving tabs left and right.

+

That's how I use Vivaldi, but I know other users who make extensive use of mouse gestures so that they rarely have to touch the keyboard. Polar opposite ways of working that are both possible in the same piece of software.

+

Once you start digging into the different ways of using Vivaldi you'll find a level of fine-grained control you won't find elsewhere. Consider for instance, privacy in the context of web searching.

+

Whenever you search in the address bar of other browsers, that information is, by default, sent to a third-party server, be it Google, Bing or whomever the search provider is for that browser. This means the third-party can keep track of what you search for, but it also means it can see URLs you type as well. Because you're searching in the URL bar, and the browser doesn't know if you're entering a domain name or searching, in most cases, the browser will send every URL you enter to the search engine as well.

+

Most browsers allow you to turn this feature off, but in every browser I've used the choice of whether or not to use predictive searching is binary: it's either on or off.

+

In Vivaldi you get more control than that.

+

The first thing to realize is that this behavior is off by default. Out of the box nothing you type in the address bar is sent to any third-party. Vivaldi takes your privacy much more seriously than the rest of the browsers I've tested.

+

If, however, you decide you want predictive searching, as this is known, you can turn it on in Settings >> Search. Once it's on you have some extra options to control how it works. You could, for instance, turn it off when typing in the URL bar, but enable it in the separate search box. That would mean things you type in the URL bar, e.g. URLs, would never be sent on to a third-party, but when you search in the search box you'd get suggestions.

+

You can fine tune this a bit more too. I don't want suggestions for everything I search in the URL, but I also don't like a separate search box cluttering up the URL bar. So I turn off suggestions in the URL bar, but enable them if I explicitly use a search keyword (letter really) to trigger a search from the URL bar. That way if I type "arstechnica.com", no data is sent and I get no suggestions I just go to the Ars site. But if I type "d arstechnica" I'll get suggestions from DuckDuckGo because the "d" prefix tells Vivaldi to search DuckDuckGo.

+[image="vivaldi-search-settings.jpg" caption="Granular control allows you to balance privacy with convenience when searching the web."] +

You can further refine this to restrict it to only search engines you trust to keep your data private, like DuckDuckGo, StartPage or Quant, all of which Vivaldi includes out of the box. You can also use a POST request if the search engine supports it, further limiting the data that you're leaking when you search (I have not, however, been able to make this work with anything except StartPage). There's even an option to set different default search engines for normal windows and private browsing windows (by the default the latter will use DuckDuckGo).

+

It's not new in this release, but there's another Vivaldi feature worth noting: fast forward and rewind. Fast forward is useful for any sort of paged content, as it allows you to jump to the next page, and you don't have to click the button, there's a keyboard shortcut as well. For example, search for something on Google, use spacebar to scroll down the page, and when you get to the bottom of the page, hit spacebar again and Vivaldi will automatically load the next pages of results. Rewind will do the opposite, take you back to the beginning of the your most recent browsing history for that tab.

+

You can also alter Vivaldi's interface to suit your needs, moving the tab bar to any side of the window you like, same with the URL bar, bookmarks and so on.

+

The possibilities are almost limitless. With that in mind, I'd also suggest looking over the user forums for tips from other users, examples of how people are using Vivaldi and other suggestions. Vivaldi users are some of the active, helpful people I've encountered in the software world. If there's a way to do something with Vivaldi -- and chances are pretty good there is -- they'll know.

+

In fact, according to von Tetzchner, about half of all the features in this release come from user feedback and suggestions. To protect your privacy Vivaldi does not collect any data about how you use the browser, so if you want to have an impact on the future of Vivaldi, and you definitely can have one, you'll have to join the community and get involved.

+

Conclusion

+

While Vivaldi 2.0 is not perfect, its lack of a mobile version remains frustrating, and there are some other features I'd like to see, like a way to export notes, to make notes on PDF files, keyboard shortcuts for selecting tabs, and an Opera-mail style mail client -- most of which I know are on the roadmap -- this release sees the browser maturing, adding the features users want and continuing to focus on the details that make Vivaldi a power user's delight.

+

When I asked why a tech savvy user might consider switching from, say, Firefox, von Tetzchner said Vivaldi's advantage lies in its user-centric focus. "It's about the focus on you and your requirements," he says. "Other browsers are removing features, we're adding them. There's more than one way to do everything in Vivaldi. Make it yours."

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/vivaldi2.txt b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi2.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6859d39 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/vivaldi2.txt @@ -0,0 +1,110 @@ +The Web browser is likely the most important piece of software on your hardware, whatever that hardware may be. Indeed whenever a new bit of hardware arrives, should it lack a way to browse the web, invariably one of the first things enthusiasts will do is figure out a way to run a web browser on it. + +Despite its ubiquity there is little difference between web browsers. Most people it seems, get by with whatever was installed by default. And no wonder. Modern browsers, Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera are largely indistinguishable both in appearance and features -- why bother with one over the other? + +But this lack of choice is itself a choice. It's the result of a particular approach to software development. The prevailing wisdom of the moment is that web browsers should be like children of the Victorian age: seen and not heard. Or in the case of browsers, neither seen nor heard. + +Fortunately for those of us who'd like something different, something we can bend to *our* will rather than the other way around, there is an alternative. It's called Vivaldi and it recently hit the 2.0 milestone. + +You can download the latest version of Vivaldi from the [Vivaldi site](https://vivaldi.com/download/) or install it through your OSes' app store or package manager. + +Perhaps the most shocking thing about this release is that it's merely 2.0. That's a throwback to an earlier time when version numbers had meaning, and a major number increment meant that something major had happened. + +The version number here does mean something, but it's also perhaps a tad misleading. Under the hood Vivaldi tracks Chromium updates and, like Chrome and Firefox, issues minor updates every six weeks or so. That means some of the features I'll be discussing trickled in over time, rather than all arriving in one monolithic 2.0 release. It also means that under the hood Vivaldi 2.0 uses Chromium 69. + +But first, a confession. I'm probably a bit biased. I've been using Vivaldi daily since the pre-release versions first hit the web and at this point it's difficult to imagine going back to another browser that doesn't have a way to stack tabs, view two (or more) tabs side by side, take notes with full page screenshots, control my search suggestion privacy settings, or browse the web without ever taking my fingers off the keyboard, all standard features in Vivaldi. + +If you'd like to go beyond the vanilla browsing experience offered by the big name browser makers, if you'd like to customize your browser in myriad ways and have more control over your browsing experience, Vivaldi 2.0 is well worth trying. + +## Vivaldi 2.0 + +Vivaldi 2.0 has several headline-grabbing new features, but the most welcome is undoubtedly be the new syncing feature. + +Vivaldi 2.0 can synchronize your bookmarks, passwords, autofill data, typed URLs, notes, remote sessions and some, though not all, of your settings between installs. + +Syncing data is no small undertaking since it requires a server-side component as well as the in-browser UI. Because of it's focus on data privacy, Vivaldi opted to build its own sync tools and did so in such a way that your data is encrypted end-to-end (provided you set a password, which you should). Vivaldi stores, but has no way to read your data, and it isn't sending any data to third-party servers at all. Everything is in-house. + +While I don't actually have a use for sync until there's a mobile version, I've been testing Vivaldi's syncing features for over a month now, syncing everything between my machine and my wife's machine, and have yet to experience any hiccups or problems. It just works. + +Vivaldi CEO, and co-creator of the once-great Opera, Jon von Tetzchner tells Ars that sync will be evolving quickly from here, hopefully soon including the ability to sync more settings, history, web panels, themes and more. + +As welcome as sync is, there's something a little bittersweet about it since it makes a mobile version of Vivaldi even more desirable. Thus far that doesn't exist. Publicly anyway, von Tetzchner tells Ars that the mobile version does exist, but isn't ready for prime time yet. He did not give me any kind of time frame, but I think it's safe to say that a mobile version of Vivaldi is a very high priority. + +In the mean time there are quite a few other improvements in Vivaldi 2.0 that make it an even more powerful tool. One that I haven't seen Vivaldi tout much is how much faster Vivaldi 2.0 is than it was back in the 1.0 days. According to von Tetzchner some of the speed boost is a result of Chromium improvements, and some of it is related to a significant Chromium change that came along last year, which force Vivaldi's engineers to refactor a considerable amount of code, speeding up the browser in the process. + +Whatever the case, Vivaldi 2.0 is noticeably faster than 1.0, both in terms of UI and page load speeds. In my testing, this improvement is most noticeable if you have a lot of tabs open, as well as a lot of bookmarks and notes (as an aside, if you do have a lot of tabs open, periodically right-click the active tab and select "Hibernate Background Tabs, this will stop background tabs from eating up memory. In my testing this can free up as much as 500MB of RAM. Ah, JavaScript, what would RAM makers do without you?). + +This is the third time I've covered Vivaldi for Ars, so before I dig into some of the nice refinements in 2.0, I wanted to briefly revisiting those previous reviews. In my [review of Vivaldi 1.0](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/even-at-1-0-vivaldi-closes-in-on-the-cure-for-the-common-browser/) I criticized Vivaldi for a few missing features, notably that there was no syncing between computers, no mobile version, no way to dock the developer tools panel, and no way to customize buttons in the URL bar. + +I'm happy to report that Vivaldi 2.0 has solved all these problem, plus a slew of smaller ones I mentioned in that piece, except of course for the lack of a mobile version. + +After sync and the speed improvements Vivaldi 2.0's feature list becomes a browser tinkerer's wonderland. Vivaldi's MO has always been to keep refining, and fine tuning existing features, and this release is no exception. There are so many new options, added little features and tweaks that it's tough to know where to start. I highly recommend checking out the [Vivaldi blog](https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-2-0-your-browser-matters/) for more details, and the complete list of [everything that's new in 2.0](https://vivaldi.com/changelog-vivaldi-1-15-to-2-0/). + +My favorite feature in this release is in Vivaldi's Tab Tiling feature. One of Vivaldi's most innovative features, tab tiling allows you to viewing several tabs in a single window that's split into little subwindows (nerds: think tmux in your browser). As someone who does a tremendous amount of online research, especially comparing things, this feature is what made Vivaldi my default browser years ago and I can't imagine browsing the web without it. + +In Vivaldi 2.0 you can now resize each tiled tab's window by dragging that tile’s border. Even better, your customized layout persists through restarts and loading of saved sessions. + +Another standout feature among the hundreds of improvements in 2.0 is support for "floating" Panels. Panels are the small windows holding various menus, or even webpages if you like, that live as buttons in Vivaldi's sidebar. Push the button and panel expands. By default panels include bookmarks, notes, history, and downloads. In previous releases when a panel opened it resized the main window to fit both on screen. In the day and age of responsive design that sometimes meant the webpage you were viewing suddenly changed, and even if it didn't, resizing the page could be annoying. + +Resizing the page is still the default, but with Vivaldi 2.0 there's a new setting to enable "floating" panels. Turn that on and panels will not resize the main window, they'll overlay it, floating on top of the content. That does mean they'll cover any content in your main window, but since the purpose of opening the panel is to interact with it, covering other content is rarely a problem. There's also a setting to auto-close the panel so that when you're done with the panel it will get out of your way again. + +screen resize +screen float + +I said covering content is "rarely" a problem, but the truth is there are times when floating mode works better, and times when resizing the main window works better. Recognizing this, Vivaldi has a keyboard shortcut available to toggle between the two. You'll have to set the keyboard shortcut, by default it's blank, but it's there if you need it. + +Another nice new feature is the new Quick Commands support for bookmark nicknames. If you've nicknamed your bookmarks you can now pull up the Quick Commands window (press F2), type the nickname and Vivaldi will automatically open that page -- you don't even need to hit return, as soon as you type out the nickname the page opens. + +One feature of Vivaldi I've always ignored is the Web Panel -- I've never really seen a use for it. + +In 2.0 there's a new feature called Web Panel Suggestions which is designed to help you explore Web Panels. Click the "+" icon to add a new Web Panel and Vivaldi will suggest websites that might be useful in a panel out of the sites you visit the most. + +I'm still not a big user of web panels, but thanks to the suggestions I have discovered that documentation sites are a good use case. For example, I have the [devdocs](https://devdocs.io/) site as a panel and the Vivaldi help site as another. Whenever I need to look something up I open the panel, figure out what I want to know, and close it again without adding new tabs or changing the main browsing session in any way. + +This perhaps highlights something that will become very obvious the minute you start using Vivaldi: it's very customizable. Sometimes the sheer number of options can be overwhelming and if you don't spend some time digging, you can overlook very useful features. + +For example I've been using Vivaldi for years and always been slightly irritated that releasing the Alt key opens the main menu. Because I use Alt-J and Alt-K to switch desktops, I'd always land on Vivaldi and the main menu would be open. Arguably this is an OS-level feature that I should figure out how to turn off globally since it happens in Firefox and LibreOffice as well. I happened to mention this annoyance in passing when I spoke with von Tetzchner and he emailed me a bit later to point out that Vivaldi has a setting to turn off "Alt key for Main Menu". It was there for who knows how long, I simply missed it. + +## How to get the most of Vivaldi + +That highlights what's probably Vivaldi 2.0's biggest challenge -- convincing people to put in little bit of effort. As von Tetzchner tells Ars, "there is a little bit of a learning curve, but if you give it time and customize it, you'll find that Vivaldi feels really right. If there's something you don't like let us know, we're unique in how we listen to users." + +To really get the most out of Vivaldi, you need to spend some time customizing it to your needs, and to do that, you need to know what's possible. I would strongly suggest you spend some time exploring Vivaldi's settings page to see what you can change. And of course Chrome extensions work just fine in Vivaldi, so if there is something it can't do out of the box, there's always extensions. That said I've only found the need for two extensions. + +The first thing you should do when you install Vivaldi is open up the settings panel and have a look around. + +To do that you can either click the gear icon at the lower left part of the screen, or click the main menu, go to Tools and then settings, or type F2 and then "sett" and hit return, or hit Alt-P, or you can visualize the settings page and it will appear. Just kidding, visualizing it doesn't work. Yet. + +As you can see there are many different ways to do any one thing in Vivaldi. This is its gift to you, it will work however you'd like to work. I happen to be a keyboard shortcuts fan, so I've set up Vivaldi so that nearly everything I want to do I can do without taking my fingers off the keys (I also use a plugin, Vimium to add some shortcut Vivaldi doesn't offer out of the box). In Vivaldi 2.0 there are a few new shortcuts worth familiarizing yourself with, for example there are now predefined shortcuts for moving tabs left and right. + +That's how I use Vivaldi, but I know other users who make extensive use of mouse gestures so that they rarely have to touch the keyboard. Polar opposite ways of working that are both possible in the same piece of software. + +Once you start digging into the different ways of using Vivaldi you'll find a level of fine-grained control you won't find elsewhere. Consider for instance, privacy in the context of web searching. + +Whenever you search in the address bar of other browsers, that information is, by default, sent to a third-party server, be it Google, Bing or whomever the search provider is for that browser. This means the third-party can keep track of what you search for, but it also means it can see URLs you type as well. Because you're searching in the URL bar, and the browser doesn't know if you're entering a domain name or searching, in most cases, the browser will send every URL you enter to the search engine as well. + +Most browsers allow you to turn this feature off, but in every browser I've used the choice of whether or not to use predictive searching is binary: it's either on or off. + +In Vivaldi you get more control than that. + +The first thing to realize is that this behavior is off by default. Out of the box nothing you type in the address bar is sent to any third-party. Vivaldi takes your privacy much more seriously than the rest of the browsers I've tested. + +If, however, you decide you want predictive searching, as this is known, you can turn it on in Settings >> Search. Once it's on you have some extra options to control how it works. You could, for instance, turn it off when typing in the URL bar, but enable it in the separate search box. That would mean things you type in the URL bar, e.g. URLs, would never be sent on to a third-party, but when you search in the search box you'd get suggestions. + +You can fine tune this a bit more too. I don't want suggestions for everything I search in the URL, but I also don't like a separate search box cluttering up the URL bar. So I turn off suggestions in the URL bar, but enable them if I explicitly use a search keyword (letter really) to trigger a search from the URL bar. That way if I type "arstechnica.com", no data is sent and I get no suggestions I just go to the Ars site. But if I type "d arstechnica" I'll get suggestions from DuckDuckGo because the "d" prefix tells Vivaldi to search DuckDuckGo. + +You can further refine this to restrict it to only search engines you trust to keep your data private, like DuckDuckGo, StartPage or Quant, all of which Vivaldi includes out of the box. You can also use a POST request if the search engine supports it, further limiting the data that you're leaking when you search (I have not, however, been able to make this work with anything except StartPage). There's even an option to set different default search engines for normal windows and private browsing windows (by the default the latter will use DuckDuckGo). + +It's not new in this release, but there's another Vivaldi feature worth noting: fast forward and rewind. Fast forward is useful for any sort of paged content, as it allows you to jump to the next page, and you don't have to click the button, there's a keyboard shortcut as well. For example, search for something on Google, use spacebar to scroll down the page, and when you get to the bottom of the page, hit spacebar again and Vivaldi will automatically load the next pages of results. Rewind will do the opposite, take you back to the beginning of the your most recent browsing history for that tab. + +You can also alter Vivaldi's interface to suite your needs, moving the tab bar to any side of the window you like, same with the URL bar, bookmarks and so on. + +The possibilities are almost limitless. With that in mind, I'd also suggest looking over the [user forums](https://forum.vivaldi.net/) for tips from other users, examples of how people are using Vivaldi and other suggestions. Vivaldi users are some of the active, helpful people I've encountered in the software world. If there's a way to do something with Vivaldi -- and chances are pretty good there is -- they'll know. + +In fact, according to von Tetzchner, about half of all the features in this release come from user feedback and suggestions. To protect your privacy Vivaldi does not collect any data about how you use the browser, so if you want to have an impact on the future of Vivaldi, and you definitely can have one, you'll have to join the community and get involved. + +## Conclusion + +While Vivaldi 2.0 is not perfect, its lack of a mobile version remains frustrating, and there are some other features I'd like to see, like a way to export notes, to make notes on PDF files, keyboard shortcuts for selecting tabs, and an Opera-mail style mail client -- most of which I know are on the roadmap -- this release sees the browser maturing, adding the features users want and continuing to focus on the details that make Vivaldi a power users delight. + +When I asked why tech savvy user might consider switching from, say, Firefox, von Tetzchner said Vivaldi's advantage likes in its user-centric focus. "It's about the focus on you and your requirements," he says. "Other browsers are removing features, we're adding them. There's more than one way to do everything in Vivaldi. Make it yours." diff --git a/ars-technica/published/vivaldireview-edit.html b/ars-technica/published/vivaldireview-edit.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2f1ed49 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/vivaldireview-edit.html @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +

It's been a long time since a brand new desktop browser landed on the web. Web newcomers might even be forgiven for thinking that there have always been just four web browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

+

After the vicious early days when the world of web browsers closely resembled the ruthless world of the railroad barons a century earlier, the browser market settled down to something pretty boring: IE and Firefox. A few years later Apple introduced Safari. Several years after that Google launched Chrome. Since Chrome arrived in 2008 the web hasn't seen another major browser launch until now.

+

The Browser is Dead, Long Live the Browser

+

Part of the reason hardly anyone wants to build a new browser is no doubt that it's a massive undertaking. Another part though is likely due to the rise of mobile devices, which have spawned a thousand browsers, all quietly, invisibly embedded into other applications.

+

Site-specific mobile applications like the Facebook or Twitter apps push the browser into the background. When you click a link in these apps the pages just appear. Behind the scenes an embedded browser handles everything without switching to whatever dedicated browser might be installed. In fact there's little need for a dedicated web browser at all if you spend most of your time in mobile applications.

+

Desktop browsers have largely followed this overall trend of slipping into the background. Every new release sees them simplifying their interfaces and removing features that their data collection tools indicate are only used by a small handful. RSS icons disappear, toolbars get hidden away, the URL bar will likely disappear soon in many browsers.

+

This ends up working out well for most people, especially since, as Google infamously demonstrated some years ago, most people have no idea what a web browser is or even that they're using one. The simpler the interface the less the average user needs to think about anything other than what they want to see or do on the web.

+

Given that success in the browser market is measured in market share this is not surprising. The less sophisticated user will always be the most plentiful and browsers will alway chase the numbers.

+

That's not a bad thing. It helps to get more people online. It improves the experience for the majority. Most people reading this have long since forgotten it, but there was a time when we too had no idea what all those inscrutable icons littered around the browser windows actually did.

+

There is, however, still that 5 percent that actually did use the RSS icon, liked their status bar and will most likely abandon any browser that hides away the address bar. The power users may be the minority, but they still exist. Exactly what constitutes a power user is up for debate, but looking at the recent history of web browser "advances" one thing seems clear, the power user is not the target audience. The person who wants to be in control of their experience and customize it to their liking has been left behind by most browsers.

+

Vivaldi, a New Browser for Power Users

+

The power user's current solution to the simplification, arguably the infantilization, of the web browser interface is to get all those missing features back with add-ons. This works to a degree, but it introduces a ton of extra code, some of it written by programmers far less capable than those contributing to the core of Firefox or Chromium, which means, inevitably, add-ons slow things down. The problem is bad enough that a future version of Firefox will have a feature dedicated to letting you know which of your add-ons is slowing you down.

+

The list of major browsers at the start of this article was actually short one browser -- Opera. Opera has never had a huge audience, but it did cater to power users. Then Opera decided to abandon its homegrown rendering engine and adopt WebKit (along with Chrome, Opera now uses the WebKit fork, Blink). The move to WebKit meant more sites rendered properly in Opera (since supporting Opera's Presto engine was a low priority for most web developers), but it also meant Opera had to leave behind some of the features that its power users relied on the most.

+

Even two years later the current version of Opera still lacks most of the features targeted at power users -- tab stacks, mouse gestures, extensive keyboard shortcuts, the ability to take notes on a web page and more are all still missing. Opera today is a shadow of its last Presto-based release (Opera 12).

+

Opera threw in the towel on power users. That's at least part of why Vivaldi came to exist.

+

Vivaldi is a brand new web browser that wants to bring back all the old features of Opera 12 and more. The Vivaldi browser bills itself as "for our friends", which would seem to mean for power users. Vivaldi boasts many features the average user is unlikely to need or even be aware of. This is indeed a power user's browser built by power users for power users. Put another way, this is the new (old) Opera.

+

The team behind Vivaldi recently release a second "technical preview". It's still experimentaland a long way from finished, but you can try out Vivaldi today. Vivaldi works on Windows, OS X and Linux (there are even .deb and .rpm downloads available for easy installation on Linux).

+ +[image="vivaldi-ars.png" caption="Vivaldi"] + +

If you're a former Opera user unhappy with the direction of desktop Opera I strongly suggest you download Vivaldi. The technical preview release may be rough around the edges but it already supports tab stacking, adding notes (complete with screenshots of any page), mouse gestures and tons of keyboard shortcuts all wrapped in a user interface that's reminiscent of Opera 12.

+

It's no accident that Vivaldi offers most of what Opera 12 offered. Vivaldi's CEO is Jon S. von Tetzchner, co-founder and former CEO of Opera. Von Tetzchner's primary goal for Vivaldi is to rebuild the browser that Opera once was -- the power user's browser.

+

Building a new browser is not for the faint of heart, but of course this isn't the first time von Tetzchner has done it. Why do it again? The motivations behind Vivaldi are startlingly simple. As Von Tetzchner tells me, "Opera abandoned Opera... I thought, what am I going to do now? There were all these features that I was used to, that everyone else was used to and they were gone. So we thought, well there's a lot of people that want to do more with their browser, let's make a browser for them."

+

In other words Vivaldi isn't interested in chasing the market share of IE, Firefox or Chrome. It's never going to get to that size user base, but it will let you do more with the web than any of the others will out of the box.

+

Vivaldi also has the potential to re-shape the browser market. Opera never had anything but a tiny slice of the browser market either, but its impact on the browser market has been enormous. Just about every major feature in today's browsers started out in Opera. Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, pioneering support for web standards and even the clustered page thumbnails when you open a new window or tab (a feature known as "speed dial") all started in Opera and were then copied by Firefox, Chrome, Safari and (sometimes) IE.

+

For now Vivaldi is primarily concerned with getting its desktop offering to a stable, usable point.

+

At first glance what you see when you open Vivaldi for the first time isn't all that different from any other browser you've used. Indeed it looks and behaves like any other on the surface.

+

Vivaldi, like the latest versions of Opera and seemingly pretty much everything else these days, uses the WebKit rendering engine behind the scenes. That means Vivaldi renders pages just the same as Chrome or any other WebKit/Blink browser would. But Vivaldi's interface does not rely on the same code you'll find in Chrome or Opera. In fact the interface is written entirely with web technologies, primarily Javascript and CSS. JavaScript and React along with Node.js, Browserify and "a long list of NPM modules" create the Vivaldi UI. As the website puts it, "Vivaldi is the web built with the web".

+

It's fitting that just under the surface Vivaldi is significantly different than its competition since the same it true of its features. Vivaldi's interface isn't cluttered, you'll have to poke around to discover the real power. Once you start to dig into the interface there's a ton of stuff you won't find elsewhere like the ability to put tabs on any side of the screen, customize keyboard shortcuts, turn off images, even render the page with monospace fonts if you want. If you remember the heady days back when Netscape was the dominant browser and user stylesheets were still an option then you'll love Vivaldi.

+ +[image="vivaldi-ars-no-img.png" caption="Vivaldi with images turned off."] + +

Among the elements you can customize in Vivaldi are the location of the tab bar, which can be on any side of the window you like, the address bar, which can be on the top or bottom, the order in which you cycle through tabs in the tab switcher, any keyboard shortcut, the position of the sidebar panel, and the available search engines and keyboard shortcuts for each.

+

There are other power user friendly tools too, like what Vivaldi calls "Quick Commands". Press F2 (that shortcut is configurable naturally) and Vivaldi will launch a small command window which allows you to search through your browsing history, open tabs, bookmarks, even settings. Between the built-in (yes, configurable) keyboard shortcuts and Quick Commands it's possible to control Vivaldi and browse the web without lifting your fingers off the keys. About the only thing that isn't easy to do is click a link (as far as I can tell you'll need to tab through every link on the page to get to the one you want).

+ +[image="vivaldi-ars-quick-commands.png" caption="Vivaldi's Quick Commands allow fast keyboard access to just about everything."] + +

Another familiar feature for Opera refugees is the sidebar, which can show your bookmarks, contacts, downloads, notes and (not working yet) mail. The notes panel allows you to take notes on a page and even capture screenshots for later reference. Notes can be organized into folders, though currently there doesn't seem to be a way to export them.

+ +[image="vivaldi-notes.png" caption="Vivaldi's Notes panel with screenshots."] + +

The just-released second technical preview adds a couple more welcome power user features and customization options. There's now an (optional) bookmarks menu bar. Where most browsers have a special folder for the menu bar, Vivaldi lets you make any folder in your bookmarks show up in the Bookmarks bar.

+

This second release also sees some improvements to the on-demand image loading. Instead of just on or off, there's now a setting to show all, only cached images or no images at all. Although primarily aimed at those on slow or metered networks, turning off images also makes for much faster searching. I found myself turning off images (regrettably, for all the customization there is in Vivaldi, there's no keyboard shortcut for toggling images) every time I searched on Google or DuckDuckGo. That way loading those "maybe this page has what I want" results is much faster since I don't have to sit and wait while a bunch of images I don't care about load. It also makes visiting Medium.com more tolerable.

+

Perhaps the most notable new feature in the second technical preview is what Vivaldi calls "spatial navigation". Instead of reaching for your mouse, spatial navigation lets you click links by pressing the shift key and the arrow keys. You'll see a blue highlight surround each link and you can quickly jump to the link you want without taking your hands off the keyboard. In practice it's just like tabbing through links, but allows you to move much faster since you don't have to go in order.

+

The last item of note in the latest version is something I would not at all be surprised to see other browsers copying soon: fast-forward and rewind buttons. Fast forward and rewind take a minute to wrap your head around, but once you do they become fantastically useful, especially rewind. Rewind backs you up to the first page you visited at a particular domain. So if you come to Ars to read this review, but then clicked around, read a few other articles and then want to get back to the Vivaldi download link in this piece you would just hit rewind and you're instantly back to the first page you started on.

+

Fast-forward is a little more unpredictable, but an interesting idea. It attempts to, according to the Vivaldi docs, "jump to the most natural next page". For example the second page of search results or the next page in a forum thread.

+

Nice as the new features are, Vivaldi still isn't feature complete, even by its own standards. Click the mail panel in the sidebar and you'll get a "coming soon" message.

+ +[image="vivaldi-mail.png" caption="Vivaldi's Mail panel, coming soon."] + +

The mail panel hints at Vivaldi's biggest problem right now -- it's not done.

+

Vivaldi has so many great features it can be a little frustrating because it is still very much a technical preview. It's been largely stable in my testing (most of the bugs I encountered using the first release are gone in the second), but it's still missing some key features.

+

Extensions still don't exist. They're in the works, but for now you'll have to get by with Vivaldi as is. That means, for example, no Ad-Block Plus or other popular extensions. It's also worth noting that thanks to extensions you could, in theory, get most of Vivaldi's features to Firefox or Chrome, something von Tetzchner acknowledges though, as he points out, too many extensions is often the reason browsers get so slow.

+

Then there's syncing. In the multi-device world of today a browser without sync features is next to useless and thus far Vivaldi is missing any kind of mobile component, let alone a way to sync between desktop and mobile. Both things are already in the works according to von Tetzchner, though he declined to comment on when either might arrive. "For now," he says, "we're focused on building out the desktop version."

+

At the moment Vivaldi is really too new and unfinished to use on a day to day basis, though that hasn't stopped me from doing so for the past few weeks. It hasn't always been completely smooth, but it has worked for the most part. Even if you don't jump in with both feet right now, if you miss the good old Opera -- the Opera of Opera 12 -- then Vivaldi is one to keep an eye on. Even if you never use it yourself, given their track record there's a good chance some of ideas von Tetzchner and crew come up with may well end up in your favorite browser eventually.

diff --git a/ars-technica/published/vivaldireview.html b/ars-technica/published/vivaldireview.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a70f705 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/published/vivaldireview.html @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +

It's been a long time since a brand new desktop browser landed on the web. Web newcomers might even be forgiven for thinking that there have always been just four web browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

+

After the vicious early days when the world of web browsers closely resembled the ruthless world of the railroad barons a century earlier, the browser market settled down to something pretty boring: IE and Firefox. A few years later Apple introduced Safari. Several years after that Google launched Chrome. Since Chrome arrived in 2008 the web hasn't seen another major browser launch until now.

+

The Browser is Dead, Long Live the Browser

+

Part of the reason hardly anyone wants to build a new browser is no doubt that it's a massive undertaking. Another part though is likely due to the rise of mobile devices, which have spawned a thousand browsers, all quietly, invisibly embedded into other applications.

+

Site-specific mobile applications like the Facebook or Twitter apps push the browser into the background. When you click a link in these apps the pages just appear. Behind the scenes an embedded browser handles everything without switching to whatever dedicated browser might be installed. In fact there's little need for a dedicated web browser at all if you spend most of your time in mobile applications.

+

Desktop browsers have largely followed this overall trend of slipping into the background. Every new release sees them simplifying their interfaces and removing features that their data collection tools indicate are only used by a small handful. RSS icons disappear, toolbars get hidden away, the URL bar will likely disappear soon in many browsers.

+

This ends up working out well for most people, especially since, as Google infamously demonstrated some years ago, most people have no idea what a web browser is or even that they're using one. The simpler the interface the less the average user needs to think about anything other than what they want to see or do on the web.

+

Given that success in the browser market is measured in market share this is not surprising. The less sophisticated user will always be the most plentiful and browsers will alway chase the numbers.

+

That's not a bad thing. It helps to get more people online. It improves the experience for the majority. Most people reading this have long since forgotten it, but there was a time when we too had no idea what all those inscrutable icons littered around the browser windows actually did.

+

There is, however, still that 5 percent that actually did use the RSS icon, liked their status bar and will most likely abandon any browser that hides away the address bar. The power users may be the minority, but they still exist. Exactly what constitutes a power user is up for debate, but looking at the recent history of web browser "advances" one thing seems clear, the power user is not the target audience. The person who wants to be in control of their experience and customize it to their liking has been left behind by most browsers.

+

Vivaldi, a New Browser for Power Users

+

The power user's current solution to the simplification, arguably the infantilization, of the web browser interface is to get all those missing features back with add-ons. This works to a degree, but it introduces a ton of extra code, some of it written by programmers far less capable than those contributing to the core of Firefox or Chromium, which means, inevitably, add-ons slow things down. The problem is bad enough that a future version of Firefox will have a feature dedicated to letting you know which of your add-ons is slowing you down.

+

The list of major browsers at the start of this article was actually short one browser -- Opera. Opera has never had a huge audience, but it did cater to power users. Then Opera decided to abandon its homegrown rendering engine and adopt WebKit (along with Chrome, Opera now uses the WebKit fork, Blink). The move to WebKit meant more sites rendered properly in Opera (since supporting Opera's Presto engine was a low priority for most web developers), but it also meant Opera had to leave behind some of the features that its power users relied on the most.

+

Even two years later the current version of Opera still lacks most of the features targeted at power users -- tab stacks, mouse gestures, extensive keyboard shortcuts, the ability to take notes on a web page and more are all still missing. Opera today is a shadow of its last Presto-based release (Opera 12).

+

Opera threw in the towel on power users. That's at least part of why Vivaldi came to exist.

+

Vivaldi is a brand new web browser that wants to bring back all the old features of Opera 12 and more. The Vivaldi browser bills itself as "for our friends", which would seem to mean for power users. Vivaldi boasts many features the average user is unlikely to need or even be aware of. This is indeed a power user's browser built by power users for power users. Put another way, this is the new (old) Opera.

+

It's highly experimental, a little bit buggy and a long way from finished, but you can try out Vivaldi today. Vivaldi works on Windows, OS X and Linux (there are even .deb and .rpm downloads available for easy installation on Linux).

+ +[image="vivaldi-ars.png" caption="Vivaldi"] + +

If you're a former Opera user unhappy with the direction of desktop Opera I strongly suggest you download Vivaldi. The technical preview release may be rough around the edges but it already supports tab stacking, adding notes (complete with screenshots of any page), mouse gestures and tons of keyboard shortcuts all wrapped in a user interface that's reminiscent of Opera 12.

+

It's no accident that Vivaldi offers most of what Opera 12 offered. Vivaldi's CEO is Jon S. von Tetzchner, co-founder and former CEO of Opera. Von Tetzchner's primary goal for Vivaldi is to rebuild the browser that Opera once was -- the power user's browser.

+

Building a new browser is not for the faint of heart, but of course this isn't the first time von Tetzchner has done it. Why do it again? The motivations behind Vivaldi are startlingly simple. As Von Tetzchner tells me, "Opera abandoned Opera... I thought, what am I going to do now? There were all these features that I was used to, that everyone else was used to and they were gone. So we thought, well there's a lot of people that want to do more with their browser, let's make a browser for them."

+

In other words Vivaldi isn't interested in chasing the market share of IE, Firefox or Chrome. It's never going to get to that size user base, but it will let you do more with the web than any of the others will out of the box.

+

Vivaldi also has the potential to re-shape the browser market. Opera never had anything but a tiny slice of the browser market either, but its impact on the browser market has been enormous. Just about every major feature in today's browsers started out in Opera. Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, pioneering support for web standards and even the clustered page thumbnails when you open a new window or tab (a feature known as "speed dial") all started in Opera and were then copied by Firefox, Chrome, Safari and (sometimes) IE.

+

For now Vivaldi is primarily concerned with getting its desktop offering to a stable, usable point.

+

At first glance what you see when you open Vivaldi for the first time isn't all that different from any other browser you've used. Indeed it looks and behaves like any other on the surface.

+

Vivaldi, like the latest versions of Opera and seemingly pretty much everything else these days, uses the WebKit rendering engine behind the scenes. That means Vivaldi renders pages just the same as Chrome or any other WebKit/Blink browser would. But Vivaldi's interface does not rely on the same code you'll find in Chrome or Opera. In fact the interface is written entirely with web technologies, primarily Javascript and CSS. JavaScript and React along with Node.js, Browserify and "a long list of NPM modules" create the Vivaldi UI. As the website puts it, "Vivaldi is the web built with the web".

+

It's fitting that just under the surface Vivaldi is significantly different than its competition since the same it true of its features. Vivaldi's interface isn't cluttered, you'll have to poke around to discover the real power. Once you start to dig into the interface there's a ton of stuff you won't find elsewhere like the ability to put tabs on any side of the screen, customize keyboard shortcuts, turn off images, even render the page with monospace fonts if you want. If you remember the heady days back when Netscape was the dominant browser and user stylesheets were still an option then you'll love Vivaldi.

+ +[image="vivaldi-ars-no-img.png" caption="Vivaldi with images turned off."] + +

Among the elements you can customize in Vivaldi are the location of the tab bar, which can be on any side of the window you like, the order in which you cycle through tabs in the tab switcher, any keyboard shortcut, the position of the sidebar panel, and the available search engines and keyboard shortcuts for each.

+

There are other power user friendly tools too, like what Vivaldi calls "Quick Commands". Press F2 (that shortcut is configurable naturally) and Vivaldi will launch a small command window which allows you to search through your browsing history, open tabs, bookmarks, even settings. Between the built-in (yes, configurable) keyboard shortcuts and Quick Commands it's possible to control Vivaldi and browse the web without lifting your fingers off the keys. About the only thing that isn't easy to do is click a link (as far as I can tell you'll need to tab through every link on the page to get to the one you want).

+ +[image="vivaldi-ars-quick-commands.png" caption="Vivaldi's Quick Commands allow fast keyboard access to just about everything."] + +

Another familiar feature for Opera refugees is the sidebar, which can show your bookmarks, contacts, downloads, notes and (not working yet) mail. The notes panel allows you to take notes on a page and even capture screenshots for later reference. Notes can be organized into folders, though currently there doesn't seem to be a way to export them.

+ +[image="vivaldi-notes.png" caption="Vivaldi's Notes panel with screenshots."] + +[image="vivaldi-mail.png" caption="Vivaldi's Mail panel, coming soon."] + +

The mail panel hints at Vivaldi's biggest problem right now -- it's not done.

+

Vivaldi has so many great features it can be a little frustrating because it is still very much a technical preview.

+

There are bugs and even some features where it's hard to tell what's a bug and what's intended. For example, the feature to turn off images makes pages load much faster, which is great when you're, for example, searching for something, clicking a lot of links and then backing out; unless you're searching for something very visible you probably don't need to see every image on the page. This seems like the perfect place to use Vivaldi's image toggle button, but it appears to only work on the first domain you click it on, making it useless in this scenario.

+

Another sorely missing feature is extensions, which are in the works, but for now you'll have to get by with Vivaldi as is. That means, for example, no Ad-Block Plus or other popular extensions. It's also worth noting that thanks to extensions you could, in theory, get most of Vivaldi's features to Firefox or Chrome, something von Tetzchner acknowledges though, as he points out, too many extensions is often the reason browsers get so slow.

+

Then there's syncing. In the multi-device world of today a browser without sync features is next to useless and thus far Vivaldi is missing any kind of mobile component, let alone a way to sync between desktop and mobile. Both things are already in the works according to von Tetzchner, though he declined to comment on when either might arrive. "For now," he says, "we're focused on building out the desktop version."

+

At the moment Vivaldi is really too new and unfinished to use on a day to day basis, though that hasn't stopped me from doing so for the past few weeks. It hasn't always been completely smooth, but it has worked for the most part. Even if you don't jump in with both feet right now, if you miss the good old Opera -- the Opera of Opera 12 -- then Vivaldi is one to keep an eye on. Even if you never use it yourself, given their track record there's a good chance some of ideas von Tetzchner and crew come up with may well end up in your favorite browser eventually.

diff --git a/ars-technica/ubuntu1910-review.html b/ars-technica/ubuntu1910-review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f159cc1 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/ubuntu1910-review.html @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ +

Leaves are turning, temperatures dipping, sure signs – if you live in the northern hemisphere – that Canonical’s Autumn release is upon us. Ubuntu 19.10 is nicknamed Eoan Ermine – I don’t know how you pronounce it either – and it’s the best non-LTS Ubuntu release Canonical has ever put out.

+

I should qualify that statement somewhat, because really, as the newest version, it had damn well better be the best Ubuntu ever. But it’s more than that this time around. I’ve been reviewing Ubuntu for ten years now, using and interacting with it in some form or another for another three or four years before that, and Ubuntu 19.10 is quite simply the best Ubuntu Canonical has ever released.

+

The reason I am like 19.10 so much is that it feels insanely fast. Everyday tasks like opening applications, dragging windows, activating the search interface, and even just moving the cursor around are all noticeably faster than in 19.04.

+

I happened to be testing a top of the line MacBook around the time I first installed the 19.10 beta on my aging Lenovo x240, and it instantly made the Mac feel like a sloth. Ubuntu 19.10 ran circles around the Mac even on much, much less powerful hardware. Nothing says success in my testing like software that makes old hardware feel newer and even if that were all you got out of Ubuntu 19.10, I’d call it a win.

+

The speed boost is immediately noticeable from the minute you pop in the live CD, and it’s even faster when you have it installed, but that’s not all that’s new. As is typical of Ubuntu’s October release there’s a number of new features that are not quite ready for prime time, but show considerable promise including support for the ZFS file system. While still clearly labelled “experimental” (in all caps even), I have had not problems running 19.10 on a root partition formatted with ZFS. That’s not to say that you should go try it, it is EXPERIMENTAL, but it appears that what’s really lacking are tools for managing and working with ZFS. Using ZFS enables some powerful backup and replication possibilities, but the tools for working with ZFS in Ubuntu are still somewhat limited. More on that in minute.

+

But first, let’s dig into the speed improvements and what’s new under the hood in Ubuntu 19.10.

+

Like GNOME, But Fast

+ +[image="ubuntu1910-desktop.jpg" caption='The default GNOME desktop in Ubuntu 19.10'] + +

Most of improvements in 19.10 can be attributed to the latest release of GNOME 3.34, the default desktop for Ubuntu. However, GNOME 3.34 is faster largely because of work Canonical engineers put in. As an aside, I think the current state of GNOME and the work Canonical has done to make it better are the best argument around for why Canonical made the right call when it shut down Unity.

+

If you’d like to understand the finer details of what Canonical did to improve GNOME and how they did it, there’s a post over on the Ubuntu Discourse board that goes into considerable detail. The biggest takeaway is that Canonical’s engineers looked not for the typical “hot spots,” places RAM or CPU usage spiked, but what it calls “cold spots.” That is, places where GNOME was “was idle instead of updating the screen smoothly.”

+

Canonical developers found a bunch of places where this was happening. Three that jumped out at me are improvements to how Mutter refreshes, changes that transferred some work from the GPU back to the CPU, and a fix to frame lagging in Xorg. The latter is interesting because one of the things that I noticed in this release is that GNOME under Wayland did not feel dramatically faster than under Xorg the way it did for me in 19.04. I lost my Wayland envy with the speed improvements in this release.

+

Canonical’s write up of the work done to improve GNOME is also interesting for the long list of what didn’t work, and how wrong some of the developers’ initial assumptions were – especially regarding GNOME’s use of JavaScript, which turns out to have next to no effect on performance. Sorry JavaScript haters, but it turns out “assuming that JavaScript is slower than everything else written in C,” is a bad assumption.

+

Canonical is not done improving GNOME. The project’s goal for the next release is better performance on faster, modern hardware. Then in 20.10 it wants to improve performance on older, slower machines. As Canonical’s Daniel Van Vugt puts it, “the future of Gnome Shell is bright and worth getting excited about.”

+

Even the present is pretty bright. As primarily an i3 user, I still find GNOME Shell overkill, but in 19.10 it’s fast enough that I no longer rush to uninstall it.

+

This release sees some tweaks to Ubuntu’s default “Yaru” themes. Yaru is a mix of light and dark elements, though as of 19.10 it’s leaning more toward the light end of the theme spectrum. Personally I rather like the new default look. Ubuntu’s mix of light and dark elements is well thought out and updates in this release include making notifications, menus, and dialogs all share the same light skin, while the top GNOME Shell panel remains dark.

+ +[image="ubuntu1910-light-panels.jpg" caption="The new lighter look for Ubuntu's Yaro theme in 19.10 (composit screenshot)"] + +

If the changes aren’t to your liking both a full light theme, and full dark theme are included as well. However, to change themes you’ll need to install GNOME Tweak.

+

As detailed above, the big news in GNOME 3.34 is the speed boost, but it also has a handful of new features worth noting. Two of the best new features are in the main search view, and in the application overview section. Here you can now group applications into folders, making it easier to organize and find frequently used apps. Creating a folder works just like it does on mobile OSes – drag one app icon onto another and a folder will be automatically created.

+ +[image="ubuntu1910-gnome-folders.jpg" caption="Creating folders in GNOME 3.34."] + +

In a related feature, you can now order the types of results shown in GNOME’s global search feature. To do so head to the Search panel in settings and you can now, in addition to turning items on and off, drag and drop to reorder them. For example if you want files to always be the first results show, just drag the files option to the top of the settings list.

+

ZFS and the Kernel

+

The Ubuntu 19.10 installer includes an option to format the root drive using the Z file system, better known as ZFS. This support is label experimental (in all caps even), and it bears heeding this warning. Do not format your root disk to ZFS on production hardware. I went ahead and formatted a root drive with ZFS on a machine I have to return anyway, and I have had no problems (which, frankly, is amazing), but if Canonical changes some implementation detail between now and when ZFS support is declared stable, that data could be lost. Again, don’t use it now, but having kernel-level support for ZFS is a huge deal, not the least because Canonical thinks the license allows for it.

+

Ubuntu has been working on ZFS support for quite a few years now. It started with file-based ZFS in 15.10, which drew on the work of the ZFS On Linux project. Later that support was extended to ZFS for containers in Ubuntu 16.10. Having used ZFS for my LXC containers for nearly a year now with no problems, I can say that Canonical’s handling of the ZFS implementation details makes using ZFS with LXC/LXD no different than using any other file system.

+

Fedora and other distros also have good support for ZFS, but most distros have thus far not included kernel level support. One reason is may be that ZFS is licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License, which some claim is incompatible with the GNU General Public License. Canonical and others disagree, but Canonical is one of the first to actual ship with ZFS in the kernel.

+

Ubuntu 19.10 adds support for ZFS as the root file system and has tools to create and partition a ZFS file system layout directly from the installer.

+

If you’re not familiar with ZFS you may be wondering why you should care. Indeed it’s possible you shouldn’t. There’s nothing wrong with ext4, the default file system used by Ubuntu (and nearly every other distro). ZFS, however, enables some powerful tools that you wouldn’t have access to otherwise, including pooled storage, disk snapshots, data integrity verification and good bit more. A full background on ZFS is beyond the scope of this article, but for those of us using Ubuntu as a workstation, the two biggest wins ZFS offers are probably pooled storage and disk snapshots.

+

Because ZFS acts as both a file system and volume manager, it can create a file system that spans multiple hard drives (this is a “pool” in ZFS parlance). How many disks can you pool? Fun fact, Oracle has done the math and fully populating a 128-bit ZFS storage pool would require more energy than boiling the oceans. Which is to say, ZFS has large datasets covered.

+

The disk snapshots feature though is more useful on your root partition. Imagine for a moment you have root formatted to ZFS and snapshots are enabled. You install an update that breaks some piece of software you rely on. No problem, you can just roll back the file system to a prior state, effectively wiping the update. This is where Ubuntu is headed, but it’s not there yet. Getting ZFS on the root file system is easy (if EXPERIMENTAL), but there aren’t really any tools yet to manage and take advantage of ZFS’s features. If, however, Canonical can bundle a nice GUI for interacting with and managing ZFS it’s going to have an edge over the competition, especially in the enterprise market.

+

The kernel in 19.10 is based on Linux kernel 5.3, which is notable for adding support for the new Radeon RX 5700 series graphics card, as well as the beginnings of support for Intel Speed Select which adds some easier power tuning options.

+

Also noteworthy under the hood in the release is the inclusion of proprietary Nvidia drivers on the Ubuntu installation disk. That means you can now install the Nvidia drivers right from the start without any glitchy post-installation hassles.

+

Snaps and Bugs

+

Ubuntu 19.10 ships with quite a few more default apps as Snap packages, notably the Chromium web browser. This change is coming for all version of Ubuntu once the kinks have been worked out. This will save considerable engineering effort on Canonical’s side since it eliminates the need to build every new version of Chromium for all supported Ubuntu releases.

+

I had no problems using the Snap version of Chromium, and indeed the only real indicator that it’s a Snap is that it takes just a bit longer to open than usual. That said, there are quite a few reports of bugs over on the relevant Ubuntu Discourse thread. The main complaints seem to center around the Snap version not adopting the look when using other GNOME themes, and, for some users, problems with Chromium save dialogs. There are also edge case issues using some advanced features of the Chromium developer tools.

+

While I can see how moving Chromium in particular to a Snap would be a huge time and effort savings for Canonical, judging by user feedback it’s not quite there yet. So far anyway, it hasn’t been pushed out to users of older Ubuntu releases.

+

Ubuntu 19.10 ships with new ‘Media Sharing’ toggle in the Settings app, under the Sharing panel. It shares files that any DLNA or UPnP compatible device can access, which means it should have out of the box support for sharing files with smart TVs, some consoles (Playstation 4, for example), and other devices on your network. There’s a couple things to note here though. First off this feature shares three folders by default – Pictures, Videos and Music – and it shares them to every device on your LAN. If you want more fine-grained control you’re out of luck.

+

The other more serious note is that initial release of Ubuntu 19.10 shipped with a bug that enabled this sharing by default. That’s been fixed, but if you installed 19.10 right away, definitely make sure to update your system and double-check to make sure the sharing feature is off. I tested this feature using VLC on Android to play videos. Everything works fine, but it lacks the polish and speed of Plex. Given how easy it is to install and run Plex (or my personal favorite of the DLNA players, Jellyfin), I’d suggest using a third-party media sharing app.

+

One final note for those of you waiting on support for the Raspberry Pi 4, Ubuntu has published a roadmap. The short story is that Ubuntu 19.10 support for the Raspberry Pi 4 model B is currently limited to the 1GB and 2GB versions. Canonical’s Galem Kayo writes on the Ubuntu blog that, “due to a kernel bug, USB ports are not supported out of the box in the official arm64 image on the 4GB RAM version.”

+

Canonical’s engineers have identified the necessary kernel fixes and are currently testing them, but so far there’s no official support for the 4 GB model. There is, however, a workaround. I have successfully installed 19.10 on my 4 GB Raspberry Pi 4 using a boot param to tell the kernel it only has 3 GB of RAM. It’s hardly ideal, but if you want to play around with it today it is technically possible to do so.

+

Conclusion

+

Ubuntu 19.10 is unusual for an October Ubuntu release in that I’d call it a must-have upgrade. While it retains some of the experimental elements Ubuntu’s Fall releases have always been noted for, the speed boosts to GNOME alone make it will worth your time. If you prefer to stick with more stable releases, most of what’s new in 19.10 will eventually be backported to 19.04 and possibly even the last LTS release, 18.04.

+

Still, unless you’re committed to the stability of LTS releases, I see no reason not to upgrade. As I said at the beginning of this review, Ubuntu 19.10 is quite possibly the best release of Ubuntu Canonical has ever delivered and it’s well worth upgrading if you’re already an Ubuntu user and well worth trying if you’re not.

diff --git a/ars-technica/ubuntu1910review.txt b/ars-technica/ubuntu1910review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0715a54 --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/ubuntu1910review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,75 @@ +Leaves are turning, temperatures dipping, sure signs -- if you live in the northern hemisphere -- that Canonical's Autumn release is upon us. Ubuntu 19.10 is nicknamed Eoan Ermine -- I don't know how you pronounce it either -- and it's the best non-LTS Ubuntu release Canonical has ever put out. + +I should qualify that statement somewhat, because really, as the newest version, it had damn well better be the best Ubuntu ever. But it's more than that this time around. I've been reviewing Ubuntu for ten years now, using and interacting with it in some form or another for another three or four years before that, and Ubuntu 19.10 is quite simply the best Ubuntu Canonical has ever released. + +The reason I am like 19.10 so much is that it feels insanely fast. Everyday tasks like opening applications, dragging windows, activating the search interface, and even just moving the cursor around are all noticeably faster than in 19.04. + +I happened to be testing a top of the line MacBook around the time I first installed the 19.10 beta on my aging Lenovo x240, and it instantly made the Mac feel like a sloth. Ubuntu 19.10 ran circles around the Mac even on much, much less powerful hardware. Nothing says success in my testing like software that makes old hardware feel newer and even if that were all you got out of Ubuntu 19.10, I'd call it a win. + +The speed boost is immediately noticeable from the minute you pop in the live CD, and it's even faster when you have it installed, but that's not all that's new. As is typical of Ubuntu's October release there's a number of new features that are not quite ready for prime time, but show considerable promise including support for the ZFS file system. While still clearly labelled "experimental" (in all caps even), I have had not problems running 19.10 on a root partition formatted with ZFS. That's not to say that you should go try it, it is EXPERIMENTAL, but it appears that what's really lacking are tools for managing and working with ZFS. Using ZFS enables some powerful backup and replication possibilities, but the tools for working with ZFS in Ubuntu are still somewhat limited. More on that in minute. + +But first, let's dig into the speed improvements and what's new under the hood in Ubuntu 19.10. + +### Like GNOME, But Fast + +Most of improvements in 19.10 can be attributed to the latest release of GNOME 3.34, the default desktop for Ubuntu. However, GNOME 3.34 is faster largely because of work Canonical engineers put in. As an aside, I think the current state of GNOME and the work Canonical has done to make it better are the best argument around for why Canonical made the right call when it shut down Unity. + +If you'd like to understand the finer details of what Canonical did to improve GNOME and how they did it, there's a post over on the Ubuntu Discourse board that [goes into considerable detail](https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/boosting-the-real-time-performance-of-gnome-shell-3-34-in-ubuntu-19-10/13095). The biggest takeaway is that Canonical's engineers looked not for the typical "hot spots," places RAM or CPU usage spiked, but what it calls "cold spots." That is, places where GNOME was "was idle instead of updating the screen smoothly." + +Canonical developers found a bunch of places where this was happening. Three that jumped out at me are improvements to how Mutter refreshes, changes that transferred some work from the GPU *back* to the CPU, and a fix to frame lagging in Xorg. The latter is interesting because one of the things that I noticed in this release is that GNOME under Wayland did not feel dramatically faster than under Xorg the way it did for me in 19.04. I lost my Wayland envy with the speed improvements in this release. + +Canonical's write up of the work done to improve GNOME is also interesting for the long list of what didn't work, and how wrong some of the developers' initial assumptions were -- especially regarding GNOME's use of JavaScript, which turns out to have next to no effect on performance. Sorry JavaScript haters, but it turns out "assuming that JavaScript is slower than everything else written in C," is a bad assumption. + +Canonical is not done improving GNOME. The project's goal for the next release is better performance on faster, modern hardware. Then in 20.10 it wants to improve performance on older, slower machines. As Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt puts it, "the future of Gnome Shell is bright and worth getting excited about." + +Even the present is pretty bright. As primarily an i3 user, I still find GNOME Shell overkill, but in 19.10 it's fast enough that I no longer rush to uninstall it. + +This release sees some tweaks to Ubuntu's default "Yaru" themes. Yaru is a mix of light and dark elements, though as of 19.10 it's leaning more toward the light end of the theme spectrum. Personally I rather like the new default look. Ubuntu's mix of light and dark elements is well thought out and updates in this release include making notifications, menus, and dialogs all share the same light skin, while the top GNOME Shell panel remains dark. + +If the changes aren't to your liking both a full light theme, and full dark theme are included as well. However, to change themes you'll need to install GNOME Tweak. + +As detailed above, the big news in GNOME 3.34 is the speed boost, but it also has a handful of new features worth noting. Two of the best new features are in the main search view, and in the application overview section. Here you can now group applications into folders, making it easier to organize and find frequently used apps. Creating a folder works just like it does on mobile OSes -- drag one app icon onto another and a folder will be automatically created. + +In a related feature, you can now order the types of results shown in GNOME's global search feature. To do so head to the Search panel in settings and you can now, in addition to turning items on and off, drag and drop to reorder them. For example if you want files to always be the first results show, just drag the files option to the top of the settings list. + +### ZFS and the Kernel + +The Ubuntu 19.10 installer includes an option to format the root drive using the Z file system, better known as ZFS. This support is label experimental (in all caps even), and it bears heeding this warning. Do not format your root disk to ZFS on production hardware. I went ahead and formatted a root drive with ZFS on a machine I have to return anyway, and I have had no problems (which, frankly, is amazing), but if Canonical changes some implementation detail between now and when ZFS support is declared stable, that data could be lost. Again, don't use it now, but having kernel-level support for ZFS is a huge deal, not the least because Canonical thinks the license allows for it. + +Ubuntu has been working on ZFS support for quite a few years now. It started with file-based ZFS in 15.10, which drew on the work of the ZFS On Linux project. Later that support was extended to ZFS for containers in Ubuntu 16.10. Having used ZFS for my LXC containers for nearly a year now with no problems, I can say that Canonical's handling of the ZFS implementation details makes using ZFS with LXC/LXD no different than using any other file system. + +Fedora and other distros also have good support for ZFS, but most distros have thus far not included kernel level support. One reason is may be that ZFS is licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License, which [some claim](https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/) is incompatible with the GNU General Public License. Canonical and others disagree, but Canonical is one of the first to actual ship with ZFS in the kernel. + +Ubuntu 19.10 adds support for ZFS as the root file system and has tools to create and partition a ZFS file system layout directly from the installer. + +If you're not familiar with ZFS you may be wondering why you should care. Indeed it's possible you shouldn't. There's nothing wrong with ext4, the default file system used by Ubuntu (and nearly every other distro). ZFS, however, enables some powerful tools that you wouldn't have access to otherwise, including pooled storage, disk snapshots, data integrity verification and good bit more. A full background on ZFS is beyond the scope of this article, but for those of us using Ubuntu as a workstation, the two biggest wins ZFS offers are probably pooled storage and disk snapshots. + +Because ZFS acts as both a file system and volume manager, it can create a file system that spans multiple hard drives (this is a "pool" in ZFS parlance). How many disks can you pool? Fun fact, Oracle [has done the math](https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/128-bit-storage:-are-you-high) and fully populating a 128-bit ZFS storage pool would require more energy than boiling the oceans. Which is to say, ZFS has large datasets covered. + +The disk snapshots feature though is more useful on your root partition. Imagine for a moment you have root formatted to ZFS and snapshots are enabled. You install an update that breaks some piece of software you rely on. No problem, you can just roll back the file system to a prior state, effectively wiping the update. This is where Ubuntu is headed, but it's not there yet. Getting ZFS on the root file system is easy (if EXPERIMENTAL), but there aren't really any tools yet to manage and take advantage of ZFS's features. If, however, Canonical can bundle a nice GUI for interacting with and managing ZFS it's going to have an edge over the competition, especially in the enterprise market. + +The kernel in 19.10 is based on Linux kernel 5.3, which is notable for adding support for the new Radeon RX 5700 series graphics card, as well as the beginnings of support for Intel Speed Select which adds some easier power tuning options. + +Also noteworthy under the hood in the release is the inclusion of proprietary Nvidia drivers on the Ubuntu installation disk. That means you can now install the Nvidia drivers right from the start without any glitchy post-installation hassles. + +### Snaps and Bugs + +Ubuntu 19.10 ships with quite a few more default apps as Snap packages, notably the Chromium web browser. This change is coming for all version of Ubuntu once the kinks have been worked out. This will save considerable engineering effort on Canonical's side since it eliminates the need to build every new version of Chromium for all supported Ubuntu releases. + +I had no problems using the Snap version of Chromium, and indeed the only real indicator that it's a Snap is that it takes just a bit longer to open than usual. That said, there are quite a few reports of bugs over on the [relevant Ubuntu Discourse thread](https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/call-for-testing-chromium-browser-deb-to-snap-transition/11179/11). The main complaints seem to center around the Snap version not adopting the look when using other GNOME themes, and, for some users, problems with Chromium save dialogs. There are also edge case issues using some advanced features of the Chromium developer tools. + +While I can see how moving Chromium in particular to a Snap would be a huge time and effort savings for Canonical, judging by user feedback it's not quite there yet. So far anyway, it hasn't been pushed out to users of older Ubuntu releases. + +Ubuntu 19.10 ships with new ‘Media Sharing’ toggle in the Settings app, under the Sharing panel. It shares files that any DLNA or UPnP compatible device can access, which means it should have out of the box support for sharing files with smart TVs, some consoles (Playstation 4, for example), and other devices on your network. There's a couple things to note here though. First off this feature shares three folders by default -- Pictures, Videos and Music -- and it shares them to every device on your LAN. If you want more fine-grained control you're out of luck. + +The other more serious note is that initial release of Ubuntu 19.10 shipped with a bug that enabled this sharing by default. That's been fixed, but if you installed 19.10 right away, definitely make sure to update your system and double-check to make sure the sharing feature is off. I tested this feature using VLC on Android to play videos. Everything works fine, but it lacks the polish and speed of Plex. Given how easy it is to install and run Plex (or my personal favorite of the DLNA players, Jellyfin), I'd suggest using a third-party media sharing app. + +One final note for those of you waiting on support for the Raspberry Pi 4, Ubuntu has published a [roadmap](https://ubuntu.com/blog/roadmap-for-official-support-for-the-raspberry-pi-4). The short story is that Ubuntu 19.10 support for the Raspberry Pi 4 model B is currently limited to the 1GB and 2GB versions. Canonical's Galem Kayo writes on the Ubuntu blog that, "due to a kernel bug, USB ports are not supported out of the box in the official arm64 image on the 4GB RAM version." + +Canonical's engineers have identified the necessary kernel fixes and are currently testing them, but so far there's no official support for the 4 GB model. There is, however, a workaround. I have successfully installed 19.10 on my 4 GB Raspberry Pi 4 using a boot param to tell the kernel it only has 3 GB of RAM. It's hardly ideal, but if you want to play around with it today it is technically possible to do so. + +### Conclusion + +Ubuntu 19.10 is unusual for an October Ubuntu release in that I'd call it a must-have upgrade. While it retains some of the experimental elements Ubuntu's Fall releases have always been noted for, the speed boosts to GNOME alone make it will worth your time. If you prefer to stick with more stable releases, most of what's new in 19.10 will eventually be backported to 19.04 and possibly even the last LTS release, 18.04. + +Still, unless you're committed to the stability of LTS releases, I see no reason not to upgrade. As I said at the beginning of this review, Ubuntu 19.10 is quite possibly the best release of Ubuntu Canonical has ever delivered and it's well worth upgrading if you're already an Ubuntu user and well worth trying if you're not. diff --git a/ars-technica/vivaldi-mobile-review.html b/ars-technica/vivaldi-mobile-review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..26e0f7d --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/vivaldi-mobile-review.html @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +

Vivaldi, makers of the power user’s favorite web browser, have finally released a mobile version. Vivaldi for Android (sorry iOS users, it’s Android-only for now) brings most of what’s great about Vivaldi to your phone, and thanks to Vivaldi’s sync service you can have all your desktop data on your mobile device.

+

Web browsers are perhaps the most important piece of software we use. Our devices are often little more than small windows onto the web. The web browser is what we use to see and explore what’s in that window. For all their importance though, the modern web browser, especially the mobile web browser, offers precious little in the way of features. It displays the web and that’s about it. Want to interact with what you see? You’re mostly out of luck.

+

Most people probably like their browser this way. Google, maker of the most widely-used mobile browser, rarely does anything without extensive user testing. If Chrome is minimalist it’s safe to assume it’s that way because Google has determined that’s what its users want. And since most other browsers copy whatever Google Chrome does, most mobile web browsers end up very minimalist pieces of software.

+

On the desktop there has long been an exception to the uniformly dumbed-down offerings of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari – Vivaldi.

+

Led by CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner, co-founder and former CEO of Opera, Vivaldi’s primary goal is to build a useful browser, a tool you can bend to your will rather than the other way around. Vivaldi is a tool you can customize the way you like, its preferences may be overwhelming at first glance, but if you dig in you can make Vivaldi do just about whatever you want it to do. For this reason Vivaldi is often called a “power user’s browser”. As opposed, I guess, to the powerless user’s browser.

+

For all that there was always one big problem with Vivaldi: it was desktop only. The company said it was working on a mobile version from the beginning, and von Tetzchner told me several times he was already using it, but there was nothing for the rest of us.

+

Now Vivaldi Mobile is here, for Android users at least. Technically it’s a beta release and all the common cautions regarding beta software apply, but I’ve been using it for over a month now and have had no problems. Or, I should say, I have had problems, but updates prior to the public release eliminated all of them. And even if there were still bugs, Vivaldi would still be more useful than any other browser on my phone – and yes, I’ve tried nearly all of them, even the small, cottage efforts.

+

Sync and Mobile UI

+

Vivaldi Mobile is surprisingly feature-complete for a beta release.

+ +[image="vivaldi-ui-explainer.png" caption='Vivaldi Mobile beta interface explained.'] + +

The headlining feature for now – aside from the mere existence of a mobile version, finally – is the syncing. Building on the syncing support that debuted in Vivaldi’s 2.0 release, all your bookmarks, tabs, history, and notes are now available on your phone.

+

The sync happens both ways of course, so I can click the cloud icon at the top of the browser on my laptop and get quick access to any open tabs on my phone. Notes and bookmarks from my phone appear whenever a sync happens.

+

If you, like me, make heavy use of Vivaldi’s bookmarks, notes, and history search, having this synced to your phone is enough to make Vivaldi Mobile more powerful than other mobile browsers, but of course Vivaldi’s take on mobile isn’t limited to syncing.

+

Unlike your more minimalist mobile browsers, Vivaldi adds a menu bar to the bottom of the page, giving you quick thumb access to a series of options along the bottom of the screen. On the left is the mobile version of Vivaldi’s Panel, which brings up a new screen that contains bookmarks, history, notes, and downloads. Swipe horizontally to move between them.

+ +[image="vivaldi-ui-explainer.png" caption='Vivaldi Mobile beta interface explained.'] + +

Unlike the desktop, you can’t add anything to this panel (frankly, it wouldn’t really make sense to, it’s an overlaying screen that hides the rest of your content, not a side panel).

+

The bottom menu bar also offers back and forward buttons, speed dial, and access to all your open tabs. The center button is actually context-based, so it’s a speed dial button on a web page, but when you’re in speed dial it becomes a search button.

+ +[image="vivaldi-bookmarks.jpg" caption='Click the panel button and Vivaldi Mobile will bring up the panel with bookmarks, history, notes and downloads. You can swipe to move between panes.'] + +

When you scroll content, the both the bottom menu bar and the URL bar are hidden away, maximizing the amount of space available for the actual website. Scroll up and both bars come back. This strikes a nice balance between having the tools you want at your fingertips, and yet also being able to focus on the content of a webpage.

+

At the top of the screen there’s a URL bar and Vivaldi icon. As with the desktop version you can prefix your searches with a letter to use different search engines. For example, the string “d Vivaldi” would search DuckDuckGo for the term “Vivaldi”. The mobile version supports the same search engines found in the desktop version.

+

Tap the Vivaldi icon and you’ll get a main menu very similar to what you’ll see in Chrome or Firefox, though there are some Vivaldi-specific customizations, like an option to clone the current tab, add a bookmark, access your recent tabs, or grab a screenshot of the current page. The latter will produce a screenshot of either the current viewport or the entire page. Screen captures are, unfortunately, not currently synced with the desktop.

+

You can work around the lack of image sync using a separate sync service like Nextcloud or Dropbox. I set up Nextcloud to automatically upload anything in the Vivaldi screen captures folder on my phone and sync it to the Vivaldi screen captures folder on my laptop. It’s not ideal, but until Vivaldi supports syncing images, it works. I should also note that Vivaldi doesn’t currently sync images attached to notes. You do get all your notes synced from the desktop, but not the images that go with them. Currently there does not seem to be a way to add an image to a note in Vivaldi Mobile.

+

There’s also a bug in the UI that doesn’t allow you to add a URL when manually creating a note in Vivaldi Mobile. The developers are aware of this and I was told it would be fixed after launch. For now, if you like having your notes attached to a URL, use the “copy to note” option in the context menu, which will create a note with your highlighted text and attach the current URL to the note.

+

The main menu is where you access the settings for Vivaldi Mobile. It’s early days for Vivaldi Mobile so there’s currently nowhere near the level of settings and UI control you’ll find in the desktop version. There’s all the standard settings inherited from Chromium – passwords, payment methods, saved address controls, notification settings, privacy, accessibility and so on – along with some Vivaldi-specific controls like the option to set your default search engine and sign into your Vivaldi sync account.

+ + +[image="vivaldi-colors.jpg" caption='As with the desktop version, Vivaldi will changes the accent colors of the browser based on the site you're visiting.'] + +

One of the things that sets Vivaldi apart on the desktop is the way it allows you to interact with the web more than most browsers. The best thing about the mobile version is that Vivaldi has stuck with this approach of doing more. The tools for interacting with the web, creating notes for example, are largely the same in the Mobile Version. For example, select some text and the context menu that appears will have an option to “copy to note”, which mirrors the context menu on the desktop.

+

Similarly, tools like page capture don’t just exist, but are easy to access – just one tap to open the main menu, another to capture the page – which is refreshing change from the usual, “bury it five menus down so it’s not the way” approach of other browsers.

+

What’s Not There

+

Like Google’s mobile version of Chrome – which is also built off the Chromium project – Vivaldi has left extensions to the desktop for now.

+

Originally Vivaldi did try to enable extensions. In fact, I suspect this is part of what took so long for the mobile version to be released. The problem, according to von Tetzchner, was that it quickly became apparent that to support extensions Vivaldi would risk lagging behind when Chromium release updates.

+

Extension support requires significant changes to Chromium code, changes that it would be up to Vivaldi to maintain (and continue to update down the road, should Chromium change anything). Vivaldi has opted, for now at least, to make sure that it stays up-to-date with Chromium releases even though that means no support for extensions in the mobile version.

+

It’s worth noting here that Vivaldi Mobile compiles its own version of Chromium. Many smaller browsers without the programming resources of, for example, Google or Opera, simple render pages with the version of Chromium that ships with Android. While this works, the system version of Chromium doesn’t get updates very often. This is why larger browser makers, including Google, ship with their own bundled version of Chromium with their browsers. This is what Vivaldi is doing as well.

+

I point this out because in theory it is possible that down the road Vivaldi could decided the maintenance effort of customizing Chromium to add support for extensions is workable, though personally I would not hold my breath.

+

While I am not a heavy extension user (in desktop Vivaldi I use only three extensions), I do miss some kind of ad blocker. Like the mobile version of Chrome, Vivaldi Mobile has an option “Block Ads on Abusive Sites”, but it doesn’t block much.

+

I’d love to see Vivaldi embrace some kind of built-in ad blocking solution on mobile. This is one place I think Opera Mobile has an edge over Vivaldi.

+

I recognize that I am writing this on a website at least partly supported by advertising, which has a certain irony to it, but on mobile ad-blocking seems like an even more legitimate feature due to bandwidth constraints. Ad blocking on mobile saves bandwidth, which translates to saving money for many users.

+

For now you’ll have to live with ads in Vivaldi Mobile, just like you live with them in Chrome. If want ad blocking on mobile your options are Opera, or Firefox with an add-on. Alternatively you can do what I do: disable JavaScript. That stops ads and a host of other things I find irritating, but of course it also breaks half the web. I have go through and whitelist sites where I want JavaScript, which is time consuming and not for most people.

+

It’s the beginning, but it’s enough

+

If you like Vivaldi on the desktop you’re going to like it on a phone as well. It’s still early days, and there are half a dozen things I’d like to see added to Vivaldi Mobile, especially support for user profile switching.

+

Still, the syncing features alone make this a welcome release for anyone at all invested in Vivaldi’s various tools. Bringing your notes, bookmarks, and other data to mobile is the first step. In the end it may be the only step you really need.

+

Much of Vivaldi’s appeal lies in its tools that go beyond mere browsing. With Vivaldi you can take notes, grab screenshots and attach them to notes, create web panels, view two (or more!) pages side by side, and so on.

+

But the form factor of mobile devices discourages this kind of participatory browsing. The longer I’ve used Vivaldi Mobile the more I’ve realized the limitations of the form factor. Typing is awkward, even just selecting text can be an exercise in frustration at times. In some ways mobile is meant to be passive.

+

For instance, while I think I want to add sites to the Panel like I can on the desktop (where I keep reference sites, and chat windows just a click away), where would the panel go on mobile? I’d want it to be near fullscreen to interact with, but then how would that be different than just another page in a tab?

+

Another thing I use all the time is tab tiling. If you have a big enough phone this might work. Some of my testing was done on a Sony Xperia 1, which is tall enough to make tab tiling workable with a horizontal split, but on most phones I think tab tiling would make tabs too small to be useful.

+

In the end I’ve come to the conclusion that the main thing I ever really wanted from Vivaldi Mobile, is exactly what this release gives you – a good browser, all your data, and key extras like note support.

+

Perhaps less really is more. Then again, I like to think Vivaldi has clever people thinking up clever ways to take all those features I just mentioned and bring them to mobile in way that makes them just as great as they are on the desktop.

diff --git a/ars-technica/vivaldi-mobile-review.txt b/ars-technica/vivaldi-mobile-review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..19a2c7a --- /dev/null +++ b/ars-technica/vivaldi-mobile-review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,83 @@ +Vivaldi, makers of the power user's favorite web browser, have finally released a mobile version. Vivaldi for Android (sorry iOS users, it's Android-only for now) brings most of what's great about Vivaldi to your phone, and thanks to Vivaldi's sync service you can have all your desktop data on your mobile device. + +Web browsers are perhaps the most important piece of software we use. Our devices are often little more than small windows onto the web. The web browser is what we use to see and explore what's in that window. For all their importance though, the modern web browser, especially the mobile web browser, offers precious little in the way of features. It displays the web and that's about it. Want to interact with what you see? You're mostly out of luck. + +Most people probably like their browser this way. Google, maker of the most widely-used mobile browser, rarely does anything without extensive user testing. If Chrome is minimalist it's safe to assume it's that way because Google has determined that's what its users want. And since most other browsers copy whatever Google Chrome does, most mobile web browsers end up very minimalist pieces of software. + +On the desktop there has long been an exception to the uniformly dumbed-down offerings of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari -- Vivaldi. + +Led by CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner, co-founder and former CEO of Opera, Vivaldi's primary goal is to build a useful browser, a tool you can bend to your will rather than the other way around. Vivaldi is a tool you can customize the way you like, its preferences may be overwhelming at first glance, but if you dig in you can make Vivaldi do just about whatever you want it to do. For this reason Vivaldi is often called a "power user's browser". As opposed, I guess, to the powerless user's browser. + +For all that there was always one big problem with Vivaldi: it was desktop only. The company said it was working on a mobile version from the beginning, and von Tetzchner told me several times he was already using it, but there was nothing for the rest of us. + +Now Vivaldi Mobile is here, for Android users at least. Technically it's a beta release and all the common cautions regarding beta software apply, but I've been using it for over a month now and have had no problems. Or, I should say, I have had problems, but updates prior to the public release eliminated all of them. And even if there were still bugs, Vivaldi would still be more useful than any other browser on my phone -- and yes, I've tried nearly all of them, even the small, cottage efforts. + +## Sync and Mobile UI + +Vivaldi Mobile is surprisingly feature-complete for a beta release. + +The headlining feature for now -- aside from the mere existence of a mobile version, finally -- is the syncing. Building on the syncing support that debuted in [Vivaldi's 2.0 release](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/vivaldi-2-0-review-meet-your-ideal-browser-if-youre-willing-to-invest-time/), all your bookmarks, tabs, history, and notes are now available on your phone. + +The sync happens both ways of course, so I can click the cloud icon at the top of the browser on my laptop and get quick access to any open tabs on my phone. Notes and bookmarks from my phone appear whenever a sync happens. + +If you, like me, make heavy use of Vivaldi's bookmarks, notes, and history search, having this synced to your phone is enough to make Vivaldi Mobile more powerful than other mobile browsers, but of course Vivaldi's take on mobile isn't limited to syncing. + +Unlike your more minimalist mobile browsers, Vivaldi adds a menu bar to the bottom of the page, giving you quick thumb access to a series of options along the bottom of the screen. On the left is the mobile version of Vivaldi's Panel, which brings up a new screen that contains bookmarks, history, notes, and downloads. Swipe horizontally to move between them. + +Unlike the desktop, you can't add anything to this panel (frankly, it wouldn't really make sense to, it's an overlaying screen that hides the rest of your content, not a side panel). + +The bottom menu bar also offers back and forward buttons, speed dial, and access to all your open tabs. The center button is actually context-based, so it's a speed dial button on a web page, but when you're in speed dial it becomes a search button. + +When you scroll content, the both the bottom menu bar and the URL bar are hidden away, maximizing the amount of space available for the actual website. Scroll up and both bars come back. This strikes a nice balance between having the tools you want at your fingertips, and yet also being able to focus on the content of a webpage. + +At the top of the screen there's a URL bar and Vivaldi icon. As with the desktop version you can prefix your searches with a letter to use different search engines. For example, the string "d Vivaldi" would search DuckDuckGo for the term "Vivaldi". The mobile version supports the same search engines found in the desktop version. + +Tap the Vivaldi icon and you'll get a main menu very similar to what you'll see in Chrome or Firefox, though there are some Vivaldi-specific customizations, like an option to clone the current tab, add a bookmark, access your recent tabs, or grab a screenshot of the current page. The latter will produce a screenshot of either the current viewport or the entire page. Screen captures are, unfortunately, not currently synced with the desktop. + +You can work around the lack of image sync using a separate sync service like Nextcloud or Dropbox. I set up Nextcloud to automatically upload anything in the Vivaldi screen captures folder on my phone and sync it to the Vivaldi screen captures folder on my laptop. It's not ideal, but until Vivaldi supports syncing images, it works. I should also note that Vivaldi doesn't currently sync images attached to notes. You do get all your notes synced from the desktop, but not the images that go with them. Currently there does not seem to be a way to add an image to a note in Vivaldi Mobile. + +There's also a bug in the UI that doesn't allow you to add a URL when manually creating a note in Vivaldi Mobile. The developers are aware of this and I was told it would be fixed after launch. For now, if you like having your notes attached to a URL, use the "copy to note" option in the context menu, which will create a note with your highlighted text and attach the current URL to the note. + +The main menu is where you access the settings for Vivaldi Mobile. It's early days for Vivaldi Mobile so there's currently nowhere near the level of settings and UI control you'll find in the desktop version. There's all the standard settings inherited from Chromium -- passwords, payment methods, saved address controls, notification settings, privacy, accessibility and so on -- along with some Vivaldi-specific controls like the option to set your default search engine and sign into your Vivaldi sync account. + +One of the things that sets Vivaldi apart on the desktop is the way it allows you to interact with the web more than most browsers. The best thing about the mobile version is that Vivaldi has stuck with this approach of doing more. The tools for interacting with the web, creating notes for example, are largely the same in the Mobile Version. For example, select some text and the context menu that appears will have an option to "copy to note", which mirrors the context menu on the desktop. + +Similarly, tools like page capture don't just exist, but are easy to access -- just one tap to open the main menu, another to capture the page -- which is refreshing change from the usual, "bury it five menus down so it's not the way" approach of other browsers. + +### What's Not There + +Like Google's mobile version of Chrome -- which is also built off the Chromium project -- Vivaldi has left extensions to the desktop for now. + +Originally Vivaldi did try to enable extensions. In fact, I suspect this is part of what took so long for the mobile version to be released. The problem, according to von Tetzchner, was that it quickly became apparent that to support extensions Vivaldi would risk lagging behind when Chromium release updates. + +Extension support requires significant changes to Chromium code, changes that it would be up to Vivaldi to maintain (and continue to update down the road, should Chromium change anything). Vivaldi has opted, for now at least, to make sure that it stays up-to-date with Chromium releases even though that means no support for extensions in the mobile version. + +It's worth noting here that Vivaldi Mobile compiles its own version of Chromium. Many smaller browsers without the programming resources of, for example, Google or Opera, simple render pages with the version of Chromium that ships with Android. While this works, the system version of Chromium doesn't get updates very often. This is why larger browser makers, including Google, ship with their own bundled version of Chromium with their browsers. This is what Vivaldi is doing as well. + +I point this out because in theory it is possible that down the road Vivaldi could decided the maintenance effort of customizing Chromium to add support for extensions is workable, though personally I would not hold my breath. + +While I am not a heavy extension user (in desktop Vivaldi I use only three extensions), I do miss some kind of ad blocker. Like the mobile version of Chrome, Vivaldi Mobile has an option "Block Ads on Abusive Sites", but it doesn't block much. + +I'd love to see Vivaldi embrace some kind of built-in ad blocking solution on mobile. This is one place I think [Opera Mobile](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/review-opera-once-led-web-browser-innovation-it-has-new-ideas-again-with-reborn-3/) has an edge over Vivaldi. + +I recognize that I am writing this on a website at least partly supported by advertising, which has a certain irony to it, but on mobile ad-blocking seems like an even more legitimate feature due to bandwidth constraints. Ad blocking on mobile saves bandwidth, which translates to saving money for many users. + +For now you'll have to live with ads in Vivaldi Mobile, just like you live with them in Chrome. If want ad blocking on mobile your options are Opera, or Firefox with an add-on. Alternatively you can do what I do: disable JavaScript. That stops ads and a host of other things I find irritating, but of course it also breaks half the web. I have go through and whitelist sites where I want JavaScript, which is time consuming and not for most people. + +### It's the beginning, but it's enough + +If you like Vivaldi on the desktop you're going to like it on a phone as well. It's still early days, and there are half a dozen things I'd like to see added to Vivaldi Mobile, especially support for user profile switching. + +Still, the syncing features alone make this a welcome release for anyone at all invested in Vivaldi's various tools. Bringing your notes, bookmarks, and other data to mobile is the first step. In the end it may be the only step you really need. + +Much of Vivaldi's appeal lies in its tools that go beyond mere browsing. With Vivaldi you can take notes, grab screenshots and attach them to notes, create web panels, view two (or more!) pages side by side, and so on. + +But the form factor of mobile devices discourages this kind of participatory browsing. The longer I've used Vivaldi Mobile the more I've realized the limitations of the form factor. Typing is awkward, even just selecting text can be an exercise in frustration at times. In some ways mobile is meant to be passive. + +For instance, while I think I want to add sites to the Panel like I can on the desktop (where I keep reference sites, and chat windows just a click away), where would the panel *go* on mobile? I'd want it to be near fullscreen to interact with, but then how would that be different than just another page in a tab? + +Another thing I use all the time is tab tiling. If you have a big enough phone this might work. Some of my testing was done on a Sony Xperia 1, which is tall enough to make tab tiling workable with a horizontal split, but on most phones I think tab tiling would make tabs too small to be useful. + +In the end I've come to the conclusion that the main thing I ever really wanted from Vivaldi Mobile, is exactly what this release gives you -- a good browser, all your data, and key extras like note support. + +Perhaps less really is more. Then again, I like to think Vivaldi has clever people thinking up clever ways to take all those features I just mentioned and bring them to mobile in way that makes them just as great as they are on the desktop. -- cgit v1.2.3-70-g09d2