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diff --git a/published/fedora26review.txt b/published/fedora26review.txt
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+The Fedora Project has released Fedora 26. As with Fedora's last couple of releases there are three major ways to get Fedora 26 -- Workstation, Server and Atomic Host. The Workstation release is aimed at desktop users and, by default, will install the GNOME desktop. 
+
+The Server and Atomic Host releases are aimed at servers and container-based deployments respectively.
+
+Fedora 26 brings an updated kernel, version 4.11, Mesa 17.1.4, and jumps to GCC 7. More visible changes include the latest version of GNOME, 3.24, a new partitioning tool in the Anaconda installer, and much better support for ARM processors, notably an official version of Fedora for Raspberry Pi which appears to be much more stable than the previous release, which seemingly had more caveats than features.
+
+The most obvious change is the move the GNOME 3.24. GNOME 3.24, nicknamed Portland, ships with quite a few new features and improved applications, including Night Light. Night Light is a new settings panel that tints the color of your displays according to the time of day. In the evening Night Light makes the screen color warmer, which helps prevent sleeplessness and eye strain.
+
+The screen color automatically tints based on the sunrise and sunset times for your location. You can manually control it as well if you like. The GNOME top bar shows when Night Light is on, and the system drop down menu allows you to turn it off temporarily. That's handy if you want to edit photos or similar because what you see is not what you get with Night Light. 
+
+There are quite a few third party apps that already provided the features of Night Light, but none of them worked seamlessly with Wayland, which makes Night Light a welcome addition to the GNOME feature stack (it works with X11 too if you aren't on Wayland capable hardware).
+
+GNOME 3.24 features an improved notification system, with a simplified layout and weather info integration -- it will pull in a summary of the day's forecast for the location that you set in the Weather application. 
+
+GNOME 3.24 ships with a new app, Recipes, which contains recipes contributed by the GNOME community. It offers ways to add and edit recipes, create shopping lists and even offers a hands-free mode for when you're cooking. It's a well thought out app, but unfortunately there just aren't that many recipes in it and there's no easy to way to add recipes you find on the web.
+
+Other GNOME applications updated 3.24 include Web, Photos, Polari (yes, GNOME still ships with an IRC client, because one day we'll all realize that IRC was amazing and go back to using it), Games, Calendar and the Calculator. Of these the most notable is photos which now adjusts your thumbnail size to make better use of the available space. Unfortunately Photos still has only very basic photo editing tools, but it does make a good photo organizer.
+
+GNOME Software continues to see improvements in this release with new icons that make it easier to see which applications are installed. The installed applications view also now helpfully shows how how much disk space each application is taking up. The Software app has also improved Flatpak support with a couple minor new features though the number of apps available as Flatpaks remains disappointingly small. 
+
+As you scroll through that list of installed apps checking the installed size you'll probably notice one monster taking up more space than most, LibreOffice. Normally version bumps of LibreOffice are hardly worth mentioning, but this one contains the first look many users will get at the still in progress NotebookBar UI, which apes Microsoft Word's "Ribbon" interface. I happen to dislike Ribbon and by extension NotebookBar, but it will probably go a long way to making it easier for Office users to switch to LibreOffice. For the rest of us it's pretty easy to ignore -- for now anyway.
+
+The Anaconda installer, which, while very different from most installers, has grown on me over the years. This release sees Anaconda rolling in the Blivet disk partitioning GUI, which is a huge user experience improvement. Blivet allows for drag to resize disk partitioning and makes it easy to set up LVM encrypted disks.
+
+Fedora 26 sports an updated version of Fedora Media Writer, which can create bootable SD cards of Fedora for ARM devices, handy if you want to install the new ARM version of Fedora on your Raspberry Pi. Media Writer will also notify you when a new release of Fedora is available.
+
+As is typical of Fedora, this release features plenty of updates for developers. In Fedora 26 you'll find Go 1.8, Ruby 2.4, Python 3.6, PHP 7.1, and the DNF 2.0 package manager.
+
+If GNOME is not for you there are plenty of Fedora Spins worth checking out including versions with KDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, LXDE and the newcomer, LXQT, which is the next generation version of LXDE, built using the Qt framework. If you want to delve into the <a href="https://labs.fedoraproject.org/">Fedora Labs</a> you can find version of Fedora optimized for astronomy, graphic design, gaming, security, and development.
+
+I generally prefer to run GNOME with Fedora because the overlap of Fedora devs and GNOME devs is such that GNOME is nearly always just about flawless on Fedora and Fedora 26 is no exception. Even the wallpaper feels perfectly suited to the stock GNOME theme. I've been using Fedora 26 since the beta was released earlier this year and have yet to experience any showstopping bugs, though I did have to wait a bit for some apps as EPEL and Fusion support is often a little behind the main release.
+
+I've also got Fedora Server installed on a couple of VPS instances and haven't had any major issues there either. The server edition comes with one thing I haven't tested yet -- the new Fedora Modularity project. Support is listed as a "preview", not to be used in production, but the project is soliciting developer feedback. The idea is to build a system that lets you have some elements be cutting edge, say a new kernel and the latest development release of Node, but stick with the stable version of your favorite database. As the project homepage puts it, the Fedora modularity project is for "when you want a rolling release. But not really." It's a very interesting idea that bridges the gap between a traditionally super stable system, e.g. Red Hat and pure container based system like Fedora Atomic. If you'd like to learn more there's a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4O8G9SZwqtkIAuKcT8-JpQ">Youtube channel</a> that has some really nice video overviews of features and project goals.
+
+In the mean time Fedora 26 makes a welcome update for the already very nice Fedora 25. 
+
+fedora-desktop.jpg - The stock Fedora desktop with its very nice wallpaper
+fedora-notifications.jpg - The GNOME notifications area now includes weather forecasts
+fedora-software.jpg - See how much disk space each installed application is using in Software
diff --git a/published/linux-mint183.txt b/published/linux-mint183.txt
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+The Linux Mint project turned out an early Christmas present, as it usually does, but this year's release is perhaps more important than usual given that Linux Mint is much more alone in the Linux distro world than it was just one year ago.
+
+The past year saw Ubuntu abandon the Unity desktop and come back to the GNOME fold, which means that Linux Mint is now the most popular distro that doesn't ship with GNOME. Mind you, Linux Mint doesn't just not ship GNOME by default, it doesn't ship a GNOME version at all. That alone makes it unique, but more than unique it makes Linux Mint more important than ever. 
+
+Some might argue it doesn't matter which desktop distros ship with by default since there are dozens of desktops out there and most will work with any distro. It is true that choice has long been one of the appeals of the Linux desktop, but as study after study has showed, users very rarely stray from the defaults and that is why Linux Mint is more important than ever -- it and openSUSE are now the only major distros not shipping GNOME by default.
+
+Instead Linux Mint offers two different homegrown desktops -- Cinnamon and MATE.
+
+Several years ago Linux Mint altered its release strategy to track upstream Ubuntu LTS releases instead of chasing each new Ubuntu update. This foundation means that Linux Mint gets the security and maintenance updates Ubuntu LTS users get, but Mint can continue to refine its own desktops, Cinnamon and MATE. It's worth noting that, if the past is any guide, this will be the last Mint release based on Ubuntu 16.04. Linux Mint 19 will likely change its underlying code base to use Ubuntu 18.04 LTS when the latter is released later this year.
+
+Under the hood in Linux Mint 18.3 you'll find Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, specifically the up-to-date Ubuntu 16.04.3 release. That means you get kernel 4.10, which provides quite a few hardware fixes that plagued earlier kernels (my bluetooth actually works without issue from 4.10 onward, which was not the case when Ubuntu 16.04 was first released). You'll also find X.org 1.18.4 and the usual update to all the GNOME software suite, including the notably faster Firefox 57.
+
+You'll also find something very interesting in Linux Mint 18.3 -- support for Flatpak applications. Flatpak applications solve one of the core potential problems with Linux Mint. Because Linux Mint is built on a package base which doesn’t change, potentially for five years, it's both stable and safe, but naturally there’s a trade-off -- you don’t have access to new versions of software applications, you can only run the versions which are in that Ubuntu LTS base. That means some apps in Linux Mint can be as much as three years behind what you'll find in, say, Ubuntu 17.10. In practice that rarely happens and when it does there's probably a .deb version of the app available, but then what if that .deb version has dependencies and you need to upgrade core libraries, now your system isn't going to have that stable base anymore.
+
+Flatpaks solve this problem by packaging applications separately from that base system, so you can have the stable core and the latest and greatest applications. What's interesting about Mint throwing its weight behind Flatpaks is that there's another option you might think they'd be interested in -- Snap packages, which are essentially the same idea, but created by Ubuntu, which is directly upstream from Linux Mint. 
+
+In explaining why it chose to natively support Flatpaks, the <a href="https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3418">Mint blog says</a>, "Flatpak is also flexible and doesn't rely on a middle-man between the editor and the users. Editors and users can choose to rely on centralized app stores if they wish, but they don’t have to. For instance, an editor could ask Flathub to publish its application but it could also publish it directly, or even create its own store (i.e. 'remote'). And downstream users could very well set up their Flatpak client to point to either Flathub or the editor’s store directly, or both of them even. That flexibility is key and it contrasts with Snap which wasn't designed with multiple repositories in mind."
+
+While there may be advantages to Flatpak for Linux Mint, I would have preferred to see both Flatpak and Snap supported out of the box since there are apps available for one that are not for the other. After all Ubuntu itself ships with first class support for both, it's hard to believe Mint couldn't do the same if it wanted to. As it stands you can install Snapd, the Snap package manager, yourself and it will work, but it's not there by default. For now Linux Mint natively supports only Flatpak applications.
+
+Linux Mint 18.3's Flatpak support is excellent and is configured by default to point to two Flatpak repositories: Flathub and gnome-apps. You'll find a new section in the Software Manager for Flatpaks. It can be a little confusing since there's apps available either through the traditional repo and through the Flatpak portion of the Software Manager, and visually speaking installation is the same, but this same problem happens in GNOME Software and in Ubuntu. For now it's just a little bit confusing unless you already know what's going on. Still, despite that issue, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with an easier way to install Flatpaks than what Linux Mint has delivered in 18.3.
+
+It's also worth noting that the Software Manager in this release is considerably snappier in both Cinnamon and MATE. This release also seems to boot a bit faster as well, which helps offset that fact that Mint 18.3 Cinnamon is quite a bit heavier on the RAM. 
+
+If you followed the link to that Linux Mint blog post you might have noticed one other newsworthy bit, the Linux Mint KDE version is going away. Linux Mint 18.3 KDE Edition is the last of its kind. Going forward there will be Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. You will of course be able to install KDE atop future releases, you'll just have to do it yourself.
+
+This release sees Linux Mint putting quite a bit of work into its Backup Tool, which was almost entirely re-written and to a certain extent, re-envisioned. Backup tool is now dedicated to making a backup of your home directory, that's it. It saves all your files into a tar archive and will then restore them right where they were with the original permissions and timestamps preserved.
+
+If you want to back up the rest of your system you'll want to use Timeshift, a system snapshots tool that ships with Mint 18.3. Timeshift works a bit like rsnapshot (another option if you're comfortable with the command line) combining rsync and hard links to make incremental backups of your system. The Mint developers worked with Tony George, the developer of Timeshift, to improve localization, the UI, and add support for window progress and encrypted directories. The improvements are also available upstream as well, so even if you don't use Linux Mint, thank the developers next time you use Timeshift on another distro.
+
+While most of what's new in Linux Mint 18.3 is distro-wide (everything mentioned so far is the same for both primary desktops), there are a few desktop-specific changes, especially in the Cinnamon release.
+
+The Cinnamon Edition of Linux Mint 18.3 features Cinnamon 3.6, which is perhaps most notable for supporting GNOME Online Accounts. That means you can now browse your Google Drive or NextCloud files directly in Nemo, the Cinnamon file manager. Another change is that the Synaptics touchpad driver, has been replaced by Libinput. Practically speaking this should have no effect for most users, but if you wrote your own config files you'll want to update them to use the libinput syntax and file location (or you can uninstall libinput, Synaptics is still there and will be used if libinput is removed).
+
+Cinnamon continues to improve its HiDPI support, the release turns on HiDPI support right out of the box and the UI scaled correctly on HiDPI displays for me with no need to configure anything (it even worked correctly in Virtualbox).
+
+There are dozens of other improvements in Cinnamon though none of them are particularly earth-shattering, instead this release feels like an iterative one, where most of the focus has been in polishing and improving all the little rough edges of the last release.
+
+The MATE edition of Linux Mint 18.3 sees, well, pretty much nothing new. It ships with MATE 1.18, which was released back in March of 2017 and while it features plenty of improvements over the previous release, there hasn't been a release since. To some extent the MATE desktop feels very much complete at this point. I have no doubt there will be feature improvements and changes in the the future, but even if there were MATE would be a very solid, relatively lightweight desktop. 
+
+The same could be said of Linux Mint 18.3 more generally, it's a rock solid, relatively speedy desktop experience no matter which desktop you opt for. If you want the stability of Ubuntu LTS releases, but don't want to make the leap to GNOME, Linux Mint 18.3 makes a great alternative. 
+
+linumint-mate-desktop.jpg -- The default MATE desktop in Linux Mint 18.3
+linumint-cinnamon-desktop.jpg  -- The default Cinnamon desktop in Linux Mint 18.3
+linumint-backup.jpg -- Making backups with Timeshift and Backup Tool in Linux Mint 18.3.
+linumint-flatpak.jpg -- Installing Flatpaks through the Linux Mint Software app.
+linumint-software.jpg -- The revamped Linux Mint Software app.
diff --git a/published/open-source-insider-1707.txt b/published/open-source-insider-1707.txt
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+A couple months back I got a email from an old shared hosting provider. The host wanted to "upgrade" my account to a new server. I had long since stopped using the account for all but one client site that ran a legacy version of Django. I built it ages ago, but it was done. It worked fine and the client was still happy with it. No big deal I thought, they'll move it a new server and it'll keep on running.
+
+Then I discovered that my account was going to be involuntarily upgraded from CentOS 6 to CentOS 7. Without diving into a full review, let's just say that's a major change. There was no way that my app was going to be moved from CentOS 6 to 7 and still work.
+
+That's why there was a "migration guide", which is software hosting speak for a crap ton of work you're going to have to do continue using our service. I opted to use my own migration guide to migrate to a different company, one of the many cheap VPS hosts that have come a long in recent years. I mean if I have to update a piece of software anyway I might as well move it to something that gives me full control over the entire stack. 
+
+What I found so interesting about the experience was that in communicating with the company it became very obvious that they saw nothing wrong with randomly upgrading the server. I call it random because CentOS 6 is a perfectly good operating system that will be supported until November 2020. There's no hurry to update. Because I review OSes I happen to know that CentOS 7 introduces a whole slew of very useful tools for sysadmins though, and this I suspect was the reason for the update -- the company's engineers wanted to use those tools across the board.
+
+This sounds totally normal and even reasonable to those of us who work and live in the world of software, but it's actually totally dysfunctional and insane. To see just how dysfunctional this is it helps to re-frame things in terms of stuff in the real world. Imagine you hire a plumber to build you a new shower. They do and you are happy, you pay them and everyone goes there separate ways. Five years later you come home from work and your old shower is gone and there's a new one, but it's now in the kitchen instead of the bathroom and it only has cold water because hot has been deprecated. There's a note on the door with some suggests on how you can use it just like you used your old one.
+
+Plumbers do not do this because that would be crazy. In most professions when you are hired to do something and you do it, then the project is said to have reached a status known as "done". There is no coming in afterward to change everything and then forcing your customers to accept it.
+
+But there is no "done" in software. Software is never done. I am unaware of a single software project that is considered done. There are plenty that are done because they've been abandoned. For instance, many people say that Openbox isn't developed anymore because it's done, which I'd tend to agree with, but it may also be that the developers just lost interest. The project at least has never formally come out and said, hey, this is done.
+
+That would considered crazy in software because by the rules currently governing software culture things can never be done. If things were done no one would upgrade, if no one upgraded we'd all be out of jobs. That's how the current software industry works. And that's generally how new industries go for a while. Presumably it took some period of heavy innovation and iteration before the current hammer came to be. But then there was a hammer and not a lot of thought has been put into hammers since. Hammers are done.
+
+Software desperately tries to avoid a state of done. Yet done seems to come of its own accord. Look at the release notes for any major software product over time and you'll notice that most are heading toward a done moment. But when that moment nears someone steps in and re-writes it from scratch to "improve it". 
+
+In most cases though what works now works well enough. Even lowly, much-maligned Windows XP still works well enough. The only reason it's insecure is that it's creator decided to stop making it secure. The site I hosted with that company didn't need an upgrade, it was running fine with almost no attention at all. It was done. Which is exactly why the software gods stepped in and forced it back into development. Sure, I rewrote it working with the latest release of Django, but you know what? Now it's done.
diff --git a/published/open-source-insider-1708.txt b/published/open-source-insider-1708.txt
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+Just in case you didn't believe Firefox was on a trajectory that should have it crash and burn into extinction in the next couple of years, former Mozilla CTO, Andreas Gal, has usage stats that <a href="https://andreasgal.com/2017/07/19/firefox-marketshare-revisited/">confirm it</a>. To use Gal's words, "Firefox market share is falling off a cliff." The same could be said of Firefox itself.
+
+What's most interesting about <a href="https://andreasgal.github.io/adi/">this data</a> and Gal's interpretation of it is that at the same time Firefox is sliding into irrelevancy it's becoming a better and better browser. It's faster than it's ever been and it uses less memory. It uses less memory than what's replacing it (Chrome). Of course as the ancient Betamax vs VHS format wars demonstrated, having a superior product does not translate to market share.
+
+The big question is why? Why is Firefox, despite being faster than ever and using less memory than Chrome, losing ground to Chrome?
+
+Gal believes a big part of the problem is Google's monopoly on search and its aggressive marketing of Chrome. Log in to Google Mail, Google Calendar or YouTube and Google will push Chrome through overlays, bars at the top of the screen and other means. The language of these ads implies that whichever browser you're using -- if it isn't Chrome -- is slow and insecure.
+
+As Gal puts it, "it's hard to compete in a mature market if your main competitor has access to billions of dollars worth of free marketing." Indeed, it's impossible.
+
+"Firefox’s decline is not an engineering problem," writes Gal, "Its a market disruption (Desktop to Mobile shift) and monopoly problem. There are no engineering solutions to these market problems."
+
+To be fair there may be some explanations for Firefox's market share drop related to the source of Gal's data. Gal used Mozilla's (previously) public data on active Firefox Desktop installs running the most recent version of Firefox. There are two potential problems with that data. First legacy XP users are not counted because they're no longer using the latest version of Firefox. Then there's those of us that will be sticking with a legacy version of Firefox because some feature has been dropped. For example it'll be years before I move post Firefox 57 because of Mozilla's decision to drop "legacy" add-ons. Since the power of add-ons are a big part of Firefox's appeal I won't be upgrading until all the plugins I use have been updated.
+
+As with anything that puts Mozilla or Firefox in a negative light there are a million ways to defend both. Perhaps the best is to point out that Firefox still has 90 million daily users, which, while less than it was in the past is still nothing to sneeze at.
+
+There's another important thing to realize about Firefox's decline, it's something that's completely anathema to Silicon Valley and capitalism more generally -- Firefox doesn't have to be number one in market share. Gasp. What?
+
+Yes, it's true, Firefox can survive and even do very well as the number two browser on the web, perhaps even the number three browser on the web. Indeed my favorite web browser, Vivaldi, is barely a blip on the market share radar.
+
+Is a monoculture on the web bad? Yes, monocultures make systems vulnerable, but despite Firefox's declining market share there's no browser monoculture just yet.
+
+When Firefox first came along Microsoft had a monopoly by pre-installing IE. Now Chrome has something of a monopoly. But there's an important difference between IE and Chrome -- Google and Chrome aren't neglecting the web the way Microsoft and IE did, which means Firefox's role today doesn't require it to have a majority market share. Firefox can take on a different role, providing an alternative for those that want it without worrying about market share. 
+
+Perhaps the most sage observation to come of Gal's post can be found on Hacker News where a commenter <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14421381">points out</a> that "Mozilla won the browser war. Firefox lost the browser fight. But there's many wars left to fight, and I hope Mozilla dives into a new one." Indeed.
diff --git a/published/open-source-insider-1709.txt b/published/open-source-insider-1709.txt
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+Vivaldi founder and Opera co-founder Jon von Tetzchner has published an essay asking Google to return to its former motto, "Don't Be Evil". For full details check out The Register's <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/05/opera_founder_adwords_blasts_google/">earlier coverage</a>, but the short version is that von Tetzchner thinks speaking out against Google's monopoly position in both search and advertising temporarily cost his company its Adwords campaign. Whether or not this is true, here's the thing: it's easy to believe Google did because actual documented examples of Google "being evil" abound.
+
+That said, I take issue with von Tetzchner's piece for two reasons. First it presupposes there was ever a time when Google wasn't evil, which I see no historical evidence of -- Google is "evil" now because Google has been "evil" from the outset. It's "evil" is in the core and there is no going back to some idyllic time when Google wasn't evil. Its evil may not have affected Tetzchner until recently, but that by no means precludes its prior existence.
+
+As Tetzchner himself notes Google has long blocked browsers it didn't like (for whatever reason) from using its services <em>even when those browsers worked just fine</em>. It's currently engaged in a rather nasty campaign to switch anyone not using Chrome to Chrome by implying that anything other than Chrome is insecure. Browse google.com using Firefox to see what I'm talking about.
+
+Or take another example currently in the headlines, actually there are quite a few in the headlines these days, but the one that I've been following is the class action lawsuit against Google for systematically underpaying its female employees. That's not something that started this year, nor is it something that affects just one part of the company. It appears (from statements made by the U.S. Department of Labor) that the problem is deep, systemic and existed from the start. It's impossible to know for sure of course because <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/29/google_tries_to_hide_diversity_data/">Google won't comply</a> with the US Department of Labor's request for data -- despite Google's own claim that the data will exonerate it. Ha! 
+
+Google went so far as to try to have the request thrown out because the US Department of Labor <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/22/google-gender-discrimination-case-reporting-restricted">dared to tell the Guardian</a>, "the investigation is not complete, but at this point the department has received compelling evidence of very significant discrimination against women in the most common positions at Google headquarters." Trying to have a data request thrown out on one hand, while saying the data disproves the assertion on the other smacks of well, bullshit.
+
+But never mind the fact that Google has always been evil, the second and main reason that I take issue with with Tetzchner's essay -- while agreeing with him about the problem -- is that there is no practical top-down way to fix the situation. Regulation, which is Tetzchner's suggestion, is probably needed, but it won't do much beyond raising some money for governments.
+
+Will governments step in to regulate Google because it's abusing a monopoly position in both search and advertising? The magic eight ball on my desk says, "signs point to yes". The EU has <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/27/google_record_antitrust_fine_europe/">already fined the company a record 2.4 billion Euro</a> for favoring its comparison shopping service over others. Ironically, in my experience, Google's comparison shopping tools are some of the worst of the web, but never mind that. 
+
+My contention is that whether governments step in and regulate and fine Google over the long term doesn't particularly matter for the average user of the web. A governmental hand slap -- even if it's the largest in EU history -- isn't going to help because Google is already an integral part of the ecosystem of the web, and as anyone with an inkling of how ecology works can tell you, you cannot just yank and rearrange ecosystems without severe and often unanticipated consequences. 
+
+Take search for instance. That DuckDuckGo you use and love? I know, I do too. But a lot of its data comes from Google and Bing APIs. Take away Google and DuckDuckGo will be scrambling to expand its results. Still, don't stop using it, just recognize that that doesn't mean you're free of Google. I tend to worry less about the advertising monopoly, that will probably go belly up on its own -- along with its competitors -- once the ROI for customers finally reaches absolute zero, which it shows every sign of doing in the very near future.
+
+And I know, you're immune to all this because you don't use Google services at all. I used to think that too until it occurred to me that that's an incredibly myopic view of the web. The web is an ecosystem and all of it is interconnected and interdependent, even if Google is a cancer on the web -- and I think that metaphor is apt -- it won't disappear or even change without a rippling cascade of consequences that are difficult to even imagine let alone predict.
+
+Consider just the simple case of the companies I do chose to support and who products I do use. Most, if not all, of these other companies probably rely on Google in some form, whether for advertising revenue, analytics data, e-mail or half a dozen other small, but important parts of their business. Via those companies I am still dependent on Google. The entire ecosystem is at this point dependent on Google and that's something that no amount of regulation is going to fix. 
+
+Is there a way out? I think there is, but it won't happen overnight and it will take your help. Given the current lack of diversity in so many areas of the web, if the ecological metaphor holds, the web is incredibly unstable. That's an opportunity. 
+
+It's an opportunity for new species to find niches, to gain a toe hold and to still be standing when great ecological collapse of the current system happens. New companies, and more importantly new models of interaction, will stand a better chance of surviving. To be a bit more concrete, if you stop using Google services, if your company stops using them, if your company resists the buyout offers and forges its own path, if your open source project rejects centralized code hosting, uses open protocols for communication (Google is hardly the only dangerous monopoly out there) and so on, collectively these add up to far more than the sum of their parts. These seemingly small actions start tipping the ecosystem in a new direction, after all what really kills off a species is an ecological change and in the case of the web, users like us can create that change, we can make the web an ecosystem that's hostile to rigid, hierarchical, centralized forces like Google.
+
+The good news is that this is already happening in the tiny niches of the system that the Googles and Facebooks pay little attention to, right now the rapid new growth is perhaps most noticeable in things like distributed social systems (for example, <a href="http://scuttlebot.io/">scuttlebot</a>, et al), new protocols like <a href="https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs">IPFS</a>, even once far-fetched ideas like DIY mesh networks are quietly happening, not in silicon valley, but outside, on the fringes of the ecosystem. Will these specific efforts survive? Possibly not, but something will, the ecosystem of the web is far too young to have reached equilibrium. 
diff --git a/published/open-source-insider-1711.txt b/published/open-source-insider-1711.txt
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+Mozilla is getting ready to roll out Firefox 57, a massive update for Firefox and one that just might send many of its users scurrying for the LTS release. 
+
+First the good news. Firefox 57 is faster, quite noticeably faster, thanks to the improvements to what Mozilla calls Project Quantum. Quantum encompasses several smaller projects in order to bring more parallelization and GPU offloading to Firefox. That's developer speak for Firefox now uses more of that really fast GPU you've got. And again, the results are noticeable (some of them have already rolled out).
+
+Firefox 57 however marks a major change on another front -- Firefox extension. 
+
+For a long time Firefox has supported two types of extensions, the traditional legacy ones we're all used to and the WebExtension variety that work more like what Chrome uses. As of Firefox 57 legacy extension will no longer work. When you upgrade your legacy extensions will be disabled. If you're lucky your favorites will already be available as WebExtensions. I happened to be lucky, for the most part, one of my favorites, an extension that adds Vim-like keybindings to Firefox will never be upgraded (the developer isn't interested in re-writing it). Fortunately there's a fairly capable replacement available.
+
+Not everyone is going to be so lucky. There's a good chance you're going to lose some extensions if or when you upgrade. Mozilla has put together quite a few resources for users looking for replacement extensions. There's a website, <a href="https://arewewebextensionsyet.com/">Are we WebExtensions yet</a> that tracks the most popular add-ons and can point you to replacements where they exist. There's also a long thread of users suggesting replacements both on <a href="https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/favorite-webextensions/17087/39">Mozilla's site</a> and on <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/6i1fu2/webext_equivalents_to_legacy_addons/">Reddit</a>.
+
+Quite a few big names haven't yet ported their extensions. Lastpass, DownThemAll, HTTPSEverywhere and Flashblock are among the extensions I happened to notice. But before you pour yourself a nice hot cup of outrage keep in mind that this change is not a surprise to Firefox extension developers. The roadmap has been published for well over a year now. Of course it's understandable that some haven't wanted to do it. 
+
+Downstream software gets orphaned all the time, sometimes by API changes like this, sometimes just because the developer gets tired of doing it. Still Firefox 57 raises an interesting question -- what obligation, if any, do upstream developers have to downstream developers, and by extension, users? 
+
+There is the ruthlessly capitalistic answer: upstream projects have no obligation to anyone whatsoever. That's the approach that most of Silicon Valley's darlings take these days (and one that even its has-beens have belatedly adopted as well). Most services don't even bother with an API and those that do deliberately cripple and limit them so they won't compete with the company's own offerings. The result of this tactic is all around us. Twitter's API is the internet's worst joke, Instagram seems to have an API mainly to show what outside developers can't do, and Flickr is a hollowed out shell of its former self, to pick just three APIs. 
+
+Mozilla, however, is not a ruthlessly capitalistic company. Still the opposite answer is not necessarily better. Legacy extensions slow down Firefox and cause stability problems that end users often blame of Firefox. Mozilla has the telemetry data to prove it. WebExtension add-ons solve that problem. They also allow Firefox to move forward with quite a few other projects that are going to improve the browser down the road. 
+
+Still, it's annoying to have all your extension suddenly stop working. That's a fairly dramatic lack of backward compatibility to send downstream to users. It doesn't take much imagination to see the tech press headlines coming: Firefox breaks everything. If you head over to Reddit or even the Mozilla thread linked above you can read plenty of users already doing just that and Firefox 57 isn't even out as of today.
+
+Mozilla appears ready to weather the storm, it certainly isn't delaying Firefox 57 until everything is ported. Will someone fork Firefox to maintain support for legacy add-ons? Probably. Will that browser become the new Firefox? Probably not. That's not how software development works at this stage of the game. The users do not and have not ever had control of the tiller, not at Mozilla and not anywhere else. 
+
+It may just be though that this is the art of software development: finding the balance point between two conflicting views: developers wanting to push forward, users wanting to keep things where they are. Software is like life, it is not static, it changes or it dies. Firefox 57 will be one of the largest pieces of software to tiptop the edge of that conflict and I for one, wish it the best of luck.
diff --git a/published/open-source-insider-1801.txt b/published/open-source-insider-1801.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..98b10d8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/published/open-source-insider-1801.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@
+ The biggest open source story of 2017 was unquestionably Canonical's decision to stop developing its Unity desktop and move Ubuntu to the GNOME Shell desktop. 
+
+What made the story that much more entertaining was how well Canonical pulled off the transition. Ubuntu 17.10 was quite simply one of the best releases of the year and certainly the best release Ubuntu has put out in a good long time. Of course since 17.10 was not an LTS release the more conservative users -- which may well be the majority in Ubuntu's case -- still haven't made the transition.
+
+The repercussions of this move are still being felt in the open source world and I believe this will continue to be one of the biggest stories in 2018 for several reasons. The first is that so many have yet to actually make the move to GNOME-based Ubuntu. That will change with 18.04, which is an LTS release set to arrive later this year. Users upgrading between LTS releases will get their first taste of Ubuntu with GNOME come April.
+
+The second, and perhaps much bigger, reason Ubuntu without Unity will continue to be a big story in the foreseeable future is that with Ubuntu using GNOME Shell, almost all the major distributions out there now ship primarily with GNOME, making GNOME Shell the defacto standard Linux desktop. That's not to say GNOME is the only option, but for a new user, landing on the Ubuntu downloads webpage or the Fedora download page or the Debian download page, the default links will get you GNOME Shell on the desktop.
+
+That makes it possible for Linux and open source advocates to make a more appealing case for the platform. The ubiquity of GNOME is something that hasn't been the case previously. And it may not be good news for KDE fans, but I believe it's going to have a profound impact on the future of desktop Linux and open source development more generally because it dovetails nicely with something that I believe has been a huge story in 2017 and will continue to be a huge story in 2018 -- Flatpak/Snap packages.
+
+Combine a de facto standard desktop with a standard means of packaging applications and you have a platform that's just as easy to develop for as any other, say Windows or OS X.
+
+The development tools in GNOME, particularly the APIs and GNOME Builder tool that arrived earlier this year with GNOME 3.20, offer developers a standardized means of targeting the Linux desktop in a way that simply hasn't been possible until now. Combine that with the ability to package applications independent of distro and you have a much more compelling platform for developers. That just might mean that developers not currently targeting Linux will be willing to take another look.
+
+Now this potential utopia has some downsides, as already noted it leaves KDE fans a little out in the cold. It also leaves my favorite distro looking a little less necessary than it used to. I won't be abandoning Arch Linux any time soon, but I'll have a lot harder time making a solid case for Arch with Flatpak/Snap packages having more or less eliminated the need for the Arch User Repository. That's not going to happen overnight, but I do think it will eventually get there.
+
+There's two other big stories to watch in 2018. The first is Amazon Linux 2, Amazon's new home-grown Linux distro based, loosely it seems, on RHEL 7. While Amazon Linux 2 screams vendor lock-in to me, it will certainly appeal to the millions of companies already heavily invested in the AWS system and it appears, from my limited testing, to offer some advantages over other images on EC2. One is speed, AL2 has been tuned to the AWS environment, but perhaps the bigger advantage is the uniformity and ease of moving from development to production entirely through identical containers.
+
+The last story worth keeping an eye on is Firefox. The once, and possibly future, darling of open source development had something of a rough year. Firefox 57 with the Quantum code re-write was perhaps the most impressive release since Firefox 1.0, but that was followed up by the rather disastrous Mr Robot tie-in promo fiasco that installed unwanted plugins in users situations, an egregious breach of trust that would have made even Chrome developers blush.
+
+I think there's going to be a lot more of these sorts of gaffes in 2018. Hopefully not involving Firefox, but as open source projects struggle to find different ways to fund themselves and attain higher levels of recognition expect there to be plenty of ill-advised stunts of this sort. I'd say pop some popcorn because the harder open source projects try to find money, the more sparks -- and disgruntled users -- are going fly.
+
diff --git a/published/schedule.txt b/published/schedule.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a236cb1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/published/schedule.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,30 @@
+Gavin-
+
+Okay, here's a kind of road map for the rest of the year.
+
+Ubuntu beta release 9/22, 800 words by 9/23
+Ubuntu final 10/13 1200 words on 10/13
+
+Mint 18.1 should be about one month after ubuntu, I'll keep you posted
+
+Fedora 25 final is due 11/15, but that will probably slip a few weeks
+
+Elementary OS doesn't have a date yet, but last year it came out in December. There's a beta out now I could use like we did last time, seemed to go over well.
+
+##Pitches
+
+I also have a few linux-related software pitches
+
+GIMP 2.9, which is a preview of the next stable release, just came out a couple weeks ago. It's got a ton of new stuff including a new theme, so it doesn't look like it crawled out of windows 95 anymore. There's also a bunch of new color calibration tools that put GIMP well ahead of Photoshop on quite a few fronts. I was thinking I could do 1000 words on what's coming in 
+
+The Kdenlive video editor had the first major release it's ever had since I've been using it (it's been at least five years since it saw a significant update). It's got some great new stuff like 3 point editing, drag and drop autosizing, and background pre-rendering. It's probably the best linux video editor at the moment.
+
+I've never done a review of Arch Linux, and since that's the main distro I use these days I was thinking it would be interesting to compare it to more mainstream releases. I think a high level look at the advantages of a rolling release distro would be an interesting piece. I was thinking 1200 words but let me know what you think.
+
+I also found a new "developer" web browser based on Chrome/Chromium that has some nice features like phone emulation, synchronized simultaneous mobile and desktop views, auto refresh and a ton of nice testing features. It's a bit like Firefox developer edition, but based on Chrome so it's fast. I thought it would be worth a quick look, say 800 words.
+
+
+-s
+
+
+
diff --git a/published/ubuntu1710-flavors.txt b/published/ubuntu1710-flavors.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bd29160
--- /dev/null
+++ b/published/ubuntu1710-flavors.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,59 @@
+The Canonical project is gearing up for one of its biggest releases ever. Ubuntu 17.10, due to arrive October 19, will be the company's first release since it abandoned its Unity desktop, Mir display server and the dream of "convergence". Instead Ubuntu users will get the GNOME desktop with a few tweaks that promise to make it a little bit more Unity-like. But Unity-like does not mean it will be at all familiar for long time Unity users. Make no mistake, Ubuntu 17.10 will be a stock GNOME desktop with a couple of add-ons to improve the overall experience. 
+
+That radical change in interface has already led to much outcry and gnashing of teeth, but most of that is unnecessary, after all the main Ubuntu release is far from the only choice. And now that the Ubuntu 17.10 beta 1 release is here, it's the perfect time to explore other Ubuntu flavors to see which, if any, you might enjoy.
+
+With the possible exception of Kubuntu, almost all of these flavors will be easier on the RAM and processor than GNOME and all of them still use the same Ubuntu repositories and tools that long time Ubuntu users are familiar with.
+
+## Ubuntu MATE
+
+Ubuntu MATE takes the popular MATE desktop -- probably best known as a Linux Mint desktop -- and wraps it with some Ubuntu-specific improvements. To my mind the result is even nicer than Linux Mint's stock version of MATE, especially with its very slick set of the theme options. 
+
+Ubuntu MATE has possibly the biggest release of the bunch due in 17.10. It's also possibly the best choice for those pining over the loss of Unity thanks to the "Mutiny" panel layout which neatly mimics the Unity dock. Mutiny debuted in the last release, but 17.10 has quite a few improvements and a couple of new panel layout options, including one that mimics the Windows start menu and another that's OS X inspired.
+
+To use the various different panel layouts, you need to install and open the MATE Tweak tool and look for the panel section. It's also possible to start with any of the stock layouts and then tweak it to your liking and save the results.
+
+Mutiny isn't the only thing Ubuntu MATE offers potential Unity refugees, in fact Ubuntu MATE's Unity support is more than skin deep and includes support for the Global Menu (rather than menus being in application windows they're in the top bar) and, even better, Mutiny supports a Unity-style HUD. The HUD, one of the best features of Unity 7 for anyone who wants a more keyboard-driven desktop, allowed you to search and run menu-bar commands without reaching for the mouse. Ubuntu MATE's version works exactly the way Unity 7 users are accustomed to.
+
+Suffice to say that if you're really missing Unity and Ubuntu's version of GNOME isn't for you, Ubuntu MATE is probably your best bet. It's not Unity, but it has enough of its features out of the box that you'll likely feel right at home.
+
+## Xubuntu 
+
+If you're looking for a lightweight, fast, but still well polished desktop to replace Unity, Xfce in the form of Xubuntu is a excellent choice. Xfce's development pace is just about right in my view, with updates typically bringing a slew of minor fixes, the occasional major improvement but never a complete re-write of anything. Xfce isn't going to try to "revolutionize" your desktop.
+
+Xubuntu 17.10 is a good example of this, there's a ton of bug fixes, plenty of point updates for all the underlying Xfce tools and stability improvements. If you've used Xfce before you'll feel right at home in this release. 
+
+## Kubuntu
+
+Kubuntu 17.10 offers perhaps the most different and yet mostly highly refined and modern looking Ubuntu experiences of all the flavors. Even the Kubuntu installer is leaps and bounds beyond the rest in terms of polish and that extends to the desktop itself, which isn't heavily customized from stock KDE.
+
+This release features the latest version of Plasma 5, the KDE desktop and KDE Applications 17.04.3. The two major non-KDE apps -- LibreOffice and Firefox -- are still well integrated into the default theme. The big news in Plasma 5.10 is that KDE has finally caved in and accepted the Desktop-as-folder metaphor. That means KDE users can now litter their desktops with icons and files named "newfile", "newerfile", "newestfile" just like everyone else. If that's not your style you can disable the feature, but, while I don't happen to use the desktop as a folder, it does strike me as the sane thing to use for your default desktop.
+
+Another nice new feature involving folders is support for "spring loaded" folders. That is, when you drag a file onto a folder and wait a second the folder will open in a new window, which makes it faster and easier to file things away even if your organizational system has deeply nested folders. 
+
+This release also sees a new feature for Krunner, KDE's search tool -- if you search for an app that's not installed you'll get the Software Center's install page as a result.
+
+## Lubuntu
+
+It's an exciting time in the Lubuntu world, or for that matter any distro using the LXDE desktop, which is undergoing a massive change, moving from from GTK 2 to the Qt framework. The result will actually be an entirely different desktop from any practical point of view which is why Lubuntu is currently available as two sub-flavors if you will -- Lubuntu and Lubuntu Next. The latter is the currently still pretty unstable LXQt.
+
+While I would not suggest Lubuntu Next right now, nor indeed would I suggest it even after 17.10 is final, the current version is, for someone like me, who likes their desktop very minimal, something I've been keeping a close eye on for some time. Once Lubuntu Next becomes more stable, likely with next year's 18.04 release, I'll be taking a much closer look.
+
+In the mean time Lubuntu itself remains a great choice for anyone who wants a very lightweight, traditional desktop experience. 
+
+## Ubuntu Budgie
+
+The newest kid on the block, Ubuntu Budgie debuted early this year with the release of 17.04. The Budgie desktop is an outgrowth of the Solus project (please, don't call it a distro). At the moment most of Budgie is built atop GNOME based tools like GTK, but the plan is to, like LXQt, move from GTK to Qt as development progresses. 
+
+The Ubuntu Budgie flavor features the latest version of Budgie, 10.3 which is most notable in my experience for using considerably less RAM than its predecessors. That is due, apparently, to the project's decision to ditch several of the default GNOME apps, including GNOME Photos, Contacts, and Documents. All those make heavy use of the GNOME file indexing service that runs in the background. Without them Budgie has been able to significantly reduce its memory use when idle.
+
+No matter which flavor you decide to try, you'll get all the same underlying Ubuntu tools and repositories that you're familiar with even if all you've ever used is the main Ubuntu desktop. Currently all the flavors are beta 1 releases though so you'll want to do you testing in a virtual machine rather than your primary desktop. Like Ubuntu itself the final release of all the flavors will come next month.
+
+
+
+Screenshots:
+
+kubuntu.jpg - The default desktop for Kubuntu 17.10.
+ubuntu-mate.jpg - The default desktop for Ubuntu Mate 17.10.
+ubuntu-budgie.jpg - The default desktop for Ubuntu Budgie 17.10.
+xubuntu.jpg - The default desktop for Xubuntu 17.10.
+lubuntu.jpg - The default desktop for Lubuntu 17.10.
diff --git a/published/ubuntu1710final.txt b/published/ubuntu1710final.txt
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index 0000000..bd52a5d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/published/ubuntu1710final.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,45 @@
+[Update: Canonical has pulled Ubuntu 17.10 downloads from its website last month due to a "bug" that could corrupt BIOS settings on some laptops. Lenovo laptops appear to be the most common source of problems, though users also reported problems with Acer and Dell.
+
+The bug is actually a result of Canonical's decision to enable the Intel SPI driver, which allows BIOS firmware updates. That sounds nice, but it's not ready for prime time. Clearly. It's also clearly labeled as such and disabled in the upstream kernel. For whatever reason Canonical enabled it and, as it says on the tin, the results were unpredictable.
+
+According to chatter on the Ubuntu mailing list, a fix is a few days away, with testing happening now. In the mean time, if you've been affected (for what it's worth, I have a lenovo laptop and was *not* affected) OMGUbuntu has some <a href="http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/01/ubuntu-17-10-lenovo-fix">instructions that might possibly help</a>. 
+
+It's a shame it happened because the BIOS issue seriously mars what was an otherwise fabulous release of Ubuntu.]
+
+This innocuous sounding low-level level kernel feature gives Linux the ability to upgrade BIOS firmware on a motherboard directly. could corrupt the BIOS of an affected laptop, leaving the user unable to save settings or make changes. In extreme cases the bug left users unable to boot their laptop at all.
+
+Ubuntu 17.10 is upon us and, for the first time in recent memory, there are some very big changes in the latest release of Ubuntu.
+
+This release is the first since Canonical announced it would cease development of its Unity desktop, Mir display server and its long-touted goal of "convergence" -- AKA one OS to rule them all. All that is gone and in its place Ubuntu has returned to the GNOME desktop. The result is a revamped Ubuntu that feels a bit snappier and more modern than Unity, and, more importantly, seems to have imbued Canonical with a renewed sense of purpose as a distro.
+
+If you've been using Ubuntu long enough (since prior to 11.04) you're really returning to GNOME, though if you enjoyed Unity it may be something a bittersweet homecoming. While Ubuntu has a done a nice job of integrating GNOME extensions to create something that bears at least some resemblance to Unity -- making things at least look similar means a less jarring transition for users -- there are undeniably missing features compared to Unity.
+
+There are then two reviews to write here: first, how is Ubuntu with GNOME? And second, how is Ubuntu with GNOME compared to Ubuntu with Unity?
+
+The answer to the first question is that it's, well, pretty damn good. In fact, were it not for a few bugs that seem to make Ubuntu 17.10 unstable under Wayland, I would call 17.10 a great way to experience GNOME 3.26. Ubuntu has done a good job of integrating a few plugins that improve GNOME's user experience compared to stock GNOME -- most notably a modified version of the Dash-to-Dock and the App Indicator extensions, which go a long way toward making GNOME a bit more like Unity. It's worth nothing that Ubuntu's fork of Dash-to-Dock lacks some features of the original, but you can uninstall the Ubuntu version in favor of the original if you prefer. In fact you can really revert to a pretty stock GNOME desktop with just a few tweaks. Canonical said it wasn't going to heavily modify GNOME and indeed it hasn't.
+
+The result is a very nicely themed GNOME desktop for Ubuntu that is very reminiscent of the way Ubuntu used to customize GNOME prior to the advent of Unity. Unfortunately, there have been several stability issues in the course of my testing. Trying to configure UFW via the GUI pretty reliable crashes GNOME thanks to <a href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/synaptic/+bug/1712089">this bug</a>. It's easy enough to configure UFW via the terminal, but that bug affects other applications as well, particularly anything launched by using sudo appname. It's really a GNOME bug, but for whatever reason 17.10 is the first time I've encountered it.
+
+From my testing the big crashing system stoppers are all limited to running under Wayland though so, my suggestion is, until 18.04 arrives, if you want a rock solid system, stick with running Ubuntu under X.org.
+
+While the out of the box experience for Ubuntu 17.10 is generally good, it is not arriving out of the blue. It is replacing an arguably more powerful desktop -- Unity. 
+
+There are the obvious missing features, for example the HUD is gone and no GNOME extension I've tried has worked the same way save <a href="https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1250/gnome-global-application-menu/">this one</a> but unfortunately when I tested it was quite buggy. 
+
+There are, however, some other things to be aware of even if you don't care about the HUD and other Unity-specific features, most notably the considerable differences between GNOME applications that used to ship with Unity and those that ship with GNOME proper. Canonical has long patched and heavily modified quite a few stock GNOME apps, but one that's most obvious is Files. Files (formerly Nautilus) has completely different right-click menus and toolbars. 
+
+Other changed apps include Archive Manager, Gedit and Deja Dup, which now only works with NextCloud. The latter is one of those classic GNOME dictatorial decisions that have alienated so many users. Once upon a time Deja Dup supported Amazon S3 and some other very nice online backup solutions, but those were deemed "asking casual users to set up an Amazon S3 account is too high a bar". Last time I checked all you had to do to set up an S3 account was create an AWS user, which while perhaps a bit harder than  Google Drive, seems well within the capabilities of most people. Except those that GNOME considers its core. But what drives me batty about this kind of thinking isn't that S3 is too complicated for "casual users" it's that once that decision is made the feature must be removed for everyone.
+
+Technically speaking you can get the S3 option back. Open conf-editor and navigate to /org/gnome/deja-dup and change the backend key to either gcs, openstack, rackspace, or s3. However, before you resume backing up your files with Deja Dup, consider this note about the future of S3 and other apparently complicated backup services: "Eventually, we might drop support for backing up to them. And then later, maybe we'll drop support for restoring from them too." You don't say. If you're the sort of user who likes to control your data, and likes, for instance making encrypted backups to S3, might I suggest you learn how to use the considerably more powerful and future-proof, s3cmd.
+
+Alas this is the sort of thinking that pervades the GNOME project, as far as I can tell, from top to bottom. GNOME is not (perhaps it never was) a desktop for those who like customize, do things themselves, or have any say in the future of the software they use.
+
+This is also where I see a bumpy future for the Canonical-GNOME relationship. Canonical has always been very good at assessing and understanding what the users want and need. They've posted quite a few surveys just to see what people wanted for the transition to GNOME and appear to have taken the feedback to heart. Canonical is also not afraid to turn its back on projects that don't work. A lot of companies would never have admitted that the vision of convergence wasn't what people wanted. That's the sort of move that takes guts and honest appraisal of what you're doing, what's working and what's not. The GNOME project has never displayed that kind of thinking. And as far as I can tell, it operates on nearly the opposite premise. It's to early to say, but I predict conflict down the road. Keep a bag of popcorn handy, I believe there will be plenty of fireworks to watch.
+
+For now though Ubuntu 17.10 feels very much like Ubuntu has some of its mojo back. For the first time in a long time there are updates worth mentioning and the distro no longer feels like it's in limbo, waiting on convergence. Instead it feels like the groundwork has been laid for a brand new, rejuvenated Ubuntu. While I find this release a little unstable, it's a nice preview of what I think will be the release to jump on board with the new Ubuntu -- next spring's Ubuntu 18.04. 
+
+Screenshots:
+
+ubuntu1710-desktop.jpg: The new GNOME-based Ubuntu desktop
+ubuntu1710-files.jpg: The GNOME Files app, somewhat different than the heavily patched version previous Ubuntu desktops used.
+ubuntu1710-software.jpg: The new Ubuntu software app is largely the same as in the previous release.