Having played a bit more with Windows 7 I did find a few things I miss from Linux. Firstly the ability to put a window always ontop, I like this for detached webcam windows so I can have my finacée sitting on top of everything while I am talking to her on skype using my nokia n810. It’s a little thing, but I have grown to find it very useful.

In the same vein I really don’t like the MSN client, it’s pretty but I can’t detach the webcam images and it shows little text ads. It just feels cumbersome and it is not geared towards making IM an integrated part of the desktop instead it tries to be one big horrible application.

In Windows a long standing problem is that every good mediaplayer e.g. will only support the codecs that it’s vendor has an interest in. This means that you download iTunes to use your iPod or get access to their podcast library (which we should admit is rather well designed), however one doesn’t have support for the ecosystem beyond Apple. There is no Ogg Vorbis or FLAC support which means a large part of my music collection is rendered worthless. The same problem is present with a lot of applications, and here Free Software comes to the rescue, looking at Banshee e.g. you get all of this support even if it is not always perfect (mtp e.g. seems to have problems with my Sansa Fuze). However if I am already going to replace core applications what is left is the core Windows which might as well be Linux for all I care, it is at least not worth the price of a full Windows to me.

Internet Explorer 8 is great, no really, I quite like it and was it not because the Google Chrome development release supports Windows 7 I would have continued to use it. They have managed to produce a very stable browser that works well, I think the entire internet wins because of it, just looking at how many people already use IE and will apply the upgrade. Like Chrome it has some containment going on and their Javascript engine provides very tolerable performance.

I got my hands on the Windows 7 RC 64 bit build, and having tried it for a while I have to say that for the most part I really like what Microsoft has done. Unlike Linux on this laptop it feels smooth, the audio settings are easy and works a charm for managing and testing 5.1 setups like my own.

I think Microsoft did good work, for an RC it is very stable and the only application I have found that doesn’t work unfortunately Google Chrome. I have though only used the OS for a few hours, more extensive testing will be needed to weed out all the little trouble spots but the initial presentation is very pleasant. 

I love the audio settings and testing, I hope Pulseaudio gets to a stage where we can universally offer such UI enabled testing and preferences. It’s really that easy and comfortable in use. It just works(tm).

The little UI enhancements are great, unlike Compiz which seems more focused on making things burn, beam up or worse these really make a difference in use. E.g. when you click and drag a window to the top your cursor gives a little sonar blip and the window border is shown expanding to fullscreen. It is those little things that make it pleasant to the eye and adds to the experience. A good UI should aid the user and explain functionality, Windows 7’s revision of Aero does this very well and it remains smooth while doing so. 

Much has been written on the new taskbar and I have to say it is the sexiest new UI design Microsoft has done in a while. Peek is excellent in use, it is a visually pleasing way to solve the problem of application launching and task listing. Something in my opinion that has yet to be done either in Linux or OS X. The one problem I have seen is that there is a tendency for dialogs to pop under which leads to missing them for a while. I am very impressed.

I do miss the ability from metacity (and other window managers to put a window “always on top”. I use this a lot when chatting with the webcam on while working, it is nice to be able to see the person I am talking to on skype (I use a rather complicated setup where I have msn for the webcam on the laptop but I use skype on my nokia n810).

All in all Windows 7 RC is a very solid OS, it performs very smoothly and feels good in use. Windows users will see this as a nice upgrade. They have applied some of their prior successes more extensively e.g. users will find the Ribbon toolbar from the last Office release in Wordpad.

Some might remember that I wasn’t at all fond of Vista at the same stage in the game, and as a someone who has used nothing but Linux for more than a decade I am not familiar with the “Windows experience” but Windows 7 strikes me as being a nice solid offering. I am very pleased that Microsoft decided to bring their A game, hopefully this will spur competition and innovation.

In the quest for the perfect Linux for me, I decided to give Ubuntu a longer bit of time on my setup. This lead up largely to the weeks till the release of 9.04 meaning it is the latest Ubuntu has to offer.

Ubuntu has a very solidly frozen release which kinda bothers me since I either have to apply an unsupported PPA external repo to get the version of software upstream supports. This is the case for things like Banshee e.g.. In addition Ubuntu does not seem very willing to adopt software early which means that 9.04 ships with the older 0.9.14 version of Pulseaudio, which is a shame since 0.9.15 definitely is an improvement and finally lets me set up 5.1 (though still only analog). Again I can enable a PPA but that leads to a support nightmare (and breaks the awesomeness that is Apport) which I am not really prepared to bestove on anyone having worked with supporting users myself I know that I always like them to be in the most vanilla state I can get them to lessen my burden. This is a larger problem though of what to do with regards to the balance between a static release with updates and a rolling release. I do not believe this to be an easy problem ti solve but making people rely on PPAs to get important updates to X drivers and leaf applications like Banshee is not a good way to solve it from a QA point of view. What is, seems a huge problem space which would be interesting to explore.

There are also some really annoying moments, mostly when dealing with the package manager. I really miss an up to date PackageKit 0.4.x and interacting with apt-get or dpkg from the commandline just doesn’t feel as natural as using yum or rpm. The output of yum e.g. is very clean and easy to follow as is the out of rpm. In contrast dpkg has multiple lines of jibberish which one has to dig into to find simple information like version numbers for filing a bug report. I really think the time is approaching rapidly to have dpkg put down and radically redesigned, things like debhelper are especially poor designs for the target audience Ubuntu has. If you default to a situation where asking questions during the installation of updates you have failed. My metric for this is normally how quickly my mother would call upon me screaming “IT’S SAYING SOMETHING AGAIN!!! HELP”. Aside that dpkg is extremely frail for some reason, it falls over and gets it database corrupted quite quickly and unlike with rpm the recovery has not be easily discoverable (rm -rf /var/lib/rpm/__db.00* && rpmdb –rebuilddb normally takes care of it). It lacks some nice modern functionality like rollbacks and delta downloads, sadly it does’t look like it will gain them anytime soon either. I am concerned that I have yet to see a clear sign of commitment to PackageKit from Ubuntu, they don’t have the latest version and despite being marked as “in process for Jaunty” we still do not have it by default in any capacity.

I hate the fact that I can’t delete everything relating to gimp and openoffice without also losing my danish translations for everything else. Yes I know OpenOffice has features like a presentor that GNOME office does not have but AbiWord does just fine for me, it’s pretty, quick and very stable. I should be able to remove all those useless help files from OpenOffice as well. Minor nitpick I know but it seems that Ubuntu isn’t very flexible when it comes to changing these applications.

The Mono stack works beautifully, documentation is generated for everything and the coverage is near spotless (all I lack is Monsoon). You are given a full MonoDevelop stack. It’s truly a thing to behold how well kept it is and how much work has gone into making it the best Mono stack around. Additionally the excellent debian/ubuntu Mono team has done some impressive work cutting down the size of applications by removing Mono 1.x functionality meaning that now Banshee and all it’s dependencies take up less space on the CD than rhythmbox. I find this especially interesting as one of the, fallacious, accusations I got when proposing Banshee as the default media player in Fedora was that I disregarded the space contraints and I suggested just this solution to meet the requirement along with splitting out debug information. I am happy to see that it paid off for them and I hope that the patches will be broken out and pushed upstream where possible, also so other distros might benefit that they become available in something other than dpkgs default horrid one mega pseudo patch per package format. Truly masterful, and I get moonlight in the repos as well which rocks my rationale mind.

The desktop itself has some nice tweaks, I like the idea of using the fast user switching applet to do presence and to handle the logout/halt/suspend/hibernate scenerios. I just wish they did that work upstream so that everyone would benefit from looking at the design and applying. It is though a very nice idea and it works really well with Empathy. I do lack the option to set some predefined custom states such as “Having dinner” and such. There is the risk of growing this list very long if one was to do this though.

I hate Launchpad marginally less now, I still think that it is confusing and dead hard to use but somehow work gets done. It needs to be orders of magnitude easier to use before I beats bugzilla though. In the same sense I really miss an easy overview on a per package basis of all the bugs, like bugz.fedoraproject.org/<packagename>. It makes it much easier to do what I love, namely breaking software and triaging bugs, in an effective manner.

Suspend just works… most of the time, I have gotten the system into a state where the network driver never regained life and other little wringles but overall it is the first time I have seen suspend work consistently on this laptop. I hope the same is the case for other people so that one day we might rely universally on this technology to suspend machines when they are idle. If wake up could be made really quick perhaps a system as envisioned by OLPC that would suspend the machine while reading a website might be a viable future for us all.

I am still not sold on the per home directory encryption and it does worry me that I have yet to see any evaluation of this technology by a 3rd party security expert for flaws. It is appealing to have security that does not require every user of a machine to know the master password to boot it yet still have the advantage of knowing that while you are not logged in your data remains safe. It also does not encumber boot nor imparts the performance overhead to system binaries that full disk encryption would do, which is another appealing idea. I would like to have a more informed opinion on the design before I judging one way or the other. It worries me that I have not been able to find a wiki page listing the known weaknesses in this approach, it is not enabled by default but it would still be nice to be able to look up more information. Personally since my laptop is used only by me, I used the alternative CD to install and used dm-crypt, then added this on top, mostly “because I could”, surprisingly the performance overhead of doing this was very low. I think what worries me is that it seems like such a finely pick solution that does the best from a user point of view that it really has to have problems from a security point of view – experience tells most people that when sounds to good to be true, it very likely is.

A problem that seems to plague all Linux desktop right now on this laptop is that it takes very little to make it lock up for seconds or minutes. Audio stutters when the slightest load comes along. It didn’t used to do this but looking at the cpu scaling the slightest load seems to cause a problem where it instantly lowest the cpu speed to the lowest setting. I am currently unaware of what is going on and I don’t have another machine to confirm that it isn’t just this machine going tits up. Ubuntu sadly is affected as well, I won’t deduct them any points but it does make Linux as a desktop very painful on the whole.

Jaunty is an excellent desktop I would not hesitate to recommend it to people, out of the box you get a lot of very nice functionality and a very polished look and feel. It does somehow feel like it is the end of the line for the current Ubuntu desktop and that their experiments with new UI elements will have to lead to some major changes. Hopefully they will be able to pipe this into the GNOME 3 process in a standardized manner so to avoid basically forking the desktop.

Finally, it only took 3 months, 2 of those with a fix in LP

My faith in humanity is restored.

Once more we jump on the distro bus, this time to the land of brown and fanboys.

Contrary to what I have done before, I will start out by mentioning all the things I dislike about Ubuntu, this is to contrast with how little it takes to weight out a lot of bad.

Firstly I greatly dislike dpkg, mostly because it’s frail like a sickly 99 year old (note: my beloved grandmother is 93, and she bowls +200 points once a week as well as attending a weekly gymnastics class, she is a tough bird. Some old things are tough, dpkg is not). Twice during my testing I had managed to get the database in such a bad shape as to render the entire system for all practical purpose unrescuable by merely applying the daily Jaunt updates. This cannot happen, ever, it is unforgivable. Your packaging system does not need to be perfect but after as many years as dpkg has been deployed I would have expected it to be at least stable enough to not die on me completely. Secondly because of this annoying thing they call debconf, this is the highly annoying little program that pops up right in the middle of package installs and asks you technical questions, of a nature so scary it would force any regular user to call tech support or mindlessly press the yes button. This is not a good thing, additionally failure to address this issue means that the dpkg crowd have basically forked PackageKit into a project called aptdeamon which entirely defeats the purpose of PackageKit.

Second major pain point with Ubuntu is Launchpad, not only is this proprietary dongheap exceedingly hard to figure out how to use, but when a bug is maked as a duplicate – which thanks to the excellence that is apport happens several times a day during a development release. You get mail.. more mail than your average spammer can send out if he tried and there is no apparent way to turn it off. Launchpad just refuses to make the hurting stop, this is the primary reason to never use it really, it lets real bug resolving drown in duplication messages and users adding their +1 to bugs. The latter should clearly be a little counter or something which developers could use to gauge the number of affected users, bug messages are not intended for this. This leads developers to script replies asking for backtraces instead of reading the bugs, even when the request doesn’t concern a crash you get a request for a backtrace. The whole Ubuntu bug experience is exasperating to the point of wanting to throw oneself off a bridge, I have one bug that has had a fix posted for nearly 2 months, the fix is confirmed and will fix a major regression.. yet it has not been applied. As a maintainer you always should attempt to keep the bug count at zero, this lead to stress but if you take the responsibility for a piece of software you should also do so with regards to the bug reports. Failing to do that at least pay attention to bugs with patches, do a monthly run down, have bug templates, give users a sign you are paying attention. It could also be that I filed the bug wrong, it’s hard to tell since Launchpad is so unlike the common bugzilla everyone else uses and orders of magnitude more complicated to use.. who knows, regardless it is painful.

Thirdly, despite Shuttleworths pretty words on the matter, I just don’t see Ubuntu contributing much anywhere I care about. When they do development such as these new notifications (which are pretty I will grant you that) it seems like catheral development which is being thrown over the wall. It is very hard to figure out where if anywhere one can participate from the word go in these projects. I feels very closed and that is just not my idea of fun, I like getting my hands dirty with first looks, trying to find a way to break it or look at parts of the idea that have not yet been fully thought through.

Fourth, security. Ubuntu relies on an out of kernel solution called AppArmor instead of the in-kernel solution SELinux. I just don’t feel safe when the code I have to rely on every day to keep me safe doesn’t meet the standards of the kernel development community. Additionally patching the kernel for this very likely leads to bugs and a delay in getting important updates out. Then they have an encryption thing to create a Private directory in your home dir, however by design if I am correct this is readable by root so on any off the shelf Ubuntu box all I have to do to break it is boot the machine into single user mode. I was kinda hoping for something.. more.

Fifth, the community. I hate to say this, I hang out a lot on the Ubuntu Forums but it is very hard to have a technical debate with anyone there since it’s so infested with fanboys and people who purposefully keep themselves uninformed. On the other hand there is the development mailing lists which seem to have everything except developers, nobody throws out new ideas or gets people excited, it is in fact very hard to see how development is done or to have a look at where one would go. The image given off is that of development happening behind closed doors which is sad. There just simply doesn’t seem to be the kind of community I care about, there is all kinds of other types but none that involve a developer, some code and some great ideas being thrown around.

Sixth and final. On your start up of an Ubuntu desktop it literally begs you to install the nvidia driver if you have such a card with the words “There are things Free Software cannot do”. Free Software can do anything thank you very much, instead of helping us close the gaps of currently lacking functionality the elected solution feels some what like mockery. I also don’t see this software having a nice switch to say “No, I actually like kernel developers and have no interest in drowning them in pointless tainted reports and I wish you would solve the real problem, please don’t bother me again” and turn this off.

I shall refrain from pointing out that the Ubuntu implementation of PulseAudio is just inferior and causes popping, hissing and other nice things. This being worked on, and to be honest I have problems with audio on all distros so I will cut them slack, there are general issues and then issues specific to a distro. This is just a sign that audio really is due for a good whack with the collective bugfixing hammer and I am happy to see progress. It is sadly also one of the signs that Linux still has a long way to go to be really good for many use cases – good thing we have those walking boots on then.

Now the good stuff.

First and most important, Jo Shields. I have mentioned this guy before. He is fun, he is helpful and he makes the best maintained Mono stack run for my pleasure. He almost singlehandedly makes up for every single bad point I just mentioned. This is why they went first, to show just what makes the difference.

Secondly, supporrt for ARM as I have stated before I feel that supporting many architectures is important and a great way to get technical contributors as well as fixing bug all around for everyone. ARM is an important one to me.

Third, Apport. Apport is made of pure awesome and really helps close an important hole for bug reporting. So far as I know it still doesn’t catch crashers in Mono apps but it is an impressive tool that everyone should have. If Ubuntu gave the world anything truly great it is Apport, after they pioneered this now pretty much every distro have their own port of Apport or a separate but similar solution. The openSUSE people had a great apport presentation at FOSDEM 2009 which also compares similar solutions in other OSes which people should go watch.

Fouth, I like the artwork. No really I do. They managed to keep it consistently improving over a number of years, polishing it every cycle. While it is closing on it’s useful lifespan I so admire this as I have always found it frustratingly unprofessional to look at Fedora changing every 6 months and in my eyes not fundamentally improving over time. I am sure they will come up with a great look for the future, and polish it till it shines and starts the test of time. It is why you can always clearly make out an Ubuntu desktop, it is an important brand and I wish we all took this more seriously.

I really want to like Ubuntu but they make it so hard. It just feels opaque and undutily closed off from participation, what work is being done also feels like it is living it’s own life in Ubuntu world and never really leaves, this is especially true for translations which is sad as that is a great stepping stone for contributions. The tools are frustratingly hard to use correctly and everything seems to have need to be done in an Ubuntu specific way. It doesn’t feel so much as a Linux distro but a different world. Had it only been a utopian world of peace, cake and pink unicorns.. but no.

Well, not really commercial but a few of my friends, started their own company Jenruno last year and they just launched their first product called SpamTask. In case anyone is in the market for a good WordPress spam filter this might be worth a try, but from here a big round of congratulations to Rune and Richard on the launch. The best wishes for the future.

SUSE Studio is made of pure awesome, definitely the slickest way to build appliances I have ever seen. I shall worship forever at the feet of it’s developers while basking the immensity of it’s glory.

The one feature I can’t seem to find though is setting the architecture of the appliance which would come in very handy when say, building a GNOME desktop filled with holy goodness for my Core 2 Duo laptop.

In the eternal quest for the perfect distro, impossible as that might be I have been dabbling with Foresight. It is attractive to me as it is a very close to vanilla GNOME and their Conary doing things right approach makes sense to me.

The developers are really nice people, they are ready to help out on IRC, they are polite and generally have an answer ready for most things. However sometimes their answers conflict, e.g. I was having a problem with Conary being very advanced and preventing me from uninstalling software which other things depended on (without suggesting that it remove those as well mind you). I was told to go use the commandline tools as the PackageKit implementation wasn’t fully formed yet. However the cli tools are some what hard to use, after which another developer told me to use PackageKit.. circular reasoning begins here. It seems to me that Conary is so advanced behind the curtains that correctly and sanely presenting all this functionality to the user still needs a lot of work. I have no doubt they can do it but it will take a while. Now I doubt it is the case that Conary is hard to use because it does the right thing, but possibly rather because they bite off more than they could chew and did not deeply consider the user experience when designing their solution. The backend is wonderful though and I cannot praise it enough, lots of cool functionality and promise to for the future, we should all learn from their work. Another little grip with Foresight is that it lacks polish, and bug tracking is slow due to being understaffed, this is a shame as Foresight is a nice place to be and I hope they will be able to grow more contributors. Additionally they get points for making the sane decision to have Banshee as their default mediaplayer and installing Moonlight by default. Again Conary has overdesign issues, installing codec support for some unknown reason feels the need to pull in mplayer, and that is quite typical of the granularity of control one seems to have in Foresight and I am not generally a fan of all or nothing solutions. Conary does represent much needed advancements like rollbacks for users and many good tools for a package maintainer, there is lots of love about it.

All in all Foresight is nice but plagued by bugs and lacking user experience for Conary which makes it hard to get my setup just right. I am sure Foresight has a bright future but currently I am not in it. I like being part of a fairly decent sized community as I always feel the most inspired by seeing other peoples passion and results around me. Additionally there are some bugs they just should have fixed, such as pulseaudion not starting due to libflac missing, this was known since december and yet existed till when I tried it a little while ago.

Foresight is a diamond in the rough no doubt, but I feel like there aren’t really any corners for me to polish there. I like feelling like I help make Linux happen, and in Foresight what I got the biggest impression was that of making Conary happen – a lofty goal as that is, it is not one I can really fulfill since I lack the qualifications. Something about Foresight seemed just not right for me, it is hard to pin down.

I would whole heartedly recommend Foresight to others who don’t mind a bumpy ride, but one that is fun and one where a little help goes a long way. It is a great project to get started in, there isn’t tons of dreaded beaucracy like in Fedora just the will and ability to help out.

Good things:

Ext4 support (for my external drive which is partitioned using ext4 and contains all my data this cannot due to circumstances be reformated thus any distro without such support is discarded), Mono is in a good shape, Banshee is present in the default install and up to date, Conary is awesome (as a maintainer). The community while small is very nice and welcoming. It is always fresh and the rolling release style is very welcome in my general usage pattern.

Bad things:

No encryption support in the installer, it is hard to get rid of certain applications like OpenOffice, bugs go untreated. Conary needs work (as a user). No ext4 support in the installer. Lacks polish and is a little to focused on how awesome Conary so that it seems to lose it’s own identity to it.

Yesterday as I was typing up yet another article explaining why people should use and contribute to Fedora, I noticed that my template list of important improvements to Linux done in Fedora was getting several pages long. Fedora does a lot of important work, much of it fueled by Red Hat but I often feel like there is ample room for other companies to take Fedora other places, interesting places we didn’t think of. To do with Fedora what we might not dream, things like building a nationally certified OS for schools and the interesting demands that would put on the distribution. Porting and developing interfaces for netbooks, and many other things which might ultimately blow our minds and take us new places.

But are we being hampered by Red Hat as our sole sponsor I wonder, while they unquestionably are doing a lot of good, there is much they cannot do or have no interest in doing. Fedora also does not seem to have been able to attract much additional corporate interest, which I hear from talking to such people is due to them not wanting another company to have the ultimate deciding vote over their work. So today when I read that Intel were handing over Moblin to The Linux Foundation while remaining key contributors I started thinking what if Fedora did something similar. Opening up Fedora to multiple contributors with a foundation at the helm rather than a single company. It would be bold move, I doubt Red Hat would be entirely opposed to doing so but also considering their historically very generous inventments in Fedora it would be unfair not to give them credit and a say in Fedora and it’s future direction. Something they might rightfully fear they would not get in that new situation.

I do believe that in a foundation of equal partners we could attract more big investors to take Fedora and scale it beyond its current limitations. Be those architecture ports or deployment scenerios. I also believe that it would fundamental be good for Red Hat as well as Fedora to help make such a move happen, they would tab directly into important markets and while their adjustments for their RHEL products might be bigger this way the gains in support and a wider community would amply make up for it I think.

As a Fedora contributor I always cringed when I heard Fedora mentioned as Red Hat’ community offering or simply as Red Hat Fedora Linux. I always felt like deep down Fedora was it’s own and attributing it all to Red Hat with the implication that it was their unsupported public beta tree was rather untrue and unfair towards non-RH contributors (which now make up more than 50% the last time I heard numbers – corrections welcome), I contributed because it was a best possible place to do so, I believe if we make it so it can be the best possible place to contribute for everyone. Be they private individuals, governments or companies I think Fedora has a lot of offer and I think that moving it beyond a one company sphere of dominance it could become _the_ reference Linux platform. I think that would make good business sense to strive to be that for Red Hat, I think it would be easy to get there if the freedom and will exists to seek that position. It would help create a real world standard, one that would work unlike LSB and other some what failed attempts at standardizing Linux as a whole.

Following a lot of soul searching, mostly based in the ton of friendly mail I have gotten lately I have decided to renounce my evil ways and remove all of Mono from my machines. I also have applied to be part of the Rhythmbox development team so to bring computing into the 21th century.

I plan to rewrite as much code in the only true language there is, ASM. thank you very much for showing me, through repeated use of sound reasoning and flawless logic, the err of my ways. I will forever be in your gratitude oh great ones.

Don’t forget to check upcoming blog posts which will soon be aggregated via BoycottNovell.om