Are there really many people interested in using ubuntu on high powered laptops who can't install it on their own?
I don't know, but I, for one, am interested in buying a laptop without paying for software that I won't use, and in paying a vendor to either used Linux-supported components or developing Linux support for the components that they use. Dell puts significant effort into developing Linux support, and pushes the rest of hardware industry to maintain Linux support.
It supports extensions on the mobile version, for another. Chrome doesn't. It's true that they're changing the API, but that means that they're significantly decreasing the amount of effort that developers need to put in, to get an extension that works on both Firefox and Chrome. I'm cautiously optimistic. It'll probably be a painful transition, but you should consider that your premise is flawed. Firefox isn't going to be "without customization."
This weekend I spent some time improving my personal installation of SOGo groupware, so that my wife and I can better share email, calendars, and contacts on a system that we personally own.
Certainly, big companies don't respect users, but it's still possible to provide all of the services that I need using only Free Software, so I do. Pretty much the only exception is navigation, for which I use Google Maps. Everything else we do with Free Software and the more I move my wife to our own services, the happier she is. Personally, I find that immensely gratifying. As long as that continues, I'll find computing as cool and fun as ever.
All of the systems listed in the post are good choices. To those, I would add only the Librem laptops, which are designed specifically for Free Software:
Almost everything is better refined under Fedora. Most recent example: I support a lab that teaches embedded development. The ARM devices present themselves to a host as a USB network device with DHCP. If we attach those devices via USB to an Ubuntu host, it switches the default route to the embedded device, which means the host loses access to the NFS server and the whole desktop session hangs. On Fedora and CentOS, the hosts correctly get an address and a subnet route, but the default route is unmodified, so the system continues working.
Ubuntu and Fedora are mostly the same software, so it's hard to find "big" reasons to choose one over the other. Instead, it's the details that really make Fedora stand out.
The sad thing is that it's always been this way. Ubuntu made a splash in its initial releases, claiming that they'd made Linux "just work". The truth was that Red Hat, GNOME, and other groups had been making all the bits just work for a long time before Ubuntu was released, Canonical merely released a distribution just as those bits were getting finished. Fedora's release at that time was a major jump in usability from the previous release, and "just worked" as well.
Fedora has always been the more refined platform in a long list of ways.
is there ANY other company you can think of that gives up market share to help a competitor?
"They now fully-support a standalone Ubuntu (Linux) installation under Windows as either an integrated part of Windows, or a fully-supported guest OS under their hypervisor,"
I don't see that behavior when I open Firefox on my systems. Unless you define its initial memory set as arbitrary and large, which could be considered technically correct, but in that case, every browser does that trick.
I'm not the only one. Benchmarks that compare memory use typically note that Firefox uses less. You're the odd man out, making claims counter to everyone else's experience.
As I replied to another comment: it uses less memory than other browsers, it syncs my bookmarks and other data between desktop and mobile, and I can use ad-blockers and other extensions on the mobile version. Those are significant advantages that make Firefox the best browser, IMO.
Firefox regularly introduces real, tangible improvements. Bagging the whole thing because this one release (made on their regular schedule) isn't ground-breaking is just a little disingenuous.
Yes, because it uses less memory than other browsers, it syncs my bookmarks and other data between desktop and mobile, and I can use ad-blockers and other extensions on the mobile version.
As far as I know, that's not true of any other browser.
Depends on the model. The second generation Thinkpad X1 Carbon didn't work with Linux *at all*.
If you want a Linux laptop, look for someone who actually supports Linux on the laptop. Dell has a few, including their XPS 13 developer edition. Purism's Librem laptops are a little more expensive, but specifically built for Linux. There are a handful of other vendors that primarily support Linux.
> Python 2 is still maintained because developers aren't porting their code to Python 3.
That's not really what I see. At Python meetups and conferences, the Python developers I meet are near unanimous in their praise for Python 3. On my workstation, there are more packages that depend on python3 than on python. Porting is clearly happening.
Python was initially released in January 1994, almost 23 years ago. Since then, some libraries have been deprecated, first producing warnings, and later being removed. That process gave users and developers time to update the code without completely breaking following an upgrade. Backward compatibility was reasonably well maintained until 3.0, which was released in parallel with 2.6. Python 2 is still maintained while developers port code to Python 3.
That's a big contrast from Swift, which was initially released almost exactly 2 years ago, and made significant backward-incompatible changes without an interim version that retained compatibility. Python's not perfectly backward compatible, but it's a whole lot better than this.
Lots of people are repeating the refrain "RAID is not a backup." To that, I want to add an illustration of what that means. If there's only one place your data is located, you don't have backups.
If your data only exists on a "backup" drive, then it isn't backed up. You need to have two, and a single RAID volume doesn't provide that. No matter how many disks are in it, a RAID volume is just one "place." The same goes for Storage Spaces. If your disks are mirrored, then corruption or accidental deletions will remove the data from both.
Of the three proposals, only the last one would actually give you a backup.
Personally, I want as much distance from my data and its backup as is reasonably possible, so my recommendation would be for cloud backups or, if you don't like that idea or the price, then a small NAS for backups. A WD My Cloud 4TB (which will be 2TB in RAID1 mode, which I recommend) runs $180.
The problem with "proper" security is that it works against the user
NIST guidelines: Favor the user. To begin with, make your password policies user friendly and put the burden on the verifier when possible.
Long passwords that you can't remember
NIST guidelines:Applications must allow all printable ASCII characters, including spaces, and should accept all UNICODE characters.. We often advise people to use passphrases, so they should be allowed to use all common punctuation characters and any language to improve usability and increase variety... No composition rules. What this means is, no more rules that force you to use particular characters or combinations
so far no one has come up with a better way to do it.
Says the guy who obviously hasn't read the guidelines they're criticizing.
I'm not in the habit of responding to obvious trolls, but this case makes very clear the flaw in the logic of people who actually believe that open source is insecure.
The bug is in the specification, which is necessarily open in order to create inter-operable systems. And what is code, if not a machine readable specification?
The idea that closed source is more secure, taken to its logical end, is an argument for closed systems that don't inter-operate with other systems. Their operation would have to be entirely secret and proprietary.
Would it? Glenn Greenwald is highly trustworthy, and he was the one person that Snowden contacted first. If his word isn't good enough, I'm not sure anything is.
Slashdot Mirror
Are there really many people interested in using ubuntu on high powered laptops who can't install it on their own?
I don't know, but I, for one, am interested in buying a laptop without paying for software that I won't use, and in paying a vendor to either used Linux-supported components or developing Linux support for the components that they use. Dell puts significant effort into developing Linux support, and pushes the rest of hardware industry to maintain Linux support.
Do you mean QA? Your comments need QA. :)
what exactly does Firefox offer over Chrome?
It's smaller, for one: smaller download, smaller installation, smaller memory footprint.
It supports extensions on the mobile version, for another. Chrome doesn't. It's true that they're changing the API, but that means that they're significantly decreasing the amount of effort that developers need to put in, to get an extension that works on both Firefox and Chrome. I'm cautiously optimistic. It'll probably be a painful transition, but you should consider that your premise is flawed. Firefox isn't going to be "without customization."
It was completely different from any that came before it
Well... It was better than PalmOS phones, certainly, but not "completely different." Most of its UI was, let's say, familiar to PalmOS users.
This weekend I spent some time improving my personal installation of SOGo groupware, so that my wife and I can better share email, calendars, and contacts on a system that we personally own.
Certainly, big companies don't respect users, but it's still possible to provide all of the services that I need using only Free Software, so I do. Pretty much the only exception is navigation, for which I use Google Maps. Everything else we do with Free Software and the more I move my wife to our own services, the happier she is. Personally, I find that immensely gratifying. As long as that continues, I'll find computing as cool and fun as ever.
No, it's the browser people use because they want to sync their bookmarks *and* have extensions on a mobile device.
The problem is that people buy Mac Pro for the GPUs in order to use OpenCL, or god forbid, CUDA.
Since the GPUs are AMD, I'm pretty sure OpenCL is the only option.
All of the systems listed in the post are good choices. To those, I would add only the Librem laptops, which are designed specifically for Free Software:
https://puri.sm/products/
Almost everything is better refined under Fedora. Most recent example: I support a lab that teaches embedded development. The ARM devices present themselves to a host as a USB network device with DHCP. If we attach those devices via USB to an Ubuntu host, it switches the default route to the embedded device, which means the host loses access to the NFS server and the whole desktop session hangs. On Fedora and CentOS, the hosts correctly get an address and a subnet route, but the default route is unmodified, so the system continues working.
Ubuntu and Fedora are mostly the same software, so it's hard to find "big" reasons to choose one over the other. Instead, it's the details that really make Fedora stand out.
The sad thing is that it's always been this way. Ubuntu made a splash in its initial releases, claiming that they'd made Linux "just work". The truth was that Red Hat, GNOME, and other groups had been making all the bits just work for a long time before Ubuntu was released, Canonical merely released a distribution just as those bits were getting finished. Fedora's release at that time was a major jump in usability from the previous release, and "just worked" as well.
Fedora has always been the more refined platform in a long list of ways.
is there ANY other company you can think of that gives up market share to help a competitor?
"They now fully-support a standalone Ubuntu (Linux) installation under Windows as either an integrated part of Windows, or a fully-supported guest OS under their hypervisor,"
So... Canonical, then?
Yes? I'm all ears.
I don't see that behavior when I open Firefox on my systems. Unless you define its initial memory set as arbitrary and large, which could be considered technically correct, but in that case, every browser does that trick.
I'm not the only one. Benchmarks that compare memory use typically note that Firefox uses less. You're the odd man out, making claims counter to everyone else's experience.
What advantage does it possibly have?
As I replied to another comment: it uses less memory than other browsers, it syncs my bookmarks and other data between desktop and mobile, and I can use ad-blockers and other extensions on the mobile version. Those are significant advantages that make Firefox the best browser, IMO.
Firefox regularly introduces real, tangible improvements. Bagging the whole thing because this one release (made on their regular schedule) isn't ground-breaking is just a little disingenuous.
Yes, because it uses less memory than other browsers, it syncs my bookmarks and other data between desktop and mobile, and I can use ad-blockers and other extensions on the mobile version.
As far as I know, that's not true of any other browser.
Burn Tails to a USB drive. Boot that for anonymous access.
https://tails.boum.org/
In particular, the ability to have extensions on the mobile app is a major advantage.
Depends on the model. The second generation Thinkpad X1 Carbon didn't work with Linux *at all*.
If you want a Linux laptop, look for someone who actually supports Linux on the laptop. Dell has a few, including their XPS 13 developer edition. Purism's Librem laptops are a little more expensive, but specifically built for Linux. There are a handful of other vendors that primarily support Linux.
Lenovo has been hit-and-miss for a while now, and this isn't showing much that's recent:
https://support.lenovo.com/us/...
> Python 2 is still maintained because developers aren't porting their code to Python 3.
That's not really what I see. At Python meetups and conferences, the Python developers I meet are near unanimous in their praise for Python 3. On my workstation, there are more packages that depend on python3 than on python. Porting is clearly happening.
Python was initially released in January 1994, almost 23 years ago. Since then, some libraries have been deprecated, first producing warnings, and later being removed. That process gave users and developers time to update the code without completely breaking following an upgrade. Backward compatibility was reasonably well maintained until 3.0, which was released in parallel with 2.6. Python 2 is still maintained while developers port code to Python 3.
That's a big contrast from Swift, which was initially released almost exactly 2 years ago, and made significant backward-incompatible changes without an interim version that retained compatibility. Python's not perfectly backward compatible, but it's a whole lot better than this.
No, it's a paranoid stance. Insanity is neither left nor right.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/n...
Lots of people are repeating the refrain "RAID is not a backup." To that, I want to add an illustration of what that means. If there's only one place your data is located, you don't have backups.
If your data only exists on a "backup" drive, then it isn't backed up. You need to have two, and a single RAID volume doesn't provide that. No matter how many disks are in it, a RAID volume is just one "place." The same goes for Storage Spaces. If your disks are mirrored, then corruption or accidental deletions will remove the data from both.
Of the three proposals, only the last one would actually give you a backup.
Personally, I want as much distance from my data and its backup as is reasonably possible, so my recommendation would be for cloud backups or, if you don't like that idea or the price, then a small NAS for backups. A WD My Cloud 4TB (which will be 2TB in RAID1 mode, which I recommend) runs $180.
Let's add a summary from a Sophos blog:
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.c...
The problem with "proper" security is that it works against the user
NIST guidelines:
Favor the user. To begin with, make your password policies user friendly and put the burden on the verifier when possible.
Long passwords that you can't remember
NIST guidelines:Applications must allow all printable ASCII characters, including spaces, and should accept all UNICODE characters.. We often advise people to use passphrases, so they should be allowed to use all common punctuation characters and any language to improve usability and increase variety... No composition rules. What this means is, no more rules that force you to use particular characters or combinations
so far no one has come up with a better way to do it.
Says the guy who obviously hasn't read the guidelines they're criticizing.
Just days ago, NIST recommended that SMS no longer be used for authentication
https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-...
I'm not in the habit of responding to obvious trolls, but this case makes very clear the flaw in the logic of people who actually believe that open source is insecure.
The bug is in the specification, which is necessarily open in order to create inter-operable systems. And what is code, if not a machine readable specification?
The idea that closed source is more secure, taken to its logical end, is an argument for closed systems that don't inter-operate with other systems. Their operation would have to be entirely secret and proprietary.
it will quench the worst of the rumors.
Would it? Glenn Greenwald is highly trustworthy, and he was the one person that Snowden contacted first. If his word isn't good enough, I'm not sure anything is.