I’ve downloaded all the necessary tools and images already, and while I’ve been at it I also downloaded the Android SDK again which comes with an emulator for several phones, tablets, and so on. So here is a virtual Google Pixel 3a starting on my screen on Arch Linux:
virtual Google Pixel 3a, first boot steps…
We haven’t yet decided what to do with the device once it’s ready – most people do own at least one mobile phone already, and others who don’t probably don’t even want one (like me until I ‘inherited’ Mitchie’s Pixel 4a). But ok; it will be interesting to see how long a 3rd party free and open source provider like LineageOS can support older hardware like that – I guess until a newer kernel or firewall won’t be available for the hardware anymore (like what was the case with/for the older Nexus 5 and other devices)?
Anyway, it’s good to see (and know) that you don’t have to dump something just because Google (or Apple or Microsoft or your other ‘Enterpri$e’ vendor of choice) thinks you should… (and shove more money their way in the process…)
Earlier this month, I wrote about the different flavours of Debian, and noted that you could take (and stay with) Debian ‘testing’ or even ‘unstable’ to have something like a rolling release.
And that’s exactly what Google is doing since a while, and like their article about it shows they understand Debian pretty well. They know about the problems with mixing stuff from ‘testing’ and ‘unstable’ (which is btw what Ubuntu is doing as well), they know about the Debian security team *not* updating ‘testing’, and that not every package from upstream which ends up in ‘unstable’ has CVE reports. And they also supply packages themselves, which is how it should be.
So in that regard, Google was thinking like me – you don’t have to take Arch or Suse’s ‘Tumbleweed’ if you want rolling releases, and going back from using Ubuntu to its own parent can only be a good thing. Good to see professionals working and thinking like oneself 🙂
In yesterday’s post “Try before you buy” I listed some examples of hardware vendors who include free and open source software. Today, The Register reports about the Spanish vendor Slimbook who offer a notebook in two different screen sizes and with KDE Neon pre-installed. They also link to the hardware page of KDE which in turn has many vendors who ship with that desktop in case you like it, from games consoles to phones to notebooks starting at around the 200$ range, you’ll get it. Of course, at some of those vendors you are free to choose whatever distribution you would like, an example for a German-based shop like this is Tuxedo computers. Very much like my own German division of ZaReason (RIP).
I’d still rather build computers myself, but if I was in need of a cheap alternative to a Chromebook or something like that right now, I’d have a closer look at the Pinebook Pro… maybe you could even order this with Debian, or with a standard Arch installation? If not, Manjaro with KDE Plasma would be perfectly fine as well…
I read last week already that Lenovo seems to be selling notebooks now which don’t allow to boot Linux or any other operating system from USB sticks anymore. Matthew Garrett, a Debian developer had discovered this, and I’ve found his blog post about it via Planet Debian. Now The Register also reports about it. And who asked Microsoft to “support” secure boot in the beginning? A bad idea in not only my opinion… this should be fixed, ASAP please.
So the best advice at the moment is that you should try before you buy – any new notebook or computer which comes pre-installed with Windows or with MacOS is generally a bad idea, and the best solution would be to build it yourself, and install your OS of choice. Since not everyone can do that, look out for vendors who pre-install Linux or other Libre software. This is possible and advisable even on “smart” phones, as this article from the FSFE shows. See here about what is possible with a phone, and with some good intentions…
We shouldn’t let the wrong people decide about the future, we’ll have to do that ourselves…
In case you’ll go to any big consumer electronics store/chain to try out notebooks, this would be a good OS to test them with.
As always, thanks for reading.
Update, from Friday July 15th, 2022: here’s an update from Michael Larabel on booting a new Lenovo X13 with Linux. You still have the problem that the reason for first boot failures is not even shown, thanks to Micro$oft. Fix this, guys… we don’t need that crap. Thanks.
see and read more at tails.boum.org – you can thank me later 😉
No joke: put this onto a bootable USB stick, if you must then make a persistent (and of course encrypted) storage on the same, and use it wherever you might be. The machine you are using wouldn’t even know that you’ve been there. Recommended by top security experts, and feared by the NSA and other non-privacy guys.
As always, thanks for reading. Oh, and in case you were wondering: yes, I’ve written this blog post using Tails exactly as you see it above.
Bill, a photographer friend from Florida who is also a programmer recently decided to try Debian, and, some days later, decided to upgrade it from ‘stable’ to ‘testing’. I commented on his blog that I had done so as well for a while, but in the end I decided that ‘stable’ was more than good enough for me, so I stayed with that until now (and probably always will).
In case you don’t know, Debian comes in mainly three different ‘flavours’, namely ‘stable’ and ‘testing’ as noted above, and also ‘Sid’, with the latter being the ‘unstable’ branch (with ‘Sid’ being the ‘bad boy’ from the neighbourhood who breaks toys from time to time, so ‘unstable’ Debian will always be called ‘Sid’). If packages don’t get any error reports after being uploaded by developers to ‘unstable’, they usually get into ‘testing’ after about two weeks, for use in a wider audience, and thus with the chance of getting more bug reports.
So ‘testing’ isn’t as ‘stable’ as ‘stable’, but also not as ‘unstable’ as ‘unstable’, but are that all differences besides having newer packages?
No. While there are many good reasons to use Debian, running ‘testing’ still has some risks; its page for instance names the biggest one as: ‘Please note that security updates for “testing” distribution are not yet managed by the security team.’ It’s also work in progress, and as such lacks a lot of documentation, and to even get it, you’ll have to move to the Debian-Installer page which is *not* the one for the official ‘stable’ installer. You’ll have to follow the Debian Release Management team and their pages to get some updates on it from time to time other than their famous and proud quote “quando paratus est” (=”when it’s ready”). And the team’s release-critical bugs page lists the number of problems which are still to solve until the freeze for the next version of Debian, which at the time of this writing will be called ‘Bookworm’ (like always, after a character from the “Toy Story” movies).
Release critical bugs for Debian ‘testing’ as of today. Release dates are when RC bugs (the green line) are zero, that’s where the “when it’s ready” comes from, and Debian can be rightfully proud of that…
Don’t get me wrong – Debian ‘testing’ isn’t ‘unstable’, or worse than any other Linux distribution, even those with some kind of “Enterprise” in their names. But it’s also not ready, and as such not meant for all of us. If you’re a developer, you’ll run both ‘stable’ and ‘unstable’, simply because you’ll have to send in and upload new packages against the latter (I did so for a while as well, but never became an official Debian Developer due to lack of time). If you’re an average Joe (or Jack or Wolfgang) like me, you’d probably be better off with ‘stable’.
So to run ‘testing’ has some risks you’ll have to cope with, and as such in my opinion isn’t recommendable for the greater audience, most people who want newer packages than ‘stable’ has would be better off with adding the ‘backports’ repositories to ‘stable’, and so get some stuff earlier than with having to wait for the next big release date.
But as I said, Bill is a programmer himself, and like every developer he has read the documentation and so he knows what he’s doing. If that’s you as well, then go ahead and run ‘testing’, or anything you like. For me these days (approaching retirement), it’s too much effort to constantly care about my operating system, so I’m happy to have ‘stable’.
My 2 (Euro-) Cents of course, and as always, thanks for reading.
I’m no “distro hopper”, and pretty much set with what I have on my machine – and if you are reading this since a bit, you’ll probably know that I’m normally using Debian Linux, and for some newer things, Arch.
So when my friend Bill from Florida (a really good photographer who also has cats and dogs and is a computer nerd) wrote about Fedora and some problems he’s having with it, and when shortly after that seeing that I just got new Gnome “Boxes” on Arch, I decided to try and see…
For those of you who might not know Linux: on that OS you normally have both qemu and also kvm, which means that virtualisation is built into the kernel and your operating system already – and with a smart tool like the mentioned “Gnome Boxes”, the installation of other systems is only a few mouse clicks away, and really child’s play, even if you’d want Windows.
So I went and downloaded Fedora Workstation, and because I was curious I also downloaded openSUSE Tumbleweed, and installed them both in Boxes. First, Fedora:
Welcome Screen of Fedora Linux 36
and a few minutes later, Suse:
Configuration of openSUSE Tumbleweed
Because my machine has “only” 16GB of main memory, and my host operating system has a system drive of ~240GB, I was a bit conservative and chose the default settings of 2GB of RAM and 20GB of storage for both. Fedora comes with Gnome42 by default which is fine, and openSUSE asks you, and from (old) experience I assumed that the first option (namely, KDE Plasma) was/is still their default one, so I chose that.
And voilá, both running in parallel on my Arch system as their host:
Linux³
I haven’t tested much yet since I just interrupted my “work” on a beautiful Wikiloops song for this, but what I can say so far is that at least in my virtual machine and from my desktop, printing wasn’t a problem with Fedora – I had to give the Gnome desktop the local IPv4 address of our printer (an OfficeJet Pro 7740), but then I could print a test page no problem.
I’ll have a look at both and report more if there is something to say about these.
For now, and like always, thanks for reading.
P.S.: just discovered another first of usually many little “niggles” I have when testing Fedora – look at the clocks, after falling asleep for a while:
The frightening one is how close professional voice generation has become. If you listen to Google’s text-to-speech examples, and switch to a British or a German voice (and give it some text of course), that’s the “Wow!” part. But for this, your text will be sent to Google’s servers to process it in realtime, so some privacy issues might occur. But it won’t be long now, so is my guess, before you can really trick us humans into believing that this would be a real person speaking… see Turing test and so on.
TheReg has tested EndeavourOS Artemis 22.6 two days ago, and seemingly liked it (and here’s their report about it). I also did when I last looked at it, but although I liked it, in the end I installed pure Arch. But sure, to just play around because you might be curious, EndeavourOS could be just the ticket. So go ahead and try it, and have fun 🙂
