I tend to run Ubuntu on my computers as the primary operating system. Given I work for Canonical, this isn’t especially surprising. However I have run Ubuntu on pretty much everything since 2005 or so - long before I started working at Canonical (in 2011). Mostly I will upgrade as each new release comes out, only doing a clean install once in a while.

I ran GNOME 2 for all the years from 2004 through to Unity being released, then switched to that. After Ubuntu switched from Unity to GNOME Shell I went along with that in late 2017, and have mostly been running it ever since. I sometimes run other distros in VMs, or play with live environments, but I tend to stick to Ubuntu. Not for any company imposed reason - there’s a bunch of people at Canonical who run Arch, MacOS or something else. I just prefer Ubuntu.

I recently had the opportunity to attend Akademy - the annual world summit of KDE. This blog post covers my experience of the event, and is mostly a brain-dump memory aide. Akademy attracts KDE developers, enthusiast users and others from the wider Qt, KDE and distro communities. The event is a week-long in-person combination of talks and BoF (Birds of a Feather) sessions. This year Akademy was held at TU Wein in Vienna, Austria.

KDE Slimbook 2 Review

The kind folks at Slimbook recently sent me the latest generation of their ultrabook-style laptop line for review, the KDE Slimbook 2. You can hear my thoughts on the latest episode of the Ubuntu Podcast, released on June 7th 2018.

Slimbook are a small laptop vendor based in Spain. All the laptops ship with KDE Neon as the default operating system. In addition to their hardware, they also contribute to and facilitate local Free Software events in their area. I was sent the laptop only for review purposes. There’s no other incentive provided, and Slimbook didn’t see this blog post before I published it.