This article previously appeared on listed.to. I’ve moved it here to consolidate my blogging

Every 3 years at Canonical we get a laptop refresh fund. With it we can buy whatever devices we need to work. I used my last one to buy a ThinkPad T450. The most recent one arrived in November this year. I was considering replacing the ThinkPad with a desktop computer of some kind. I can certainly keep the T450 for portable work, but I mostly sit at the same desk all day, so figure I may as well get a desktop rather than a laptop.

This article previously appeared on listed.to. I’ve moved it here to consolidate my blogging

I hang around in technical support back-alleys. All too often a new person turns up asking for urgent help. Their system is catastrophically broken and they have no easy way to fix it. With a bit of help they can usually come to a fork in the road. Do they wipe and re-install, or keep fighting with the computer to get it working. It’s a knowledge, time, effort and convenience trade-off as old as technology itself.

I recently ordered a Raspberry Pi 400, I couldn’t resist. I’ve bought a few Raspberry Pi’s over the years, with a couple installed around the house. The Pi 400 struck me as quite the game-changer though, with a built in keyboard-enclosure and accessible connectors. The fact it reminded me of my youth with memories of the Sinclair Spectrum where everything is housed inside the keyboard helped a bit.

One omission which struck me as odd was the lack of audio jack. I’m sure there’s sensible cost or logical, technical reasons for it, but it’s a bit of a pain for me. Neither of the displays my Pi 400 is connected to have any kind of speaker or audio jacks. I don’t often need the audio output, but sometimes I’m testing applications which require an audio device.

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.

A while back I proposed that we replace the old static Ubuntu Community site, which looked a bit like this, with something a little more dynamic.

So today we are replacing the static site with an instance of discourse, which looks a bit like this

You can go back and read that blog post for the full rationale but essentially it boils down to two aims:

Status Quo

For over four years now, the Ubuntu Community Portal has been the ‘welcome mat’ for new people seeking to get involved in Ubuntu. In that time the site had seen some valuable but minor incremental changes; no major updates have occurred recently. I’d like us to fix this. We can also use this as an opportunity to improve our whole onboarding process.

I’ve spent a chunk of time recently chatting with active members of the Ubuntu Community about the community itself. A few themes came up in these conversations which can be summarised as:-

Ubuntu Artful Desktop July Shakedown

We’re mid-way through the Ubuntu Artful development cycle, with the 17.10 release rapidly approaching on the horizon. Now is a great time to start exercising the new GNOME goodness that’s landed on our recent daily images! Please download the ISO, test it out on your own hardware, and file bugs where appropriate.

If you’re lucky enough to find any new bugs, please tag them with ‘julyshakedown’, so we can easily find them from this testing session.

It’s now super easy to build Linux software packages on your Windows laptop. No VM required, no need for remote Linux hosts.

I spend a lot of my day talking to developers about their Linux software packaging woes. Many of them are using Linux desktops as their primary development platform. Some aren’t, and that’s their (or their employers) choice. For those developers who run Windows and want to target Linux for their applications, things just got a bit easier.

OpenSpades is a super-fun “Open-Source Voxel First Person Shooter”. I’ve been playing it for a while both on my GameOS desktop and under WINE on Linux. For whatever reason the upstream OpenSpades on github project had no Linux builds available for download, and I was lazy so I used WINE, which worked just fine.

This weekend though I decided to fix that. So I made a snap of it and pushed it to the store. If you’re on a Linux distro which supports snaps you can install it with one command:-