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.

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:-

My Ubuntu 16.04 GNOME Setup

This is a post for friends who saw my desktop screenshot and anyone else who likes Unity and is looking at alternatives. A big thanks to Stuart Langridge and Joey Sneddon whose linked posts inspired some of this.

The recent news that upcoming versions of Ubuntu will use GNOME as the default desktop rather than Unity, made me take another look at the GNOME desktop

If you’re not interested in my opinion but just want to know what I did, then jump to “Migration from Unity to GNOME” below.

Dell XPS 13 9360 Review

On the ‘Tasty Different Cow’ (don’t ask) episode of the Ubuntu Podcast - we reviewed the latest Dell XPS 13 9360 Laptop shipping with Ubuntu.

Dell kindly sent us the review unit for a couple of weeks, and while we talked all about it on the podcast, I thought I’d jot some notes down here in case I missed anything or it’s not clear in the audio version.

A little while ago I bought a Zoostorm PC from Ebuyer. It’s a farily basic (but powerful) i7 based system with 8GB RAM and a 1TB hard disk. This is to replace my older (but still fully working) Mesh PC. The newer one is more power efficient, quieter, a lot faster, and all Intel inside - the previous desktop was nVidia based.

I wanted to migrate from the install on my old Mesh PC to a new clean install on the Zoostorm. I could have just yanked the disk out of the Mesh and put it in the Zoostorm, but I did it slightly differently. I’m typing it up here for my own notes but also to find out how other people do it, and to get any tips.