Today’s date is Thursday, April 24th, 2008. That means that today is the day that Ubuntu 8.04 is released. At the time of writing this, Ubuntus own page hasn’t yet been updated to reflect that so hold off downloading for a while until it’s been updated.

I’ve been running the 64-bit version of Hardy on my workstation for the past month or so, and it’s the best so far. Because that’s what Linux is, small but steady improvements. I’ve read a lot of comments on the net saying that they’re always disappointed that there’s never any huge improvements in each new version of Ubuntu, and compares it with Windows who introduces a lot of new flair.

Unfortunately, what they forget to factor in is that Ubuntu ships a new version every six months. That is twelve (12!!) releases for the time it took to finish Vista. Consider again that each new version of Ubuntu contains myriads of improvements - some small, some big - and Windows just looks plain silly. The only really new improvement Vista brought over XP was a flashier interface.

I recommend everyone to download it and try it. It won’t cost you more than a CD-R and some time.

There are however a few issues for me left from when I earlier wrote about Hardy. Pretty much all of them have been fixed, except for

* I’m still not completely happy with btnx, and evdev seems to be broken still. After some fiddling with it, researching it a bit more and generally spending slightly more time than ten seconds thinking about it, I discovered that a minor bit of tweaking was needed. Just point evdev at the right device and it works fine. Sidescroll works fine now, but I need to figure out a way to reverse it - right now it scrolls right when you punch left and so on. Btnx is history for me.

(it should be noted though that this might be residual annoyance since my Hardy-installation started life as Alpha6, and it might be some old configuration that lurks beneath the surface)

* Flash has issues. I realized how Flash is implemented in the 64-bit version, it’s simply a 64-bit wrapper around the regular 32-bit Flash binary. This is an ugly hack, and the wrapper has a tendency to lock up every now and again. It should be pointed out though that this is not Ubuntus fault - it’s Adobes, for insisting on not releasing a 64-bit Flash for Linux.

* I don’t know if Ubuntu has updated it’s proprietary driver-manager to support newer Nvidia-cards such as the 9xxx-series. I know the driver supporting them is still in Beta, so it might not be supported by the easy click-and-say-yes method Ubuntu has. This means that owners of 9xxx-cards (including myself) have to visit Nvidias site and install it the old-fashioned method. This is quite user-unfriendly, but again, blame Nvidia and not Ubuntu. I don’t know if the famous Envy-script supports installing the drivers for 9xxx-series cards since I’ve never used it.

Here’s two screenshots for you. The top is a standard desktop, the bottom is the exposé-like view featuring the “curved” option enabled. I think it’s pretty.

UPDATE: The official page has been updated. Grab your copy from the download page.

Yeah, keen observers might note that I’ve removed the “Ubuntu Linux” page from my blog.

Why?

Well, I realized that it was futile to try to have a static page about such a fast-moving target. By the time I’m even close to getting around to finishing it a new version of Ubuntu has been released, and the cycle starts over again.

Instead I’m going to write a static page about Ubuntu, I’m going to some day create a static page about my thoughts on Free Software, Linux and that stuff. For Ubuntu-related news you’ll simply have to read the blog instead. Or search it.

In two days Hardy Heron is officially released. It’s a bit obvious saying this, but so far it’s the best yet. I roll my eyes a bit when I read about how people try it and are disappointed that the changes aren’t as big as they expected. Well, that’s how Linux works. Small, but constant and never-ending improvements - unlike Windows who builds a hype-machine for five years and then falls flat on it’s face since it’s essentially the same stuff as before.

I really shouldn’t be sitting here blogging about Linux, but instead get my lazy ass into the kitchen and doing the damn dishes. I’m excellent at procrastinating, so sue me.

Last night I had bit of a hard time falling asleep, and as is fairly common these days my brain goes into a maelstrom of thoughts. One that slightly coherent thought was “I should blog about Hardy” and then my mind fell back into chaos for another twenty minutes before I finally fell under the spell of morpheus.

So, what are my thoughts on the upcoming version of Ubuntu? Mostly they can be summed up with “more of the good stuff, less of the bad stuff”.

I’ve been running Hardy as my current desktop since upgrading my machine. Right after the upgrade I modified my current Gutsy-install to work with the new hardware, but I think I broke something in it and it started acting funky after a while. It didn’t want to play nice with my new graphics-card (BFG Geforce 9600GT) since it’s so new that Nvidia still haven’t gotten their Linux-drivers for it out of beta. This meant I had to install the driver the manual way, and also meant surgically removing some bits of Gutsy that otherwise would’ve conflicted with the new driver. I suppose that somewhere along the line my wild flailing broke something, and after a quick backup I decided to start fresh.

The Gutsy live-cd wouldn’t play nice either, and I felt that it was kind of bass-ackwards to install Gutsy just to upgrade it in a month or so. Thus, I went for the then-current Alpha6 of Hardy. Since then it’s gone into beta, so if you download it now it will be of that quality from the start and then get updated as you go along.

Installation went fine, it used the VESA-driver for the live-cd portion. I also went for the 64-bit version since I now have a CPU capable of those extensions. I had heard that there would be some issues, but I forged ahead boldly and decided that I’d have to figure out those issues as I went along. What does not kill you instead makes you stronger, right?

After some minor tweaking it was up and running. Still no Ubuntu-support for the 9600GT so I installed the drivers manually from Nvidia. Pretty simple for me, but newbies will definitely get confused by this.

Let’s break down my experience of Hardy. Remember that I installed Alpha6 of it, and I’ve applied updates for it since then so now my installation is “beta-quality”.

* GDM would consume a lot of CPU (a lot, as in 100% of one of my four cores) after logging in, and generally the system would become jerky and somewhat unresponsive. Logging out and back in solved this, but it was definitely an irritation. It has now disappeared after several updates.

* PulseAudio would sometimes lock up and die. This would bring Rhythmbox down as well. Restarting the PA-daemon would solve this until it crashed once again. This is no longer an issue and PulseAudio plays well.

* Unlike Feisty and Gutsy my Soundblaster Audigy2 ZS is now capable of genuine 5.1 Dolby Digital-surround. For some reason this never worked under Feisty and Gutsy (but did under Edgy!) and I could never figure out why.

* Some of my regular apps aren’t supported under the 64-bit arch, but I simply compiled them from source instead. This might change in the future.

* Setting up evdev for complete support of my Logitech MX1000 proved to be futile. Apparently a lot of things regarding hotplug and evdev has changed since Gutsy, and most of it is unfortunately poorly documented. Previously I had set up my mouse with a pretty arcane mix of evdev and xbindkeys but this wouldn’t play well under Hardy. Instead I discovered btnx which is a lot smoother to set up. Again, I had to compile this from source since there was no native 64-bit binary in the repos. A nice side-effect of this was that I didn’t have to mess around with my xorg.conf since btnx has a GUI, albeit somewhat obtuse.

* Flash actually worked out of the box. I had previously heard horror-stories about having to install a 32-bit Firefox in order to get Flash working since Adobe doesn’t provide a 64-bit version of Flash. This worked out of the box, no funky installs needed or anything. I haven’t investigated why, if Adobe decided to release a 64-bit version of Flash (highly doubtful) or if Canonical/Ubuntu does some impressive voodoo to get it all working (much more likely).

* Firefox 3 is faaaaast. At first I found it confusing and annoying, and most of my extensions wouldn’t work. Beta 4 of FF3 is included in the current Hardy, and it’s actually quite nice now that I’ve gotten used to it. Some extensions I like worked, others could be hacked to fool them into working. Some that got hacked made FF3 kinda funky and had to be uninstalled. Never the less, FF3 is very, very fast compared to FF2 .

* For whatever reasons Conky refuses to read sensor-readings from LM-sensors. Even though they’re set up correctly and reporting values Conky refuses to display them. I have no idea why, Conky doesn’t give any errors or anything. This led to me doing a bit of soul-searching and ultimately deciding that I didn’t like Conky any more, since it didn’t give me any information I couldn’t find out through a terminal (which I always keep open) and also it forces me to minimize whatever windows I have open. So bye-bye Conky, it was fun while it lasted.

* Gnome 2.22 is a much nicer experience due to myriads of minor touch-ups. The file/open/save/whetever dialogs are much nicer. Click on a picture and it automatically displays a thumbnail of that picture, rather than forcing you to remember a filename. Panels slide into view after login, and when dragging icons they are now completely alpha-transparent so you can actually see where you’re dragging and dropping them. Nautilus now detects the contents of memory-cards and give well-meaning suggestions as to what to do with it. There are no huge differences, but there’s several minor and they make Gnome so much nicer to work with.

* Compiz Fusion 0.7.whatever is included and there’s a few new neat effects to dazzle your friends with. Some of them are pure eyecandy, some of them are quite useful, a lot of them are both or neither. It’s all up to you to decide what you want to enable.

* Several minor touches such as a prettier login-screen and a slightly fresher default theme help to make Hardy a bit more polished. First I thought it was a bit sad that the brand-new theme got delayed until Ubuntu 8.10 but since I’ve never used the default Ubuntu theme it was a pretty minor point.

* Installing the Konica-Minolta color-laser we have was a bit less painful than before. It pretty much autodetected, but I had to install the m2300w package in order to get the proper driver, since it defaulted to text-only. Other things that get plugged into the computer is detected automagically and work just fine, this includes my Wacom-tablet.

* For whatever reason the splashscreen doesn’t work. This is no longer true, at least not for me. The other night I decided to see if it had changed (since among several updates then was included an update to usplash), enabled splash and rebooted. Lo and behold, it worked.

—

Hardy gets released on April 24th and I think it will be interesting. I’m not going to proclaim any huge revolutionary inroads to the world of Windows, but I think Ubuntu is a pretty solid distribution. Sure, there were some issues with the Alpha6, but they’ve all disappeared with the updates and as far as I’m concerned my Hardy-installation is solid.

One thing though that constantly irks me with Linux is the sound-support. It’s nice seeing Hardy dropping the ancient ESD in favor of PulseAudio, but I still think that sound-support under Linux could use some serious cleaning-up. It’s a bit confusing with two different architectures (ALSA and the now obsolete OSS) providing the base, and then on top of that have to wonder about sound-daemons and sinks and such. Yeah, yeah, I know I’m essentially talking out of my ass since I’m not a developer and have no deep insights into the inner workings of the OS, but as a user I find it somewhat confusing - and I’m not a greenhorn! PulseAudio is neat, providing drop-in replacement for ESD (the Enlightened Sound Daemon, which hasn’t been developed since frickin’ 2001, so it was about time that it got shelved!) and also adding some neat tricks such as the ability to send sound over a network to another computer running PulseAudio.

If there’s any questions about Hardy I will do my best to try to answer them, but remember that I’m just a user and not a developer or in any way a part of the creation-process.

UPDATE 080331: I added a point of contention.

(Warning: This is a very, very, very geeky article. Do not read if you’re not a hard-core computer nerd)

I was sitting just a few minutes ago, idly surfing the intarweb. Milling around inside my head was various threads and yarns, and out of the chaos I realized that by all measures and means, Apple is the last real proprietary UNIX-vendor.

There was a time when proprietary UNIX’es ruled the kingdom of serious computing-use. This was back when the only real supercomputers came from Cray, the only real graphics workstation were badged Silicon Graphics and when the must-have UNIX workstations with almost complete certainty came from Sun Microsystems.

This was also back when Linux was in its infancy (or not even born at all), when GNU still was unknown territory to all but the most die-hard enthusiasts, back when Macs still were considered desktop-publishing machines.

It’s ironic how things have changed a decade or two later. Silicon Graphics renamed themselves SGI and then started flapping about like a fish out of water when regular beige PC’s started having enough power to be a competitor. Cray still exists, but have been made a margin-player by companies such as IBM and (ironically) SGI using what is basically regular PC’s in clustered modes running Linux and Open-Source Software. Sun seemed to be floundering as well, but rather than trying to fight for a dying market they adapted. First by changing their hardware around, and later by opening up their operating system as well as opening up Java.

Apple however did the biggest change. In acquiring NeXT back in 1997 they not only got The Steve back to One Infinite Loop, they also acquired an operating system with heavy roots in proprietary UNIX. NeXTstep, later known as OpenStep, which later became the foundation of MacOS X. Don’t be fooled by it’s pretty aesthetics, it’s solidly UNIX in the bottom. Admittedly, it’s not 100% proprietary in the same way that IRIX (which was the UNIX-flavor that Silicon Graphics pushed) was proprietary, but none the less it’s a lot more proprietary than most other free UNIXish operating systems around today.

I remember when I was a young nerd. I lusted for those horribly expensive but very powerful proprietary UNIX-boxes. When other teenagers had half-naked models on their walls, I had a poster from Sun, proclaiming their then-current slogan “the network is the computer”. I still think it’s a great slogan though.

My first real exposure to something of that magnitude was a Sun Ultra 1 back in 1997 or so. I of course had toyed with various free UNIX-like systems such as Linux and BSD’s, but Solaris was my first real exposure to a proprietary system. I came to a realization then, that proprietary UNIX’es were powerful in the sense that a Formula 1-car is powerful. It’s been designed for a pretty narrow field of operation, and is very good at it, but in regular handling it’s quite over-engineered and to most people quite useless.

Since then I’ve had plenty of time to play with alternative operating systems. I’ve played with IRIX, the proprietary system used on older Silicon Graphics-machines. If you’ve ever seen the first Jurassic Park, then you’ve seen the funky filemanager that was included as a kind of joke. I’ve played with that, and it’s quite useless. I’ve ran systems from Sun, both on regular old x86-hardware as well as SPARC. I’ve run NeXTstep/OpenStep. I’ve also tried the legendary and rather obscure BeOS. I’ve telnetted into various VAXen and I’ve even touched (as in physically putting my hand on it, since it was non-functioning at the time) a PDP-7, the computer system that the original UNIX was developed on. Note to other nerds, it wasn’t _THE_ PDP-7, just one of them.

So, again. I find it somewhat amusing and ironic that Apple remains as the only vendor of what could be called a proprietary UNIX. Sure, it’s not completely proprietary since most of it’s underpinnings come from the world of BSD and is called Darwin, but Apple guards OS X many secrets closely, and this is what I feel qualifies it for the label of “proprietary UNIX”.

Another neat thing I brought back from my parents place was this 2-CD holder containing…. *drumroll*

Red Hat Linux 3.0.3!!

I was digging through the closet containing all my youthful foils and tribulations, and among the booty was this thing.

Pretty neat. I greatly over-estimated how easily that closet would be cleaned out, and after accepting failure I could only take a small smattering of things with me. This was one of those few items.

(Sorry mom and dad! I’m coming back up to do the job proper during spring. I thought there would be exclusively crap there, but I was wrong.)

Red Hat 3.0.3 from March 1996 (running kernel 1.2.something!) was the first real exposure to Linux for me. A few years previously me and my friends toyed around with Slackware, but THIS was the real thing. This was a lot easier to install, and a lot easier to get going. A minor recompilation of the kernel and everything worked! Really easy to install, all you needed to do was rawrite three floppies and follow some easy installation prompts. Even X worked without too much fiddling!

I’m going to try to get this thing running in VirtualBox just to get nostalgic, but for some reason the virtual harddrive is mounted read-only during installation. Weird. I’m going to have to investigate this.

I’m having a hard time deciding on whether to write about these two subjects. So, I’m going to forge ahead and actually write something about them. However, since neither really is involving enough to qualify for their own post I’ll just slap ‘em together and combine them.

—

I discovered Gnome Do a few weeks ago. Or was it maybe longer? I really can’t remember. Gnome Do is a neat application that takes a lot of inspiration from Quicksilver. Mac users will most likely be familiar with Quicksilver since it’s a very popular application. I wouldn’t say it’s genius, but it’s pretty damn smart none the less.

Gnome Do is very similar. I’ve been using the Gnome Deskbar for a year, and it has a lot of similarities as well with Quicksilver. Gnome Do however is much more similar and even though it’s less powerful than the Deskbar in some ways, it’s also more powerful than the Deskbar in other ways.

Do is in very early stages of development right now, but it’s fully usable. It installs easily for us Ubuntu-users, which is nice. The only real drawback in my opinion is that it’s written in Mono, the free implementation of Microsofts proprietary .Net-language. I have some minor philosophical grievances with that, but Do runs fine and is very fast.

—

I earlier today noticed that a TV-series based in the Terminator-franchise had been launched. It’s called “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” and is a complete and utter turd in every department. I will never understand why everyone is so desperate to keep raping what was once a great franchise. I absolutely love the first two James Cameron-helmed movies, and consider the third one to be a turkey of galactic proportions. After that I became really disgusted by how various producers seem intent on keeping on ruining this excellent concept with cheezy crap.

This TV-series strongly underscores that disgust. I watched the pilot, and it’s absolutely awful. Wooden acting, boring scripting, silly “effects” and overall just horrible abuse of excellent subject matter. I don’t understand why people couldn’t leave it be after the second movie, when even James Cameron himself stated that he was finished with the concept.

No, the “Sarah Connor Chronicles” is a mediocre production at best, and at it’s worst it’s an insult to us fans. It’s completely trite, derisive and clichéd. Avoid at all costs.

I have a history of not liking KDE. For those of you unaware of what this is, it’s one of the several popular Desktop Environments for Linux and similar operating systems. It’s complicated, but essentially a Desktop Environment consists of a whole bunch of applications designed to present the user with a usable… well… environment.

Gnome is one of the other popular environments, and comes as standard on Ubuntu-installations. There are variants of Ubuntu that have other desktop-environments. Two of those are Kubuntu (with KDE) and Xubuntu (with XFCE). They’re still Ubuntu, but with a different look and feel in the GUI-department.

Each desktop-environment (DE) has their merits and drawbacks, as well as aims and goals in the usability department. It’s also very easy to start a flamewar with fans of various DE’s. However, the availability of several DE’s is one of the many flexible offerings of Linux.

As I stated in the beginning of this post, I never really cared much for KDE. I briefly ran it back before it was 1.0 and every time I’ve tried it since it has always rubbed me the wrong way somehow. I never cared for it’s garish and plasticky color schemes, it’s waste of screen estate, and it’s (in my opinion) confusing way of handling things.

And before some fanboy quips that I never gave it a chance let me say that - no, I never did. To get me to run KDE would involve a lot of brute-force and I’ve almost always preferred the Gnome-environment. It never had quite the same amount of extreme customization ability as KDE, but I’ve never felt constricted by it. Gnome has always done what I’ve wanted, while KDE always initially scared me away.

This, however, might change.

Today is January 11th. Today is the day that KDE 4 was released, and I’ve tried it. I wouldn’t say that I’ve USED it, since I just installed the packages and logged into it. I fiddled with it a bit, admired the stunning beauty of it and realized that my previous opinions of KDE as an unsophisticated and annoying DE might have to be re-evalued.

KDE 4.0 is plain gorgeous. The re-design of the UI is overwhelming and no longer does it have that plastic and overdone look of previous versions. In fact, I think KDE 4 would give MacOS X a run for it’s money in the beauty department. It’s just that good-looking. Everything about it says gorgeous and subtle. Even the icons and the sound-effects are gorgeous and subtle, and the KDE-team have outdone themselves in that department.

Sure, I did find quite a lot of things confusing. But nothing that was as off-putting as before. KDE 4 looks great, and works great. What I found annoying is probably easy to configure away. Some things were kinda funky, but I assume that’s because my box is primarily a Gnome-box, and everything on it is configured to work with Gnome. I got some weird error-messages regarding sound, and sometimes the sound cut out. But like I said, I think it’s due to this being a primarily Gnome-computer.

In fact, in a few days when things have settled down I’m going to pop one of my smaller drives in and install a fresh setup of Kubuntu on it and see how it works. I’m really curious, and the plain gorgeousness of KDE 4 has really got me hooked.

Who knows? Maybe in a week or so I might be a complete convert.

Do you have multiple computers on your desktop? If you’re anything like me this happens from time to time. Alongside my main computer for example, I occasionally need to have my laptop on my desk. If you’re a computer-nut in any way, shape or form then the odds are in favor that you know what I’m talking about.

Multiple computers, each with their own (or several) screens. Each requiring you to switch between confusing sets of keyboards and mice. If this is the case with you, then you need Synergy.

Synergy is a neat, free/open-source application available for a number of different platforms. It runs under various UNIXish environments (such as Linux, BSD, Solaris and so on) as well as Windows and MacOS X. What is it? Well, it’s difficult to describe but essentially it’s a kind of software-KVM.

From the Synergy homepage:

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

It runs over a networked connection, so the computers intended for use with Synergy needs to be on the same network. This mini-HOWTO is intended primarily for Linux-users since that’s what I’m running, but I assume the same principles can be applied to any OS. However, I have no experience with the clients for other OS’s and thus cannot take any responsibility for instructions for them.

Synergy under Linux is a command-line tool. This is rather daunting for most users, and thus the QuickSynergy front-end is a very useful tool for anyone who prefers a GUI tool instead. Even I as a seasoned Terminal-veteran find the GUI front-end a lot smoother to operate.

The operation of Synergy is quite simple. A server is started with the indication of the physical placement of each client. Basically it’s their network names, in most cases it’s the netbios name provided your setup has such. Mine does, I like netbios in that way.

First, you’ll need to install it.

Do the command

sudo apt-get install quicksynergy

in a terminal. This will install the QuickSynergy front-end and pull in Synergy through dependencies.

Other Linux-distributions will have to use their own package-manager, provided Synergy and QuickSynergy is included in it.

Next, fire up QuickSynergy. The first you’ll see is this window below, set to the “Share” tab.

It’s fairly self-explanatory. The icon in the middle represent the server, and each box contains the name of the computer and the physical placement of it’s monitor. Notice that the name of my laptop (named “laptop”, yeah, very original name I know) is in the right-hand box, since it’s monitor sits to the right of my main monitor. When you’re happy with it, click start and minimize the window.

On each of the connecting clients you instead of the Share-tab click the Use-tab. Then input the name (or IP-adress, or whatever) of the serving computer. Click “start” and it’ll connect to the serving machine and everything will be done.

Now, you’ll probably not notice any change whatsoever. Synergy works very subtly in this way. But try moving the mouse-cursor to the edge of the screen, and it’ll move over on the screen of that client. Just like magic! Then you can use that computer just as if it was connected to your normal mouse and keyboard.

Enjoy, and I hope this helps people with multiple computers.

Fair trade is a consumer movement that has gained some momentum the last year or so. The concept is simple and ethically sound: essentially it is that what we take from developing nations, we also give back. Currently it’s more profitable for many countries to continue abusing the developing nations, and Fair Trade aims at removing that unfairness.

A few days ago my parents visited us. This was to celebrate my birthday, but they also grabbed the opportunity to spend some time downtown shopping and having a relaxed day. We discovered a fair-trade coffee-place in one of the malls, and there I found this can of cola, which made me laugh a bit.

Ubuntu is to me a Linux-distribution, which was the cause of my sudden hilarity. But Ubuntu is also a common word in Africa, essentially meaning “Humanity towards others”. Thus, Ubuntu is also a perfect name for a Fair Trade-cola. Tasted nice as well, a lot more fruity than most other Colas.

So, if you’re interested in bettering your karma while quenching your thirst, go out and grab some of these. More information about Ubuntu Trading (which makes this Cola) is available at their website.

Through the course of my life I’ve been a pretty firm supporter of FOSS (Free/Open Source Software). This basically started back in 1994, and since then my passion for this particular form of software has grown along with the strides made by the same. FOSS is in my opinion the most important type of software, and I’m certain that it will at some point overtake proprietary software as the dominant form of software on this planet. The matter of “when” is however up for debate.

One of the things that I constantly get reminded about from other users is one of the most fundamental differences between proprietary software and free software. I already know this difference, but other users seem to have a difficult time understanding these differences - differences which, when you think about it, quite obvious.

Proprietary software is closed software. It’s not debatable, it’s nod modifiable, it’s not verifiable and it most assuredly is not designed to be any of those things. FOSS on the other hand is open, available and verifiable in every way that proprietary software isn’t. If you have to draw a line, proprietary software cannot be trusted since you can’t verify it’s functionality or source-code. The most obvious example of this is Windows, controlled by one company who aggressively guard the source of their prize jewel. Despite the fact that Windows clearly is the dominant operating system on this planet, there is no way for anyone except Microsoft to know exactly what goes on behind the desktop. FOSS is completely the opposite, if you’re wondering then the source is easily available for scrutiny by anone who chooses to do just that.

An extension to proprietary software being closed is that the company has a tendency to play dirty in order to maintain that proprietary. Again, Microsoft and Windows are the prime examples of this. The whole Windows-ecosystem is designed to work best with itself. It does not extend a warm welcome to anything else except others just like it. Microsoft has designed it to do just that, using dirty tricks and undocumented tweaks to protocols. Even Apple has to reverse-engineer their stuff to understand it, since Microsoft only shares a small portion of the documentation with others. Everything else they keep close to their chest.

Linux and FOSS is steadily gaining exposure on the desktop. FOSS has virtually won the war as far as servers go, a vast majority of servers around the world run on some variation of Linux or BSD - the exceptions being those corporations with a PHB who has been swayed by the sales-talk of proprietary vendors such as Microsoft. This in turn leads to those companies making further modifications to entrench themselves into the customers datacenters.

Here the excellent example from Microsoft is Office. Do you ever notice how each new version of Word breaks the DOC-format for older versions? Newer versions can read files created by older versions, but not the other way around. Have you noticed that? Do you really think it’s a coincidence? If you do, then I’m afraid you’re very naive about the world of proprietary software. Of course no one can prove that Microsoft do this, but it’s just to convenient for them to essentially force users to upgrade to not be just a coincidence.

This strategy of making closed ecosystems is very typical of Windows. Everything from Microsoft plays fairly nice together, despite the large amounts of unreliability - yet integrating none-Microsoft/Windows systems into the ecosphere is very difficult.

And this is where I go back to what I wrote in the beginning. This is something that regularly baffles users who are new to the world of FOSS. They convert to something open, and then they get confused as to why it doesn’t play nice with the things from the closed ecosystem.

Now, I might be paranoid, but wouldn’t it be in the proprietary vendors own interest to make as sure as possible that their delicate little ecosystem stays that way, and thus implement as many tricks as possible to mess up things for users of alternate systems? To make things as difficult as possible and not play nice, in an effort to make the user say “oh screw this, it’s too much work, I’ll just go back to using the old stuff again”?