Liam on Linux

 About 5Y ago, I got a job at a big FOSS vendor and needed a desktop client. The company no longer maintained its own client for its own in-house email server.

(Repurposed CIX post.)

Don’t get me wrong. I like Apple kit. I am typing right now on an original 1990 Apple Extended II keyboard, attached via a ABD-USB convertor to a Core i5 Mac mini from 2011, running Mac OS X 10.10. It’s a very pleasant computer to work on.

But, to give an example of the issues — I also have an iPhone. It’s my spare smartphone with my old UK SIM in it.

But it’s an iPhone 4. Not a lot of RAM, under clocked CPU, and of course not upgradable.

So I’ve kept it on iOS 6, because I already find it annoyingly slow and iOS 7 would cause a reported 15-25% or more slowdown. And that’s the latest it will run.

Which means that [a] I can’t use lots of iPhone apps as they no longer support iOS 6.x and [b] it doesn’t do any of the cool integration with my Mac, because my Mac needs a phone running iOS 8 to do clever CTI stuff.

My old 3GS I upgraded from iOS 4 to 5 to 6, and regretted it. It got slower & slower and Apple being Apple, *you can’t go back*.

Apple kit is computers simplified for non-computery people. Stuff you take for granted with COTS PC kit just can’t be done. Not everything — since the G3 era, they take ordinary generic RAM, hard disks, optical drives, etc. Graphics cards etc. can often be made to work; you can, with work, replace CPUs and runs OSes too modern to be supported.

But it takes work. If you don’t want that, if you just max out the RAM, put a big disk in and live with it, then it’s fine. I’m old enough that I want a main computer that Just Works and gives me no grief and the Mac is all that and it cost me under £150, used. The OS is of course freeware and so are almost all the apps I run — mostly FOSS.

I like FOSS software. I use Firefox, Adium, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Calibre, VirtualBox and BOINC. I also have some closed-source freeware like Chrome, Dropbox, TextWrangler and Skype. I don’t use Apple’s browser, email client, chat client, text editor, productivity apps or anything. More or less only iTunes, really.

What this means is that I can use pretty much the same suite of apps on Linux, Mac and Windows, making switching between them seamless and painless. My main phone runs Android, my travelling laptop is a 2nd-hand Thinkpad with the latest Ubuntu LTS on it.

As such, many of the benefits of an all-Apple solution are not available to me — texting and making phone calls from the desktop, seamless handover of file editing from desktop to laptop to tablet, wireless transparent media sync between computers and phone, etc.

I choose not to use any of this stuff because I don’t trust closed file formats and dislike vendor lock-in.

Additionally, I don’t like Apple’s modern keyboards and trackpads, and I like portable devices where I can change the battery or upgrade the storage. So I don’t use Apple laptops and phones and don’t own a tablet. iPads are just big iPhones and I don’t like iPhones much anyway. The apps are too constrained, I hate typing on a touchscreen “keyboard” and I don’t like reading book-length texts from a brightly-glowing screen — I have a large-screen (A4) Kindle for ebooks. (Used off eBay, natch.) TBH I’d quite like a backlight on it but the big-screen model doesn’t offer one.

But I don’t get that with Ubuntu. I never used UbuntuOne; I don’t buy digital content at all, from anyone; my Apple account is around 20 years old and has no payment method set up on it. I have no lock-in to Apple and Ubuntu doesn’t try to foist it on me.

With Ubuntu, *I* choose the laptop and I can (and did) build my own desktops, or more often, use salvaged freebies. My choice of keyboard and mouse, etc. I mean, sure, the Retina iMac is lovely, but it costs more than I’m willing to spend on a computer.

Android is… all right. It’s flakey but it’s cheap, customisable (I’ve replaced web browser, keyboard, launcher and email app, something Apple does not readily permit without drastic limitations) and it works well enough.

But it’s got bloatware, tons of vendor-specific extensions and it’s not quick.

Ubuntu is sleek as Linuxes go. I like the desktop. I turn off the web ads and choose my own default apps and it’s perfectly happy to let me. I can remove the built-in ones if I want and it doesn’t break anything.

If I could get a phone that ran Ubuntu, I’d be very interested. And it might tempt me into buying a tablet.

I’ve tried all the leading Linuxes (and most of the minor ones) and so long as you’re happy with its desktop, Ubuntu is the best by a country mile. It’s the most polished, best-integrated, it works well out of the box. I more or less trust them, as much as I trust any software vendor.

The Ubuntu touch offerings look good — the UI works well, the apps look promising, and they have a very good case for the same apps working well on phone and tablet, and the tablet becoming a usable desktop if you just plug a mouse in.

Here’s a rather nice little 3min demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3PUYoa1c9M

Wireless mouse turned on: desktop mode, windows, title bars, menus, etc.
Turn it off, mid-session: it’s a tablet, with touch controls. *With all the same same apps and docs still open.*
Mouse back on: it’s in desktop mode again.

And there’s integration — e.g. phone apps run full-size in a sidebar on a tablet screen, visible side-by-side with tablet apps.

Microsoft doesn’t have this, Apple doesn’t, Google doesn’t.

It looks promising, it runs on COTS hardware and it’s FOSS. What’s not to like?

I suspect, when the whole plan comes together, that they will have a compelling desktop OS, a compelling phone OS and a compelling tablet OS, all working very well together but without any lock-in. That sounds good to me and far preferable to shelling out thousands on new kit to achieve the same on Apple’s platform. Because C21 Apple is all about selling you hardware — new, and regularly replaced, too — and then selling you digital content to consume on it.

Ubuntu isn’t. Ubuntu’s original mission was to bring Linux up to the levels of ease and polish of commercial OSes.

It’s done that.

Sadly, the world failed to beat a path to its door. It’s the leading Linux and it’s expanded the Linux market a little, but Apple beat it to market with a Unix that is easier, prettier and friendlier than Windows — and if you’re willing to pay for it, Apple makes nicer hardware too.

But now we’re hurtling into the post-desktop era. Apple is leading the way; Steve Jobs finally proved his point that he knew how to make a tablet that people wanted and Bill Gates didn’t. Gates’ company still doesn’t, even when it tries to embrace and extend the iPad type of device: millions of the original Surface tablets are destined for landfill like the Atari ET game and Apple Lisa. (N.B. *not* the totally different Surface Pro, but people use it as a lightweight laptop.)

But Apple isn’t trying to make its touch devices replace desktops and laptops — it wants to sell both.

Ubuntu doesn’t sell hardware at all. So it’s trying to drag proper all-FOSS Linux kicking and screaming into the twenty-twenties: touch-driven *and* by desk-bound hardware-I/O, equally happy on ARM or x86-64, very shiny but still FOSS underneath.

The other big Linux vendors don’t even understand what it’s trying to do. SUSE does Linux servers for Microsoft shops; Red Hat sells millions of support contracts for VMs in expensive private clouds. Both are happy doing what they’re doing.

Whereas Shuttleworth is spending his millions trying to bring FOSS to the masses.

OK, what Elon Musk is doing is much much cooler, but Shuttleworth’s efforts are not trivial.

In the beginning were the dinosaurs: Erwise, Cello, Mosaic, Lynx and things. Nobody under 40 remembers them and they're all long extinct. Everyone used Mosaic anyway, which was FOSS from the NCSA.

Nobody's heard of the NCSA any more, which is a shame as they also gave the world Apache and without them there wouldn't be a Web. They made something useful out of Tim Berners-Lee's work at CERN, but timbl and CERN are far more famous.

Odd, really, that neither CERN nor the NCSA ostensibly have anything to do with the Internet.

Mosaic begat loads of different browsers. All were also called Mosaic. Many were proprietary, "enhanced" versions, which actually weren't.

Only one was any good. Called - surprise! - Mosaic, it came from a company also called Mosaic. (Are you following all this?) Developed under the codename "Mozilla" - the Godzilla of Mosaics, you see - it was Mosaic with embedded pictures and FTP and cool stuff like that. Hey, it was 1994. People complained about the confusing name so the company renamed itself Netscape and renamed their browser Netscape as well, which isn't confusing at all. It was shareware, vastly successful, created the original 1990s Web and was killed off by Microsoft giving Internet Explorer away for free.

But as Ben Goldacre likes to say so much that he has put it on a T-shirt: "I think you'll find it's a little more complicated than that."

For starters, IE 1 was an optional extra for Windows 95, you had to buy it, and it was utterly crap. IE, incidentally, is also based on Mosaic, via Spyglass. MICROS~1 didn't write IE themselves, they just bought it in. You'd be surprised how many "Microsoft" products were not actually written by Microsoft: Powerpoint, Visual Basic, SQL Server, Defender, Frontpage, Mail and lots of others.

IE2 was free, but still rubbish. So was IE3.

So everyone used Netscape. A few even paid for it and Netscape Inc did tremendously well. This pissed off Microsoft, who don't really like anyone else making big money off their platform. So they worked away on IE until eventually, after about four versions, it was actually just about usable, kinda sorta ish.

And it was freeware.

Netscape wasn't, officially. It went through various stages, including being free only for non-profits and educational institutions, but it ended up proprietary, closed-source shareware. Home and non-commercial or non-profit use was free, businesses were meant to buy licences. Which most didn't.

It went through a whole bunch of versions, all of which were market-leaders in their time.

Netscape 1 was just a browser.

Netscape 2 added an email client and USENET news-reader. Not RSS, what we call a news-reader today, that hadn't been invented yet. Netscape 2 was a fair bit bigger than Netscape 1.

Netscape 3 Gold added web-page editing too. It was bigger still.

Netscape 4 sort of forked, internally: there was Netscape Communicator, a suite including a browser + email + news + address book + web editor + a proprietary shared diary - a huge app for the times,

And separately, there was Netscape Navigator, which was just a browser once again and thus was relatively svelte and quick - so naturally it never got updated past 4.0.x.

In the end, once IE was usable enough, everyone used that instead. Netscape Communicator was big, sluggish, took loads of memory and was inefficient - and it cost money. For instance, every time the window was resized, it re-rendered the entire page, as the rendering engine built a static page display for the current window dimensions. This was at the time when live window resizing was a trendy new feature of Windows - it was an extra in the same Plus! pack for Windows 95 that introduced IE to an indifferent world, and had even been retro-fitted on to MacOS 8.

Netscape complained that IE, a rival for their commercial product, was being given away for free - which counts as illegal restraint of trade. In response, MICROS~1 just bundled it with Windows and blithely claimed it had always been there, even though it wasn't in Windows 95 or Windows NT 3 and they also offered it for Mac and Unix. The US Department of Justice, remarkably, swallowed this, even though it was demonstrably utter bollocks, and let MICROS~1 off.

When Netscape Corp was bought out by AOL and broken up, the company's last act was to make the as-yet-unfinished Communicator 5 open source under its original codename of Mozilla.

After more than two years of work, this eventually became the Mozilla Application Suite, also the basis for AOL's Netscape 6 and 7. Netscape 6 was based on the unfinished Mozilla 0.6 code, and Netscape 7 on the final but unpolished Mozilla 1.0. AOL then outsourced it; Netscape 8 was based on Firefox 1 and Netscape 9 on Firefox 2. All were freeware; Mozilla itself was FOSS.

Mozilla was the Linux browser. It was the best FOSS browser, but that was because it was also pretty much the only FOSS browser. It was also a huge big lumbering thing, like Communicator before it, and it was unpopular on Windows and Mac (although I used it myself, as I am not a big Microsoft fan, as you might have worked out.)

Then Dave Hyatt and some mates, including a chap called Ben Goodger, stripped Mozilla down to just a browser, reinventing Navigator as if it were a new concept. They called it Mozilla Phoenix. Rising from the ashes, you see.

Phoenix the BIOS people complained.

They renamed it Firebird.

Firebird the FOSS database people complained.

They renamed it Firefox, which is a made-up word and obscure enough that nobody minded. It did brilliantly and still is today. The Mozilla Foundation consequently abandoned the Mozilla Internet Suite. The legendary open-source community took it up, renamed it Seamonkey and it's still updated. I still use it occasionally myself. It's OK. It hasn't lost any weight, but the relentless advance of computer technology means that it's no biggie any more.

Firefox is now under some threat from Google Chrome (one of whose developers being a certain Ben Goodger). Chrome is based on Apple's Webkit but with a better UI than Safari (a project headed, amongst others, by one Dave Hyatt). Webkit is Apple's cleaned-up, enhanced version of KDE's KHTML rendering library from the Konqueror browser. Webkit is so much better that KDE have given up on KHTML and now use Webkit too.

Now there are basically four main families of browser:

Internet Explorer. Windows-only nowadays, but to most people, IE is The Internet. IE6 sucks bigtime, but tons of big companies are wedded to it, so it shambles on, undead. I suppose that makes it a sort of zombie used by dinosaurs, which actually sounds kind of cool. IE 7 and 8 are sort of OK, if you're the sort of person who doesn't mind sharing needles with strangers.

Mozilla, AKA Firefox, Seamonkey, Camino and loads of others.

Both, ironically, while being lifelong bitter rivals, are descended from Mosaic.

Then there's Webkit, AKA KHTML, AKA Chrome, Safari, Konqueror, the Nokia Symbian browser and others. It was developed from scratch in the late 1990s.

And Opera, doing its own idiosyncratic thing for seventeen years. "MultiTorg" coexisted with Mosaic back when giants walked the Earth.