Full Circle Magazine FR

Hi, everyone! Welcome back to Ask the New Guy! If you have a simple question, and want an answer that doesn’t require you to enter your superuser password, contact me at copil.yanez@gmail.com. Today’s question is: Q: Ubuntu seems pretty mature. Most things just work. Is there anything left to be excited about? A: Well la-dee-da, you poor thing, sitting over there bored out of your superior mind. What, your pygmy giraffes, and your heated toilet seats, and your shoes that are shaped like human feet (and made from ACTUAL human feet) not exciting enough for you? Maybe if Mark Shuttleworth included a free trip to the International Space Station with every install, you’d be less fatigued by life? I know how it is. If you’re like me, you probably approached the idea of a new OS like a first level mage on your inaugural dungeon campaign, exploring dark corners, discovering treasure, gaining XP (experience points), and leveling up as you became more confident in your abilities. Eventually, though, you’re sitting in a tavern, drinking mead from the hollowed out skull of a lowland Orc, and huffing drunkenly as some new explorer stops in for directions to a nearby dragon’s lair. “Look at thish guy over here,” you mumble. “Probably never been attacked by a Throat Leach or shmelled the insides of a dead Ice Lizard. Think you can make it out here? I don’t think sho.” Eventually someone calls you a cab.

Salut à tous ! Bon retour dans Demandez au petit nouveau !

Si vous avez un question simple et voulez une réponse qui ne nécessite pas l'utilisation de votre mot de passe sudo, contactez-moi à copil.yanez@gmail.com.

La question d'aujourd'hui est :

Q : Ubuntu semble assez mûr. La plupart des choses fonctionnent tout simplement. Reste-t-il quoi que ce soit qui puisse nous passionner ?

R : Beh, regardez-vous, pauvre petit chose, assis là-bas, s'ennuyant à mourir. Quoi ? vos girafes miniatures, et vos sièges de wc chauffés et vos chaussures en forme de pieds humains (faites de VRAIS pieds humains) ne sont pas assez passionnants pour vous ? Si, avec chaque installation, Mark Shuttleworth offrait un voyage gratuit à la Station spatiale internationale vous seriez moins lassé par la vie, peut-être ?

Je sais ce que c'est. Si vous êtes comme moi, vous

My point is, sometimes it’s hard to sustain that level of excitement, especially when things are going right. If you’re trying to figure out how to get your laptop to see your wireless router, seeking help from a forum of fellow enthusiasts can be fun and social. But if everything works almost perfectly out of the box, well, that’s exciting, too, but not in the same way. And it means the community, a great source of camaraderie and entertainment, gets bypassed by some new users. Becoming a power user brings its own excitement, of course, and means you’re likely to encounter and overcome bigger challenges as you go. But this is Ask-the-New-Guy, not Ask-A-Guy-Who-Knows-What-The-Hell-He’s-Talking-About. So what do average Joes like me have to look forward to? What’s exciting about Ubuntu other than the fact that it just works? Plenty! In many ways, new and casual users are the ones who have the most to look forward to over the next few years. Not only does Ubuntu get better with each release, the project is expanding into some really exciting areas. Let’s take a look at what’s on the Ubuntu horizon.

Gaming For the longest time, the single biggest lament for many users who didn’t want to make the switch to Ubuntu was that there weren’t enough games for it. This was never really true, of course, there have always been decent titles for Linux, and the Ubuntu Software Center made it criminally easy to download the best ones. But Steam, a popular digital distribution platform with a deep inventory of gaming titles, was recently released for Linux and is available from the Software Center. I believe this is a game-changer (pun totally intended exactly two seconds after I realized I had unintentionally made it). By downloading the Steam software, you can browse, download, and buy the ever-growing list of games that work on Linux – including Counter-Strike and Runner2. And this is just the beginning. Valve, the maker of Steam, has promised to release Left 4 Dead 2 and other long-awaited titles in the next few months. Soon, you too will feel the horror as Boomer, a bloated zombie with infectious bile, stumbles into your room looking for night-night cuddles. Some people might argue that this is just one more company looking to make money off Linux users with no real love for its ideals. But even putting aside Valve’s past support for the Linux community, that’s just the cynical, eightieth-level mage in them talking. I believe this will encourage other developers to port their popular free titles over to Linux to engage a whole new community of players. Gaming isn’t going away and neither is Linux. This is a good marriage, more Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards than Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries.

Ubuntu on Tablets The biggest surprise at Ubuntu’s recent unveiling of its tablet OS was not that it had one, but that the one it exhibited seemed so polished and close to being ready for prime time. Early preview versions of heavy-use software like this usually include several blank screens, lots of freezing, and a couple error messages that say “And then a miracle happens here.” Sure, there will be growing pains as Ubuntu moves from a developer version to the end user install, but there’s a lot to like here. Take a look for yourself: http://youtu.be/h384z7Ph0gU. Be warned, the video involves some of Mark Shuttleworth’s chest hair, a 70’s-era peace sign belt buckle, and a weird self-help vibe that may be disturbing to former cult members and recovering hippies. Mark, talk faster! By. The. Time. . .You. . . .Get. . . . .To. . . .The. . . . . . . . Next. . . .. . .Word. . . . .I. . . . . . .. . forget. . . . . what. . .. . . . . . I’m. . . . . . . . . . . .watching. Tablet and phone devices, in my very unhumble opinion, are the future of computing. Most of us don’t need a Cray Titan to do all that web browsing and memo writing we do. (And seriously, we could probably knock out the memo writing altogether – who are you writing all those memos to?). A decent tablet with a good keyboard and a fast Internet connection will handle something like 99% of our needs. It’s like driving to work. Our average commute is something like 32 miles round trip, so we don’t need 8-mile-per-gallon Ferraris when Elon Musk’s Tesla will do it in carbon-neutral style. Holy Steaks! The most glorious fantasy just occurred to me! What if Elon Musk got into the Linux game, and suddenly you had two super-rich brainiacs competing with each other to come up with software indistinguishable from magic?! It’d be like two Bond Villains battling at the command line! Can self-aware dishwashers, and nanobots that turn human fat into gold, be far behind? The answer is no. No, they can’t.

Ubuntu TV If Matthew’s death in the Season 3 finale of Downton Abbey was ruined by someone you follow on Twitter, then Ubuntu TV was built for the way you watch TV, as an interactive experience with a community component. If Mathew’s death was ruined by me at the start of this paragraph, then you need to catch up on your recordings more often. C’mon, TiVo is not a license to keep the FireFly series finale in stasis in the unhinged belief that the series might still be picked up for another season. Time-shifting is a privilege, not a right, people! Imagine you’re watching your favorite episode of So You Think You Can Dance? and a commercial comes on for some kind of hybrid breakfast cereal/pain reliever. Instead of watching a cartoon spinal disk sing about how Ibuprophen-O’s are contraindicated with milk, you switch over to YouTube and call up clips of Mary Murphy screaming about the Hot Tamale Train! See? The future is awesome! If that doesn’t excite you, then think about Ubuntu TV giving you the functionality of a DVR coupled with integrated social media and access to all your media files. It’s not so much a revolution as an evolution of the smart TVs already on the market mated with your favorite operating system. Yes, it’s quite possible that Canonical’s master plan is to combine all digital products and make them operable from the most comfortable seat in your house. If you see them, buy Ikea – remember, I told you so. Check out this video http://youtu.be/jq_WaOLjdyQ which champions the idea that DVRs don’t need to be separate boxes, the functionality can be built directly into the TV. Plus, apparently creepy giant bunnies figure prominently in our future.

Ubuntu on Phones For my money, Ubuntu’s phone OS has the potential to be the most disruptive. The first smartphone I owned completely changed the way I interacted with the Internet and the services I found there. Having my favorite OS on my phone, with all the philosophical and practical changes it brings with it, could have a similar effect, at least on me. The phone OS seems to have all the features you’ve come to expect from a smartphone. The things that make it Ubuntu are tweaks familiar from the desktop OS – like lens-based search options and customizable side panes that give you access to frequently-used programs and apps. That apps ecosystem, in my opinion, is what makes this OS a game-changer. All the most popular paid apps will likely make their way over relatively quickly because mortgages on Finnish S&M dungeons don’t come cheap (and don’t tell me you didn’t know that’s exactly what Rovio was doing with all that avian loot they’ve been raking in). The more interesting apps, however, are merely gleams in a Linux developer’s eye right now. I can’t wait to see what Linux enthusiasts bring to the phone world. When SETI-Phone-Home becomes the most popular app on the Ubuntu phone, and we discover alien life shortly thereafter, I want to be named ambassador to Kepler 22b. I will finally be able to say Klaatu Barada Nikto unironically. And, of course, the Ubuntu philosophy of doing more with less will also be ported to the smaller screen. If you’ve ever run a perfectly stable and useful Ubuntu install on a machine others had given up for dead, you’ll probably appreciate having all the modern conveniences of a powerful smartphone running on a handset a few generations old. One of the really interesting things about the phone OS is that, for many people, this may be their first point of contact for Ubuntu. Once these new users discover that the powerful, stable and secure OS they’re using on their phones is available also for their desktops (and tablets and TVs), the time of massive Ubuntu take-up could be upon us. Check out this video for more Mark Shuttleworth chest hair: http://youtu.be/cpWHJDLsqTU. There’s also a project to put Ubuntu on Android handsets and make your phone a full-fledged desktop by adding a full-sized keyboard and monitor. I’m not entirely clear on how the Ubuntu phone OS overlaps with Ubuntu for Android, or if that docking functionality is part of the former. But the idea of having one device that works like a Transformer, without any Michael Bay quick-cuts to make me dizzy, is pretty appealing.

Conclusion The operative word for all these OSs seems to be convergence. Any cloud-based files and services should be available across all devices along with apps, bookmarks and settings. And familiar functions, like side panes and drawers, should work similarly on all screens. What stands in the way of this seamless Ubuntopia? Not the software, certainly, since its greatest strength is that it can become whatever its users need it to be. Even if the first versions of each OS are mere shadows of their mature potential, the energetic give-and-take between Canonical and the community will produce, as it has so far, a decent compromise between competing interests. More likely, the real challenges will come from hardware manufacturers and existing service providers who have a vested interest in keeping existing revenue streams in place (*cough* wireless carriers *cough*). The idea of opening the world of phones, tablets and TVs to neckbeards like me must just scare the hell out of them. And that may be the most exciting thing of all. I know, I know, this is all a little too fangirl for some of you. And forget about Ubuntu hipsters, the ones who talk about seeing Ubuntu Warty Warthog doing open mic nights at smoky Dublin pubs back in the late 90’s. They’re not going to be happy with this new world where Ubuntu is as popular as a Happy Meal (albeit much healthier). But the rest of us are likely to enjoy new campaigns and treasures as we slay dragons and fight orcs in the Sauronic pursuit of one OS to rule them all! Good luck and happy Ubuntuing!