Last year at this time I predicted that a small revolution in web apps would occur in 2010, thanks to the introduction of Google Chrome OS, and may have implied that this would have a negative effect on the iPhone. I also expressed the opinion that, if all went well with the Google branded Nexus phone, Microsoft would follow with one of their own.

This year I will have to revise and amend somewhat, since Google did not introduce Chrome OS mid-year as planned, so the fallout from that will have to wait until the first half of 2011. Daniel Eran Dilger has written a piece on this over at appleinsider.com. Perhaps not surprising given the source, it has a bit of a pro-Apple bias. Dilger notes, for example that “Unlike the Chrome OS, these machines [Apple laptops and desktops] can run native Mac apps, can host X11 Linux apps, and can even run Windows apps in a virtualization environment.” This suggests that he doesn’t get it, in spite of having extensively quoted Google’s intention earlier in the article:

”Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems,” the company blogged last summer.

“We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up,” the company explained.

“They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.”

It is Google’s intention to out-iPad the iPad by offering a world where you don’t have to worry about apps or backups or where your data is, a world in which everything “just works.” A paranoid geek like myself won’t allow Chrome OS anywhere near any of my devices, because I care about where my data is and who has access to it and things like administrative access. It’s bad enough that they have my email, I’m not handing over everything to the buggers, even if they are my favourite corporation.

But that’s just curmudgeonly old me. If they can deliver on this vision of drop dead easy computing, Steve Jobs will find himself in the position of having to play catch up, and Microsoft will then play catch up to Jobs. Technologically it won’t be difficult for either of them. The killer will be that while they sell their stuff, Google gives it away free. That could be a very difficult dime for them to turn on.

In other 2011 news: I’m not going to predict the demise of the iPhone. That’s one area that I think is fairly secure for Apple. Though with Nokia’s introduction of the N8, I wonder if the iPhone won’t become just a normal smartphone, ceding the high end to others.

You may have seen articles like this one over at pocketgamer.biz, suggesting that Nokia isn’t doing so well against Apple since the iPhone is outselling the N8 by six to one even in Nokia’s home territory of Europe. (Pro-Nokia site noknok.tv offers a rebuttal.)

This is a little like comparing sales of Rolls Royce to BMW, and, if Apple doesn’t up the ante soon, maybe Lexus. The techno-elite have already turned in their iPhones, and now it is just for little girls. (I’m only partially kidding — Sara Yin over at pcmag.com reports that when considering the purchase of a smartphone, men prefer Android, women the iPhone.)

Microsoft did not release their own branded smartphone this year, instead simply releasing a new OS for phones, Windows Phone 7. I’m not going to predict a Microsoft branded phone for 2011. I think Google’s motivation for the Nexus was sluggish uptake of Android by third parties, and if Microsoft finds themselves in a similar situation, perhaps they will adopt a similar strategy. But if they haven’t copied Google by now, I don’t think they’re going to, especially if it is strongly adopted, or even moderately well adopted.

So if I can’t predict the death of the iPhone, whose demise can I predict? Ah, yes, the overused and much abused Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash. And who will kill it? A new specification for web pages, HTML5. This specification provides for much greater support of multimedia content. When those Chrome OS web apps come rolling out, they won’t use Flash. Look for them to be written in HTML5 with other supported specifications (for example, the latest in cascading style sheets [CSS]), and associated technologies. Flash will be a thing of the past.

The revolution has not been cancelled. Merely postponed. Until then, best wishes for the holidays and the new year.

I am much more enamoured of my Acer Aspire One netbook since I put the Xubuntu Linux distribution on it (instructions here).  The original Linux interface strongly suggested that its developers thought people would like the netbook to be a simple internet appliance.  An interesting idea. However, it looks like a laptop, albeit a diminutive one, and I was disappointed initially by its limited application selector. (I can’t call it a desktop environment; it’s so limited, it doesn’t really have a desktop.)  Fortunately, as long as it responded as expected to alt+F2, I could get useful work done while bypassing the interface.  That ended when a software update caused it to freeze cursor and keyboard on boot.

Something like the Xubuntu’s XFCE desktop environment fulfils expectations better.  It has what we all expect: a desktop with user settable wallpaper, user litterable with all kinds of shortcuts, and, of course, a bar with a button which you click when you want to go hunting for things.  It provides all this in a much less resource intensive way than the main Linux desktop environments, KDE and Gnome (used by its sister Linux distributions, Kubuntu and Ubuntu), making it suitable for not only netbooks, but for any computer past its prime and no longer capable of running the latest desktop environments or Windows operating systems.

I also upgraded my desktop distribution, Kubuntu, in order to have easier access to more recent versions of applications.  In Linuxland, all the applications are free — you just say some magic words and they fly into your computer from a magic cloud.  However, each distribution, and each version of each distribution, has its own magic cloud.  My cloud no longer had the latest versions.

For me a sure sign that Linux is ready for the desktop is the fact that I no longer look forward to upgrading.  Why bother when everything works fine?  And I’m a little annoyed that the applications in my magic cloud (or software repositories) are only being updated for bug fixes.  It’s like they’re deliberately goading me to upgrade.

I anticipated that I would ultimately wind up doing a clean install of the latest version of Ubuntu, and then “Kubuntuizing” it as outlined in this earlier post where I observed that direct Kubuntu installs are not advised.  There is an option to upgrade the version from within the existing version, but I have never, ever seen that work.  Until now.

I used the upgrade version option in the package manager to go from version 8.04 to version 9.04, totally skipping inbetween version 8.10.  It took some time downloading and installing stuff, but damned if it didn’t actually work.  The only major glitch was a variation on the old “no sound from the sound card even though the hardware is recognized” problem. (Hint, from the mixer config set all sliders to visible and try pushing up ones that are all the way down until you hear sound.)

This is a joy Windows users will likely never know.  Imagine an XP user seeing a dialogue that says “Would you like to upgrade to Windows 7 for free?   Just click here.”  Upon clicking, XP replaces itself with the latest version of Windows.  Then another dialogue pops which says “Now, would  you like to upgrade Office for free as well?”  There are days when I really, really wonder why people keep using Windows.  As opposed to those other days when I only really wonder why people keep using Windows.

Aside from a repository cloud with more recent versions of all those lovely, free, applications, there really isn’t much reason to upgrade.  The KDE4 desktop environment is much cooler looking than KDE3, with all the useless visual eye candy of a Vista or OS/X.  Some of the configuration options are arranged in ways which border on actually intuitive, while others have gotten worse. (Trying to get it to use a static ip today, I soon found myself back on the command line.)  However, I can confirm that it is usable.  Many thought the first version of KDE4 was released too early, but if that was so, then it has had enough time to mature into something which is really lacking only one thing from KDE3 that I can see — it won’t allow me to put different wallpaper on each of my eight virtual desktops.

I did run into a major application incompatibility.  My version of VMware Server wouldn’t run as it couldn’t compile the modules it needed.  It was already getting long in the tooth, but again, if it works well, why upgrade?  Since it wasn’t working, I downloaded and installed the latest version from VMware’s site.

VMware Server has become quite a horrible application if all you want to do is run Windows on Linux.  It is clearly aimed at the “Enterprise” market where companies might want to maintain a bunch of servers running a bunch of virtual servers, all in a data centre but controlled from the company IT offices. To that end it now sports a web interface.  I think one is supposed to see the operating system in a tab, but apparently that requires a plugin which wouldn’t install.  I could hear the XP start up sound, but couldn’t see anything in that fricken java-based web app.

I was motivated to see what the competition had to offer, and not the competition explored in an earlier post with a company called Parallels.  I wanted to see how open source was doing in this area.

I discovered a wonderful little application called VirtualBox.  There’s very little to write about it.  It creates a virtual machine, you install Windows in it, Windows boots connected to the internet, and off you go.  So nice, so simple.  About the only negative was that, although it claims to be able to open VMware created virtual machines, it failed in the case of mine, so I’m starting from scratch with a new XP install.

So the state of the penguin is that things are good and getting better, whether you’ve got a machine that can do all the KDE4 eye candy effects without breaking a sweat, or one that has been given new life by Xubuntu.  And there is no need to abandon Windows completely, since whatever app it is you can’t do without can likely be run in Windows in VirtualBox on Linux.  And all of this, with the exception of Windows, falling freely into one’s computer from the magic application clouds.  Some days I really, really, really do wonder why anyone uses Windows.

Unfortunately it’s not as simple as that, as I discovered when I installed Kubuntu on my home computer. I figured since I was going to use KDE anyway, I might as well start out with the Kubuntu distribution that has KDE as its default desktop environment, as opposed to Ubuntu’s default Gnome environment.

The version of Kubuntu that I downloaded, burned, and installed was 7.10, and it was buggy as hell. If a disgruntled Windows user were to try this, they would soon scurry back even to Vista. We’re not talking a lack of spit and polish, or a questionable aesthetic; we’re talking flat out things not working.

The most serious problem was the failure of administrative tools to remember that they were in adminstrator mode after I gave them the password they requested. One of the things that has made Linuxes more secure than Windows (at least pre-Vista) is that by default one uses Linux without administrative privileges. If that account were to be hacked, or compromised by worm or virus, the damage would be limited to what could be done with a regular account.

Lately, however, desktop environments will have an adminstrator mode, or prompt you for an administrative password. It’s a nice touch. However, when it fails, as it did with the Kubuntu 7.10 distro I installed, you’re hosed, at least as far as the pretty, graphical admin tools go. One can still use the command line, of course, but the classic test of whether or not Linux is “ready for prime time” is whether or not a naive user can manage their system without resorting to the command line.

There were a plethora of other problems, including a K-menu (KDE’s equivalent of the Windows Start button menu) populated with strangely long, not easily decipherable, labels. I will spare you the long list of bugs I discovered, as these two alone are sufficient to reject the distribution as unusable.

It occurred to me that this install was critically different from my machine at work in that it had no Gnome installed. Perhaps if I added Gnome (I reasoned), all the problems would magically go away (I wished). It didn’t make much difference, other than giving me a choice of login managers (I went with gdm).

Fortunately, the system was stable enough for me to download and burn a copy of Ubuntu which I then installed. Here is a screen shot of the default Gnome desktop. (Dimensions may seem a bit strange as I dropped the screen resolution down to 800×600 for the screen capture.)

Actually, it’s not quite default. I dragged the terminal icon from the Applications menu onto the desktop. The new Ubuntu user might not need to use the terminal/command line for most things, but if you go googling for Ubuntu-related info, sooner or later you will come across magical command line incantations for installing things. Even if you never use the command line for anything else, it is easier to copy from the web page and paste into the terminal than it is to go poking through the synaptic package manager looking for what you want. Here is the incantation for installing the KDE environment:

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

The sudo command says to do what follows as an administrator, and you will likely be asked for your password. Once installed, you can log out, then switch your session type on the login screen to KDE, then log back in. Here is a screen shot of the almost default KDE desktop.

When you log in you may notice that the splash screen says “Kubuntu”! For some reason, the K/Ubuntu folk encourage the perception that Ubuntu with KDE is Kubuntu, even though it actually provides a much better experience. There should be another name for Ubuntu with KDE installed after. I propose calling it Ubuntuk, which I imagine to be an Inuit term meaning, “There, fixed it for you.”

In fairness, if you are an absolute n00b to Linux, you might want to stick with Gnome for awhile, since you have a bit of a learning curve ahead of you anyway. I have been using KDE for years and am very comfortable with it, so have developed something of a bias. But even just monkeying with Gnome on the way to installing KDE, I am very impressed with how far along Gnome has come. I suspect it may even be usable now, especially in this distribution where a great deal of time and care and Mark Shuttleworth‘s money has gone into tweaking it to be their default environment.

That said, even if you’re going to give Gnome a whirl, install KDE anyway, as it comes with a lot of neat applications. Gnome also has associated neat applications, and both environments’ neat applications work in either environment. Why not have it all? Sometimes the best answer to a choice of two things is simply: both. Perhaps it should be called Gubuntuk, which we could imagine to be an Inuit word meaning “I want it all.”

If I had to summarize in a word what sets (G)ubuntu(k) apart from other operating systems, and, indeed, other Linux distributions, that word would be smarts. The default install settings are intelligently chosen, so unless you have reason to make things more complicated, it’s just a question of going through a few clicks, and a bit of waiting, to get to a fully installed system. And while you wait, you can surf the web or play games, because the install CD boots into a fully functional Gnome desktop environment that you can mess around in while the install is doing its thing. In fact, you could use it to take Gnome for a spin without committing to installing anything at all.

Immediately on first boot of the fresh install, Ubuntu informed me that proprietary drivers existed for my Nvidia based video card, and asked if I would like to install them. Hell, yes. No one makes better Nvidia drivers than Nvidia. My commitment to open source is not so ideologically pure as to decline proprietary drivers which will give me more features than open source equivalents would. I don’t know if it would do the same for ATI based cards, but now that AMD has purchased ATI and is increasing its commitment to Linux, I wouldn’t be be surprised if Ubuntu offered to install proprietary ATI drivers as well.

As I mentioned in my last post, Ubuntu is smart enough to recognize multimedia files that it doesn’t have the codecs for, then offer to download and install said codecs. Try clicking on a Windows media file in OS X and see what happens. Or on an Ogg Vorbis file in Windows. Unlike OS X or Windows, with Ubuntu you don’t have to be a computer geek in order to simply use your computer. (How’s that for turning the tables!)

The new Ubuntu user can access plenty of people-smarts via Google. (At time of writing, a Google search on “Ubuntu” returns 106,000,000 hits.) It is perhaps the most popular Linux distribution out there at the moment, boasting a large user community.

Like any OS, it does have its flaws. I would like to have seen a finer-grained progress indicator in the installer. It pauses long enough while it partitions/formats the hard drive that one begins to wonder if perhaps it is stuck. It also didn’t identify my Viewsonic PF790 monitor, so I had to tweak that myself in order to get the resolution I wanted.

I would also have liked it very much if the Ubuntu Myth TV package had installed flawlessly for use with my Hauppauge 150 TV card. I got further with Myth under Ubuntuk than I ever did under Fedora, but it still fell short. Ultimately I did manage to get the tv card to work with VLC, but that took some geeking. It would be nice to have TV work out the box. Ubuntu seems right on the edge of making that happen; the hardware itself was recognized, proper drivers in place, proper permissions, etc., but it falls short at the application level.

For the most part, though, stuff just works. For example, I had no trouble getting Parallels Workstation installed so that I could run Windows XP in a virtual machine. (I hadn’t been able to under Fedora 7.) Not only does Ubuntu have Mark Shuttleworth’s economic support behind it, but because it is so popular, there are many, many open source developers using it as their base distribution to develop for and with. And even those who don’t use it know that it is a distribution they can’t ignore. Not operating on Ubuntu is not an option.

An operating system with smarts. So different from OS X (“I am pretty, oh so pretty”) or Windows (“You are trying to do something. Doing things can be dangerous. Cancel or Allow?”). Ubuntu can be downloaded from their site, or get it preinstalled on a Dell.

Just don’t make the mistake I did of assuming that K/Ubuntu is Kubuntu. Either go with the default Gnome, or install KDE on Ubuntu using the magic incantation. If you’re looking to flee Windows but don’t want to shell out for a Mac, or if you’re tired of fighting with Fedora, Ubuntu might be just what you’re looking for.