I got a new Macbook Pro for work, replacing (e:Paul)'s old Dell that I had been using. I have to say the computer itself is really amazing. The screen is so high res and bright and it's nice having a battery that lasts in hours and not minutes. My virtual machines start and suspend super fast and it's probably a quarter the weight and thickness of the old Dell.

Switching keyboards and commands from a PC Linux computer is driving me crazy - command + z, x, c, v are all so cramped and awkward to move to from the home keys compared to left control. I can't get used to command + R as refresh versus F5.

I also hate the Apple worship that I feel like is all over the internet when I look something up - if some decision made by Apple makes no sense they'll defend it to the death. IE hiding a "lock computer" function not in System Preferences->Security or Users or even screensaver, but you have to open Keychain->Preferences, enable "show keychain menu on menu bar". From there, you have to click the keychain menu and select lock the computer. How does this make sense?!

The scales at Wegmans pull up a recipie now when you punch in your produce. But there's no QR code or any URL or method for your to keep the recipie. How are you supposed to use it besides taking a photo of the screen?

Yesterday was the official release of both Fedora 20 and the Android 4.3 update for the Galaxy Note II.

The Android 4.3 update finally came after taking forever to go through AT&T. The changes aren't major but it's definitely updated and flattened a bit visually, especially the Samsung TouchWiz stuff. The gallery finally is way better in terms of arranging and selecting photos, like the new geotag view option and the different preview sizes. For some reason they removed the shortcut buttons on the lockscreen, so you have to unlock to get to the camera shortcut. The best part is the application manager now lets you turn off any app, even the built-in AT&T garbage that you can't uninstall.
The screen seems to be brighter and higher contrast too, although it's been sucking down battery way faster than before. Samsung claims they improved memory usage and GPU hardware rendering, I haven't done anything to that shows a huge difference. I hope we get KitKat relatively soon, where a virtual secure element will let anyone use Google Wallet's NFC.





I also upgraded my laptop from Fedora 19 to Fedora 20. (e:Paul) got me trying Linux about 3 months ago and since then I've barely touched my Windows 8 partition. Just the terminal alone makes doing things on the computer so much easier than a mish mosh of GUI and command line things in Windows. Even powershell can't come close to touching it. The only thing I miss in Linux is a Adobe Lightroom replacement. There is an open source alternative, Darktable (link) but it doesn't compare for post processing or library management.

Anyway, Fedora 20 added some pretty awesome stuff even if they seem to be trying to apple-fy themselves. The upgrade didn't actually work out at first for Paul, since the official upgrade method, FedUp, was broken. They added Gnome Maps, which seems alright, but not as good as Google Maps (it uses mapquest data, wtf?). The Wifi geolocation also places us in Kansas for some reason.

Gnome Maps - Thinks we're still in Kansas

The system preferences and chrome updates make it more Mac like by merging the title bar and menu bar, combining all off the notifications and controls into one menu in the corner.






There were also tons of backend changes too. The biggest is probably that ARM is now an official platform for Fedora, which makes sense since there are so many more devices now. SSD caching for hard disks is now in the kernel which should speed things up. There are also a ton of virtualization improvements like external notifications for the VM manager and LVM thin provisioning in the updates kernel. Thun provisioning isnkind of awesone becauee you can pook storage space between different devices. Ex if you have multiple users who have changing sotrage demands and a limited amount of storage, they can all share the existing storage and it can be allocated on demand. I can see that getting messy if tons of devices start requesting space at the same time but its still neat.
I never would use a lot of the features because I have no need to virtualize anything but I can imagine it makes administering a bunch of VMs on a server a lot easier.

I love using Linux now on everything, it really makes going back to XP at work painful.