Year review 2016

This year I used my laptop like 10 days, mostly for planning complex trips on Google Maps, because of the external monitor.

Which means I am basically at one phone video interface from bringing my laptop to the recycling center. USB-C probably.

Firefox OS is dead. Makes sense given that Mozilla can barely keep up maintaining Firefox relevant.

Looking forward to see Ubuntu Phone becoming relevant.

Which will happen only if they actually sell some phone with Ubuntu Phone on it.

Internet Explorer 11 is the only IE above 0.5 % of market share. The dreamed app-capable Web is here.

Disproportionate ads are slowly but surely ruining my experience on iPhone. Will give a chance to an Android + Firefox + uBlock Origin soon.

Sigh, no VP9 for WebRTC on Firefox yet. Everytime I videocall on Hangouts my battery not only gets hot, but *inflates*. Time to try those video calls on Slack I guess.

Yeah, Slack app is built on JavaScript-based Electron. 🤘

Angular 2 will be soon everywhere. I hope ECMAScript stays close to TypeScript, and browsers close to ECMAScript. Otherwise multi megabyte downloads will be necessary for every web app ... and that will justify a second wave of mobile app worship.

Guessing 2017 will bring more USB-C phones and JS (web and native) applications.

The title of this blog does not make sense anymore. Should rename it or start a new one.

Predictions 2016

Is that time of the year again. Half the World is expecting it. Is the time for:

Linux for targets: Predictions 2016

Retrospective of predictions 2015.

I will write few-to-none new posts on this blog.

Correct. This one was easy.

There will be zero new projects made on Adobe Flash.

Correct! as far as I know. Except for those crappy free online games.

WebRTC will support VP9 and kick ass.

Well, that sentence does not even make sense. I guess I meant that Firefox would support VP9 for WebRTC. It has not been the case :(

Related: I tried Firefox Hello during the year and, even though the video was OK, the audio was crap. To the level of "I can barely understand you". Pfff no replacement for Skype at sight yet.

Somebody at YouTube will realize that refreshing the page on log-in sucks, and will do that on Ajax

HAHA no.

The most interesting OS in the world (Firefox OS) will continue to be shipped only on infra-hardware

Correct. I guess creating drivers for average 200-300 USD phones is so fucking hard. Is still sad not being able to use one of them with Firefox. Who called "high-end" to this?

Will buy a new battery for my 4 year old laptop, since newer laptops are not really that better.

Did not happen. I'm seeing nearly interesting replacements appearing, although above 1000 USD. My dream is something based on a 14- nm Atom (or Core M) expandable up to 16+ GB of RAM. I would pay whatever it takes for that. Whatever factor it has.

And now, predictions 2016.

• JavaScript will start to raise as platform for native applications, as it has just done with Calypso.
• Eww who cares about the desktop anymore. Life goes on the web. Let's just hope Mozilla can really focus on Firefox and save us from doom.

What if XFCE on a 4K monitor

From Xfce 4.12 tour:

Window tiling mode was improved by providing support for corner-tiling

This little addition might just be enough to make XFCE 4K-friendly.

By tiling a Full HD window on each corner of the screen, one can work as having four Full HD monitors.

With window searching reduced to a fourth of what it used to be, time savings for professional uses are massive.

Loving to see those 4K TVs dropping price in the last year.

The pressure for cheaper HiDPI displays will continue over 2016 thanks to mobile.

That will make 4K monitors affordable for most freelancers and companies by 2017.

XFCE is alive

XFCE, imo the only desktop non-crazy, non-underdeveloped as of 2015, just got a new release that according to the release notes, it keeps the good things getting better: XFCE 4.12!.

Which is great, because after 3 years from the previous release, I thought XFCE was dead and buried.

Meanwhile, pre-1.0 LXQt releases still look promising. When I tried 0.8 it gave me a black screen, but I really believe that it is working for someone out there. Will try 0.9 soon.

Predictions 2015

Retrospective of predictions 2014.

My mother will master Ubuntu 12.04 - a very cheap OS that allows you to focus on web browsing.

Well not a master but she was able to use it indeed for web-based email, web-based chat, and web searches. There was a complain nevertheless: "there are always updates". Interesting comment. Prompts for updates should IMHO be an easily findable opt-in. Then again 3% of the users think that the OS should ask confirmation for each byte of input/output by default, and that changing it should require to create your own fork of GNU.

Firefox OS will get a ridiculous but historical 2% of share among web users, and I will buy one.

I don't know what the market share of Firefox OS is, and I did not buy one. Very poor hardware is still the only one sold with support for Firefox OS. A camera that I don't regret to use is certainly a must feature for me. Hopefully during 2016 this will change.

Internet Explorer 9- will only matter if you are addressing hardcore dinosaurs. Hopefully jQuery guys will realize of this and will release a half-sized version of jQuery named jQuery 3, that I will not use anyway.

Yes! IE9- does not matter anymore. jQuery guys realized of this: no. Do I care: no.

The only remaining mainstream usage for desktop applications will be accessing USB devices. The rest of the mainstream things will be done through the web. asm.js' utopic but real 1.5x slower than native speed will be a big factor.

Wrong :( WebRTC is, as a matter of fact, still in "release candidate" state. There has not been also enough increase on web-based apps to acknowledge yet that "everything but USB stuff is on the web". ES6 will soon make things easier but I think the resulting apps will not flourish until 2016.

And now predictions 2015:

1. I will write few-to-none new posts on this blog. It feels like there is no point anymore. The situation now is so different. Back in 2009 Microsoft owned our asses, and all but using Windows caused unavoidable frustration. But now mobile _is_ the new personal computing platform, and Microsoft has lost this war by far. Android is the new Windows, and it comes with a first-class web browser. Now if only spreadsheets made on LibreOffice did not suck when opened on Excel...
2. There will be zero new projects made on Adobe Flash.
3. WebRTC will support VP9 and kick ass.
4. Somebody at YouTube will realize that refreshing the page on log-in sucks, and will do that on Ajax.
5. The most interesting OS in the world (Firefox OS) will continue to be shipped only on infra-hardware.
6. Will buy a new battery for my 4 year old laptop, since newer laptops are not really that better.

Fix for noise on Skype for Ubuntu 14.04

Instead of running simply skype, run this:

env PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30 skype

Source: Get The Sound Working In Skype With Ubuntu 13.10

Together with the fix for the camera, the thing to run is:

export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libv4l/v4l1compat.so && env PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30 skype

Which sucks.

A bit better is to have this in a script on the desktop that you can simply double click. So write the following in it.

#!/bin/bash
export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libv4l/v4l1compat.so && env PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30 skype

And give it run permissions by doing right-click on the file > "Properties" > "Permissions" > and check "Execution permission".

I hate Skype.

Desktop wars: Linux 1, Windows 56929

How Munich switched 15,000 PCs from Windows to Linux.

Sumario en castellano de cómo Munich ha migrado 15.000 PCs de Windows a Linux.

Once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning.