This is a fairly short one, I hope though still useful and discussive. :)
Dell Has Sold Tens of Millions of Dollars of Sputnik Hardware
Dell's Sputnik project, a project which brought us the Dell Developer Edition Linux laptops has made tens of millions of dollars since its inception 5 years ago. I think this is just another tick in the box that Linux for the end user can and is a profitable business.
You can learn more about it all in an interview with Barton George by Bryan Lunduke:
Dell recently updated their XPS 13 (sputnik) developer edition at the end of 2016 and is probably a decent place to start looking for a Linux based laptop (where your money counts as a Linux sale xD). The XPS line isn't he only sputnik laptops out there though, the slightly out of date https://dell.com/developer site lists some of the other Linux based laptops they have to offer.
5.3 of our lovable office suite is avaiable. Theres updates in a number of areas a little to big to list. A quick rundown of the new features is avaiable here, and a short video playlist of the new features here.
Most interesting is possibly the short note of LibreOffice Online. A (for now) basic collaborative editing platform for editing documents online.
There's a docker image here if you want to try it out.
KDE have released Plasma 5.9, yay! As with their usual style, this has a massive list of improvements and bug fixes along with new functionality and ease of use changes. You can see the whole list here.
The release video sums up nicely the most notable features and changes in this release.
Other Stuff
Look out for MESA 17 and Linux 4.10 if your an AMD GPU owner. I could probably say this every time there's a release, because its basically true. Improvements, fixes, better support for older cards, better performance.
Community
@SgtAwesomesauce is continuing his The Pragmatic Neckbeard series. This instalment covering KVM and libvirt.
@SolitaryOwlet did a good speech on Linux and is looking for feedback.
If your taking part in the 1 Year Linux Challange look out for a new topic from me about it.
The Level1 Techs Linux channel has rebooted, and @wendell is starting to kick off more content. Remember to subscribe to it if you've not already.
Their "aimed at developers" but meant to be light weight (literally). i7s 8/16gb ram, etc. They come with a similar price though £1500~ There's 3 developer edition XPS 13s I think.
oh, thought it was just a DE like openbox... but these look nice, going to drool over these now, I will also put them on the list of laptops I might buy
Check out their site in the new bit above. These a few. The XPS was the first. Comes with Ubuntu installed. But Dell have been pushing code upstream, including firmware updates to fwupd which comes with Fedora (and is available on basically any Linux OS)
In terms of putting Linux on it, Dell's Inspiron machines are quite solid and I haven't had any issues with my bunch. I think it'd be nice to see some of these come with Linux (developer edition) type configurations, making it easier for those with a smaller budget or lack of a need for that 'rank' of hardware. Hell, even an N3050 processor which is commonly used in Chromebooks runs Ubuntu like a champ. It's nice to see a profit in the Sputnik line though, as it does show progress for Linux overall. I'm waiting for "Dell recommends using Ubuntu"
