And I've been running rolling Fedora dev versions for three years, and before that I ran Mandriva Cooker for years. Any geek _can_ keep any given distro rolling on their personal desktop, it's not that difficult to do. Making an OS that you sell to real people for extremely large amounts of money to do mission critical work on across thousands of machines robust enough that you can recommend in-place upgrades for major releases is an _extremely_ different kettle of fish.

We don't _recommend_ upgrades between major versions of RHEL, but you could do it, if you wanted to. It's not like the capability isn't there; it's just packages. We just don't suggest it's the best idea, and doing so has support implications if you have a paid support contract.

It's not charity, it's a perfectly reasonable business arrangement. Firefox still has a good 30% or so of all web users. _All web users_. That's a massive number of people. Being Firefox's default search engine is worth a significant amount of money to Google, and Google pays a significant amount of money for it. If Google didn't, I'm sure Yahoo or Microsoft would.

I have to say, it's pretty funny to read a bunch of highfalutin' rhetoric like this applied to a post about the following sites being blocked:

"Project Free TV, YIFY, PrimeWire"..."The Pirate Bay, BitSnoop, ExtraTorrent, Torrentz, 1337x, Fenopy, H33T, KickAssTorrents"

Yes, this is clearly about high principles of legal fairness and not about watching Thor without paying.

The MBPs are significantly heavier - there's definitely a distinct sub-3lbs weight class where this, the Kirabook, the MBA and so on all play.

This had the same weight, RAM and display. Only difference in the new model is the CPU and video chipset. Of course, that does make a significant difference in battery life, but then it's pretty much a given that every Ivy Bridge laptop is getting a Haswell bump, so it wasn't particularly difficult to figure out that this one would...

"can get much better laptops that don't cost that much even if you put a touchscreen onto them"

Like what? in the 13" ultraportable (i.e. sub-3lbs) weight class, what is 'much better'?

The Macbook Air 13" is broadly comparable (slightly cheaper, slightly worse hardware). Whatever model number Asus is on right now, it'll be broadly similar in hardware terms but inferior in build quality while being a bit cheaper. The Thinkpad 13" model is lower-specced with a worse screen (though probably better build quality and a better keyboard). Those couple of laptops from Samsung and someone else with retina-class displays use 'U' class processors, which are much much slower than what the XPS 13 and MBA use, and come with less memory. The Pixel costs about the same and has less storage.

I've been through the whole 13" ultraportable class, and the XPS 13 is pretty competitive. Not obviously the best choice, not obviously the worst - there really isn't an obvious best choice, it's all a case of how much CPU power you need, how much screen resolution you need, what OS you want, and how much you can afford to spend.

The two are very similar in hardware and form factor, so I don't know why you'd call this a 'turd'. I'd expect them to post very similar battery life figures, given that they're based on very similar hardware. There's nothing magical about the new Macbooks' battery life; it's just thanks to Haswell's significant improvements in power efficiency. Every laptop that's got a Haswell bump has posted similarly impressive improvements in battery life, and this one will likely be the same.

The XPS 13 has a better screen and a smaller form factor than the MBA. And, of course, it comes pre-loaded with Linux. You can argue in theoretical terms about whether the better screen and the smaller chassis are 'worth' the extra money, but let's face it, if you want OS X you'd be better off buying the MBA, and if you want Linux you'd be better off buying the XPS 13.

"I would have considered this one if it had been available three weeks ago."

It was available three weeks ago, albeit in its previous Ivy Bridge form. I don't know why Slashdot is reporting this as if it were a new model rather than just a spec bump.

...but this is somewhat more powerful, and a better form factor. The XPS 13 is significantly smaller than the MBA 13"; I know, I've made a stack out of an MBA 11", an XPS 13, and an MBA 13". The XPS 13 is barely larger than the MBA 11", and a lot smaller than the MBA 13".

And I mean, yeah, obviously this is aimed at people who want a Linux laptop. If you want a Linux laptop you probably don't want to buy a Macbook. You can make it work, but it's a giant PITA. I'd much rather buy one of these.

And they've already been selling this system for like two years. This is just a spec bump.

" In the past, Dell has focused on low-end Linux offerings"

Well, not really, because they've been selling this system for like two years now. This is just the Haswell bump for it.

"For example, chances are that it's graphics chipset is "supported" but very, very slim that it enjoys full acceleration unless we're talking about an Intel chipset or a binary driver somewhere."

It has an Intel chipset, which has full 2D and 3D acceleration.

I have the second-gen XPS 13 developer edition. Every function on the system works. It does not include any binary drivers. Yes, only the supplied Ubuntu install is 'supported', but then, if you buy a Windows 7 laptop and then self-install Windows 8 on it (for instance), your manufacturer isn't going to support that either. I run Fedora 19 on my second-gen XPS 13 and all its functions work fully and correctly.

"try setting up your Linux partitions to mirror those of a Zip-disk on even boot/install USB disks"

What? That fragment does not even make syntactical sense, so far as I can work out.

"having to manually load soundfonts with a script to make soundcards work"

Along with the reference to 'Zip-disks' - 1996 called and it wants its problems back.

"or having to compile for some mini-ITX boards that can barely support the 486 instruction set to get an idea of the sorts of things that can crop up with old / embedded / poorly supported hardware"

So, buying CPUs that 'can barely support the 486 instruction set' is a bad idea in 2013, huh? Thanks for the tip, I never would've guessed.

"Now, before you all rush to the comments section to tell me how long your hard drives have lasted, I’m not talking anecdotally. I mean, in hard numbers, just how long does the average hard drive last?"

From the second paragraph of the article.

" Yes Mario Brothers is still copyrighted, but short of emulation you simply can't actually play it anymore even if it was free. "

roflcopters - you can buy it on every Nintendo console in existence, for a start.

"Copyright shouldn't exist for SOFTWARE in the first place"

Wouldn't actually matter much in this case, as the guy has not re-used Nintendo's SMB *source code*, but its 'assets' - graphics, sound, level design etc. These are copyrighted separately (and, at this point, massively more valuable to Nintendo than the original SMB source code.)

This. He can write a platform game on a web platform without re-using someone else's level design, character design and all the rest of it.

Also, SMB is hardly close to being 'obsolete' - Nintendo still manages to find ways to sell it again on every new platform it releases. I'm sure it's buyable or will be soon on the Wii U.