Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 1

A rare find: A great adaptation of a great book.

Fred Fordham’s watercolor-style art is absolutely gorgeous. The adaptation plays to the medium’s strengths, allowing the visuals to tell the story when possible, keeping Ursula K. Le Guin’s prose when needed. Wide seascapes, rocky coasts, forested landscapes, people (not whitewashed!) and dragons…

There’s a preview featuring the first few pages and a few of the seascapes at Fordham’s website.

The printing is a bit dark for some scenes set at night or in dimly lit rooms (of which there are a lot, some pivotal). The first time through, I could barely see what was going on in the scene where Ged first summons the shadow in Ogion’s house. So you’ll want to read it by sunlight or with an actual reading lamp, not just ambient room lighting. (This isn’t a problem with the digital edition, though I suppose that might depend on your device’s display!)

I started using FeatherPad on a low-end Linux machine, and was impressed with its speed, stability, and a feature set with just enough to make it practical as my main text editor. (Search of course, but also syntax highlighting, sorting lines within a file, and quickly switching word-wrap on and off.) It’s more stable (and faster!) than GNOME Text Editor and more capable than Gedit. I’ve since set it as my default on my main Linux system.

There are a few things that still frustrate me. It doesn’t auto-switch between dark and light mode, for instance, and I switch between modes regularly depending on ambient lighting. Spell check is limited, and search is a bit jankier than I’d like. But it does the job, and does it fast, and I can always fire up another editor like Sublime Text when I do need something more elaborate.

Featherpad is available in most Linux distributions I’ve tried (including Fedora, Debian and Arch), but not on Alpine Linux unless you want to use the testing repo.

Fedora Workstation is still my favorite Linux for desktop use (followed by Debian as a close second), but every once in a while you’re reminded that IBM (via Red Hat) still has an out-sized influence on it.

Part of it is familiarity. But it’s also a good balance between a fast-changing, rolling distribution like Arch and a slower, stability-focused distribution like Debian. So it’s fast enough to get new drivers and update apps, but still has stable checkpoints.

Fedora’s easy to install. It walks you through choosing your setup and gives you a working, GUI desktop at the end. It’s not quite as user-friendly a setup as Linux Mint, but the configuration tools are more consistent than Ubuntu-based distros. And like Debian, it’s available on multiple architectures, so you don’t need to look for a downstream aarch64 variant in order to install it on ARM hardware.

Available Software

The main software repository has a lot of official packages for programs across the Linux ecosystem, so it’s rare that I need to resort to a Flatpak, Snap, binary or local build. And they’re updated frequently. Though I do have a handful of third-party repositories set up for things like Vivaldi and Sublime Text.

Unlike Ubuntu, which has separate apps for the system software updates and the Snap Store, Fedora puts everything into the Software application on GNOME or the Discover application on KDE Plasma. (Downside: GNOME Software insists on restarting for more updates than necessary. This is why I still use dnf from the command line most of the time. But if you don’t want to, you don’t have to.)

Gaming

Steam runs well on it. I used to dual-boot the system with Windows for gaming, but over the last couple of years Proton has gotten a lot better, and compatibility between Wayland and NVidia graphics has improved drastically. I’ve moved most of the Steam games I actively play over to the Linux partition. It’s been months since I’ve booted into Windows for anything other than maintenance. (I try to keep it current so that when I do want to use it, I won’t have to wait while it updates everything.)

Solid Upgrades

Major upgrades are reliable, too. I’ve been upgrading my main desktop piece by piece for ages, swapping in new hardware over time. The last clean install I did on it was in 2008 when I switched from a 32-bit motherboard/CPU combo to x86_64. I’ve moved the OS to new hard drives, and I’ve had to rescue the boot setup a couple of times due to hardware problems and dual-boot shenanigans. But OS upgrades haven’t broken it in all that time!

I have done more recent fresh installs on virtual machines, which is how I know the installer is still, you know, usable.

Yes, Very Atomic!

In addition to the more traditional setup where the system updates packages as needed, Fedora has a few “atomic” variations, where there’s a base system that’s updated as a whole, and applications installed on top of it, mainly through Flatpak. I’ve tried running Silverblue in virtual machines a few times, thinking it might be worth considering the next time I do a clean install, but there’s always something that doesn’t work quite right.

History and Priorities

Back in the stone age, Red Hat offered two Linux distributions: Red Hat Linux was their free, open system, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux was their professional release where you paid for support and got some really nice system management tools. I started using Red Hat Linux during this time.

In the early 2000s, Red Hat discontinued RHL in favor of Fedora Core, which they spun off into a sort of quasi-independent community project that would move faster than RHEL, and every few versions they’d take Fedora Core, stabilize it, and add their management tools for the next RHEL. This led to conflicting messages from Red Hat engineering and marketing as to whether Fedora Core was stable enough for actual use (spoiler: it already was). My favorite expression of this was the joke IRC log posted to the mailing list with marketing insisting that Fedora “will eat your brane.”

From the beginning there have been questions about how independent Fedora really is from Red Hat, and there have been several times they’ve made decisions that looked very much like they were based on RHEL goals. Even before IBM bought Red Hat. But for the most part it’s worked out over the last (checks calendar) 20 years. But that corporate pressure is still there, seen most recently in the debate over whether and how to allow LLM-generated code into the project. It’s going to be interesting to see how that shakes out. If it goes badly, I may finally switch this box to Debian, or distro-hop for a bit.

Usurpation is a very different book than the two that preceded it. It’s set entirely on Earth, for one thing, and for another it deals with people and violence on a much larger scale. The human colony on Pax is too small to afford people killing each other, but the opening scene here has a bystander getting brutally caught up in a murder. Interference had a slow-motion war between two plant ecosystems. Usurpation has international wars in which cities are firebombed off the map.

And there are multiple sentient bamboo groves, each with her own personality, not just one.

A century has passed since the epilogue, and humans have incorporated rainbow bamboo and fippokats into their cities, gardens and greenbelts worldwide, though they still haven’t quite tumbled to how intelligent either are. Nature is healing from the injuries that prompted the colonists to leave for Pax in the first place, and humanity is rebounding from the global fascist state that sent the follow-up expedition. NVA hasn’t quite been forgotten, though, as some people honor “Envia” as the goddess of suffering. And some nations are freer than others.

Even more than the previous books it’s about who counts as a person, and what happens on the far side of where you draw the line, as seen from human, cetacean, bamboo, robot and even fippokat perspectives. Two Bamboo groves try to get fippokats to fight a proxy war. A group of fippokats uses a squirrel as bait. Robots prefer the humans who will let them perform their functions over the humans who won’t. And of course we already know humans will try to manipulate those they consider inferior.

The second half of the book is primarily a plague story, focusing on a disease that infects both humans and bamboo, hijacking their nervous systems like the fungus that takes over ants. It adds another wrinkle to the “who’s really a person?” question, when you have something interfering with the link between who you are and what you do at such a fundamental level.

The plague story itself is less satisfying than the stories that weave into and out of it. I disagree with the low ratings I’ve seen on Bookwyrm, though. I’d only rate it slightly below Interference, rounding them both to four stars.

I recently discovered that SeaMonkey is still around! It’s the continuation of the pre-Firefox Mozilla Suite, itself the successor to Netscape Communicator.

It really feels like a throwback to the early 2000s. Partly because it’s an all-in-one suite combining a web browser, email, news reader (with both Usenet and RSS/Atom support), calendar, IRC chat, and even an HTML page editor. (The only modern suite I can think of is Vivaldi.) But also because they haven’t changed the look of the program since then. It still has gradient toolbars, 3D icons, stippled toolbar handles on some platforms, a bookmarks sidebar…wait, those are back now. And I could swear the Preview icon in the editor goes back to Communicator.

Compatibility

There’s no official ARM version for any platform as near as I can tell, just x86_64. It runs fine on ARM-based Macs and Windows using emulation. They aren’t signed, though, so on macOS you have to jump through hoops to get the system to let you run it the first time. (It’s still included in Fedora’s standard repo, though!)

I keep running into trouble with web apps. Gmail and Roundcube-based webmail sites seem to work, but Outlook breaks after login. Nextcloud can’t even show the login form. OpenStreetMap works, but its online editor doesn’t. GitHub sort of works. WordPress dashboards seem OK so far.

But it can’t even display Bluesky or Mastodon posts (they’re JS;DR). Elk and Phanpy don’t run. The only Fediverse client I’ve found that works at all is Enafore, and then only partially.

SeaMonkey shares code with Firefox and Thunderbird, but still uses an old version of the renderer due to incompatible changes in the code. So until someone has the time to do a massive rewrite, it’s stuck at the level of Firefox 60 (7 years ago as I write this), which would explain the compatibility problems.

Another problem is websites that mistake it for a scraper and actively block it. Anubis seems to tag it more often than it ought to. Annoyingly, this includes the SeaMonkey forums at MozillaZine . It usually works as long as you go directly to the HTTPS version, but if you follow an old link to plain HTTP, Anubis is convinced you’ve turned off cookie support and rejects you.

Mail & Newsgroups

The email component is sort of like a really old Thunderbird in the sense that the browser is sort of like a really old Firefox.

When setting up an email account, it doesn’t even try to look up the settings based on your address. You have to add them all manually. Worse, it doesn’t offer secure transports during setup (or alternative authentication methods like OAuth2) That means you have to set up a placeholder first, then fill in the settings. Or if your mail server still supports unsecured connections, it’ll try to set them up insecurely first, which IMO is irresponsible in this day and age.

I was able to connect it to Gmail, though! Presumably the same approach should work for Outlook, Yahoo, or other providers that use OAuth2.

Calendar and address book are hidden away inside the mail app, though they seem to work entirely locally. No two-way sync as far as I can see, and only one-way subscription to remote calendars.

The RSS/Atom feed reader appears in Mail & News when you add a “Blogs & News Feeds” account.

And it still seems able to connect to Usenet! If you know of an NNTP server, you might actually be able to use it!

HTML Editor / Composer

These days, when hardly anyone writes their own web pages, those who do often use a templating system, and most mainstream platforms either have built-in WYSIWYG editors or only accept plain text anyway, the idea of an editor that generates HTML feels kind of obsolete.

And to be honest, the code it generates is obsolete too. Late 1990s-era HTML, color specified using font tags, no support for CSS styling (so you can’t make something that adjusts to light/dark color schemes) or scripting.

But the code it generates is also compact and efficient. No scripting support means the page isn’t going to load half a megabyte of dependencies to show you a page of text. No CSS support means it’s not going to import a gigantic stylesheet that clears and reimplements the basic styling it can do.

It supports tables, and embedding images and links, and the basic HTML styles of lists, quotes, bold and italic. If you want to learn HTML by example, building a page in SeaMonkey and then looking at the code is a much better choice than picking a random real-world website to start with. Or worse, exporting from Word.

The Publish button really is obsolete, though, since it doesn’t support FTPS or SFTP, only FTP. (It also supports some kind of HTTP publishing, but it doesn’t seem to be WebDAV. I haven’t figured it out, and haven’t gotten a clear answer either.)

Bottom Line

I want to like SeaMonkey. But the fact is that web tech has moved on. If I want to use modern web applications, I need to use something with up-to-date capabilities like Waterfox or LibreWolf, or at least Falkon. If I want to just view pages and I’m not concerned about being totally up to date, I’d rather use something small like Dillo or NetSurf.