Posts by timrichardson

Free Software Foundation rides to defend AGPLv3 against Neo4j license add-ons

Surely if neoj holds the copyright to changes between 3.4 and 3.5, they are allowed to licence those changes as they wish..They can't unlicence 3.4 but this is about 3.5. reading this article, it sounds like there are claims version 3.5 is open source because 3.4 was..that is silly.

Rights you had under a binary.distributed to you or served to based on 3.4 can't extend to any future works by the same author..that makes a joke of copyright, and copyright is the basis of open source.

If this case is merely about a confusing licence with contradictory terms,.it's not really such a big precedent..if the conclusion is simply that neoj could have achieved its goal by deleting some paragraphs on the licence, it's not a big deal.

GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

I sit back a bit these days and wonder at just how good Gnome has become. I am heavily in the keep it simple and keep it stable camp, I just wish for the laptop that would have a go at a solution for trackpad scroll speed control. Yes, it may be hacky, but KDE Plasma has made it work for a few years now. libinput can do it.

The hyper-clouds are open source's friends

When Redis the company says its business model is selling hosted services, it can't really complain about competing hosting companies fighting for those customers.

Redis tightens its license terms, pleasing basically no one

Re: Open Source developers

Redis was selling a product all.along, hosting..giving away redis was an attempt to grow market share, monetisation was based on trying to convert some of those to paying for hosted redis. It's not that AWS ripped off Redis Labs. They were both making money by renting servers, but one was much better than the other. Redis and others all had this business model, which is "compete with AWS" and it was a mistake..now they either want AWS customers to pay a licence fee or to stop using AWS.

We'll see what happens. A key value database is exactly the sort of boring infrastructure project that open source does well. Something that lots of people find useful enough but not so important that it's worth paying to reimplement what other people are already using under open source.

Redis does have advanced features but it already had them under a non free licence. I doubt this will work out well for Redis Labs but it's not as if the current situation seems very sustainable.

KDE 6 misses boat to make it into Kubuntu 24.04

5.27 has been stable for the entire release of kubuntu 23.10. So it has been getting so many rounds of bug fixes. More than any other edition of KDE v5.

It shows, too. There are a few ways of saying the same thing. Let me just say that many months of bug fixes has been good. 5.27 is truly a stable release.

The battle between open source and 'sort of' open source is as old as software

We know open source can work really well, that is, it can reach an economically sustaining level, such as linux the kernel. A characteristic is that no one entity controls the source de facto, and that competitors collaborate (such as when a maintainer working for Intel processes a pull request from AMD as a matter of course). Those firms use linux as a brick in the wall of their business. To do what they do, there must be an OS, and it turns out to be much cheaper to contribute to Linux than to build one from scratch, and linux has such momentum that even if you did have your own OS, customers are going to demand that it works with Linux.

It doesn't always work. It's hard to see how it makes sense for a business which exists to develop a software product can make money by giving it away for free. If you try to monetise it by hosting servers, then you are a competing with AWS. You could sell consulting services, but that doesn't scale so it won't get much VC funding.And yet, postgresql and mariadb are open source, and then there is sqlite, which is simply public domain. It might be that ultimately the biggest incompatibility with open source is not the software but the funding model. How can open source deliver the high returns the VC Investors demand? But not just any software can offer these big returns. Is any database product innovative enough to have such barriers to entry that millions of users feel they have to pay for it?

Terraform may be different, it seems a more complex area where it has a more distinct offer. But on the other hand, the large cloud providers who make good money by hosting kubernetes may decide that something like terraform is worth investing in to win the hosting business, in the same way they all invest in Linux or Python. It looks like open source works well when it plays an enabling role for some added value where there is a barrier to entry, but is not the added value itself. One of the most obvious examples is hardware: Linux grew because it was a great way of selling servers. There is more open hardware than ever before: android, drones, Raspberry PI, soon there will be Risc V everywhere, automobile maybe; I'd say just on that basis open source looks fine.

An interesting case study could be the firewall pfsense. This is router/firewall used by a hardware firm to help sell devices. That sounds like a classic open source story. There are even easy services you can sell on top, such as subscriptions to the latest packet filtering rules, or 24x7 service. They don't have VC funding, as far as I know. But Netgate has told everyone that the community version is close to end of life. When they announced that, they offered small users a free licence to the new proprietary version, and a year or so later, now you have to pay for it. It's been a bad experience. Maybe the problem is that router hardware is so commoditised they can't make margin on it (more and more firewalls run on virtualised hardware) ,so they are pivoting to be a software firm now. Developers have to be paid,this is just people trying to work out how to be financially sustainable.

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

"After over a decade of trying, it may be that Red Hat has finally found a way to shut down the RHEL rebuild aftermarket."

The problem is that this can be written:

"After over a decade of trying, it may be that Red Hat has finally found a way to shut down the open source right to redistribute source, modified or unmodified"

and

" It never was under any obligation to provide ready-packaged source code in a form that made it easy for competitors to construct identical copies. That is not what the GPL – or any other FOSS license – was ever about."

Correct. The GPL was not about that. The GPL is about mutual co-operation not competition. The best and most successful open source products are ones where one contributor is ok with the fact that the contribution benefits a competitor, because the GPL means it goes back the other way. This works when the open source code is not anyone's actual product, but an enabler of added value. Clearly, Red Hat now thinks that open source is harmful to its business model because the source code is the product. For all the talk of "services", they now see themselves selling licensed source code. This is not a business model which works with open source (well, until this legal hack). Mongo DB and Elasticsearch solved the problem be deactivating the open source licensing. They could, because those companies had copyright in most of the code, and CLAs for the rest allowing relicensing. Red Hat can't do that because it has copyright to almost none of RHEL.

The GPL is about the freedom to modify and redistribute source. RHEL is noe only nominally compliant with this. If people had known that this was the deal with RHEL before they committed to it, that's one kettle of fish. But Red Hat has pulled basically a relicensing trick. It's not very nice. This is enterprise software with long life cycles, they should have dated this to take effect at the next release. I think it is against the spirit of free software, and I think it is a bit unethical. I hope Red Hat takes a big reputational hit for this.

Oh Snap... Desktop Ubuntu Core to arrive in 2024

Re: This is probably worthy of an article on its own

There is no MS Office problem on desktop linux because there is WPS Office.

Re: Just when we thought that Linux gave us the freedom to choose

Calm down. There is a contest of technologies here. This article, surprisingly perhaps, make the case the Canonical has the best tech for the job, and the job is a safe, sealed-unit OS like Android or iOS. This will put desktop linux well ahead of Windows. And there will always be Arch.

That was the least snarky Register article I have read. It even did some snap myth busting :)

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 as a Linux laptop

Re: installed on every machine

Yes typical Microsoft approach, barely usable V1 but by attempt 3 it is ok. Kudos to Microsoft for starting this journey early. Gnome is aiming for the perfect solution. KDE is more pragmatic as usual.

Re: installed on every machine

It may be 3% of all desktops globally, but it would be a much higher share of ThinkPads, which is why Lenovo, Dell and HP now offer supported Linux laptops, and since they are sold mostly to developers and power users, the value share would be higher still (that is, Linux is more likely to be used on more expensive laptops). Plus it may have got to the point where some attractive corporate contracts are contingent on supplying some Linux SKUs.

Re: Optional

You might be able to get them to do it as a custom build. I had that choice in Australia. Problem is that the discounts on the pre-built bundles made them cheaper, with Win 10 Pro, than a custom build with no windows. So I went with Windows, and dual boot is the not the end of the world. Makes resale easier too.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING is to use the US site to see which configurations Lenovo is supporting for Linux. For the Gen 10 ThinkPad, some configurations are not 'hardware enabled' because of the MIPI 6 'computer vision' camera, and unfortunately the author here managed to buy one of these.

this is not a Lenovo configuration supported for Linux, the author should have said that. It as the "computer vision" camera which does not have good open source drivers at present. The other configurations will be fine, although they also mean a standard resolution display. I was disappointed to read of the scaling problems I thought wayland gnome would be a good experience by now, at least for 200% scaling. But I'm not sure I'd take the battery hit of a hidpi screen. I will decide that when I upgrade my current TigerLake X1 in a couple of years.

Re: installed on every machine

It didn't brick the machine. Bricking means a firmware destruction which the user can not fix. The installation mistake the author describes broke the boot partition; the firmware was not even touched. He probably didn't need to fully reinstall to fix it, unless perhaps the author actually wiped out the entire drive. However, in either case, it is not "bricking", it was a mistake with a non-standard install method.

Windows 11 still doesn't understand our complex lives – and it hurts

Re: Browser sessions don't work as you've described

Yes, it is a killer feature.

Ha!

I have a domain for my business, mostly linked to Google services. A client added my email address to a Teams project.

And then ... bad things happened. I could not use this address myself when other clients wanted to invite me to taems. Attempts to set the password to take control of my own email address were pointless, because something at Microsoft at implicitly added my organisation (my domain) as a Teams organisation but it had no actual administrator. You can't reset passwords, only the admin can, but there was no way to become the administrator. The client removed my account from their Teams project, but it made no difference. Eventually, after a few weeks, a Microsoft tech called me and via a phone call, removed my organisation. It was incredible: I never registered my domain with Teams, it was somehow captured by the client innocently adding my email to a Teams project.

However, being able to call support when I don't pay a cent to Microsoft was actually kind of impressive, but not enough to compensate for such a strange experience.

The Linux Teams client is fine, and the browser client is acceptable. Electron supports native wayland now, so Teams will presumably get this over the next 12 months. Zoom still has the best Linux support.

The Audacity: Audio tool finds new and exciting ways to annoy contributors with a Contributor License Agreement

You make the mistake of thinking all CLAs are the same. The Canonical CLA for instance commits to never remove the contribution from the licence that it was submitted under, and it commits Canonical to always publishing your contribution under that licence. Since GPLv2 and v3 are strong ("viral") copyleft licences, I think this must make it impossible to move to a non copyleft licence in many cases.

The Audacity CLA has no such restriction. You keep copyright, but the licence you grant by accepting the CLA removes all the meaning of your copyright. Audacity can relicence it at will. This is what MongoDB did. There is some more at the Wikipedia CLA article.

Note that the Fedora agreement (https://fedoraproject.org

/wiki/Legal:Fedora_Project_Contributor_Agreement) does not provide *any* relicensing rights at all

"Q. Does this mean that Fedora will always relicense my contributions from $MY_LICENSE to MIT?

A. No. If you put a Free license on your contribution, we will use it under the terms of that license. If you put it under a non-Free license, we won't use it at all. Only unlicensed contributions where the copyright holder is the Fedora contributor qualify for the "default licensing" clause. "

You can generate good CLAs using http://harmonyagreements.org/ including with options to protect copyleft integrity.

Dodgy vids can hijack PCs via VLC security flaw, US, Germany warn. Software's makers not app-y with that claim

The Ubuntu LTS packaged version, 3.0.4, does crash on the proof of concept video. But the 3.0.7 version does not crash. So I now use the snap version for this, having seen that VLC officially recommends the snap as their distribution channel for Linux users.

I don't have to save my work, it's in The Cloud. But Microsoft really must fix this files issue

The behaviour the user is expecting is ecactly how Google's Gsuite works. If you create a document, it is always saved. Same wirh gmail: you don't need to take any action to save a draft. We are in a transition about how document saving works. I imagine younger users find MS word quite odd.

Ubuntu says i386 to be 86'd with Eoan 19.10 release: Ageing 32-bit x86 support will be ex-86

Re: All good things come to an end

2028 actually. 18.04 is supported for ten years. Sort of. You can buy five years extra support.

You GNOME it: Windows and Apple devs get a compelling reason to turn to Linux

Re: So, 2018 will be the year of the Linux desktop because of Gnome?

I'm a lot, lot less sceptical about Android on the desktop after being the owner of a recent Chromebook. Most reviews of Android on Chromebooks are lukewarm, and I didn't expect to find more than a curiosity, but the actual experience has been very good. Highly stable, and very usfeul.

Re: Text wrangling on windows

Both apps are great open source projects

Actually LTS users upgrade at 18.04.1

I think from memory that the LTS upgrade activates after the first point release of the new LTS, so 16.04 desktop users will move in mass when 18.04.1 is available, more like June than April.

Radiohead hides ZX Spectrum proggie in OK Computer re-release

Re: Only a British would use a ZX spectrum for music...

I'm an Australia and I used the ZX81 and Spectrum. My keyboard suffered from the conductive membrane being above the heat sink, I had to do repairs. So sad that the Spectrum got lost. My favourite program was a talking clock: my voice was sampled by the Spectrum to build the vocab, it was recognisable. The C64 was much more sophisticated but the Spectrum was arguable more educational because producing sound and doing something else required understanding multitasking, either using interrupts or co-operatively. The C64 had a real sound chip.

Feelin' safe and snug on Linux while the Windows world burns? Stop that

Servers are a red-herring, I think. Ransomware is mostly, I assume, an attack on desktop Windows machines, or servers running remote desktop. Probably the initial upload of the recent attack was via a compromised windows server at a Ukranian Windows software developer, but the overwhelming majority of infections would be on desktop machines infected by other desktop machines. And the most common vector of initial infection is via desktop machines too, typically via an Outlook attachment, of a download with some kind of Windows executable payload.

Keeping a fleet of Windows desktops updated is hard. How can you explain that the most commonly infected Windows desktop is Windows 7, which has pretty good update capabilities? I don't know, but I think we can say that for sure it is badly broken. I'm going to dump on Microsoft here. It is a very complex OS stack which is full of legacy code and truly incredible security holes (plain text passwords bouncing across the LAN; remote execution tools which basically default to high privileges), and an update mechanism which apparently doesn't work very well for the small business and consumer user base it aims to serve. Linux and to a lesser extent Mac desktop users have several reasons to feel superior: better quality software, security issues taken seriously for the last 30 years, not the last five years, with incomparably better update mechanisms, not to mention much more genetic diversity in the case of Linux. With a such a different mix of kernels and distribution configs, finding an exploit that can infect a critical mass of machines is really hard, I think.

Nearly all patches for Windows servers require reboots, a very different situation with modern Linux, and reboots on remote desktop servers are inconvenient, particularly for businesses which don't have dedicated admin staff. But we're stuck with Windows, so it's a smart choice to avoid it yourself if possible.

Windows 10 S: Good, bad, and how this could get ugly for PC makers

Re: Stuck on Edge

I just can't imagine an IT teacher telling people they have locked off the kids from Google. Parents are going to be negative about that.

Microsoft set benchmarks: it has to compete with Chrome OS in start up times, etc. The HP Stream can't.

Re: Offline

Like a plough pulled by a horse. And about as useful.

I just had three weeks in Java, much of it far from big cities. This is a country of about $4K GDP per person (Java would be higher taken on its own). 4G coverage almost everywhere. As every day goes by, the relevance of offline capabilities diminishes further and further. In Indonesia there are thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of businesses which run off mobile phones apps (including payments), so the traditional computer is fading away. This is an odd move by Microsoft, I can't believe it is getting much focus from senior management.

Re: Windows RT???

The upgrade to full Windows will be free initially, informed by the Windows RT debacle. So mislead consumers will be mollified, this time without refunds. But it makes you wonder what the point of the exercise is, since once updated to full Windows, Windows Store and Universal apps will be as irrelevant as normal, and the laptop will be just another laptop.

My niece goes to a Catholic secondary school in Albury: they switched to Chromebooks a few years ago. I can't see why they won't catch on here; the Windows environment my son puts up with at his primary school is horrible.

Fundamental contradictions

Windows RT and Windows Phone failed because there were no apps. Microsoft had a grand strategy: we will offer all these users + desktop users as Universal App customers. But one by one this fell away: Windows RT and Windows Phone failed, and Windows 8's draconian effort to force Universal apps failed too. Now, Microsoft is trying again, but without Phone. So customers who understand this will be reluctant to engage. So reluctant, that Microsoft says you can turn it into full Windows for free, and they all will, which means there is still little incentive for developers. Microsoft needs a base of captive users who will get Windows S deployed without them being able to choose, and hopefully that market will be enough to kickstart interest in Windows Store apps, because customers are never going to voluntarily spend $1000 on a laptop that probably on balance does less than a Chromebook. Microsoft will fail; the barriers to success are even greater than they were at the time of Windows RT: not only does Microsoft have less to offer, but Chrome OS is now close to dominant in the only niche which gives Microsoft any chance of success, plus sooner or later Android apps will be viable (I guess within 12 months). At which point Microsoft is selling a more expensive, vastly inferior solution which it can only sell be giving customers a free or low cost escape route. Above all, it's hard to see what the incentives for Microsoft are. It's a low margin laptop with a low margin OS. The only thing it can do is drive sales to the Windows store, which makes margin for Microsoft, at the expense of application developers using traditional sales channels. There is almost no angle from which this makes much sense to anyone.

If in fact Microsoft hopes that this will expose the future generation of users to Teams to kill Slack, as the article says, they must be terrified at what Chromebooks are doing to Office.

You only need 60 bytes to hose Linux's rpcbind

are you sure port 111 is open by default on AWS? Everytime I've made a new ubuntu server on AWS, no ports are open by default, not even port 80

Ubuntu 17.04 beta FACT: It's what's on the inside that matters, not looks

And Nvidia Optimus has PRIME Sync working ... no more screen tearing on the laptop's panel if you're using Nvidia Optimus. At the moment this needs xserver 19.1.3 from a staging PPA and a tweak to a config file, but it works, at last. This is a big deal for Optimus users. Fingers crossed X 19.1.3 makes it officially to 17.04 because then we can expect it in 16.04.3

Oi, Mint 18.1! KEEP UP! Ubuntu LTS love breeds a laggard

Just as with Ubuntu 16.04.1, kernel 4.8 is there if you want it. In a week when 16.04.2 is released, 4.8 will become Ubuntu's default kernel for desktop installs... this is the new model in Ubuntu 16.04, which means each point release will include a new kernel version, and the old point version is then unsupported. The 4.4 kernel will be supported for five years, but that's aimed at servers. So Ubuntu LTS is basically a rolling release for desktop users, at least when it comes to the kernel and some other key infrastructure, but it is a very conservative rolling release: the point updates come after everything has been tested on a six month release. I don't know what Mint plans to do about this because from the sounds of it, they need to get everyone on to 4.8 so they get the benefit of what Ubuntu is doing. A desktop distribution based on 16.04.1 is out out of date when 16.04.2 is released on Jan 19. This is different from 14.04 LTS where Ubuntu supports every point release until end of life (2019) (too hard; now they support only once point release at a time). For Ubuntu desktop users, it sounds pretty good, particularly if snap takes off, meaning an easy way to keep current with the applications you care about.

For example after 17.04 is released, Ubuntu 16.04.3 will arrive hopefully with xorg 1.19. This is why I reverted to xubuntu: it's a very good story if you are using Linux on a modern laptop as your money-earning-it-must-just-work OS.

Arch Linux: In a world of polish, DIY never felt so good

Re: What's the real advantage

A big advantage of Arch is the community. It's very strong technically. The documentation is very good and I've found it a very helpful community.

Four reasons Pixel turns flagship Android mobe makers into roadkill

Google likes to cut out the middle man? Since when? It's entire business model is based on triangular relationships: search is bringing visitors to advertisers, Android been 100% partner-based since it's beginning.

It very much remains to be seen if the Pixel phones will be any more successful than the Pixel laptops. I give them h a 20% chance of surviving four years. Launching high end phones into a saturated market with no distribution experience, with enormous capacity pressure from manufacturers who can make a lot more phones they can sell, and one of the weaker OEMs who may have been expected to drop out, helping over capacity, has in fact just been thrown a lifeline. This won't even rate in India and SE Asia, and something so cloud dependent as Google's added-value software won't even launch in China. It seems like madness.

Sneaky Gugi banking trojan sidesteps Android OS security barricades

which many people in Russia do, to access cracked apps at pirate app stores.

Oracle Java copyright war latest: Why Google's luck is about to run out

Re: Why Google's luck is about to run out

All the appeals court can do is ask for another jury trial on fair use. I suspect the court will be reluctant. Google did disclose the previous technology for porting Android apps to Chrome OS, so it is not news to Oracle that Google planned to port Android apps to Chrome OS: to me, this sounds more like a change of technology, but the destination is the same. Chrome OS has a tiny share of desktop OS anyway, which is probably why Oracle ignored the previous implementation. The new implementation is still in development so it was obviously a very immature technology at the time of the trial: what could anyone have shown the jury anyway? I would be surprised if this one argument is enough to cause a jury retrial.

Originally we suspected that Oracle was pursuing this to get control over Android, but Google has now moved to OpenJDK and is in full compliance with the open source requirements, so the only real outcome is a settlement, which will be delayed for years in the courts even if Oracle wins something.

Oracle campaigns for third Android Java infringement trial

Re: Google are switching to OpenJDK...

It's not the code, it's the licence. Until Nougat, Google did not accept or use an open source Java licence. Neither did it get a Sun licence. Since Sun holds copyright in Java, or now Oracle, this was a breach of copyright. Well it was, until Google won a fair use argument. Now Google is complying with copyright since it has accepted OpenJDK, but this doesn't change history.

Google tells Android's Linux kernel to toughen up and fight off those horrible hacker bullies

Re: Patching speed is probably the issue @Planty

My Nexus 2013 tablet still gets updates.

Re: Patching speed is probably the issue

I got four Android phones in the family, oldest is HTC m7. Other three are Samsungs. They all have stagefright patches (even though the m7 is stuck on Android 5, it still gets security patches). All were bought from Telstra, an Australian tell, which is supporting them. So mainstream users who buy phones from a good network provider should be OK for patches.

Crash Google Chrome with one tiny URL: We cram a probe in this bug

turns out this was first reported in May but that bug report was hidden as a security bug. But not fixed.

Welcome, stranger: Inside Microsoft's command line shell

idiosyncratic

A compromise between a useful shell and learning something which only has value on windows, a platform of declining relevance to the world of servers, is bash. Git for windows comes with bash and it's nice to have one common shell as I move across os x, linux and windows. powershell looks very interesting but I have not been able to justify learning it yet. For more advanced admin python on windows works well and once again there is not a new learning curve. I wonder if the new Microsoft would have done something as idiosyncratic as powershell.

iPhone 6: The final straw for Android makers eaten alive by the data parasite?

An unsually poor article

Firstly, Apple's pricing is very high and leaves a lot of margin room. Apple simply can't make the volume to change this; or rather, it would be too risky to do it. Apple doesn't need to change strategy, but there is a lot of volume which means a lot of money left on the table.

Secondly, OEMs don't need to command such high margins as Apple since their costs are much lower. It's a different business model. PC manufacturers don't have anywhere near the margins of the Macintosh, but there are a lot of PC OEMs. Thirdly, wearables are a new high-growth sector. Apple's watches don't work without an iPhone, which means they have left the very large Android installed base to Android manufacturers. If the rate of innovation in wearables and mobiles continues, Google's added-value will be important. The undeniable fact is that if you want to make mobile hardware, you need Android, unless you are Apple. Microsoft will spend a few more billions dollars before it is forced to concede this; everyone else has worked it out already (vale Tizen).

Fourthly, how does this theory explain the rush of PC OEMs into Chromebooks, which are low-priced, low margin and also run a free Google OS? Because OEMs make money on low margins. This is what they are good at. The idea that only Samsung and Apple make money from smartphones is wrong. It may be that some manufacturers can't move with the times on this, but plenty will rise to take their place. At this point in the lift of microcomputers, Dell, Asus and Acer didn't exist yet.

Fifthly, you gloss over the middle of the market as if this is a bad place to be, but in fact it is where most of the money is.

Chromebooks to break out of US schools: Netbook 2.0 comeback not just for children

The Gartner chart showing the fall in Windows market share (consumer USA) is amazing, coming on top of the slow PC market. No wonder OEMs are targeting Chrome OS. apple has been eating windows at the top end and now Chrome OS at the low end is getting ttaction; wait until Chromebooks run Android apps and get launched outside the US

Google in NOT EVIL shocker: Bins student email ad scanning

Or pay via Apps for Business.

Re: Is your privacy worth nothing?

And in return for reading your mail, they block unsolicited mail and warn you of frauds.

Google doesn't root through all email. You have always been able to turn it off for Apps for Business and for Education. The change is to remove the option to turn it on.

Gimme a high S5: Samsung Galaxy S5 puts substance over style

And from an actual user of the S5...

It's my first galaxy. Last phone was the htc one m7.

The fingerprint scanner is ok. It does need two handed operation, although that's pretty much given for general use on such a large phone. Apparently you can register a Apart from that, it works well. The phone is much better for it, and I'm happily using it. It's a bit fussy, but it's fast. Biometrics is a joke for security since you can't change them, but it's convenient. Touchwiz is fine. I haven't used it before and apparently it's much better this time around, I can't compare except to std android and to sense. It's ok. I use Nova launcher. The built-in calendar app is good. The stock keyboard is good. The camera is very good. The display is excellent. The pulse reader works. Battery life is radical compared to the m7, but the m8 also has a big improvement. It's not as nice looking as the m8, but it's lighter, it's waterproof and the battery is swappable. This means I can expect a long useful life for this phone in the hands of family members, since the battery has a much short practical life than the rest of the phone. The audio latency is much better than the m7. This is a little thing which no one has ever mentioned in a review, but I find it classy (it means you can use key clicks, hopeless on the HTC One, they are way too late). I'm pleased to be using it.