Month: January 2022

Enlarge / Master Chief leads Silver Team through the series' new "Silver" timeline. (credit: Paramount+)

After years of teases, announcements, and false starts, a Halo TV series starring Master Chief is finally on the verge of existing—and its first substantial, dialogue-filled trailer landed on Sunday with equal parts clarification and confusion.

The flashy, two-minute trailer arrived days after a major announcement last week from Halo's narrative handlers at 343 Industries: this new TV series, exclusive to Paramount+, will not be part of the game series' official canon. That might have been good information to flash on the trailer itself, as fans otherwise may have missed the memo and wondered why this trailer rewrites a couple of plot cornerstones.

This clearly looks like an authentic Halo battle sequence, right down to the details on the sniper rifle. But many, many plot elements will be shuffled for the sake of translating the game to a TV series. (credit: Paramount+)

Longtime series scribe Frank O'Connor described the creative decision behind moving the TV series forward with a mix of familiar and brand-new plot elements. "We want to use the existing Halo lore, history, canon, and characters wherever they make sense for a linear narrative but also separate the two distinctly so that we don’t invalidate the core canon or do unnatural things to force a first-person video game into an ensemble TV show," he wrote. O'Connor clarified that all things Halo up until this point, including games, comics, novels, and online errata, count as "core canon" for the series, while the TV show will exist as a "parallel, similar, but separate timeline," officially dubbed the "Silver timeline."

Enlarge / The MNT Reform, a boxy laptop built around maximally open-source hardware and software. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

If you’re a Linux fan or open source advocate looking for a decent laptop, you actually have some solid options right now—much better, at least, than buying a Windows laptop, installing Linux on it, and hoping for the best.

Dell has offered Ubuntu editions of some of its XPS laptops and other PCs for years now, and Lenovo sells a respectable collection of desktops and laptops with Linux. System76 sells a selection of Linux-friendly laptops preloaded with Ubuntu or its own Pop!_OS distribution. The repair-friendly Framework Laptop doesn’t ship with Linux, but it can be configured without an OS, and Framework promises robust Linux support from multiple distributions.

But those laptops all have something in common with run-of-the-mill Windows PCs: a reliance on closed-source hardware and, often, the proprietary software and drivers needed to make it function. For some people, this is a tolerable trade-off. You put up with the closed hardware because it performs well, and it supports the standard software, development tools, and APIs that keep the computing world spinning. For others, it’s anathema—if you can’t see the source code for these “binary blobs,” they are inherently untrustworthy and should be used sparingly or not at all.