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whats the differnce?
is this any better than twine 1x?
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The trouble with Twine 1.x is that it's very passage centric. You can't have a lot of fiddly things like items on the player's person dropping in and mutating only parts of sentences without a lot of hacky workarounds. Harlowe in 2.x fixes a lot of this. And the IDE is a lot more versatile - letting you debug stories easier and build a library of projects.
The downside is that documentation is still incomplete, performance of the IDE is a bit ropey and there's bugs and missing features like the desperately needed ability to have CSS tags on passages.
But if you don't use it, it won't get fixed. If people don't come here and stamp their feet then there won't be the impetus to get these issues solved.
The software itself (both 1.x and 2.x) is made up of two main parts:
1. The Twine GUI
The 1.x version is written in Python and can be used on Windows, Mac (OSX) and Linux. It is the more mature application with features like macro syntax highlighting, in-built image support, font importing, support for TWEE, and the ability for a Story Format Creator to influence/extend the GUI's functionality. It can be used to create very large projects as it is basically only limited by the amount of memory your OS is willing to give it.
The 2.x version is written in HTML/Javascript and can be ran in most modern web-browsers which allows it to run on machines/devices that 1.x cant. It supports syntax highlighting for CSS and Javascript but not for macros or HTML, has the ability to start a story in Test Mode (as long as the Story Format supports/implements this mode. Harlowe only). The maximum size of your project is limited by the web-browser's local storage setting, the default value of this depends on which web-browser your using, which OS (branch/version) your using it on, if the web-browser stores data using UFT16 and whether you're running the local (downloaded) or hosted (on-line) version of Twine 2.x but it is generally between 5 and 10 MBs (or around 2.5 to 5 Million characters)
2. The Story Formats
These are what determine the basic functionality available to your project, they each contain a Javascript engine that defines the base macros available and their format, the core CSS and HTML structure, and how you extend the engines basic functionality (if it supports this at all)
The only two story formats that currently support both 1.x and 2.x are SugarCube (third-party) and Snowman (was third-party now built-in), the other built-in story formats only work with the version of Twine they came with. (1.x has Sugarcane, Johan and Responsive; 2.x has Harlowe)
It would take a while to describe the differences between each of the story formats, so I wont do that here.