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To start the conference off on Thursday morning, Jorge Castro gave a speech regarding “Gaming on Ubuntu” as part of UbuCon. In only 15 minutes he was able to deliver a State of the Union address on gaming on Linux distros, particularly Ubuntu. He covered the pros and cons of such, Steam, and Linux getting next gen titles. Most helpful was a reference to multiple Personal Package Archives for the Linux gamer for controllers and new drivers, as well as the proper hardware to use to complement Linux gaming. This was followed by a presentation by Didiers Roche discussing Ubuntu Make, a command line tool for developers of many kinds.

So armed with some information and just as much misinformation, I set out to study the options open to us Linux users. I mean, in my heart of hearts, I didn’t think that virus and malware threats are near as prevalent on Linux as they are on Windows, but it turns out that several antivirus companies did not agree, to the point that they created antivirus programs for Linux too. And just about the time I began to despair at the number of choices I had and the amount of research that would be necessary to get the best protection available, it came to me….

It’s not the distro that’s important to most users, they said, because most users don’t interact with the distro itself as they work and play on their Linux machines. Instead, the average user’s direct interaction with a computer is primarily through the desktop environment, whether that be KDE, GNOME, Unity or something they rolled on their own on a Friday night instead of having a boys’ or girls’ night out.

Are you a distro hopper? Are you one of those people who knows what day of the week it is because of which distro you’re using? If so, this quiz for you. But even if you’re one of those people who finds a distro you like and sticks with it until it becomes as comfortable as a well worn shoe, you’ve probably done your homework, and that’s why you were able to find the distro that was a perfect fit for you. In other words, you’ll probably do well on our quiz too — because it just might be a tortoise and hare sort of thing.

Is world peace next? GNOME and KDE are neighbors at SCALE 14X, and for all intents and purposes that was by design. Thank, or blame, SoCal SUSE, which arranged for the two desktop rivals — both available on openSUSE and other major distros — to share a large booth at SCALE 14X.

This is the second time in three years that IT-oLogy’s longest running conference has been cancelled. In 2014 the event was cancelled, evidently due to logistical problems as IT-oLogy was in the process of launching the first Great Wide Open conference in Atlanta. Last year there was no Atlanta event, and POSSCON was successfully rebooted in Columbia, attracting around 850 atendees.

One of the fears — one of the many in having an established conference at a brand spanking new venue — is this: Suppose they gave an outstanding Friday keynote, and nobody came? All those sleepless nights worrying about it were essentially for naught, since Cory Doctorow’s keynote at SCALE 14X Friday was a standing room only success.

The Linux Foundation’s board has always been weighted heavily in favor of corporations and money, with a large majority of the foundation’s board being elected by member corporations. The nine platinum members, who pay $500,000 yearly in membership dues, elect up to ten board members (or one each for up to ten directors), the sixteen gold members elect three, and the more than 250 silver members elect only one. Until last week, individual members, who pay $99 in annual dues elected two members to the board, not enough to influence foundation policy in a vote, but enough to give the community some say in the decision making process.

Shuttleworth’s keynote kicked off a busier-than-expected day at SCALE 14X. Sessions on Thursday throughout UbuCon and the rest of SCALE 14X seemed to have more than adequate attendance, especially in the larger rooms at the Pasadena Convention Center. In fact, the Chef Training was standing room only, and some of the attendees had to be turned away.

Starting today, the Southern California Linux Expo — SCALE 14X in this year’s 14th annual iteration — moves from being hotel-based event busting at the seams to hold all the exhibitors and sessions to being a full-fledged, freewheeling convention center-based event with wide-open spaces and widespread talks.

But I realized this morning that the emails I’ve been receiving from SCALE — I signed up for them back before registration was open — actually brighten my day and do much to make me wish I could travel cross continent to take part. Indeed, I think that other conferences, especially the big ones, could learn something by taking a look at SCALE’s use of email — for not only do they offer information for those attending this year’s event, they plant the seed in those who couldn’t make it this year that maybe they might want to decide now to be at SCALE 15x.

What hasn’t been cool is the destruction of expensive things that occur when Monty’s has one of his moments. The 42 inch TV donated by Melissa’s church has a plexiglas shield in front of it, and the last two computers we’ve placed in Monty’s home were destroyed as well. The first computer we placed was a fairly powerful quad core desktop with a 22 inch monitor and built-in speakers. Monty broke his left foot trying to pick the computer up and smash it onto the floor. After Melissa and I spoke about it, it was decided that a laptop would be more practical, as it can be placed out of harm’s way when not in use.

While Arch’s taking of the gold wasn’t much of a surprise, given the distro’s commanding performance in the qualifying poll, round two results below the top slot were a little different from what we expected. Elementary OS took second place, with 502 votes, just three percentage points behind the winner. In the qualifying round, Elementary wasn’t even offered as a poll choice and only made the final round due to a write-in campaign from the Elementary community.

The latest Microsoft-loves-Ubuntu news came this week, when Microsoft announced it was open sourcing, under the permissive MIT license, its Edge web browser’s JavaScript engine, ChakraCore, with plans to port it to Linux. While this was undoubtedly huge news to the development community, for the rest of us if was primarily just more evidence of how deeply Redmond is trying to reach its tentacles into Linux. But it’s not just Linux that will be the beneficiary of the ChakraCore port. More specifically, it’s “Ubuntu Linux 15.10,” according to Gaurav Seth, Microsoft’s main man on the Chakra project.

The BSD Certification Group will offer BSDA certification exam at SCALE on Sunday, Jan. 24, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Exam candidates should be proficient in the BSDA Certification Requirements and the Command Reference, both of which are available as a free download. Participants need to register for a BSDCG ID, and once you have an ID, choose SCALE as the site for your exam. Oh, and you’ll have to fork over $75, payable through Paypal or credit card.

A PlayStation hack should come as no surprise to gamers, not with the PlayStation’s history of lackluster security. Fail0verflow has hacked the PlayStation 3, as well as the Wii and Wii U before. PS4 uses FreeBSD and the browser Webkit, both of which are said to be relatively easy to exploit. The PlayStation’s online network has been prone to security breaches as well, with the latest incident taking place only three days into the new year.

Picademy is a two day series of classes taught by certified Raspberry Pi educators. These classes involve learning all hardware and software aspects of the Raspberry Pi. You will also be learning from some of the brightest minds that make up the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

So you think you know your Linux history, eh? It’s time to put on your thinking cap and find out whether or not that’s true. We’ve racked our brains, wearing out a few grey cells in the process, and come up with what we think is a pretty good quiz that looks at the history of Linux from before Linux even existed to just about the present.

But this incident wasn’t to be pushed aside. The emails started coming in faster and faster, until I acknowledged that I had a real problem. Security hasn’t been and isn’t my strong suit. My passwords are almost an afterthought. After all, I am running Linux. What could go wrong?

Sure you go to Linux expos such as SCALE to sharpen your coding skills and to learn about how to get your hands dirty going under the hood with you favorite open source applications. You might even go to learn a little bit about the business of open source. But you have to admit that an added attraction is just getting to see presentations from FOSS rock stars, the well known movers and shakers who have taken a big part in shaping the past, present and future of free and open source software. These are people whose presentations you’ll be tempted to attend no matter what the subject because…well, just because. Some of these are legends; some are not. But they’re all rock stars.