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The voting is over in the first round of our annual GNU/Linux distro poll, which sought an answer to the simple question, “What Linux distro do you currently use most?” The result was a complete surprise, at least to us.

When Randi Harper decided to bail on participation in FreeBSD as she outlined in her blog, it raises the question, “Where have we seen this before?” Taking a step back, it raises the question, “Why does this keep happening in FOSS communities?”

One of my New Year’s resolutions this year is to only use cloud services when absolutely necessary. Web apps are great tools when you need to collaborate at a distance, but other than that you’re better off keeping your work on your own machines, for privacy reasons if nothing else.

The 2nd Annual Pi Wars occurred in Cambridge this past December and just like the year before, it was a complete success. If you haven’t heard of Pi Wars, then get used to seeing the name because this event will only keep getting bigger. Pi Wars is a robot competition that centers around each robot having a Raspberry Pi at its core. There are a series of challenges in which entries must compete, and at the end of the day winners are declared.

Our first major project for the 2016 year is establishing a program that insures every student who resides within the Taylor Texas Housing Authority has both a computer and an Internet connection. I have been working one-on-one with Mr. Bob VanTil to iron out the logistics of this effort. Bob makes sure that this subsidized housing project doesn’t look or feel like government subsidized housing.

We’re going to pretend like we’re AM disc jockeys from the golden days of top 40 radio and countdown the top nine stories that appeared on FOSS Force last year. Along the way, we’ll offer a bit of commentary, and maybe remind you a time or two that things were much different way back in 2015.

It’s time for our annual “What’s Your Distro” poll, to determine who gets the FOSS Force Best Distro Award for 2015. This year we’re pulling out all the stops. We want this one to be a metaphoric old fashioned slug fest that will be played until only one distro is standing.

The results of our hardware platform poll have been tallied and just as we suspected, FOSS Force readers in large part use every platform available. The poll, which asked what different hardware platforms you use, offered a slate of answers too long to list here. Let’s just say it covered the gamut, from smartphones to desktops, and included separate places to tic for different operating systems.

This is the time of year when we look back and go, “Wow. How did this all ever happen?” Or something to that effect. And after about a month of PC-BSD daily use, the verdict so far (subject to appeal) is overwhelmingly positive with a couple of bumps (e.g., someday I will turn off tap-to-click on my touchpad).

The news of Murdock’s death was first made public in a blog post on the Docker website. When the page became unreachable at approximately 4:20 p.m. EST, there was a glimmer of hope that perhaps the report had been an error, as the post made no mention of a cause death, nor did it reference disturbing tweets on Murdock’s Twitter account on Monday. However, the page was back online by a little after 5:00 p.m.

If you did give or receive a Raspberry for Christmas, hopefully it was part of a kit where all the necessary parts are included. If not, you may be asking what you need to get started? First you will need a microSD card with your operating system of choice installed. Next, a USB supported keyboard and mouse, as well as a HDMI cable. If the monitor you intend to use does not support HDMI, then a proper adapter will be necessary. Finally, a micro USB power supply will be needed to power your new device.

A number of Reglue Kids began complaining about homework assignments being rejected. Most times they were scolded and told to re-submit the assignment in the proper format…you know, that well known proprietary one. Sometimes students were given a lower grade for not following the submission instructions.

Practically none of us, outside those who worked for IBM or Honeywell, knew anything about computers in 1967. Public utilities were just in the process of sending out bills that were essentially keypunch cards — a Stone Age computer storage scheme — with the ever present warning to not “bend, staple, mutilate or fold,” so we knew the computer was already our boss. We also knew what computers looked like, or thought we did, from TV shows like “The Man from Uncle”: gigantic room filling devices loaded with flashing lights that didn’t seem to indicate much of anything. A powerful computer that could be carried in your hand was, well, light years away.

What do I think? For one thing, I think if Canonical does have that many users and if they could get each to send them just 25 cents, they’d have a quarter of a billion dollars. I also think that just a little over a year ago, this same company claimed there were 25 million Ubuntu users worldwide spanning 240 countries. That sounded good until tech media pundits pointed out that the United Nations estimated there were only 196 countries in the world at that time.

For this poll we focused on the Raspberry Pi. We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of you who read The Raspberry Pi Report, so we thought we’d see just how far into the Raspberry Pi phenomena you dwell. We wondered how many of you already own a Pi, how many are thinking of getting one to tinker with, and how many of you just plain aren’t interested. We were also wondering how many of you might be influenced by the super low $5 price of the recently released Pi Zero.

AMD will soon be embracing open source with a new set of gaming tools. Until now, Nvidia’s proprietary GameWorks tools have had the lead over AMD in PC gaming. To counter this, on December 15, AMD announced GPUOpen. The suite will contain open source tools, graphics effects, libraries and SDKs and promises to be a boon to game developers.

How about a big medallion at the top of the page saying “we recommend Linux” and just include Windows 10 as a secondary option? Heck, if I were Michael Dell, I’d customize Ubuntu, get rid of any major bugs, drop Unity in favor of something more readily understandable to the average Joe or Jane, like maybe Xfce, and proudly proclaim, “we recommend DellOS 11 Premium Edition” or some such nonsense. We already know from experiences at public libraries that have replaced Windows with Linux boxes, that the learning curve doesn’t exist anymore — and probably hasn’t for the last decade or so.

Let's get this put to bed now: At the grade school level, girls are far and away better at most technological challenges than are boys. I've seen it for years; I've lived it for years. Where is the failure? It resides in the adults in a girl's life who tell her she shouldn't be wasting her time with computers and that she should start wearing skirts and dresses instead of jeans and that damned three button pullover shirt. Some will go so far as to point out the lack of female presence in the technology workplace as proof. Well yeah...there is a smaller female representation. That's because mommy and school career counselors are channeling her into roles "more suited to her gender" and their preconceived ideas of her abilities.

Like it or not, Google’s open source WebP image format is here to stay. At this point, the only thing holding back widespread adoption on the Internet is browser support. At present, the format is supported in Chrome, Opera, Opera Mini, Android Browser and Chrome for Android. However, with the folks at Mozilla working fast and furious to improve the Firefox experience in hopes of giving Chrome some competition, you can bet that Firefox support for WebP will be coming soon. When that happens, the two other major holdouts, Internet Explorer (now Microsoft Edge) and Safari, will be sure to follow suit.

Okay, artists, get those colored pencils sharpened, those brushes cleaned and ready, because you have an assignment — that logo isn’t going to design itself. FreeNAS — “founded in 2005 on the guiding principle that network storage software should be available to the public at no cost and free of license restrictions” according to its site — has initiated a logo contest, urging the community to contribute artwork to become a part of FreeNAS history.