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Did you ever notice that when you go to a LinuxFest that many of the geeks are carrying around Mac laptops? Tarus Balog has noticed, mainly because he’s a long time self professed Apple fanboy himself, who’s taken the steps to free himself of the limitations inherent in using proprietary operating systems and make the move to something a little more open.

Of course, LibreOffice as an online app has already been available online since early last year through rollApp — but this will be different. For starters, it’ll be “free as in beer,” meaning it won’t cost you anything. While rollApp has a free plan which allows users to open files from cloud storage to read online, users have to pay $6.99 monthly if they want to actually save their changes.

Why KDE? According to your comments, there were two major reasons: stability and configurability, with many of you saying, “It just works.” But there seemed to be some disagreement over whether KDE’s legendary configurability is as great as it once was.

Last night I bought a Tracfone online. This morning, when I bring up FOSS Force on the browser, I’m greeted by an ad hawking Tracfones. Likewise, a few months ago after I purchased a coolant reservoir for my 27 year old BMW, I was greeted by ads on every site I visited for companies specializing in parts for old BMWs. We’re all used to this, right? Even if we just conduct a simple Google search, we’re liable to be followed around by ads pertaining to that search for hours, if not days or weeks. Well, guess what? This sort of targeting is coming to your TV soon.

Ken Starks put another well deserved feather in his cap on Saturday when he accepted an award for Reglue from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) at the LibrePlanet conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Saturday. Reglue was announced as this year’s winner of the Project of Social Benefit Award by FSF executive director John Sullivan, who also announced that Sébastien Jodogne had won this year’s award for Advancement of Free Software. The event took place on the MIT campus.

The Fedora Project — mythically known as the “bleeding-edge distro” which only experienced users can use, but which in reality can be used easily by anyone from kids to grandmothers — understands the unique connection between diversity and open source. They are looking for a Diversity Advisor, and they’re seeking your help.

This isn’t the case so much with Linux, because users can choose from a long list of desktop environments to install atop any distro, changing the entire look and feel of their system. You can have Mageia and PCLinuxOS both running KDE natively — but you also can run KDE as your desktop in Fedora, even though Fedora defaults to GNOME.

Charlie Kravetz said he was a little nervous at SCALE 13x. Not only had his presentation slides gorped about a week ahead of the expo (he got them back together and working, of course), it was Charlie’s first time speaking in front of a group. And the message he wished to convey in his talk, “Accessibility in Software,” was an important one.

This isn’t likely to bother Shuttleworth & Company much, as it doesn’t make its money from home users — at least, not until the Ubuntu Phone gets traction. What money the company is making comes from the enterprise, and it’s not clear that enterprise customers care whether Canonical cozies up to Microsoft. Most tech companies, or companies that use tech in a big way, are already dealing with Microsoft themselves, by licensing its products if in no other ways.

After being a two day event for its first two years, this year the event, which is staged by the Columbia, South Carolina based nonprofit IT-oLogy, will expand to take place over a three day period. In addition, the event is moving from midweek to the beginning of the week, and is scheduled to begin on Sunday, October 18th and run through Tuesday, October 20th.

Canonical trumpets its partnership with Microsoft — yep, Microsoft — this week at the Open Compute Summit, where the Isle of Man reached across to Redmond to demonstrate how Canonical and Microsoft are working together to create scalable, OCP-compliant architecture.

With nearly 50 hardware vendors exhibiting and with over 30 sessions over two days — not to mention a wide range of keynotes including one from Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth and Rackspace’s Aaron Sullivan — nearly 3,000 attendees took in the event on an usually warm March week in the capital of the Silicon Valley.

After taking a year off so that the nonprofit behind the event could concentrate on launching the Great Wide Open conference in Atlanta, the POSSCON developer's conference will return to Columbia, South Carolina on Tuesday and Wednesday, April 14th and 15th. Last year, regular attendees of POSSCON were urged to attend the Atlanta event instead. This year's event will take place at various venues in the Vista, Columbia's arts and entertainment district.

The thing is, here in the FOSS world we have absolutely no way of knowing how many people might be using a particular distro. There are no licenses to sign, and companies using Linux aren’t required to take inventory to make sure they’re staying in compliance. So while Microsoft and Apple can give us a pretty accurate figure for the number of times their operating systems have been legally installed in the last few months or so, we can’t. Unlike Windows, Linux doesn’t require users to sign draconian EULAs. Unlike Apple, our distros aren’t performing all of the installs themselves on machines they manufacture.

Like many distros these days, Bodhi is built on top of a Ubuntu base, in this case using version 14.04 LTS as its core. However, Bodhi is anything but just another cookie cutter distro. From it’s inception back in 2012, the main purpose of the project has been to offer a Linux distribution that fully takes advantage of the lightweight but full featured and elegantly beautiful Enlightenment desktop environment.

Sunday, March 15, marks the third anniversary of the arrest in Damascus, Syria, of Bassel Khartabil (Bassel Safadi), a computer engineer who was Creative Commons lead in Syria and who started a hackerspace, Aiki Lab, in Damascus in 2010. This is only a small part of Bassel’s resume, which includes numerous other open source and free culture projects.

Evolution, not revolution, to match users’ needs: That is what’s behind the process the Xfce team uses in developing their desktop environment. So, despite what some consider a long time between releases, Xfce released version 4.12 last week, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.10.

When I first decided that I wanted to use text to speech on a daily basis, I began researching and testing the available applications. The Mint/Ubuntu repositories showed much promise. The first thing I did was become acquainted with the KDE app Jovie. It’s appeal was that it’s built to work right in KDE, but right out of the gate I ran into a such a high level of complexity and gaping holes in usability that I just shut it down and began searching for other solutions. Apparently, Jovie depends on other voice “synthesisers” to get working.

There’s a new player in the preinstalled Linux world offering computers with with Ubuntu preinstalled for $89, and although this price might suggest bottom of the line specs, the machines are more than powerful enough for most users. They’re also green — very green. They weigh in at 50% less than the average desktop, meaning they use less fossil fuel to ship, and are built in a case made of 100 percent recycled ABS plastic. They’re also shipped in packages completely made from non-virgin fiber.

Was that former Linux Outlaw Dan Lynch on FLOSS Weekly 326 earlier this week? It most certainly was. Dan joins regular host Randall Schwartz in talking about the Open Source Initiative with Simon Phipps and Patrick Masson in this particular episode, which is well worth a watch. It’s always great to see Randall on his show, and it’s great that he has such fantastic “guest help” from time to time.